Trauma

by Patrick Mcgrath

  “He’s persecuting me,” I said.

  Her arm was swiftly withdrawn, and again she stared at me aghast. “Are you serious?”

  Yes, better to say nothing at all.

  “I said, are you serious?”

  “It’s difficult,” I said, “for an only child like you to understand what goes on in a family like mine. I think he’s not even aware of what he’s doing. But you see, my darling, that doesn’t mean he’s not doing it.”

  She pulled away from me and sat on the edge of the subway seat, her eyes narrowed and her lips pressed tight together. We were approaching Twenty-third Street. A bag lady shuffled through the car, wheezing and mumbling, her world stuffed into two straining trash bags. A cop with a dog was standing at the far end of the car. The wheels screamed as the train braked into the station. Several passengers rose to their feet.

  “Our stop,” I said.

  Out on the street she had still said nothing. We were in the elevator of my building when at last she spoke.

  “But is it worth it, Charlie?”

  “Is what worth it?”

  “Constructing these dramas, all this imaginary conflict? It makes everything so fucking complicated.”

  “Not imaginary, babe, just concealed. You deny the unconscious?”

  “Oh, I don’t know! No, I suppose not, but can’t you just give it up on Sundays?”

  This was a novel thought. We walked down the hall to the door of 11F and I took out my keys. I unlocked both locks, then the dead bolt, and pushed open the door for her. Couldn’t I just give it up on Sundays!

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Why not what?”

  She was standing in the middle of the room, lighting a cigarette. She was wearing a belted black sweater, close-fitting over breasts and hips. She was still irritated, and what I wanted to do was sweep it away and return us to that easy affectionate spontaneity we’d grown used to.

  “Why not give it up on Sundays? The unconscious and all its dark works.”

  “Yes, Charlie, renounce it!”

  Then she was standing in front of me, laughing, her arms outstretched as though in welcome.

  “I renounce it,” I said.

  Later, it occurred to me that my anger had nothing to do with the furniture. It was about Walt and his family going away for a year. I’d simply displaced the anger, unwilling to acknowledge how much I resented being abandoned.

  Chapter Seven

  It was late May when Nora moved in with me. She needed a home. For some months she’d been house-sitting a small apartment in the Village, and when the tenant returned to the city she’d moved in with Audrey. She told me she hadn’t had a place of her own since her divorce four years earlier, and I was still a little confused as to her source of income, for this freelance research seemed to bring in almost nothing. I was able to create enough closet space for her wardrobe, which was less extensive than I’d feared it would be, but the housing of her books and papers was more problematic. She did much of her work in various libraries around town, though for the actual writing—she still used a manual typewriter, she said she couldn’t work any other way—she required a room of her own. I gave her my study, though sometimes she worked at the dining table because she wanted to look out the window at the river.

  I liked the sight of a writer’s table, books and papers spread across a working surface, pencils, spectacles, typewriter. When I was very young I thought this would be my work, but I am far too social an animal. I require others. I require talk. Every psychiatrist a writer manqué, exiled from the kingdom because he has to talk.

  “Charlie, you’re early.”

  She would shuffle her books and papers together, carry them out and stash them in the spare room. I told her I wanted her to stay where she was, that I liked to see her working. I liked her with her spectacles on.

  “Too bad. Pour me a glass of wine.”

  Other times she worked all day in the spare room, and when I came home and heard the tapping of her typewriter I’d stand outside the door and allow the sound to arouse memories of my childhood. She emerged once and found me absorbed in nostalgia and asked what I was doing. When I told her she was astonished.

  “You think I’m like your mother?”

  “Babe,” I said, “nobody’s like my mother and you least of all.”

  I was not being entirely candid here. Nora reminded me strongly of my mother, and not just by the sound of her typewriter.

  I liked too the evenings we spent together in the kitchen. I liked the ritual of preparing dinner, this an aspect of domestic life that was new to me. When I was married to Agnes I was almost never home in time for dinner, and on West Eighty-seventh Street, especially after Fred ran off with his girlfriend, it was mostly takeout or restaurants.

  I took a strong interest in what happened in the kitchen. I asked her questions. Why coriander and not parsley? Why high heat rather than low? Why lemon juice? Why chicken stock? Why simmer? Why must it sit in the fridge overnight? It would have driven another woman crazy but it gave us something to argue about, and arguing, as opposed to quarreling, was one of the things we liked to do. I see this small woman in a baggy T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans, barefoot, a rag tied around her head, shuffling about, pausing to peer at the recipe, spectacles on the end of her nose while she takes a thoughtful pull on her cigarette. Myself meanwhile attempting to keep the work surfaces clear, disposing of peelings, the kitchen toto. Nora was only partially attentive while she cooked, but occasionally she paused and, with knife poised aloft, responded. This at least is how I remember it.

  Later we would read and listen to music. There was a table in the living room reserved for books. Saturday afternoons we made an expedition to Union Square and came home heavily laden with vegetables and bread and books. Was I wrong to regard this brief period of domesticity as not merely tranquil but as a kind of flowering? Intimacy burgeoning, love maturing, all done with the simplest of ingredients, the sharing of ordinary activities with close, unwavering attention paid to the other? Is it any more complicated than that? Need it be?

  But occasionally the idyll was disturbed. I came home from the office once in the middle of the day and found her not alone in the apartment. She was at the table, still in her bathrobe, and as I came in she turned toward the door with an expression on her face that I couldn’t read. There were papers strewn all over the table. Sitting beside her with a pencil in his hand was my brother.

  “Charlie, what are you doing home?” she said.

  I ignored her. “Hello, Walter.”

  I once told Nora how my mother would talk to people about her son, as though she only had one. She did it in my hearing. I used to say to her, “What about me, Mom? Aren’t I your son too?” I also told her about the time she said to Agnes that anyone could be a psychiatrist, but it took talent to be an artist.

  Now here he was in the apartment with her.

  “This place almost feels human now,” said Walt. “Charlie used to keep his shoes in the oven.”

  Bluff hearty Walt. I’d felt furious that he would let this happen, that he’d be found with Nora in my apartment while I was supposed to be at work. I assumed she would’ve told me about his visit, but that wasn’t the point. He at least had the grace to leave fairly quickly, having refused the drink I’d felt constrained to offer him. When he’d gone I had asked Nora, coldly, if she’d known he was going to show up.

  “Fuck you.”

  It came like an arrow. I suppose it was the response I deserved. She was sitting at the table very straight, her eyes strangely bright, a cigarette between her fingers.

  I sat down opposite her, rubbed my face and, through sheer force of professional habit, listened to my own words from her point of view. “All right, you would’ve told me.”

  “Not good enough, Charlie.”

  I saw then how pale she was. With shock, I supposed. I pushed myself up out of the chair.

  “Don’t come near me.”

&nb
sp; “Look, can’t you just forget I said it?”

  “You are so fucking clumsy.”

  This was excessive. With rising passion she demanded to know by what right I accused her of lying, what justification could I possibly have for thinking she was—what, seeing Walt behind my back? There was more in this vein. She stormed around the room with fists balled, dramatic gestures appearing, the head lifting to the ceiling—ridiculous, completely out of control. I hate to be called clumsy. I’m not a clumsy man, not physically, not psychologically, but of course it didn’t matter who was right or wrong. There was no right or wrong, only the reality of her emotion. With an effort of self-control I set aside my own anger, my own ego, and told her, without rancor, when she paused for breath, that I was genuinely sorry that what I’d said had caused her pain because that was the last thing in the world I wanted to happen, and that I loved her.

  Love. We never talked about love. A moment before she had been unrecognizable, gripped by a rage of such spiraling intensity that she’d become almost ugly. Somehow the idea of love tripped the circuit. Deflated, she sank onto a chair and, with her head bowed, put her hands to her face and quietly wept.

  “Here, babe, take this.”

  She glanced up and I gave her a clean handkerchief.

  She wiped her eyes. “Charlie, you do get it?” She was determined to make her point, but the storm had passed.

  “Forgive me.”

  I am a proud man but I am not a slave to my pride. Again, this wasn’t about right and wrong. She understood what I’d done, that I’d resolved the situation when I might have made it worse. I stroked her head and led her into the bedroom. A small smile appeared. I saw the little teeth between the red lips, the little pink tongue. How white her skin was. She sat on the bed limp as a rag doll and allowed me to undress her. Caresses were involved, then kisses, and when I had her naked on the bed I flung off my own clothes and joined her there.

  Later, she lay with her head on my chest.

  “Charlie,” she said, “it’s not that I want to know every last little thing about you because I don’t. But you must have a little generosity. You can’t just assume the worst of me.”

  We grow older, and still we screw up when it comes to generosity. I apologized again. She was eager now to be mollified. We hated to be estranged. Freud once said that signs of conflict are signs of life, but we had life enough without that.

  This took place on a Friday afternoon and we had the weekend to recuperate, a weekend of pleasure as it turned out, the glimpse of schism serving only to draw us more closely together. I remember the Sunday morning. Still in our bathrobes, we were having bagels, eggs, the works. She was reading the Times, her hair uncombed and glasses perched on the tip of her nose. She made some remark, then squinted over the top of her lenses like a bird, a little, delicate, crested American finch. There had been much sex over the weekend. We were both soft, fond, tender. Sore. It occurred to me that it was almost worth having fights if they brought in their wake tranquillity of this high order. I killed the thought at once. I knew what it looked like when she was angry; I’d seen how her anger fed on itself, as though recognition of it aroused further indignation, further rage, thus compounding the original provocation. Then there was no reasoning with her, and to fight back was a mistake. She had spoken to me only obliquely about the arguments she’d had with her ex-husband. I could now understand why the breakdown of that marriage had been so acrimonious.

  We decided to eat out.

  “Where would you like to go?” I said.

  “Oh, Sulfur, why not?”

  “Why not.”

  I put on the suit I’d worn the first time we met, at Walt’s dinner party. We cabbed it downtown. We were met at the door by Audrey. It was a warm evening in June and Nora was wearing her simple black dress, arms and shoulders bare, legs bare, and as Audrey led us across the busy room all eyes were upon her, or they should have been. She slid into the banquette as Audrey, with a quick, conspiratorial glance in my direction, gave us menus, the wine list, wished us bon appétit and left.

  She was radiant. Her eyes were shining. She gazed at me fondly and reached across the table for my hand. We were both feeling silly with love.

  “Hi, babe.”

  “Hi, Charlie.”

  It was as though all the late unpleasantness had never occurred. The talk meandered as it often did, two lovers nattering across a table, and at some point, for some reason, I mentioned the music I wished to be played at my funeral.

  “Oh, don’t!” she cried. “No, really. Don’t. It’s such bad luck to talk about your own funeral. My father used to talk about his funeral like that, then when he was ill, near the end, he never talked about death at all.”

  It was the first time she’d mentioned her father to me, and I couldn’t let it pass. I asked her why.

  “Too many bad associations. Let’s not talk about it.”

  Our first course had come and gone. Her steak arrived with a bowl of fries. I was having the grilled tuna and a side of haricots verts. A second bottle of wine was presented, tasted, accepted, poured. She brought up our recent row.

  “I’m sorry I put you through it, Charlie. What would I do without you?”

  “All over now.”

  Again her hand was on mine. She lifted her glass and gazed at me over the top of it. I lifted my own glass. There came a moment around nine when they dimmed the lights and the room grew more intimate. I told her that men and women once solved their problems without people like me. The invention of psychiatry is a relatively late development in human history, I said. Like all good things it came with the rise of the bourgeoisie.

  “There’s an argument,” I said, “that psychiatry’s overrated. People become dependent on us. They believe nothing has any value unless you pay for it, good advice included.”

  “You’ll talk yourself out of a job.”

  “There’s always the tough cases.”

  “You’re not still angry with Walter, are you? He’s been very sweet to me.”

  I was aware of a structure in my mind collapsing in slow motion; a psychological implosion, the disappearance of a body of suspicion I’d erected around Nora and my brother. It was oddly liberating, like a darkness lifting. My distrust of Walter was deep-rooted.

  “You do have a lot of anger in you, Charlie, and it’s really very obvious why.”

  “It is?”

  “Of course it is. Absorbing all that pain every day. Listening to those ghastly stories.”

  In the gloom of the restaurant, each of us leaning forward across the table, we might have been alone in a confessional. Dominant among my various sensations was lust, but I was also keenly interested in the conversation. A little later she suggested we get the check. Normally she’d have ordered a grappa, coffee, spun the night out until she was properly lit. Not this night. Outside the restaurant I kissed her. She was small and pale and gorgeous.

  “Shall we just go home, Charlie?”

  We took a cab. We came up to the apartment and once inside I poured her a glass of wine and myself a small brandy. We settled down on the sofa. She seemed in no hurry to get to the bedroom and neither was I. There was no tension, no current of unspoken discord that I was aware of. Perhaps a subtle aura of erotic anticipation. She’d kicked off her shoes and there they were on the rug, tiny black suede pumps with chunky heels, the one standing upright, the other nearby lying on its side and their owner, also tiny, sprawled across my lap, one hand hanging over the side of the sofa and the other toying with my shirt buttons. I’d turned on the lamp on the far side of the room. She yawned. The end of a perfect day.

  Some hours later she had a nightmare. It was bad. She didn’t know where she was, or who I was. It began with a scream, that’s what woke me up, and I found her sitting in the bed making violent, stabbing motions with both hands and sobbing with terror. I tried to take her in my arms, but she resisted with all her strength.

  “Don’t touch me!” she shouted
.

  I’d seen hysteria like this before, though not for many years. I tried to restrain her and still she resisted, the stabbing motions now directed at my face and body, and no small number landing with some force until at last I seized her arms and held them to her sides. She was throwing her head from side to side and trying to get out of the bed.

  “You’re hurting me, let me go!”

  There was nothing to do but hold on to her until she was exhausted. At last she slumped sobbing in the bed. It was almost over. She lifted her face and stared at me as I held her wrists, murmuring to her in a low voice, saying her name, my own name, telling her where she was. As I held her she grew sleepy and only when the dream began to properly subside was I able to release her wrists. She lay down in the fetal position and at once fell asleep.

  Silence.

  I rose from the bed and covered her, then sat on the chair by the door and watched her sleep. My thoughts drifted. I remembered the period in my childhood when I’d been awoken every night by a bad dream, and I imagined my mother sitting in my bedroom, watching me as I was watching Nora. It was the dream of my father putting a gun to my head in a dark room and saying he was going to kill me. Mom would come in and comfort me. They were the only times I remember any real warmth and intimacy between us.

  The next day Nora’s memory of the night was vague. Her struggle with me in the bed had been absorbed into the dream, and the dream had sunk back into her unconscious. She didn’t believe what I was telling her in the morning until I opened my shirt and showed her the bruises. She was horrified. She knew she’d been fighting with somebody in her dream, but had no idea it was me.

  “Charlie, this is awful.”

  “You want to see someone?”

  It seemed a reasonable suggestion.

  “Oh no! No, don’t send me to some stranger! Please don’t do that!”

  The terror in her face then was not unlike what I’d seen in the night. I told her that no, I’d never send her to some stranger.