Other people

by Sol Stein

  Well, we talked a lot that evening, and when the adults were ready to go home, Bill didn't offer to take me somewhere for a drink, meaning something else of course, he shook hands. Sure there's something terribly square and old-fashioned about that, and I guess all I thought at the time was that Bill was not boring and he's the kind of guy you could bring home if you had to (can you imagine my bringing the Frenchman from the U.N. home? My father'd have had a heart attack!). So when he was leaving I said call me. That's all.

  Well, of course he called my home and Mom told him I don't live at home and gave him my phone number, and we got together for the movies, we went on a picnic believe it or not, I found out he liked rock and classical just like me, and then one Saturday we had dinner at Adam's Apple, which I sometimes go to to get away from the U.N. crowd at lunch, and we had no particular plans for afterwards, so we walked downtown and then West, and before you know it, we're in pornsville, and when he realized it, I swear he blushed. The theater right in front of us was playing Behind the Green Door. He asked me did I know what kind of a film it was, and I said yes, Betsy Thorne described it scene by scene to me. The box office was manned by a Puerto-Rican-looking woman. We were about five feet from her, and she was looking Bill right in the eyeball when he said to me, "Let's not."

  I could hear the woman whisper "Chicken shit."

  Bill walked closer to her cage and said, "What did you say?"

  "Nothing," said the woman.

  I took Bill by the arm and said, "Let's go." We walked quite a while before he talked. He said he'd seen a couple of films like that some time ago and really didn't care for them, they made sex seem mechanical and impersonal.

  "But did you find them exciting?" I asked.

  "Sure," he said. "It gets you going and stops you at the same time because it's so crude. Did you ever get a tan from a sunlamp?"

  I hadn't.

  "Well, I have," Bill said, "and it's not the same as getting it from the sun. It feels artificial. That's what I'm talking about."

  I knew all about his ambivalence because I was churning over some of my own. A fellow couldn't be nicer than Bill. Bill was reliable. A friend. A nonthreatening friend. I asked him did he ever lose his temper, and he said he tried to control his temper. I told him about my insomnia, and he looked at me as if I were reporting on outer space. He always slept. It's not that I'm afraid of perfect people. I'm leery of my reaction to them.

  Eventually we wound our way back to Bill's car. When we got to my place, I invited him up for a drink, and for a moment I thought he was going to beg off, but I said, "There's a parking place right in front. A New Yorker can't turn down an empty parking place, can he?"

  Upstairs he hung his jacket up on a chair. I put a record on and brought out a half-gallon jug of Gallo's Hearty Burgundy and a couple of glasses. Bill did the pouring as if it were his role.

  I tried to get him to talk about himself, and finally he told me about his year-long leading-to-marriage kind of thing that broke up. She sounded like a very nice person, a perfect match. She took up with someone Bill described as mean. Isn't that the way the ball bounces?

  I asked him if he'd ever smoked dope. He nodded. I wanted to say Good for you. So I went to my stash and brought us a joint. Neither of us was a cigarette smoker, and we had a lot of trouble inhaling. It was a bit comical. He seemed happy that I was sharing the embarrassment as well as the joint. It relaxed him, I could tell, and I felt he was making something erotic out of passing the joint from his lips to my lips, back and forth. Suddenly he excused himself and went to the John. When he came back his breath smelled of toothpaste. I knew Bill was the kind of person who would never use someone else's toothbrush. What did he use, his finger?

  When I offered a second joint, Bill volunteered to reimburse me for it and I told him not to be silly.

  "It's funny," he said, not looking at me, "before the wine and dope I was wondering what a person like you saw in a person like me, but now I'm feeling pretty good about myself," and he tried to put his arms around me.

  "No," I said.

  He took his arms back immediately.

  "I like you," I said. "But not that way."

  He looked so crestfallen I wanted to take his face in my hands and kiss it, but anything physical at that point could have been misinterpreted.

  I didn't pass the joint back. "Not if you're driving soon," I said.

  "I better go," said good Bill.

  "Yes. I enjoyed your company."

  "Thanks for the wine. And the…" He pointed to the joint I was still holding. Then he fled.

  I felt like a shit. What would have been so awful if I had gone to bed with him? The Frenchman didn't misinterpret it, a fuck was a fuck. But Bill would have, wouldn't he?

  The following afternoon, lying on Dr. Koch's couch, I described the evening with Bill in minute detail. I am listening to myself tell it as if I'm a Christian martyr. I felt I was inches away from grasping something about myself. Dr. Koch interrupted my silence to say, "What are you thinking?" and I said I was reciting the evening with Bill to make Koch jealous.

  I could hear the clock ticking in Koch's study.

  For a long time he said nothing. Finally, I heard a deep sigh.

  "Do you feel guilty about what you said?"

  I didn't answer.

  "You did nothing terrible," he said.

  I come here for insight, not for absolution. I didn't want to talk.

  "What are you thinking?" he insisted.

  "Nothing," I lied. "Nothing, nothing, nothing."

  ~~~

  Before Marta died, for almost all of the thirty-four years of our marriage, every Saturday morning when weather permitted, we would go out shopping together. In the early years it was often just window shopping, discussing with high seriousness which of two armchairs we would buy for my den, knowing we would never decide between the two and have to look for a third because there was not enough money to buy something as frivolous as a comfortable place for me to sit. But when I had paid off my debts from medical school and from the early years of transposing myself to this country, we used whatever was left after food and rent not to save — how could we save for the future when we had so much to make up for the past? — but to spend with a vengeance against the forces that had denied us!

  When we go on a shopping spree not for what we need but for what we want, we find we still have the reckless joy of children somewhere inside bursting out. I remember the day Marta and I splurged — we felt like kings — buying our first wall-to-wall carpeting for the living room and hallway to replace the second-hand rugs, threadbare from the feet of our only son, Kurt, and his friends, and our friends, and our own feet, and from the feet of patients without count, coming and going.

  I remember the crazy delight we took in buying an electric orange juice squeezer — this was before the days of frozen juice — because I drink orange juice the way Americans drink Coca-Cola and it pained me to see Marta squeeze each orange half, the palm of her right hand turning it against the serrations of a glass squeezer that had cost twenty-five cents in Woolworth's when we were first married. For Kurt, when he was eight, we committed the ultimate extravagance. We bought him a new dress coat and a new lined jacket for playing street hockey, even though we knew he could wear them only one season before his limbs were too long.

  These Saturday-morning escapades into department stores were our chief form of recreation. Never once in all those years did I think of patients during the time that Marta and I were out. Only when we came back home, exhilarated and exhausted eye-consumers, did I slump into my armchair, put my feet up on the ottoman, and think of my Worry Number One, Higgins, the only patient I had who could be a murderer in fact and not just in heart. Three times a week I would wait for his first words on the couch, wondering had something finally happened, had he been unable to control his desire to beat another human to death with his bare hands. Higgins was a strong man, capable, quick-tempered, a boss of truck drivers
. Thank God he found a prostitute with well-padded buttocks who let him spank her with his hand till relief came. I told Higgins he should save the money he spent on me and just see that woman as often as he needed. When you think of the millions of aberrant and lonely persons over the course of human history who have found some release among prostitutes — those great actresses who understood human aberration long before Sacher-Masoch or Krafft-Ebing, we have cause to be grateful. It is possible that prostitution has done more than medicine for mankind, and with fewer mistakes that have converted a minor affliction into death by surgery and malpractice.

  All right, I am meandering. Since Marta died, the Saturday shopping ritual continues without heart. What am I to buy, new carpeting when the old will outlive me? And so I buy light bulbs, Kleenex boxes, toilet tissue, soap, all with the excuse that it is very inconvenient to run out of such things, but what would another analyst make of my collection of such items? Of my need to pretend to shop when there is nothing I really have to buy? Why do I not go on weekends to visit my grandchild? Because our son Kurt married a young woman who had already had a needless hysterectomy, and I have asked was this to spite us, a willful attack, to deprive me of grandchildren?

  The truth is that I have developed Worry Number Two, a patient who occupies my thoughts on weekends, not a murderer, not a suicide, but Francine Widmer, whose source of difficulty I now understand and am possibly postponing, dragging out her own understanding of the problem, because I do not want her to stop coming to me because I am infatuated with this baby of twenty-seven. Please understand, ever since Marta's passing, I go to dinner parties, pushed by friends to meet eligible widows, it doesn't work, it would be a housekeeping arrangement, I would constantly be making comparisons to Marta, whose shadows are still in every corner of my mind. But this young woman, Francine, is not in any way like Marta, and I have tried to tie off the waves of stimulation that flow from her without success. I daydream that I am licking the palm of her hand, it is a disgrace for a man my age, I must control this urge, I must arrange for her to see another analyst even though we are on the verge of success, I cannot give her up. I ask myself, does she know? Of course a person always knows. It would be easier for me to marry one of the widows than to act out my fantasies for this young woman.

  I have a confession. Not too long ago — why do I say that? I remember the exact date of course! — I was at a matchmaking dinner contrived by my friend Herman, when he is called to the hospital — his wife says it always happens — to deliver another inconveniently timed baby, and when Herman stops talking, the dinner party died. I tried to keep the conversation flowing, and finally the widow says we had better say good night, would I drop her off, so we walk the few blocks to her apartment, and she says come up, so I go, and when we get there, without fuss, she takes me to her bed. The widow is an ordinary woman of her age, fifty-something, not too bad looking, a bit thin, she is on estrogen, full of hope, my testicles are as full as those of a stud bull whose farmer has closed the fence and thrown the key away. So I do what is asked, and all the time I am thinking of Francine, her face, what her body must look like, what it would feel to be doing this and that to her. The widow asks will I see her again, I am a careful lover, her face shines, I have provided her as well as myself with relief, and I promise to call, knowing I am not likely to call because the widow bores me and I am a poor actor who cannot sustain a role for too long.

  Within a week, I am rumbling about the house, looking through old books read long ago, when I get a phone call after my last patient has said good night, and I think aha, it is the widow, but when I answer it is Francine, she is half talking, half sobbing, and she tells me that a man has violated the orifice I coveted. This is not what she tells me, of course, this is what I think, I try to reassure her, but my heart is pounding wildly as if she is telling me about a crime against myself. I ask her if she has gone to a hospital, I tell her to go, I ask her if she has called the police, I advise her to do so after the hospital, and to please call me afterward, I will wait for her call (what else do I have to do?). She asks me to go to the hospital and the police with her, she wants to come see me now, first, and I tell her, coward that I am, that I cannot, has she told her father, she says she can't, and then I think of that young man she has been dating — whom I despise out of sheer jealousy of his age — and she says in anger yes, that is what she will do, slamming down the phone.

  Years ago I devised a quick remedy for when tension ties my insides into knots. On my desk I keep three well-balanced English darts in a holder. When I open the closet door in my study, hanging on the back is the same dart board I have been using as long as I can remember. When you pick up the darts and take aim, your concentration is one thing only, moving the right arm forward with a snap to release the dart headed for as close to the bull's-eye as you can. And then there is the second and the third. You see your score, and in a moment you are plucking the darts out to show yourself that you can improve the result. Darts are addictive. You never throw just one. And before you know it, you have recreated yourself. And there is not, as with other recreations, a mess to clean up afterwards; just to close the closet door, and put the three darts back in the holder on the desk.

  This evening my throwing of the darts is not entirely successful, because as I throw I cannot put completely out of my mind a petition to the absent Francine. I don't want her to continue her anger at me. Long after I have put away the darts, the phone rings again. It is the young man calling for her, I agree to see her though it is very late. It is in this moment of crisis that the cause of her insomnia comes surging into her memory. I am delighted, even though the cost of the revelation is this hideous thing. It is out in the open, and what do I do? I find myself lecturing instead of soothing her. Is this a form of attack because of her unfaithfulness to me, with the boy Bill and with the rapist?

  In the silence after she leaves, I sit in my bathrobe into the night, trying to define my worthlessness this evening. I am not her father, her lover, I am her therapist, I must help her, I hope I do not love her, she has become a sexual affliction for me, I am afraid I adore her unreasonably, I must give her up as a patient, I cannot give her up, I must have the help of the Deity now in exchange for whatever promises will buy surcease.

  Seven

  Francine

  All those wasted hours Koch the Coward sat behind my head listening, when he has to do something to help, he waddles out of it like a fat chicken, refusing me!

  Oh I know what mother would have said, you need a best girl friend to turn to, as if I were a ten-year-old.

  My best girl friend was a boy, the one sweet man who, even if he couldn't possibly understand what rape was like, would be a presence, a friend. I dialed Bill's number, still seeing Koch's fat face in my mind, wanting to pummel it with my fists. When Bill answered, my voice was quivering.

  "What's the matter?" Bill said.

  I told Bill what had happened. No details, just a man forced me.

  "Oh nooo," he said. He sounded as if I had just told him his mother and father had died in a car crash.

  "Are you all right?"

  What does that mean?

  "Are you hurt?"

  How can I answer that?

  "Please, Francine, say something!"

  I became aware of my silence. I couldn't connect my rage and my voice.

  "Are you there?!"

  "I'm here," I managed to say, my voice a dry rasp defying me to control it.

  "I'll be right over," he said.

  I gentled the receiver back onto the cradle, not letting it go, then felt it shivering, ringing in my hand, and I picked it up again to hear Bill saying, "It'll take me nearly an hour driving fast."

  "Don't drive fast. You'll get a ticket." There's no point getting killed coming to me.

  When Bill walked in, he looked at me as if to see how I was different.

  Don't look at me, I am a violated person.

  "Are you hurt?"

  H
e's not looking at me.

  "Your cheek is very red."

  I put my hand up to where Koslak's hand had slapped me hard. It hurt to the touch.

  I turned my wrists up so Bill could see where the rope had burned in.

  He was wondering about the rest of me. "I hurt inside," I said.

  He was looking at me as if to define "inside."

  "In my head," I said, "and everywhere else. Please drive me to the hospital."

  When we arrived there. Bill double-parked — I was sure he'd get a ticket, I said — and accompanied me inside the double doors marked "Emergency." We went up to the nurse's desk.

  Before I could speak, the nurse said, "Which one of you is the patient?"

  My mouth felt too dry to talk. I pointed to myself. I wondered if my breath was bad.

  "Are you her husband?" the nurse asked Bill.

  He shook his head.

  "Then step back behind the white line."

  Bill blushed, moved back fifteen feet to the white line he had not noticed. I could feel him watching me.

  "Name?"

  "Francine Widmer."

  "Spell it. Do you feel faint?"

  "No." I spelled my name, gave my address, said I had Blue Cross coverage, signed the form the nurse pushed at me.

  "What's the complaint?"

  "I have an internal problem."

  Bill, watching my lips, heard.

  "What kind of internal problem?"

  There were now two people in line behind Bill, impatient to get to the nurse.

  "I don't know," I said.

  "We can't admit you without a doctor's authorization and without a specific complaint."

  "You mean I have to go away."

  "Unless there's something specifically wrong."