“But then to leave me!”
For once I didn’t challenge her, although I still believed I’d been right to leave. Instead, tentatively, I asked whether her changed attitude regarding my responsibility for Danny’s death was what had made her wait for me after my mother’s funeral, and kept bringing her back to my apartment. I didn’t know if this would anger her.
“Of course it did. You think I’d come here if I hated you?”
“So do you love me?”
“Don’t get carried away, Charlie. All I said was, I didn’t hate you. I did hate you, but I don’t now. It’s such hard work hating someone.”
“I’ve never hated anyone. Except my father. And Walt, of course, but that’s complicated. That’s not true hatred.”
“What is it then?”
“You want me to tell you a story about Walt?”
I was watching her closely. Did she want me to tell her a story about Walt? I took a strong interest in what others felt about my brother, and it was a source of astonishment to me that people didn’t see right through him. When Agnes first met him, Walt was a hairy, hard-drinking painter-man whose abstract aesthetics were tempered by a ferocious ambition he did little to conceal. This wasn’t something I could talk to him about. Walt derided me for supposedly upholding some outdated myth of the artist in the garret, and I told him that his cynicism made a mockery of any aspiration to integrity he might claim. On one occasion, and this was the story I told Agnes, I had accused him of being indifferent to the war—this at a time when the streets of American cities were loud with protest. Walt’s response was extraordinary. He claimed he was himself at war.
“At war with what?” I’d said.
“With the history of art.”
I had never forgotten it. I told Agnes about it as though it had happened not years ago but yesterday.
“You do know, don’t you, that you’ve told me that story before?” she said.
I was aware that I’d told her the story before, but what mattered was that she share my horrified amusement. So deep an impression had it made on me, so strong was the charge that still attached to the memory, that it overrode any embarrassment I may have felt about repeating myself.
“Oh, Charlie, you’re so odd about Walter. I’m afraid your mother’s responsible for that.”
“You think it’s unhealthy.”
“Sure I think it’s unhealthy. I never figured out why she treated you so badly, and so adored Walter.”
This, too, we’d discussed before. The sad fact was, I didn’t know either.
“But you’re the shrink!”
I spread my hands wide. I didn’t know.
One night, when she was about to return to Fulton Street, I asked why she couldn’t stay the night.
“Don’t, Charlie. Try to imagine my situation. It’s not easy.”
I said nothing. She put her arms on my shoulders. She was almost as tall as me in her heels.
“You’re a nice guy,” she said. “Say something, Charlie. Be nice.”
“I’m running on empty here,” I said.
She angled her head slightly and kissed me.
“Is it very unfair?” she said.
“I think it is.” She gazed at me then with what looked like sadness tinged with affection, but said nothing.
A little later I sat in the dark apartment feeling like a man suffering from a peculiar sort of thirst. Lacking the power to control the course of the relationship, starved of information about what was happening in Fulton Street and forced to accommodate Agnes’s erratic schedule, I was in the position of a kept man. Concubinage was still a criminal offense in some countries. Sophia Loren had been prosecuted for it. Of course I wasn’t paid to hold myself in readiness for my lover’s occasional appearances, unless the sex was itself payment; and there were the women I visited on Lexington Avenue and elsewhere, though they offered little of what I required, the sort of intimacy that Agnes promised but never quite delivered. She never stayed the night and gave me only partial glimpses of the life she led apart from me. But despite my dissatisfaction I knew it wouldn’t be me who broke off the arrangement. I still entertained fantasies of the three of us living under one roof, a family. And god knows I needed a family—my own had been a disaster.
After she’d left, my mind drifted back to the story I’d told her about Walter. The bond between brothers is often intense, but it isn’t necessarily affection that unites them.
Affection was rarely evident in our relationship, yet we depended on each other in a number of ways. I often questioned him closely about our childhood. Being three years older than me, he remembered more than I could, and despite the patent unreliability of such memories I was always eager to hear his stories. I remember one particular conversation in some detail. We were sitting up late drinking in my apartment.
“Did he ever have a job?” I said.
We were talking about Fred, of course.
“He brought in a little cash now and then, but it was never clear where he got it. Gambling, I guess, the horses. I think he fenced stolen property, but very small-time. You remember that time the bedroom was full of cardboard boxes?”
“No.”
“I had a look in one of them. Kitchen equipment. Egg beaters, knives and forks, pots and pans. Mom told him if he didn’t get that shit out of the apartment she’d call the cops.”
I think I would’ve looked more kindly on my father’s shortcomings, or with less scorn, at least, if he’d been even slightly affable or affectionate toward me. But he wasn’t.
“You remember how he’d just blow?” said Walt.
Oh, I remembered. I remembered him shouting, I remembered doors being slammed, plates and glasses being smashed. I remembered how once I climbed onto the table and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” with my hand on my heart, just to distract him. It worked: the astonishment was enough to disrupt his anger and turn it into laughter. Walter nodded when I told him this story. He’d been there, of course; in fact he’d probably shaped the story for me in later years.
“Why did he get so mad?” I said.
Adult anger is terrifying to a child. The loss of control threatens the stability of his world and puts him in fear of his life. The child has no confidence in his ability to withstand rage, and believes it will break him into fragments.
“Because Mom told him he was a loser.”
“You heard her say that?”
“Not in so many words.”
“Then how do you know?”
“Christ, Charlie, I just remember how she’d go for his jugular, and it drove him crazy.”
Fred Weir in fact was a loser, and this must have been apparent to others long before I realized it myself. My mother, on the other hand, was a sharp-tongued woman who saw no reason not to speak her mind, which made her ill-suited for life with a lazy, shiftless, short-tempered man like him. Small wonder that as a child I used to dream of him putting a gun to my head and threatening to kill me.
“She provoked him, didn’t she?” I said.
“He couldn’t take criticism. She didn’t care. She wasn’t going to keep quiet just because he lost his temper.”
Walter fished a cigar out of his pocket and took a moment to get it going. I waited.
“It got pretty bad at times,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“He used to hit her.”
He leaned across the table and refilled my glass. I didn’t remember it, but at the same time I knew it had happened. Nobody had ever told me it happened, but I was sure that when he described it I would recognize it. In fact, I could dimly visualize it already. I said as much.
“I guess you’ve wiped it. I wish I could.”
“Why?”
“I saw it happen one time. He knocked her down, but she got right back up like one of those dolls and called him a cocksucker and then boom! Down she went again.”
“Where did it happen?”
“In some hotel in the Catsk
ills. I saw it through a crack in the door. I never told her I saw him hit her. Then he’d walk out and we’d hear her crying in there. You hated that. You’d go in and try to comfort her.”
“I do remember that.”
“But this one time it was really bad.”
“Go on.”
“You remember his gun?”
His gun. Fred and his firearms.
“No.”
But I did, and even as I denied it I felt the memory begin to stir, the dream of the gun rising in my mind as though from under a lifting mist—it was what I’d felt a moment before, the certainty that when he said it I would know it. Fred’s gun, which he kept in a locked drawer of his desk in the living room. But Walter knew where he put the key: on the top shelf of a cupboard in the kitchen. One time, when Fred was out, and Mom was in her room, we unlocked the drawer and looked at the gun. It lay there among the bills and checkbooks, a heavy black automatic. His service weapon from World War II. Neither of us dared even touch it. Fred always had firearms. He went to jail for firearms.
“So what about the gun?”
“Oh, I forget now. All so long ago.”
Chapter Five
Then my life changed. It was sudden, and while it took me by surprise, in retrospect I see that I had been unconsciously preparing myself for just such an event. I met a woman. Her name was Nora Chiara. Now I should tell you at once that by this time in my life I was not a catch. On a busy street in Manhattan your eye would not be drawn to this harried-looking figure, above medium height, conservatively dressed and older, apparently, than his almost forty years. I had a failed marriage behind me, I lived for my work, I never left town, and the people I saw most often were my daughter and my brother and his family, who’d moved into the apartment on Eighty-seventh Street left to them by my mother.
The first time I saw her she was in a restaurant called Sulfur, one of the new places then opening downtown. It was popular in those days and may be still for all I know, but it always reminded me of a railroad station. The noise of so many people beneath so high a ceiling made me think of trains, or of missing trains. The fear of missing trains. I was in private practice by then and had a small office on Park Avenue. One of my patients at the time, Joseph Stein, dreamed of missing trains, and this is why I mention it, for he was on my mind that night: this was a man who through no fault of his own had killed a pedestrian when he’d lost control of his car on an icy road. Having taken a life he didn’t know why he himself should be allowed to live, and this was causing me some concern. We had established trust, and what I was trying to elicit from him now was the trauma story itself: what happened, what were the details of the thing, what did he feel, what did his body do, what did it all mean. Only when we had the trauma story, and he’d assimilated it into conscious memory—into the self—could we move on to the last stage, which involved reconnecting him to the world, specifically his family and the community in which he lived.
There was a long bar of dark wood, the open cabinets behind it rising to the ceiling and stacked with bottles of red wine that gleamed black as billiard balls. You could sit at the counter and eat hard-boiled eggs with your wine, if you wanted to. From the ceiling, large yellow globe-lamps spread a penumbral half-light on the scattering of tables on the mosaic tile floor far below.
That night, a wet night in early April, I’d been supposed to dine with Walt but he canceled at the last minute. I was already downtown, so rather than go back to Twenty-third Street I’d come in out of the rain and asked for a table for one. I was seated in the corner, and over my newspaper I watched the owner’s wife, Audrey, pull up a chair at a noisy table and engage in a low-voiced conversation with a small, dark-haired woman I’d noticed the moment I stepped into the place. I guessed she was in her early thirties. She possessed the sort of beauty I associate with French actresses of a certain age, and she gave off a faint, subtle suggestion of recent grievous suffering. Her heart had been much broken; or so one felt, watching her.
I ordered a salad and a piece of grilled fish. At first I thought she must be a celebrity of some kind, though in this I was mistaken. She was famous only for destroying men. That night she wore a dark gray cashmere shawl around her shoulders, also an air of distant indulgence, laughing occasionally but giving the impression that this was a mere flurry on a sea of private pain. She was attached to nobody, yet they all in a way performed for her. Only her friend Audrey seemed able to bring a spark of life to her gravely composed features. I watched her with some curiosity, for if it was a performance—as I assume all public behavior is, at root—then its accomplishment was to seem anything but, which perhaps was why the entire table sought to amuse her.
She didn’t move from her place—no table-hopping for this one—and sustained her composure throughout the evening; and when the table began to break up she showed no effects of the wine she’d drunk, six glasses of Chablis by my count. I watched her as she paused at the door for a last word with her friend. She touched the other woman’s cheek and murmured what looked like “Bless you,” then disappeared into the night.
Then, a week later, quite by chance, or at least I assumed it was, I encountered her again. Walt had asked me to dinner to make up for the evening we’d missed at Sulfur. It had been a long day. Joe Stein was beginning to display a fixation on his trauma, a worrying development. He told me that his mental life was now entirely focused on the death of the pedestrian. When his wife called to remind him of his mother’s birthday, he at once thought of the birthday of the mother of the man who’d died, and then of the dead man’s birthday, or rather of the fact that for him there would be no more birthdays, and why? Because—and so he was back to it.
“Because I killed the poor bastard!”
Stein was a slim, bald, dapper little man, a commodities broker with an office on Wall Street. The trauma was obsessing him. He was starting to structure his entire mental life around it. Not good. Not uncommon, but not good. So I really wasn’t in the mood for company, but Walt had insisted. There was someone he wanted me to meet. I left my apartment with some irritation, but managed to find a cab right away. The driver was from the Soviet Union.
“You want the highway, you want local?”
“Highway.”
Night was falling. Stein had told me he was thinking about suicide. Though I was fairly sure he didn’t mean it, I’d been wrong before. I remember staring out at the river and imagining him jumping from the George Washington Bridge, then listing all the reasons why that wasn’t going to happen. For one thing, he had the support of his wife, and while this may be heresy in my profession, it is often by means of simple courage and a good woman that psychological problems are overcome, and without any help from people like me.
By the time I got out of the cab I’d succeeded in putting all thoughts of suicide out of my mind. I stood outside what I still thought of as my mother’s building and gazed down the block to the park, where the trees massed in the now-fallen darkness. A misty rain had begun to fall, slanting through the streetlights. It was one of those deceptively still, mild nights that occasionally occurs in New York, when the city seems to collapse, exhausted from its relentless roaring and surging, and pauses briefly to gather its immense energies before starting up again. What I really wanted was to find some little place on Columbus Avenue and have dinner alone.
Walt, wearing a striped apron, opened the door of the apartment with a glass of wine in his hand. He liked to cook now. He considered himself a nurturing man. He was a good thirty pounds overweight.
“Doctor Charlie,” he said.
He put his hand on my shoulder and we walked down the hall, whose walls fairly bristled with art and into the big atelier, what had once been our living room, the high windows shaded by pale slatted blinds now and a large Twombly hanging over the fireplace. As I came into the room Lucia, Walt’s wife, shouted to me from the kitchen, and I caught a glimpse of their eldest child, Jake. A man and two women were sitting on the sofa. To my
astonishment the dark-haired woman, the one I’d seen in Sulfur, was one of them.
“Charlie, a good friend of mine, Nora Chiara.”
I almost said, But I know you.
I couldn’t define her. I knew she was vulnerable. Despite the tough, urbane cast of the woman, the mature intelligence, the sophistication—the whiskey-throated laughter—she was certainly vulnerable. We are all of course vulnerable, and I can’t pretend that I didn’t see it at once, or draw the obvious inference regarding our mutual attraction. There were a number of indications. The twitching foot, or rather the anxiety it couldn’t mask, this suggested damage. She had reached for my hand without rising from the sofa, and I’d known then, or thought I did, why Walt had asked me to come: his so-called nurturing included getting me hooked up again. Her gleaming hair was blue-black and cut in a clean line at chin level, exposing the back of her neck and her soft throat. She was wearing a clingy black dress and her shoulders were bare. How small she was, how perfect the swell of her breasts against the black material. How creamy and white her skin. She half-turned on the sofa, an arm thrown over the back, and looked me over rather coolly. She wasn’t French, as I’d idly imagined, she was from Queens. I thought of the cashmere shawl that had covered those shoulders and breasts a week ago. I myself was in a gray suit and a black shirt, and by chance a tie the exact same shade as that shawl.
“So you’re the shrink,” she said.
“I’m a psychiatrist.”
There was a sort of sharpened gleam about her, as though she sniffed conflict and liked it. For a second I glimpsed her teeth, small and feral, very white against the red lipstick.
“Psychiatrist, then.”
Trauma Page 5