The Demonologist

by Andrew Pyper

  “That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?” O’Brien replies, taking me by the arm and leading me through the mob on the terminal floor. Her hand on my elbow a patch of cool on my suddenly burning skin.

  THE OYSTER BAR IS UNDERGROUND. A WINDOWLESS CAVERN BENEATH the station floor that, for whatever reason, lends itself to the eating of raw seafood and the drinking of cold vodka. O’Brien and I have spent our time here mulling over the state of our careers (mine hitting the top of its game, enjoying “leading world expert” status at almost every mention, and O’Brien’s writing on the psychological underpinnings of faith healing lending her recent semi-fame). Mostly, though, we talk about nothing in particular in the way of well-matched, if unlikely, companions.

  What makes us unlikely? She’s a woman, first of all. A single woman. Dark hair cut short, blue eyes blazing out of a darkly Irish complexion. Unlike me, she comes from money, though of the unshowy, northeastern kind. A tennis-camp Connecticut youth, followed by a seemingly effortless gathering of high-powered degrees, a successful private practice in Boston, and now Columbia, where only last year she stepped down as head of the Psych Department to concentrate more on her own research. A winning résumé, no question. But not exactly the profile for a married guy’s drinking buddy.

  Diane has never directly complained about our friendship. In fact, it’s something she’s encouraged. Not that this has stopped her from being jealous of our Oyster Bar celebrations, our midweek sports bar watching of hockey games (O’Brien and I are both now provisional Rangers fans, though born to other teams, she the Bruins, I the Leafs). Diane has no choice but to accept O’Brien, as to deny our friendship would be to concede that there is something Elaine gives me that Diane cannot. That this is true and plainly known to all three of us is what can make coming home after a night out with O’Brien especially chilly.

  The thought that I might cut off our friendship as a peace offering to Diane has occurred to me, as it would to any husband in a floundering marriage who still wants it to work, against all odds and good advice. And I do want it to work. I admit to more than my fair share of failings—the undefined pool of shade that lies at the bottom of who I am—but none are intentional, none within grasp of my control. My imperfections haven’t prevented me from doing everything I could think of to be a good husband to Diane. But the thing is: I need Elaine O’Brien in my life. Not as a chronic flirtation, not as a sentimental torment of what might have been, but as my counsel, my more articulate, clear-thinking inner self.

  This may sound strange—it is strange—but she has taken the place of the brother I lost when I was a child. While I could do nothing to prevent his death then, I cannot now let O’Brien go.

  What’s less clear is what she gets from our association. I’ve asked her, from time to time, why she wastes so many of her sparse social hours on a melancholic Miltonist like me. Her answer is always the same.

  “I’m meant for you,” she says.

  We find stools at the long bar and order a dozen New Brunswick malpeques and a couple martinis to get us started. The place is jostling and loud as the floor of the Stock Exchange, yet O’Brien and I instantly find ourselves cocooned in our shared thoughts. I begin by relating my encounter with Will Junger, adding some sharper put-downs to the ones I actually delivered earlier that afternoon (and leaving out the raw confessions of worry about Tess). O’Brien smiles, though she detects my embellishments (and likely my omissions, too) as I knew she would.

  “Did you really say all that?”

  “Almost,” I say. “I certainly wish I had said all that.”

  “Then let’s say you did. Let the record show that the slippery snake, William Junger of Physics, is right now licking the verbal wounds inflicted by the dangerously underestimated Dave Ullman of Old Books.”

  “Yes. I like that.” I nod, sipping my drink. “It’s like a kind of superpower, when you think of it. Having a friend who accepts your version of reality.”

  “There’s no reality but versions of reality.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Me, as far as I know,” she says, and takes a long drink herself.

  The vodka, the consoling pleasure of being next to her, the confidence that, for now, nothing of any real danger could be visited on us—all of it makes me feel it would be okay to plunge forward and tell O’Brien about my meeting with the Thin Woman. I’m wiping my lips with a napkin in preparation when she begins before I do.

  “I have some news,” she says, slurping down a malpeque. It is the kind of introduction that suggests top-tier gossip, something startling and necessarily sexual. But then, after swallowing, she announces: “I have cancer.”

  If there was anything in my throat, I would have choked on it.

  “That a joke?” I say. “Tell me that’s a fucking joke.”

  “Do the oncologists at New York Presbyterian joke?”

  “Elaine. My God. No. No.”

  “They’re not exactly sure where it started, but it’s in the bones now. Which would explain my piss-poor squash game of late.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “What is the bargain-store Zen mantra these days? It is what it is.”

  “Is it serious? I mean—of course it’s serious—but how far along?”

  “Advanced, they say. Like it’s a grad course or something. Only cancers having already received their prerequisites need apply.”

  She’s doing an astonishing job at being good humored—it’s being with me that helps, I can tell, along with the bracing courage of the martini—but there’s a tremble at the corner of her mouth that now I can see is a battle against tears. And then, before I know it, I’m the one who’s crying. Throwing my arms around her, knocking a couple empty oyster shells off our ice tray and onto the floor.

  “Easy, professor,” O’Brien whispers into my ear, though she holds me just as tightly as I hold her. “People might get the wrong idea.”

  And what would the right idea be? An embrace such as this could never be confused with lust or congratulation. It is a hopeless refusal. A child clinging to a departing loved one at the station, fighting the inevitable to the end, instead of the adult’s polite surrender.

  “We’ll get help,” I say. “We’ll find the right doctors.”

  “It’s beyond that, David.”

  “You’re not just going to accept this, are you?”

  “Yes. I’m going to try. And I’d like to ask you to help me.”

  She pushes me back from her. Not from embarrassment, but so she can show me her eyes.

  “I know you’re afraid,” she says.

  “Of course I’m afraid. This is a pretty devastating—”

  “I’m not talking about the cancer. I’m talking about you.”

  She takes a long breath. Whatever she is about to say requires energy she may not have. So I grip her arms to support her. Bend close to listen.

  “I’ve never been able to figure out what you’re so scared of, but there’s something in you that’s got you backed into a corner so tight your eyes are closed against it,” she says. “You don’t have to tell me what it is. I bet you don’t even know yourself. But here’s the thing: I probably won’t be around for you when you face it down. I wish I could be, but I won’t. You’re going to need someone. You won’t make it if you’re alone. I don’t know of anyone who could.”

  “Tess.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You want me to look out for Tess?”

  “I want you to remember that she’s as scared as you are. That she thinks she’s alone, too.”

  “Not sure I’m getting—”

  “Your melancholy. Or depression. Along with nine-tenths of the afflictions I’ve studied, diagnosed, attempted to treat. Call them whatever you like, but they’re just different names for loneliness. That’s what lets the darkness in. That’s what you have to fight.”

  Loneliness. As though O’Brien was at my lecture today, taking notes.

  “
I’m not alone.”

  “But you think you are. You’ve thought you’ve been all on your own your whole life—and what do I know? Maybe you have. It nearly took you down. If you didn’t have your books, your work, all the shields of your mind, it would have. It still wants to. But you can’t let it, because there’s Tess now. And no matter how far away she’ll drift from you, you can’t give up. She’s your child, David. She is you. So you have to prove your love for her every goddamn minute of every goddamn day. Anything less and you fail the Human Being Test. Anything less and you really are just alone.”

  Even here, in the A/C-challenged Oyster Bar, O’Brien shivers.

  “Where is this coming from?” I ask her. “You’ve never said anything like that about Tess before. That she’s . . . like me. By which you mean she has what I have.”

  “More than eye color and height passes through the bloodline.”

  “Hold on a second here. Are you speaking as Dr. O’Brien the shrink? Or my pal O’Brien, the friendly kicker of ass?”

  This question, intended to return us to lighter ground, only seems to confound her. And in the moment she struggles to find an answer, her illness passes over her features. Her skin pulls close over her face, her color fades. In a transformation that would be invisible to anyone but me, she now looks as though she could be the Thin Woman’s sister. A likeness that ought to have been apparent from the time I saw the woman sitting outside my office, but revealed, in a private second of horror, only now.

  “It’s just something I know,” she answers finally.

  We carry on for a while. Order another round, share a lobster as we normally do. The whole time O’Brien expertly keeps us from returning to her diagnosis, or her oddly portentous insight into my lifelong affliction. She has said all that she meant to say about it. And there is the unspoken assurance between us that even she isn’t sure of its full implications.

  When we’re done, I walk her back up to the main terminal floor. It’s quieter here now, the commuters outnumbered by the gawkers, the picture takers. I’m ready to wait with O’Brien at the entrance to her platform until her train up to Greenwich is ready to go, but she stops me at the gold clock.

  “I’ll be okay,” she says with a weak smile.

  “Of course you will. But there’s no point waiting alone.”

  “I’m not alone.” She links her hand around my wrist in a show of gratitude. “And there’s someone waiting for you.”

  “I doubt that. These days, Tess just locks herself in her room after dinner, gets on the computer. DO NOT DISTURB in neon on her door.”

  “Sometimes people close a door because they’re trying to figure out a way to get you to knock.”

  O’Brien releases my wrist and slips away into a pack of German tourists. I would follow, or try, but she doesn’t want me to. So I turn and head off in the opposite direction, down the tunnel to the subway entrance, the air getting hotter the farther from the surface I go.

  3

  I EMERGE FROM THE 86TH STREET STOP ON THE UPPER WEST Side. This is where we live, my little family among the other little families of our neighborhood, our street often crowded with latte-holding parents pushing state-of-the-art, single-child strollers. It’s magazine perfect for people like us: educated professionals with a prejudice against the suburbs and a faith that living here, in relative safety yet also a short walk to Central Park, the Museum of Natural History, and high-rated public schools, will give our only children what they need to become us one day.

  I like it here, in a permanent tourist sort of way. I grew up in Toronto, a city of a more modest scale and modest temperament, relatively unmythologized. Living in New York has, for me, been a process of getting better at pretending. Pretending this is really my home and not a fabrication from novels, from movies. Pretending we will ever pay off the mortgage on our roomy three-bedroom apartment in a “prestige building” on 84th Street. I’m often troubled by the fact that we can’t really afford the place, though Diane likes to point out that “nobody affords things, David. It’s not 1954 anymore.”

  Things are bad between us, perhaps irreparably bad. But as I rattle upward in the old elevator to our floor I’m readying the news of this strange day, deciding what to lead with, what to bury. I want to tell Diane about O’Brien, my chat with Will Junger, the Thin Woman, because there is no one else to share these particular items with, each too intimate, in their own ways, to lay out before a colleague or at a dinner-party table. But there is also the hope of reaching her. Revealing something that might give her pause, arouse her interest, her sympathy. A delay of the inevitable, which is maybe all I can play for these days.

  I open the door to the apartment and find Diane standing there, waiting for me, a nearly empty wine glass in her hand. What’s her expression say? It says whatever story I may tell will make no difference.

  “We need to talk,” she says.

  “The four most dreaded words in the history of marriage.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I.”

  She leads me into the living room, where another wine glass (this one full) awaits me on the coffee table. Something to dull the blow she is about to deliver. But I don’t want to be dulled. That’s been her problem all along, hasn’t it? That I’m rarely present in the moment. Well, whether it’s the strange and terrible events of the day or a new resolution I’ve just now arrived at, I feel pretty damn present in this moment.

  “I’m moving out,” Diane says, her tone one of practiced defiance, as though this is an episode of courage for her, of daring escape.

  “Where will you go?”

  “My parents’ place on the Cape for the summer. Or part of the summer. Until I get my own apartment in the city.”

  “Two Manhattan apartments. How can we pay for that? You win the lotto?”

  “I’m proposing there’s no ‘we’ anymore, David. Which means I’m talking about just one apartment. Mine.”

  “So I shouldn’t mistake this for a trial separation.”

  “No, I don’t think you should.”

  She takes the last sip from her glass. This was easier than she thought. She’s almost out of here, and the idea of it is making her thirsty.

  “I’m trying, Diane.”

  “I know you are.”

  “So you can see that I am?”

  “It hasn’t stopped you from being like someone you pass every day and say hello to but never really know. You think you do, but when it comes down to it, you don’t.”

  “There’s nothing I can say?”

  “It’s never been about saying. It’s been about doing. Or not doing.”

  I can’t argue with any of this. And even if I could, we’ve never been the arguing kind. Maybe we should have been. A few more nasty accusations, a few more passionate denials and confessions might have done the trick. But I’m not sure how that sort of thing is done.

  “You going to live with him?” I ask.

  “We’re talking about that.”

  “So when I saw him today, when he ‘bumped into me,’ he was just rubbing my face in it.”

  “Will’s not like that.”

  You’re wrong, Diane, I want to say. That’s exactly what he’s like.

  “What about Tess?” I ask.

  “What about her?”

  “Have you told her yet?”

  “I thought I’d leave that to you,” she says. “You’re better with her. You always were.”

  “It’s not a competition. We’re a family.”

  “No, that’s over now. It’s over.”

  “She’s your daughter, too.”

  “I can’t reach her, David!”

  At this, Diane surprises herself by bursting into loud, if brief, sobs. “There’s something wrong with her,” she manages. “Nothing you could ask a doctor about, that’s not what I’m saying. Nothing that would show up in a scan. Something wrong you can’t see.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “I
don’t know. Being eleven years old. Almost a teenager. The moods. But that’s not it. She’s like you,” she says, a coincidental, if angrier, echo of O’Brien’s words. “The two of you holed up in your private, untouchable little club.”

  She’s lonely. I see this now as clearly as the lipstick stain on the rim of her clenched glass. Her husband and child share some troubling darkness and, among its many side effects, it has left her on the outside. I am standing here—as I have always stood here—but she is alone.

  “Tess in her room?” I ask. Diane nods.

  “Go,” she says, dismissing me. But I’m already gone.

  EVEN ROBERT BURTON’S 1,400-PAGE Anatomy of Melancholy DOESN’T state whether the condition is hereditary or not. I suppose Tess and I make as strong a case for the affirmative as any. In just the last year or so she has outwardly shown signs of bluesy distraction, the whittling down of friends, the shift from broad interests to singular obsession, in her case the keeping of a journal I have never attempted to sneak a peek at, in part to respect her privacy, but also in part because I fear what I might find in it. This recent slide is what troubles Diane most. But the truth is I recognized myself in Tess at a much earlier age. A shared distance from the clamor of life that we continually attempt to bridge, only ever with partial success.

  I knock on her door. At her word of medieval permission—“Enter!”—I come in to find her closing her journal and sitting up straight on the edge of her bed. Her long, Riesling-colored hair still in the braid I tied for her this morning. Hair care being a territory I claimed since Tess’s toddlerhood, my patience greater than Diane’s at brushing out the knots or scissoring the dried gum free. An odd task for a dad, perhaps. But the truth is we have some of our best conversations in the bathroom before eight, the air foggy from a succession of hot showers, the two of us selecting from ponytail, single braid, or “pigs.”

  My Tess. Looking up at me and instantly reading what has transpired in the living room.