Private Practices

by Linda Wolfe

  “All right,” Ben said brusquely. “Stay with me. You can sleep in the spare room.”

  He didn’t like the idea of living with Sidney very much. But it had certain advantages he saw. He would be able to supervise him more adequately. And when Claudia called him, perhaps he would get a chance to speak with her too. Perhaps he could even convince her to call more frequently. If she didn’t want to have daily contact with Sidney just now, she could call him. He would remind her that separated or not she was still Sidney’s wife and ought at least to have the decency to stay in regular touch with the person upon whom she had shifted the burden of his care. Not that he blamed her. Looking at Sidney, fumbling and maudlin alongside him, he envied Claudia her freedom.

  Upstairs, the once-meticulous apartment was a mess. There were heaps of dirty dishes on the living-room cocktail tables, stacks of mail and newspapers on virtually every chair and footstool and, in the kitchen, overflowing garbage bags on the counters, more dirty dishes in the sink, and small, disregarded mounds of broken crockery swept helter-skelter into the corners. All the rooms smelled foul and, waiting for Sidney to finish his packing, Ben opened windows. Then he cleared a space for himself on a chair at the hall phone and, calling Naomi, who had not yet left for Petey’s play, told her about Sidney and the barbiturates.

  It was easy for him now. His hopes for establishing regular communication with Claudia helped him overcome the reticence he had experienced just an hour ago. He was as thorough in his details as he could be and apologized many times over to Naomi for not having confided in her sooner. And then he told her that Claudia had left Sidney, and that consequently he would have to let Sidney stay with him for a while.

  It wouldn’t be for terribly long, he said. Still, Naomi and Petey mightn’t be able to move in with him at the end of the month, as they had all anticipated. But they would do it soon, he promised.

  Naomi was furious. “Goddamn it, Ben, I’ve already sublet the loft.”

  “See if you can postpone your tenant for a while,” he said calmly. “I’m sure I’ll have Sidney straightened out in a month or two.”

  Naomi sulked. She was furious with Sidney. “Damn Sidney,” she railed. “That fucking Sidney.”

  “I know exactly how you feel. Poor baby. Poor sweetheart.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  JULY

  Claudia was firm about her decision in the daytime, but at night misgivings would invade her. What would become of her if she stayed away from Sidney permanently? What would become of the baby? Would it grow up resenting her for having deprived it of a father? Bootie had said, “All a kid needs is a mother,” but Bootie’s own child, a daughter the bohemian Bootie had had with a St. Louis sculptor she had never planned to marry and no longer saw at all, was whiny and secretive and hardly a good advertisement for single parenthood. Or so it seemed to Claudia.

  At night in the brightly lit suite at the Mayfair House she had taken just after her return from St. Louis, she would cry for hours or hold imaginary conversations with her unborn child, begging its forgiveness for having run away from its father.

  It had been easier in the beginning, when she had first left Sidney. She had felt, the night she had run coatless out of her apartment with her husband scrambling in pursuit behind her, that she had had no choice. If she had stayed even a second longer, he might have beaten her, not in play, as he did to become aroused, but in deadly disordered madness.

  She and Sidney had been talking in the living room of their apartment and he had been drinking heavily, despite the fact that earlier, at dinner, he had swallowed two glistening capsules of Nembutal right in front of her eyes. The phone had rung and she had dutifully gotten up and answered it on the kitchen extension and then returned to the living room to tell Sidney it was Borkin Layton of the Deutsch Foundation. Sidney had poured himself another bourbon before going into the kitchen, and she had waited gingerly outside, nervous because of what her brother-in-law had said about Sidney’s grant being in trouble and knowing it was unusual for Layton to call on a weekend.

  Eavesdropping, she had heard Sidney’s voice grow louder and more explosive as his conversation with Layton progressed. He was mad at Layton, she thought as she listened, or at Keith Neville, whose name she heard him shout several times during the conversation. Then she heard the phone receiver slam down and waited for Sidney to come out of the kitchen. But he didn’t come, and instead she began to hear toppling noises.

  First, she heard a few glasses shattering, then a tentative fall of pottery, and last a reverberating riotous crash of china. She raced into the kitchen and saw Sidney sweeping the pantry shelves with an outstretched whirling arm, glasses and cups and plates spinning and colliding and smashing beneath his feet.

  “Stop it! What’s got into you?” she cried. His face was purpling and his arms were quivering with intense spasms. And then he lunged at her.

  She started running. Sidney was mad at Layton and Neville, but she was the only person present. She knew in that moment the difference between fear and terror. Sidney had always frightened her, but until recently the tremulousness his loud voice and arbitrary assertiveness had aroused in her had usually had a pleasing component, an ingredient of sexual and intellectual thrill. She had perceived Sidney as a man in such full control of himself and his environment that she had imagined that he used fear, that he instilled it in others out of some plan or intent, some thought-out goal, and this had made his mannerisms seem stimulating rather than alarming.

  It was only lately that she had begun to suspect that her vision of Sidney had been inaccurate. Or had become inaccurate. He wasn’t in control. He was floundering. And now, as he came stumbling out of the kitchen after her, she saw at last that he was out of control, and it terrified her.

  She ran down the long foyer, tripping once over the edge of the patterned rug, but managing, despite her panic, to scoop up her large leather handbag from the front hall table. Sidney ran after her.

  Trembling, she flung open the side door that led to the steps and slammed it. Scurrying down the steep metal stairs, she heard Sidney open the door and call to her, “You bitch, you fucking bitch.” She hoped for his own sake he wouldn’t try to run after her on his drug-enfeebled legs. But she didn’t wait to find out if he would. She was on Fifth Avenue and in a cab before she had time to envision what would happen if he stumbled on the stairs.

  And then she didn’t know where to tell the driver to take her. She had no close friends of her own in the city anymore. She and Sidney had socialized chiefly with Sidney’s associates and colleagues. They all liked her, but if she went to one of them, she couldn’t trust herself not to blurt out what she had just been through, and within hours everyone at the hospital would know Sidney’s shame. Her shame. Everyone would know the maniacal condition of her once-imposing husband.

  There was Ben, of course. But he would just tell her to go back to the apartment and make sure Sidney was all right. He adored Sidney, worshiped him, perpetually did his bidding, no matter what was asked of him. Of course, Ben would offer to come with her, once she told him how terrifyingly Sidney had acted, but she couldn’t go back upstairs, not even with Ben, not now, not after having seen Sidney in such disarray.

  She told the driver to take her to La Guardia. Her mother was expecting both Sidney and herself tomorrow for a weekend visit. She would tell her mother she had come a day early, and by herself, because Sidney had unexpectedly been called out of town to chair a meeting. She caught the last shuttle flight to Boston.

  It was only once she was home and in her childhood room that she called Sidney, although throughout the flight she had had intervals of panic in which she had envisioned his having tripped on the steep, unused stairs of the apartment building, his having hit his already dazed head on stone and steel, his having lain undiscovered for hours. But her own need to escape his reach had been uppermost in her mind.

  In Boston, she felt safe enough to call, and even, hideous as the thought s
eemed to her, prepared to notify the police of Sidney didn’t answer the phone. But he did, and although his words were slurred and his statements almost incomprehensible at moments, she gathered he had had a sufficient remnant of self-composure not to have attempted the stairs once she fled. He even apologized for his rage, “Wassn’ you. Wassn’ you I wanted to hurt.”

  She had begun to cry and he had said, “’S best you ran out. ’S best you don’t come back until tomorrow.”

  Her tears had overflowed then. Hadn’t he understood she wasn’t in the city, and couldn’t come back until tomorrow? Crying, she had said “Okay,” hung up, and then lain awake for a long time, listening to the sea flagellating the rocks beneath her bedroom window.

  The house had creaked all night, sea drafts stealing through a myriad of cracks and warped window fittings. Sidney was sick, she kept telling herself, as she huddled under her patchwork quilt. She ought to go back first thing in the morning. But she didn’t want to, and as she relived her hasty flight from the apartment, she suddenly sat up in bed, fully aware now that something more than terror of Sidney’s burst of irrational behavior was making her unwilling to return. Recalling his unsteady stance and spasmodic arms, she realized there had been a strong admixture of contempt in her terror of him. She had lost respect for him.

  Damn the drugs, she thought. Had it not been for the drugs, he would not have been so wild, so unworthy of her admiration. Shivering in the cold room, she blamed the drugs for Sidney’s loss of grandeur and did not believe, although he in one of his mocking moods had insisted she’d best believe, that it was because of his grandeur, because of grandeur evolved into grandiosity, that he had turned to drugs, sure he could control them, determine their effects, manipulate them, survive them.

  If only he would stop taking them, she told herself, all would be as it had once been.

  At last she lay back down, convinced that now, at least, she knew how to regain her respect for Sidney. If he gave up taking the sleeping pills, she would love him again. She would be able to go home.

  But in the morning, when she delivered her ultimatum, Sidney rejected it. His voice was still slurry, but his words were thoughtful, almost clearheaded. “’M not sure. Don’t think I can give them up. ’M think—thinking I don’t really want to.”

  She felt lost, filled with doubts about her ability to live apart from him.

  “Please,” she said.

  “We’ll see. Meanwhile, c’mon back. I need you here.”

  She might have returned, his command triggering in her a wealth of memories of obedience, except that a moment later he added, “’M scared, ’M scared. I need you back here.”

  She had known then that she couldn’t go back, not to this man who was slurring his words and begging her for what she ordinarily gave without hesitating. “Give up the pills,” she had repeated, trying to make her voice authoritative.

  “’S no way to guarantee it, suhweehaar.” The drugs made him shorten his words. It was his slur that put her off. “You’re a fuckinbish, suhweehaar. I’ll stay high all weekend if you don’t come back, suhweehaar.”

  “And if I do?”

  He didn’t answer her.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” she had said hollowly. But when she called on Sunday he didn’t answer the phone and she imagined that, as he had said he would, he had gotten high and forgotten even his need for her.

  From Bootie’s, where she went after her stay in Boston, stopping in the city only to collect a few items of clothing, she and Sidney had similar conversations. “Come back,” he would say, and she would waver and want to return, but she would force herself to say, “I will if you’ll give up the pills,” and he would say, “I can’t promise. I will when I’m ready to.” Then always, after he had stated his position, he would turn either to pleading for her return or to demanding it in a tone that lacked the strength she used to hear in his voice. He would say, “Come back. I’m frightened,” or else grow wildly angry with her, screaming, “Get your ass back here, you fucking bitch.”

  She began to dread their conversations. This man she spoke with daily was not only not the man she had married but every time she spoke with him she felt he was eradicating her memories of that man. Talking to him, she lost her history. After a while, she didn’t even want to call him and, even more strongly, didn’t want to see him. Not in decline.

  When she returned from St. Louis she refused to tell him where she was staying, in case he took it into his head to seek her out, and she arranged a leave of absence from her job so that he wouldn’t try to visit her at the museum. Yet at night, entering the lobby of the Mayfair House she would grow irritated despite herself by the hotel’s prosaic imitations of the hand-painted French ceilings she and Sidney had admired together on a trip to the Loire Valley, and her eyes would fill with tears. And in her suite, surrounded by unfamiliar and conventional objects, she would weep loudly.

  She was homesick, pastsick. But worse still was facing the loss of a future. Until she had left Sidney, she had been able to project before she fell asleep each night not only the content of the next day, its rituals of tidying and shopping and preparing food, but the content of the next week, the next month, the next year.

  Married, she was a citizen of a familiar country. Alone, she was like an immigrant; her past was in a foreign tongue that was already growing rusty, while her future lay in a language she could barely pronounce. And might never master.

  Daily she resolved not to telephone Sidney and yet most nights she found herself dialing him once again.

  One frightening night, although she rang him until four in the morning, he didn’t answer. She set her clock for five, and again for six, and then seven, repeating her efforts hourly, although there was still no answer. And then, at nine, she finally reached Ben in the office.

  “Sidney’s staying with me,” he comforted her, pleased at hearing her cool, well-modulated voice again.

  “Oh. Thank God!”

  “Were you worried?” Despite himself, a tinge of annoyance had crept into his own voice. “One would never have known it, from the way you’ve managed to make yourself so scarce. I was wondering whether you’d even notice that he wasn’t staying in the apartment.”

  “I can’t help myself, Ben. It’s not that I’m not worried about Sidney.” She sounded embarrassed.

  “What is it then?”

  She was quiet for a moment and he anticipated that, as usual, she would hide her thoughts from him. But something had made her less reticent than she customarily was. Perhaps it was being on her own. “I just can’t bear to speak with him,” she said. “He’s different. Not the same man.”

  He listened to her carefully. “It upsets me to speak to him,” she went on, qualifying. “But I do. Not every day, I admit. But I do call.”

  “Why do you?” He spoke slowly, struggling to keep his irritation with her under control.

  She paused. He heard what sounded like sniffling, and then a tear-ridden murmur. “Because I feel so rootless. So alone. So cut off.”

  “Call me, then,” he said swiftly. “I’ll keep you in touch. Call me here in the office, anytime you like. Or at night, if that’s when the loneliness hits you.” He remembered so well that it had been for him chiefly in the dark, while others slept together, that he had felt his own desperate rootlessness. “I have a private number on the phone next to my bed. It’s different from the one on my other phones.”

  “You don’t think I’m hardhearted? Not wanting to speak to him?

  “No. I know what you’re feeling.”

  “I miss him. The man he was.” She was still crying.

  “I understand. Call me.”

  She began phoning Ben several times a week.

  It was the one bright occurrence in his life with Sidney. Sidney had seemed needy and frightened the night he had asked to stay with him. But once he knew he had a caretaker, a guardian against his fear that he might accidentally consume too many pills and fall into a
coma that would, if unattended, rob his body of oxygen and leave him dead or brain-damaged, he was confident and arrogant once again. He was willful about going into the office or hospital, no matter how dazed or dulled his state, and he was impossibly demanding to live with. Ben had forgotten how much his brother liked to be waited upon.

  Sidney would do nothing around the apartment. Ben took care of their clothing needs, making frequent trips to the laundry and the cleaner’s, and he shopped for the two of them and prepared dinner, or at least set the table and laid out the ready-to-eat food he had purchased—oranges and bananas and cheese from the local Gristede’s, fried shrimp and potatoes or barbecued chickens from Luby’s Delicatessen.

  Sidney ate very little of the food Ben set before him and never offered to clean up afterward. Sometimes Ben would ask for his help but although Sidney often said, “Sure, sure I’ll do it,” he never did, and when Ben would return to the kitchen, the waxy sandwich papers and dirty dishes would still lie scattered on the table. Ben himself would have to start brushing the garbage into a bag and washing the dishes, and after a while he gave up asking Sidney for assistance.

  “Let’s get a cleaning lady,” he called out to Sidney one night. He was scraping greasy, food-laden dinner plates into the kitchen garbage pail and Sidney was lying on a couch in the living room, reading a newspaper.

  “And have someone prowling around here whenever she wants and poking into our private papers?” Sidney got up from the couch and stood in the archway of the kitchen watching Ben. The pupils of his hazel eyes were large and dark. “Not on your life!” he added.

  “What private papers?” Ben asked.

  “My research notes.”

  “They’re in the office.”

  “Well, it’s the principle of the thing. I hate having my privacy interrupted. Besides, you’re looking after everything perfectly.”

  Sidney sat down at the kitchen table to finish reading his newspaper and Ben washed the dishes, but he was enraged. Sidney was trying to turn him into a slave. “I don’t like looking after you,” he said sharply, shutting off the faucets.