“You don’t look very pleased about seeing me today,” Gottlieb noted.
“I just woke up. I went back to sleep after breakfast. They
put someone new in the cell next to me, and he screamed like a banshee all night long.” Shannon said this in a vaguely accusing manner, as if the whole thing had been Gottlieb’s fault.
“So they woke you up to bring you here. Well, I can see how you wouldn’t care for that.”
“There are times when I don’t care about anything or anyone. Least of all, about what happens to me. There are times when I wish they’d give me a lethal injection and be done with it.”
Gottlieb raised his eyebrows. “I thought you were opposed to the death penalty.”
“I am, for other people. It’s barbaric. But in my case it would be”—he chose his words carefully—“a way out.”
“In other words, a state-assisted suicide.”
Shannon scrutinized the floor. “I suppose that you could call it that. You could call it other things too.”
“Such as?”
“Such as, an escape from an intolerable situation and intolerable memories. Such as, taking steps towards a reunion. A reunion with Margaret. I don’t know any more about the afterlife than anyone else, but that’s my fondest hope.”
Gottlieb said nothing for a few seconds. “There’s medicine for depression, Mr. Shannon,” he resumed. “I know you haven’t been interested in it up till now.”
“I’m still not,” he said, his tone close to belligerent.
“Why are you so opposed to it?”
“I just am. Do I have to give a reason?” He crossed his arms defiantly before his chest, in the manner of a pouting child. Gottlieb hadn’t seen this side of him before.
“Listen to me,” said Gottlieb, calling on his last reserves of patience. “You’re facing the most serious charge there is. You’re at the very center of a notorious case. Your life is completely different from what it was a few months ago. It’s understandable that you’d become depressed.”
Crossing his legs and shifting in his chair, the psychiatrist
continued. “I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting that medication is some kind of magic wand that’s going to make everything all right. All it can do is to help you deal with what you have to deal with, nothing more. But that’s still a lot.”
Shannon broke the ensuing silence. “I’d like to go back to my room, if you don’t mind. Nothing personal, I just don’t feel like talking much today.”
Gottlieb nodded. Ordinarily he might have tried to persuade him to stay longer.
After Shannon left, it occurred to Gottlieb that he hadn’t mentioned the visit with Ms. Pierce. Next time.
⸎
Gottlieb saw three more patients at GCFI, including James Shannon’s new neighbor, a teenage screamer who’d taken half a dozen hits of LSD and couldn’t stop seeing worms oozing from his skin. He answered eight or ten phone calls, including a particularly tedious one from Shannon’s lawyer, Brendan O’Connell. He shuffled through papers and dictated notes, as he plodded his way through the tedious morning. At one point, as he paused to sip tepid coffee, Norma Caldwell knocked on his door. “Got a minute?”
“Sure, come on in.”
“Nothing important, I just wanted to—” She broke off as she studied him closely. “Are you all right, Hal?”
He nodded. “Why do you ask?”
“You look kind of gray. And your eyes are red. If I didn’t know you so well, I’d wonder if you’d been on a bender.”
“Nothing that interesting. I didn’t get much sleep last night, and I’m having a lousy day. That’s all.”
“Anything on your mind?” She took a few steps towards his desk.
“Peter. Wondering if he’s trying to drive us crazy, or if he’s
just innately good at it.”
She laid a maternal hand across his shoulder and sighed sympathetically. “It’s innate. All adolescents know how to push us to the edge. It’s in their hard drive.”
“You had three of them at the same time, didn’t you?”
She nodded. “When Ray and I were married, we wanted children right away. We were twenty-two and twenty-one, and what the hell did we know? So, we had three children in five years. Which meant we had three teenagers all at once.”
“How did you survive?”
“Golf!” Her eyes lit up. “It’s totally absorbing, and you’re outside where no one can reach you, and you get to hit that little white bastard as hard as you can. Great outlet. Of course, the Prozac helped too.”
His lips squeezed into a poor semblance of a smile. “Maybe I should take it. Better yet, maybe Peter should.”
⸎
He went through the rest of the morning and early afternoon in a thick dull haze. After a meeting with Dwight and Norma, he listened with scant interest as they argued about the merit of Spike Lee’s movies. Norma considered him too strident. Dwight accused her of missing the point—if anything, he wasn’t strident enough. Stanley Celinsky joined them in the lunchroom, his fine tremor apparent as he took spoonfuls of yogurt. Gottlieb himself had little appetite. He barely finished half a tuna sandwich and a few dollops of macaroni salad.
Leaving GCFI shortly after lunch, he put Ellington’s “Mood Indigo” on the Saab’s CD player. Even this, his favorite composition, failed to cheer him. Arriving at his office, he used about a hundredth of his brain as he checked messages, answered calls, and opened mail. When the parade of his afternoon patients began, he had to tap his feet and bite the lining of his mouth to stay awake. He envisioned each part of the day as another stretch along a dreary highway. He looked forward to going to bed that night with near-erotic anticipation.
At six thirty, when his last patient left, he picked up the phone and dialed Cassandra’s number. He hadn’t planned to call her, at least not that he knew of.
“Hi, Hal. What’s the matter? You don’t sound so great.”
“I didn’t sleep well, and it’s been a long day.” He launched into another telling of Peter’s misadventures. As he did so, he suddenly found himself tired and sick to death of the Peter conundrum. Tired of his helplessness in the face of his son’s depression, and tired of his son’s indifference to his own plight, and tired of the pall he cast over the whole household. Tired, especially, of anticipating months or years of a situation more likely to get worse before it got better.
“I’d give anything to be with you awhile tomorrow,” he said impulsively. He didn’t realize how much he wanted to see her until the words flew out.
“I’ve got to do some things, but they don’t have to be done at any special times. Come over when you want.”
“You don’t know how much I wish I could.” He was feeling mildly sorry for himself. A rare occurrence, which he loathed.
“Full day?”
“Packed. Morning at GCFI, private patients in my office until almost seven thirty.”
“Come over anyway. Come in the morning. Let the criminally insane fend for themselves for a few hours.”
He pondered this. “Hmm. No real reason why I couldn’t. I could call in sick. Something I’ve never done before.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
⸎
Gottlieb left the house at 7:30 a.m. the next morning, his customary time. At 7:33 a.m. he called Dwight Sanderson on the cell phone. The nurse’s manner was friendly and breezy.
“Yo, Doc, what’s happenin’?’”
“Hello, Dwight. I just wanted to tell you that I’m not feeling very well today, and I won’t be coming in.” This had an element of truth to it. Gottlieb did not lie easily or often. To do so now was giving him an upset stomach and a low-grade headache.
“Hey, ’bout time you did this,” Dwight replied approvingly. “Took yourself a mental health day like the rest of us.”
“Dwight, I really feel like shit,” he said, awash in guilt.
“Yeah, whatever. Listen, Doc, if
you’re really sick I hope you feel better. And if you’re not . . . what the hell, I ain’t your momma, it don’t matter none to me. See you Monday, okay?”
“Okay.” He hung up the phone, mystified that so many people seemed to deal with guilt so effortlessly.
⸎
Cassandra came to the door wearing a lightweight blue cotton bathrobe, her hair wrapped in a towel. She reached up to kiss him. “Sorry I’m so slow this morning. I just got out of the shower. Make yourself comfortable. Freitag will keep you company while I throw on some clothes.”
You don’t have to get dressed on my account, he almost said, instantly discarding it as cheesy and adolescent. Instead, he sauntered to the sofa. In front of it sat a coffee table on which were strewn recent issues of Atlantic Monthly, the Smithsonian, and the New York Times Review of Books. There was also a massive tome on Bauhaus architecture and an oversized paperback on films of the 1950s.
While Freitag purred beside him, presenting an ear for stroking, Gottlieb picked up the book on films with his free hand. He opened it at random, found himself looking at a piece on The Seven Year Itch, and wondered if this was some kind of omen. The piece included a black and white photograph of an irresistible Marilyn Monroe smiling enticingly at a hopelessly smitten Tom Ewell.
The book contained concise descriptions and photos from some of the much-enjoyed, half-remembered movies of his youth. The Crimson Pirate, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and his all-time favorite: Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. His mother still had a picture of him in one of her albums, a little boy in a flannel shirt who wore the mandatory coonskin hat.
Utterly engrossed, he didn’t hear her coming. He was startled when she came behind him and put a cool hand against his cheek. She wore white Bermudas and the same peach and plum blouse she’d had on at the Shedd.
“A bit jumpy, are we?”
It would have been silly to refute her, so he responded with a shrug. For want of something better to do with his hands, he picked up the book again. “I didn’t know you were a film buff.”
“I’ve loved the movies from as far back as I can remember. The perfect escape. Sometimes, when I was in graduate school, I’d go on a binge and see three or four in a week.”
“What were you escaping from?”
“Everything. All the day-to-day aggravations. When I was young, the cold war between my parents, and my brother’s benign neglect. That, and a sense that I was always different.”
He closed the book and went back to petting the impatient cat. “What made you so different?”
“For starters, I was a first-generation American whose parents still spoke with an accent, and who came from a country we’d just been at war with. My father’s patients may have worshipped him, but that doesn’t mean they accepted him as a social equal. Another thing, I was pretty smart. Too smart to fit in and go along with things, but not smart enough to figure out how to make myself happy.”
“It’s not an epiphany . . . it evolves.”
“Maybe so, but you don’t know that when you’re twelve or thirteen.”
He turned his attention back to the book. “Most of these
films were made before you were born.”
“I’ve seen a lot of them, though. I’ve rented them, or I’ve caught them at revivals. I like the fifties films. There’s an innocence about them. No bad language and God forbid, no nudity or sex, but there’s often more depth to them than meets the eye. They hold up well, the best of them. A couple of months ago I rented Twelve Angry Men. Ever see it?”
“Yes, but I don’t remember it too well. About jurors, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “Very simple format. The whole thing takes place in a jury room. No high tech glitz, and certainly no ro-mance, but it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen about a jury deliberating. A hundred times better than A Time to Kill.”
She joined him on the couch, a noisily purring Freitag wedged between them. They glanced through the book together, sharing comments and reminiscences about the movies mentioned. Gottlieb found himself distracted by the freshly showered smell of her. She’d used a shampoo that reminded him of the ocean. Salt air, with a hint of citrus.
“Did you have breakfast?” she asked him a few minutes later.
“Toast and coffee.”
“I don’t have too much in now. I planned to shop later. But there’s fruit salad and bagels and whatnot. Or I could fix us some eggs or pancakes.”
“Fruit salad and a bagel would be fine.”
He followed her into the kitchen and sat down while she brought out a dish of fruit salad from the fridge, put bagels in the toaster oven, and made a fresh pot of coffee.
“Anything I can do?” He wasn’t used to sitting idly while others waited on him.
“Relax, Hal. You don’t always have to be doing.” She put cream cheese and orange marmalade on the counter, touching his shoulder as she passed by him.
After they ate—unhurriedly, as the knot in Gottlieb’s stom-
ach slowly disappeared, as they sat at the counter finishing
their coffee — he loosened his tie, pushed back the chair, and crossed his legs. “It still feels strange to be here. Less so, though.”
She regarded him with a quizzical half-smile. “I don’t know. You look pretty comfortable to me.”
He stared at the nearly empty coffee cup with more intensity than it merited. “Last night, when I couldn’t sleep, my mind was spinning like a pinwheel. I was thinking about. . . oh, God, about all kinds of thing. About you, and us, and the two of us at the aquarium.”
Gottlieb looked at her, hoping that she’d pick up the thread of the conversation. She held her silence, though, refusing to take him off the hook. He continued, “It was the first time I’ve kissed another woman in more than twenty years.”
“What was it like for you?” she asked, in what he’d come to think of as her clinical mode. She would have made a hell of a therapist, he thought, not for the first time.
He searched for the proper simile. “It was like jumping out of an airplane,” he replied finally, “or my guess of what it must be like. Jumping out, and that interval before the parachute opens.”
She threw back her head and tossed off a brief laugh. “Come, now!”
“I mean it.” He tried not to sound hurt.
“Well, it’s actually quite flattering. I’ve never heard a kiss described that way before.”
Exposed and vulnerable, he wanted to throw the focus back to her. “What was it like for you?”
“Overdue.”
With that, she moved towards him, framed his face with her hands and kissed him. Her lips parted, and her tongue flicked and darted as it sought out hidden places in his mouth. His hands came to life, at first unsteadily, moving down her cheeks to her neck and shoulders, coming to rest on the breasts that swelled beneath the plum-and-peach blouse. He felt her nipples rise and stiffen. They kissed again, and then for a third time, and a fourth.
So it went for a few minutes, or maybe five or ten, until she pulled away from him. Without speaking, she led him to the bedroom. For once passive and docile, he felt relief that she was willing to take charge. His sense of time and distance had gone awry. The bedroom seemed a block away, and it took them forever to get to it.
Once there, they stood by the side of her unmade bed while she shed her clothes with fluid ease, and then she turned her attention back to him, kissing and stroking him while she unbuttoned his shirt and unbuckled his belt. His eyes feasted on the firm smooth contours of her body, while his hand made its way (slowly, slowly) from her face to her nipples to her belly to her crotch. In spite of himself, he took note of how her body differed from his wife’s. Her firmer breasts, and the slightly more lateral pitch of them, the better definition of the muscles of her trunk and thighs, the lack of stretch marks. The curlier, more abundant thicket of blonde hair that marked the cleft between her legs.
He was too absorbed with her to give mind to his own
nakedness, for once. Intensely self-conscious about his bodily failings—his weight, his lack of muscle tone, his too-hairy arms and legs—he still felt ill at ease, still, when his wife saw him nude. Whenever possible, he dressed and undressed while she was out of the room.
Holding his hand, she splayed herself on top of the crumpled sheets of the unmade bed and pulled him towards her. As they lay side by side, he returned her kisses more avidly, while his free hand explored the warm blonde thicket. She answered by stroking the most robust erection he’d had in years. That was when the walls began to close in on him, and the room began to spin and jolt. He was seized by the notion that centrifugal force would lift him from the bed and flatten him against a contracting wall. The absurdity of this notion did nothing to dispel it. The walls themselves came in out of focus. They oscillated, their surface marred by eruptions of spark-like incandescent dots.
No matter how forcefully he inhaled, he felt on the verge of suffocation. He felt as though a great weight lay across him, precisely where his neck met his chest. Within the next few minutes he would die. He was sure of it, without a shred of doubt. He would die, and they would find his hairy, fat, buck-naked body in her bed. His heart raced, his hands shook, his palms turned clammy. And, the coup de grâce, his erection vanished in the twinkling of an eye.
And even as these thoughts and sensations assaulted him, a more analytical corner of his mind took them in dispassionately. For years my patients have told me about their panic attacks. So, this is what they’re like.
He turned on his back, put a hand over his eyes, and groaned. She shot up in the bed and leaned over him. “Hal! What’s the matter?”
“Room spinning . . . can’t catch my breath . . .” He groaned again. It was an act of will for him to talk, since every word took prodigious effort.
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