Trauma

by Patrick Mcgrath

She was certainly direct. Her legs were elegantly crossed at the knee but there was a slight tremor in the lifted foot with its vertiginous stiletto. Her black stockings were sheer, with a seam, and her skirt was riding high on her thighs. And I, freighted with my narcissistic need to be the fixer, the healer, of course I was attracted to her. Moth to a flame. So I did not go in blind.

  But the next day, waiting for Stein in my office, when I tried to describe her to myself I had some difficulty, and I’m someone who describes people to himself for a living. I had a couch in the office, an old chesterfield from my Johns Hopkins days, a commodious piece of furniture upholstered in oxblood leather much cracked and creased, and very comfortable. I stretched out on it and closed my eyes. A host of vivid impressions arose which I will not catalog here, apart from this. We’d got out of the cab and were walking toward my building. The night was wet and windy, my arm was around her shoulders, hers around my waist, and we nearly stumbled. “Fuck,” she shouted, “these heels!”—but I saw quite clearly what had happened. She’d been trying to avoid a crack in the sidewalk. She wouldn’t step on it. It was a fleeting thing, but it stayed with me: a brief glimpse of childish superstition in this very grown-up woman.

  When I rose from the couch and prepared for my appointment with Joe Stein I was aware of new feelings stirring in me. Hope, for one.

  We decided, that night, to meet in a restaurant. The decorum required in a public place would allow us to negotiate the tricky currents of this unknown sea, this sudden other person. There is trepidation attached to an intimacy embarked on without warning or preparation. Neither of us wanted to go to Sulfur, so I suggested a place in the West Village.

  She was wearing a short black jacket over a man’s white shirt unbuttoned to her breasts, and a short black skirt. Her hair was slicked back with some sort of gel, and she wore glasses with heavy black frames. Bare legs, black shoes with low heels. I told her later that she looked like a librarian with a secret. Later still I told her she was wanton. But first we had to get through dinner. When she first came into the restaurant I’d watched with quickened heartbeat as she spoke to the waiter, who’d turned to point at where I was waiting with my arm uplifted in the shadows at the back of the room. As I rose with stiffening penis to greet her, she paused, then kissed me lightly on the lips. She was fragrant.

  “I couldn’t see you,” she said. “It’s like a crypt in here.”

  “Are you all right?” I said.

  She’d sat down and was dealing with her bag, frowning, sighing, but at this question she grew still and gazed at me. I was saying, Do you regret last night? The sex had been, for me, at least, deeply interesting. She was a restrained lover, almost to the point of passivity: a small, pale, fleshy, pliant doll of a woman in bed, but she talked throughout, which I liked, husky, dirty talk. She had excited a strange fierceness in me that I didn’t trouble to analyze. Sex is sex, after all; there are few rules. Do no harm.

  “I’m fine, Charlie. How are you?”

  I told her I was all right too. We sat in silence until the waiter arrived, drinks were ordered, menus scrutinized.

  “I’m starving,” she said.

  I thought at first she was just going through the motions, having dinner with me to be polite. And that that would be the end of it. She was behaving not like the vampy creature who’d flirted with me at Walt’s, then spent the night in my bed; rather, she was the demure woman I’d seen that evening in Sulfur. But after several glasses of wine she began to warm up. She was with me because she wanted to be, and remembering how we were then, when it was all promise, with nothing to ruin it but folly, or fear, I see us as though from a camera attached to a track on the ceiling: a lean, lanky man with his hair cut short, en brosse, in a creased linen suit with one elbow propped on the candlelit table, his chin cupped in his fingers, the other arm thrown over the back of his chair, listening with a smile to this peachy woman gesticulating and smoking on the other side of the table. She ate only a little of her pasta and barely touched her steak. She drank several carafes of white wine, I didn’t count, while I nursed a glass of red. She must have smoked seven cigarettes over the course of the meal, but a number of them she crushed out after only one or two drags. I idly wondered why some cigarettes got smoked right down to the filter and others were crushed out at birth.

  I paid the check and we emerged into the night. We were a couple of blocks west of Seventh Avenue. She took my hand. We stepped away from the restaurant, and there were flowers for sale in the deli on the corner. I asked her if she’d like some.

  “No, Charlie,” she said. “Let’s just go home.”

  Home. My apartment, she meant. Which no woman had entered for many months, excepting Agnes, of course. In which I had become accustomed to retire from the world at the end of the day and there indulge the stark pleasures of my solitude. I experienced a flicker of misgiving at the prospect of relinquishing that solitude, but it was only a flicker. For a woman to refer to a man’s apartment as home is of some importance, for it suggests trust; and this had come from a woman I’d known barely twenty-four hours. One of the rewards of maturity, I told myself, in a rare burst of complacency, is the ability to make a rapid decision on a matter of profound emotional significance and have confidence in its soundness. The folly in this line of thinking didn’t become apparent until later, though even then I was aware, somewhere in the engine room at the back of my mind, of a needle flickering across a gauge and entering the red zone, signaling danger.

  Had I guessed it already, had I glimpsed again the eternal inexorable truth that it is always the sick ones who seek out the healers? The lost ones who hunt down the fathers? There was a slight tremor, this I do remember, for I had barely touched my wine, I was clearheaded; or no, not a tremor, a sensation of blur, the lover blurring into the shrink. This I ignored, and instead I exulted. Home, such as it was.

  We could talk, this was the point. In the back of cabs, in restaurants, in the park after visits to Walter and Lucia, all that spring and into the summer we talked, we told each other stories, the stories of our lives so far. Oh, the risks one has run, the injuries suffered, the losses, the triumphs, the vital relationships—though she wouldn’t talk about her childhood, curiously—all assume fresh coloring when narrated to a new lover while submerged in her gaze. She was curious about my relationship with Walter. I asked her if she had a sibling, someone she could look up to as I did my brother. I was being ironic.

  She shook her head. “I’m an only child.”

  Our conversations were like sex, our sex like conversation. In my relative social isolation since the end of my marriage I’d grown wary and suspicious but now I relaxed; I allowed the inner man to show, whoever he was. Though of course one edits. I spoke little about Agnes, for my relationship with her remained a private affair that would have deeply hurt Nora had she ever found out about it, I mean that Agnes and I continued to meet as we did. For sex. About Danny I spoke still less; in fact, about him I said nothing at all, for his was not a story I could yet trust myself to tell her with any degree of coherence. It was too tragic, too much about futility, about meaningless sacrifice, about violence, about violent death. And while so much of my work involved the pathology of the mind, the tenor of my relationship with Nora Chiara, by contrast, was one of lightness and even, yes, at times, of joy.

  I did talk to her about Cassie. I found it impossible not to. I very much wanted them to meet, but Nora resisted the idea. She said there was no point in her becoming friends with my daughter until we knew how we ourselves were going to work out. This was sensible, I supposed, though I was sorry not to be able to introduce her to the child I was so proud of. So on the days I spent with Cassie, Nora worked in the library, and in the end they never met. But I noted with pleasure that they were far from indifferent to each other. When Cassie was in the apartment she inspected whatever clothes Nora had left lying around, being at the age when fashion first becomes interesting to a girl; and Nora was no less curio
us about Cass. At such times I briefly glimpsed a distinctly maternal aspect that in her seemed surprising.

  Chapter Six

  One Sunday afternoon in May we took a walk in Central Park. It was a cool, pleasant day. Recklessly we picked our way through spent needles and dog shit to the Bethesda Fountain, where we sat on a bench so she could smoke a cigarette. Her cheeks were pink from the exertion. My arm was draped over her shoulders as we watched a group of feral children chase one another around the fountain, screaming obscenities. I asked if we could drop in on Walter. I told her I was worried about the safety of my mother’s furniture.

  “Why wouldn’t it be safe?” she said.

  “Walter’s moved it down to the basement. I don’t think he takes much interest. I should get it, by rights. Nobody else wants it.”

  “Then ask him for it.”

  “It’s more complicated than that.”

  “I know he’d be happy to have you take it.”

  How could she know this? I let it pass; it was the sort of thoughtless thing lovers say to each other all the time. Still, an alarm was sounded. I knew what Walter was like.

  Lucia greeted us at the door. She was a warm, loud, untidy woman who’d come here from Milan some years before to work in the art world, but had instead fallen into the clutches of Walter Weir and borne him four children. My brother didn’t deserve her.

  “Charlie,” she said tenderly, “and Nora. Come in.”

  She kissed us on both cheeks. We walked down the hall to the kitchen. Her arm was around my waist, her hip plump against mine. One of the children shouted at me from the living room.

  “Hi, Uncle Charlie!”

  Walt was at the stove wearing that apron of his and smoking a cigar. He was wielding a large steel spatula that dripped hot fat. He thrust it into a skillet and put down his cigar, then came and took me in his arms.

  “So glad, buddy,” he murmured in my ear.

  He meant me and Nora, our transparent pleasure in each other. I looked around. Great changes had been made. Our mother had never run a clean kitchen. The woodwork of her cupboards and counters were alive with bacteria, and it had long been a joke between us that you ate here, the Grand Central of botulism, at risk of your life. Now all was stainless steel and butcher block, and a hanging metal frame from whose hooks Walt’s various copper-bottomed pots and pans dangled like so many weapons. There was an island, as Walt called it, and we sat round it on high stools as he poured us each a glass of what he claimed was one of the great unsung heroes of Burgundy.

  “Try this,” he said, “and tell me it doesn’t break your heart. You’re staying for supper, by the way. No argument.”

  Walt and Lucia’s boy Jake was just a year older than Cassie, and there were two younger girls and a baby only a few months old. She was in some sort of basket on the kitchen floor, kicking and gurgling. One of her sisters shuffled into the kitchen. This was Giulia, an ethereal, golden-haired little creature dressed for ballet in tutu and tights, also wearing a pair of her mother’s shoes. She peered at her baby sister for a few seconds, then clomped away in her oversized shoes. We chatted for a minute or two and then I said I wanted to have a look at Mom’s furniture. Walt gave me the basement keys. “You want me to come down with you?” he said.

  I told him I knew the way. I wanted to go down alone. I knew it would be difficult for me to look at her things with equanimity, particularly seeing them among other tenants’ abandoned possessions, objects no longer of use or value in the world of the living.

  The basement was reached by a metal stairwell from a door at the back of the lobby. It was dark. Bulbs hadn’t been replaced, dust and cobwebs abounded and the clutter of detritus I found when I unlocked the door at the bottom of the stairs—rusted tools, bicycles, cans of gasoline, untidy trays of rat poison, boxes of mildewed clothes—would’ve made a city inspector slap an injunction on the building in a second. The junk blocked the passageways between the fenced pens where trunks and file cabinets and such had been displaced and forgotten like so many bad memories.

  Mom’s stuff was in the very back. It was cold down there and the floor shook whenever an A train came rushing through the nearby tunnel. The air smelled stale and faintly rancid. It would have been a dull-witted psychiatrist who failed to recognize this as a representation of the unconscious mind as we knew it, as we encountered its manifest products in our consulting rooms. All her belongings had been handled carelessly, and no attempt had been made to protect the huge old bed with the carved teak headboard, which had come down through generations of the Hallam family and was now piled high with boxes, chairs, luggage and pictures. I realized at once that if it wasn’t soon protected from dust and rodents—from time, neglect, predation—it wouldn’t be worth storing at all.

  Walt opened the door when I returned to the apartment, and I told him I was going to see to it that everything was properly wrapped in those protective blankets they used.

  “You go right ahead,” he said. “Have them send the bill here.”

  In the kitchen they were still drinking wine. I sat down next to Nora. She leaned over toward me and put her hand on mine but kept her eyes on Walt, who was telling a story. I asked them how they’d met each other; Nora had told me once, but I’d forgotten. It turned out that the book she was working on—she was a freelance art researcher—involved a notoriously difficult critic Walter knew when he was starting out.

  “She handled him beautifully,” he said. “Max Green. Such a tricky guy. Such a prick. He’d come to your space and just watch you. He never said anything. He’d let gaps open up in a conversation, just to unsettle you. We don’t like silence, people will say anything, then he’d have the advantage. He was like a shrink that way. That’s why I introduced you two.”

  He was drunk. He grinned at me.

  I disliked these half-playful barbs of his. “So it was all your doing,” I said.

  “Charlie, I look out for you.”

  He lifted his wineglass to his lips and gazed at me as he drank. Why, so often, this veiled hostility? What had I ever done to him? I glanced at Lucia, who was busy with the pasta. It still worried me that I’d first seen Nora the night Walt had failed to show up at Sulfur, then a week later there she was in his apartment. Freud said there was no such thing as an accident, and this coincidence was odd. I hadn’t made sense of it. Perhaps there was no sense to make.

  “Walt looks out for everybody,” Nora said.

  “Mostly himself,” said Lucia, without turning.

  Walt shouted with laughter and slapped the counter. His taking himself no more seriously than he did anybody else could be disarming. He had a beard then, and with his broad face and his tangle of dark hair, he had an aura about him, at least when he was drinking and at ease, that to me suggested some shaggy wine-god figure of dissolute antiquity—cunning as he was genial, entirely lacking in moral scruple, and not for a moment to be trusted, particularly by the brother for whom he sustained this intermittent, inexplicable animosity. Jake, his long-haired and painfully shy son, came in to bum a cookie, and Walter reached into the cupboard for a tin of biscotti. Lucia protested, saying he should wait for dinner. So it went, and we sat sipping Walter’s wine and I felt as though I was wrapped in a wool blanket. But just before the food was taken into the dining room Lucia stood before me and took my hands.

  “Charlie,” she said gravely, “we have something to tell you.”

  I was alarmed. “What is it? Tell me at once.”

  “Walter has accepted a residency in Venice.”

  “For how long?”

  “A year.”

  “A year! You’re all going?”

  “Yes, Charlie,” she said. “It’s what I want. I want to see my children in Italy. I want to hear them speak my language.”

  “I see.”

  “But this is exciting,” said Nora.

  A few minutes later we were at the table, where I tried to digest this new development while the children peppered their mot
her with questions about Italy. Walter turned to me and asked what was wrong. He knew me well.

  “This Venice thing,” I said. “I feel very ambivalent about it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t want to say it.

  “I’ll be back now and then,” he said. “I won’t just disappear.”

  Later we took the train back down to Twenty-third. My mood was troubled. I became preoccupied with what I perceived as Walt’s cavalier attitude to our mother’s possessions, this careless consignment of her furniture to the basement. I couldn’t see it as anything other than hostile, or worse, he must hate her, I thought, to behave with such disregard, and he must be aware too of the effect on me. Thinking this, I became angry. Nora asked me what was going on, and when I told her she was incredulous.

  “Oh, Charlie!” she cried.

  She wheeled around to face me, and other passengers in the subway car threw shifty glances in our direction before staring back down at the floor.

  “Charlie, that’s absurd,” she said quietly.

  “Is it?”

  “Of course it is! Walt just doesn’t like old stuff. He has an aesthetic. He has his own taste.”

  “And I don’t?”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  I stretched my legs out and crossed them at the ankles. I folded my arms and sank my chin onto my chest and I too then gazed unseeing at the floor of the subway car.

  Nora thrust her arm through mine. “You’re being ridiculous,” she whispered. “Everybody gets rid of their mother’s furniture. It’s not a mark of disrespect. It’s just furniture.”

  She shook her head in disbelief and looked away. I said nothing. There are times when the psychiatric perspective is a liability. You see so much more clearly than those around you the sources and motives of the behavior of others. Nora saw Walt as an artist, as a man with an aesthetic. I saw him as an older brother, threatened, attacking me where he knew me to be most vulnerable: on the maternal front. But I didn’t know how to say this to Nora without sounding paranoid. Probably better to say nothing.