“You heard me. Exorcism.”
Gottlieb sat listening, enthralled. “Go on.”
“Needless to say, that gained my attention. And then John told me the whole story. He described his brother speaking in a language he’d never heard before, in voices he’d never heard before. He described the most terrible, vilest smells imaginable, different from anything he’d ever known. He described him as having the strength of a bull, how it took four big men to hold him down. By the way, his brother was only five foot seven, about 150 pounds and slightly built. And then he told me about the levitation—”
“What!”
“Levitation,” Pasternak repeated. “His brother’s body lifted off the floor. More than once, in fact. It stayed in the air for five or ten seconds at a time.”
“That’s impossible.”
“It would seem so,” replied Pasternak, unruffled. He picked up the pipe but didn’t light it. “I asked John the obvious questions. Had he been drinking? Using drugs? Could someone else have drugged him? Could his brother have learned a foreign language without his knowledge? Could he have soiled himself and become incontinent, could that have caused the smell? Could there have been some kind of hidden supports, like wires from the ceiling? Was he too far away to see what was really happening? And the answer was always no.”
Pasternak paused briefly. “I should tell you something else about John. He wasn’t an imaginative fellow. He had no flair for melodrama. Phlegmatic, a little on the dull side. I don’t think he could have made this up, even if he’d wanted to.”
“Had he told anyone else about it?”
“No. And I don’t think he would have told me, if I hadn’t stumbled into it, and if I hadn’t pressed him.”
Pasternak broke off when a helicopter flew noisily over the beach front. “I don’t know what really happened that day with John’s brother, any more than you really know what the Shannon girl was all about. I’ll only say that things happen that can’t be addressed by our ordinary logic. Things that go beyond our ordinary realm of experience. How did Shakespeare put it in Hamlet? When Hamlet tells Horatio that there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. I forget the exact words.”
They fell silent. Gottlieb studied the lake, darker now, a deeper green than it had been before. He remembered what Pasternak had said about the lake’s different moods and colors. The lake’s mood had changed, subtly but unmistakably. More restless now, on the verge of angry.
“I’m afraid I haven’t been much help to you,” the old man commented.
“Yes, you have. It helps just to bounce this off someone else.”
The old man turned towards him. “When you called,” he prodded gently, “you said there were some other issues. Personal ones.”
“I’m terribly concerned about my son,” said Gottlieb. “He’s fifteen now, with all the signs and symptoms of a serious depression. Each day he pulls farther away from the rest of us.” Gottlieb gave a rapid account of Peter’s metamorphosis from the happy little boy with dark cherubic curls to the silent, sullen lump who sat alone in his hovel of a room.
“I see him headed for terrible trouble,” concluded Gottlieb, “and I don’t know how to stop it. He’s dead set against any kind of therapy. He won’t tell us what he wants or needs. Perhaps he can’t because he doesn’t know himself.”
“What did you want when you were his age?”
Gottlieb shut his eyes as he tried to conjure up the past.
“God, it was so long ago, I can barely remember back that far. What did I want? Well, the main thing I wanted was for my father to get well.” By the time Hal reached his teens, his father had already become incapacitated by the multiple sclerosis that ultimately took his life.
“Yes, but what did you want for yourself?”
“Above all else, I wanted to feel I wasn’t so terribly different.” He recalled, in passing, that Cassandra had told him much the same. “That I wasn’t the only one who was too fat, with acne, who masturbated all the time. Who was sure no woman would ever look twice at him. I wanted not to feel everyone in the world was better than me. Better looking, more confident, more socially adept. I felt condemned to be the outsider, not just then, but forever.”
Gottlieb’s eyes welled up. “I don’t think about those things too often. I forget how painful they once were.”
“If you consider what you were like at that age yourself, and what you needed then,” reflected Pasternak, “that alone will help you to help your son.”
Gottlieb took a macaroon, not because he was hungry, but because it gave him something to do, to focus on. Something to keep him from crying.
“There’s another thing,” he resumed after a lengthy silence. “Yesterday morning, a few hours before I called you, I had a full-blown panic attack. The first one I’ve ever had.” Too embarrassed to look at Pasternak directly, he scrutinized the lake as he haltingly delved into the circumstances.
“Who is she, this other woman? What is she to you?”
“Her name is Cassandra. She’s a historian, in her late thirties. Nice looking, very smart. As is my wife, I should add, on both counts. What is she to me? The first word that comes to mind is friend. Although I’m not sure friendship is an option now . . . not after that. I’ve told her things about myself that I haven’t told anyone else, and vice versa. I don’t know if we’ve known each other long enough to develop what constitutes a true friendship. It hasn’t even been two months, but she has gotten to be terribly important to me.”
The old man pressed his fingertips together. “You know one of things that has always struck me about psychiatry, Hal? It’s this paradox: we study the brain in all its infinite complexity, and we put together these great theories of personality and behavior, but much of it comes down to little more than common sense. For example, let’s consider what happened to you yesterday. We could talk about it fancifully. Midlife issues. Doubts about your own attractiveness to women, stemming from your own adolescence and rekindled by what’s happening to your son now, and so on. We could talk about it in these terms, but do we need to? The gist of it seems pretty clear, I think. Infidelity makes you terribly uncomfortable. You may be drawn to the fantasy of it, like most of us, but you shy away from the reality of it.”
He uncrossed his leg on the hassock before him and went on. “Now I know there are people who carry it off with relative ease, or at least who appear to. They indulge themselves. They hop from bed to bed without a second thought. Maybe they’re lucky, and maybe not. I must say, I haven’t known too many of them who struck me as terribly happy. But it’s irrelevant, since you don’t happen to be one of them.”
“I suppose,” said Gottlieb quietly, “that I knew that all along.”
“Listen, Hal, since you’re not my patient any longer, not officially, I have the luxury of giving you direct advice. Be this woman’s friend, and let her be a friend to you. Assuming that the friendship will survive, and my hunch is that it will. But let it go at that. Stay faithful to your wife. There are worse things than staying faithful to a woman you still love. That is, if you still do, of course.”
“I do. I always have, almost from the day I met her. I always will, incurably.”
Pasternak gave his knee a small fraternal pat.
Their conversation shifted to a lighter vein. The weather, local politics, Gottlieb’s plans to attend a seminar in forensic psychiatry, Pasternak’s plans to spend Labor Day weekend with a daughter in Maryland.
Gottlieb checked his watch. It was a few minutes after noon. “I really didn’t know it was so late,” he said apologetically. “I hope I haven’t imposed too much.”
Pasternak cut him off with a wave of the hand. “Not at all, not at all. It was very nice to have you here. I hope you’ll keep in touch and not wait for twenty-five more years to pass. God forbid that I should be around then.”
“I won’t. And thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Pasternak began
to walk him to the door but stopped abruptly. “Something just occurred to me about that case, the Shannon case. Why did he kill her when he did? Why not three months earlier or six months later?”
“I don’t know. Whenever we’ve talked about it, I’ve mainly been concerned with motive.”
“Never underestimate the importance of timing, Hal. Things happen for a reason, but they also happen when they happen for a reason. I know, it’s a basic point, but it’s easy to overlook.”
Gottlieb raised his eyebrows. “I’ll ask him about it. I’ll ask him the next time I see him, on Monday morning.”
They shook hands by the door. Standing, Warren Pasternak looked older than he had on the patio, stooped and wizened. But his gaze remained clear, his handshake firm. “Keep in touch,” he repeated.
“I will,” Gottlieb vowed again.
He found himself wondering what the old man’s life was like—living alone, his children living with their families far away. Watching the lake, smoking his pipe, reading. Living alone while the wife he clearly loved spent her final days in a nursing home, pacing the halls and watching a videotape of tropical fish, a video made for cats.
CHAPTER XX
T HE NEXT SUNDAY, THREE DAYS AFTER his meeting with Warren Pasternak, Gottlieb found himself with a surfeit of nervous energy. While not lazy—he had more than a touch of the workaholic in his nature—he usually avoided household chores. A Jewish medical princeling, his wife called him, a man who believed beds made themselves and clothes laundered themselves. But this Sunday he lunged into a series of mundane tasks with near-zeal. Washing and waxing the Saab (Sharon’s Acura too, for good measure), cleaning the garage, and weeding the margins of the driveway.
Sarah helped him, in a manner of speaking. She scrubbed the Saab as far as her short arms could reach, stuffing debris into heavy-duty trash bags while singing fragments of songs from The Lion King. Every so often, as her father hosed down the car, he’d turn the water on her, to her great enjoyment.
Watching her pretend to run away from him, as seemingly happy as a child can be, Gottlieb had a fleeting memory of Peter at that age. He’d been just as happy as his sister, just as carefree. Comparing them forced Gottlieb to contemplate Sarah’s adolescence. It was still a long way off, but not long enough to suit him, not nearly long enough. Maybe it won’t be as bad as his, Gottlieb allowed himself to hope. If it is, I could join the French Foreign Legion.
Peter himself was spending the day with Gordy Wilder, with whom he was on good terms again, more or less.
Gottlieb and his daughter worked steadily, from right after an early lunch until close to three. It was cooler than usual for this time of year but still muggy, and it grew muggier as the day went on. “Daddy, it’s too hot to work like this,” complained
Sarah.
“I know, sweetheart, but we’re almost finished.” They had just filled their third large plastic bag with the last of the debris from the garage.
“Could we go to a movie?”
He pretended to ponder this at length. “Well, I don’t see why not,” he answered finally. “Let me finish up the odds and ends in here and then we’ll check the paper.”
Inside the house, they skimmed the entertainment section. The cinematic fare consisted mainly of action sequels. Speed II, Jurassic Park II, the latest Batman. There were also several comedies of the Porky’s genre. Then he noticed that 101 Dalmatians had been brought back by one of the smaller nearby theaters. The next showing was at three fifty. Sarah had seen it on TV a year ago, and enough time had passed for a second viewing.
He asked Sharon to join them but she declined, as he knew she would. Sharon’s Sunday afternoon routine bordered on the sacrosanct. She sorted through papers and paid bills while listening to Car Talk, taking a walk if the weather permitted, taking a nap. Despite little interest in automotive matters, she listened to Car Talk faithfully, mainly because of an infatuation with Tom and Ray. She told Hal that she intended to run away with one of them if anything happened to their marriage. Either one; it didn’t matter.
They set off in the Saab, sparkling clean now, as they headed for the theater. Gottlieb, contented for a change, was unburdened by the pinwheel of dark tangential thoughts that had lately become the bane of his existence. He took a deep if simple comfort in listening to his daughter prattle about going back to school . . . about Disney World, and couldn’t they PLEEZE go there . . . about her friends and her dolls and her stuffed animals.
He enjoyed the movie more than he expected to. As much as
the movie itself, he enjoyed his daughter’s reactions to it. He
turned in the darkened theater to steal glances at her face, which registered concern when the Dalmatians were in danger, severe disapproval of Cruella De Vil, and joy and relief when the pups prevailed.
On the way home they stopped to have dinner at a nearby deli. She sat across from him in a booth, munching on a grilled cheese sandwich and sipping a glass of chocolate milk.
“Daddy, I think we should get a dog,” she said gravely.
“You do, do you?”
“Uh-huh. A puppy.”
“You weren’t thinking about a Dalmatian puppy by any chance, were you?”
“How did you know?”
“Just a hunch.”
She broke into a huge smile. “Those dogs in the movie were soooo cute!”
“I know, honey, but a movie’s different from real life. Having a pet means lots of work and responsibility. You’d need to give it food and water, and clean up after it, and train it. You’d have to take it out for a walk, even when you didn’t feel like it, even if it’s raining or snowing. There’s more to having a pet than just playing with it.”
“I’d take care of it. I’d feed it every morning, and give it water before I went to school. Peter could help me.”
Gottlieb took a forkful of herring salad. “But after a while, the novelty would wear off.”
“What’s novelty mean?”
“It’s when something’s new and exciting. Trouble is, it doesn’t last. What used to be novelty becomes familiar, and then it’s not a novelty anymore. It’s not so exciting.” Like a marriage, for instance.
She considered. “But something that’s familiar can still be fun, can’t it?”
“Well, yes, of course it can.”
“If we had a puppy he’d become, you know, like part of the
family,” she countered. “We’d love him, so it wouldn’t matter if he was a novelly or not.”
“Novelty,” he corrected her.
She batted her eyes at him. “You know what I mean.” He did, indeed.
“It would be a wonderful birthday present,” she pressed on. The following December she’d turn six.
“Honey, we’ll have to think about this very carefully. It’s a big decision. Dogs live a long time. Some of them live almost twenty years.”
“I hope so. It would be awful to have a dog that died.”
He sighed. “I’ll talk to Mommy about it. But no promises, okay?”
“Okay.” She nibbled at the sandwich before she played her final card. “It would make me the happiest girl in the world!”
“I thought you were already.”
She weighed this carefully. “Well, almost.”
The conversation moved on to other things, like was it better to have a dog or cat, and why couldn’t you have one of each, and did he have a dog when he was growing up, and what about Mommy, and there was a friend of hers, Betsy Powers, who had a dog and a cat and a pony. And Gottlieb knew that sooner or later a Dalmatian pup would very likely take up residence with them. It didn’t matter that Dalmatians had a reputation for being temperamental and high-strung. Nor did it matter that the complications of the Gottliebs’ lives, already considerable, would burgeon. There’d be trips to the vet and dog obedience school, and they’d have to make boarding arrangements when they went away, quite apart from the day-to-day care of an untrained puppy. Expensive too, whe
n you added up the dog food and vet bills, and maybe electric fencing.
Nor did it matter that Sharon would most likely shit a brick when he brought it up. Sharon waged a constant battle to simplify their lives. But if Sarah really wanted something, he would try to find a way to make it happen. He could no more resist her than he could resist the allure of a warm sunny day in the dead of winter.
⸎
Just as they got home, Sharon was leaving, her car keys clutched in a tight fist, her face as livid as Gottlieb had ever seen it. She accosted her husband without looking at him. “I have to get away from him. He’s in his room. You deal with him!”
He flew out of the car and ran after her. “Sharon, wait! What happened?”
“Ask him. Listen, Hal, I really have to leave.”
“Where are you going?”
“I have no idea.” She got into her Acura, slammed the door, started the car, and shot out the driveway like a rocket.
They went to the house, Gottlieb holding Sarah’s hand, squeezing it to the edge of discomfort. She looked at him, bewildered. “Daddy, what’s the matter?”
“I don’t know yet, honey. Listen, why don’t you watch TV for a bit while I talk to your brother?”
“Okay.” She trudged off to the family room as he took a deep breath and steeled himself for his son.
Gottlieb went upstairs and tapped at Peter’s door. No answer. He knocked again, more forcefully. “It’s me.”
“Go away!”
The sound of his voice, however angry or despairing, brought Gottlieb an iota of relief. At least he hasn’t hanged himself in there.
“Peter, I just got home. I have no idea what happened here today. Suppose you tell me.”
“Suppose you go away and LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE!”
Gottlieb’s cheeks reddened. “Damn it, Peter, I wasn’t even here this afternoon! Why are you mad at me?”
“Can’t you please just go away?” This time Peter’s tone
expressed less rage; it was more imploring. He sounded close to tears.
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