Other people

by Sol Stein

  Imagine a presidential candidate addressing the nation on television, saying, "I woke in the middle of the night from a dream in which the platform I was standing on was collapsing in slow motion and I was trying to grab on to people and they were shrinking away from my grasp, not wanting to go down with me, and suddenly I was awake in bed, my pajama top drenched in cold sweat. I need your vote." Yes, but that same man lying on the couch in my darkened office tells his analyst exactly that, the dream of the night before, and reaches out for the vote of the analyst that he is, nevertheless, a rational human being, anxious and frightened that he will not win in a career where winning is everything and losing is not second best but the beginning of severe depression. He wants to be sustained by me, and he speaks in a way he never would to his wife, or closest confidants, or the world. The speeches of our life are orchestrated not by what we want to say at any given moment but by who is listening.

  I think of these things as I walk home from the Thalia, where I went to see Potemkin, which I cannot bear to see on the small screen of my television and which I have not seen in a movie theater for perhaps fifteen years. I looked forward to this evening. When I sat in the lighted theater, one or two dozen people scattered among the seats, I saw that everyone else was in twos and that only I was alone. I wasn't afraid that a prostitute would come sit next to me or a man cruising would mistake me for an aging homosexual. It is only when the lights dim and the movie comes on that I suddenly feel that such occasions call for an audience of at least two. The other people in the theater have brought their own companionship. I cannot at a moment of recognition on the screen turn to Marta to see if she is reacting as well, or nudge her with my elbow, a touch of shared experience. I am too conscious of myself. One person is an insufficient audience for a motion picture. I feel a wave of anxiety. I am half an audience.

  The picture had hardly started, I was just getting used to squinting at the English subtitles when the impulse to see Potemkin again is overriden by the knowledge that movies are not to be seen alone, they exaggerate the loneliness, the inappropriateness of solitary viewing, the not being part of an audience within the audience. I must leave.

  The ticket taker looks at me. After all, it is crazy to spend three dollars to be admitted and then to leave, he thinks I came on the wrong night, that I wanted to see another film, that I will demand to have my money returned, all this I see in his expression as I go by, demanding not money or anything else but the chance to leave and, walking home, to think of the man having a heart attack in the street, and that I have been a fool among fools to have abjured a lasting companionship since Malta's death. The newsstands on Broadway shout at me with their pornographic magazines, the great behinds and breasts visible from a distance, barking at lonely men by the millions.

  I remember the first time I saw the inside of such a magazine, on the coffee table of my waiting room. I was certain it was not there before Shenker arrived, therefore Shenker must have left it. I turn the pages. The central attraction seems to be the orifices of women, some tight-mouthed as in life, some pink lips within lips, open and moist. One looks up and these orifices belong to faces that reduce one's incipient erection to instant disappointment, faces not guided by an interior intelligence, or even a sensible look, but a put-on petulance or a talentless simulacrum of passion. Did Shenker leave this as a sign that at the age of forty-two he is no longer cringingly afraid of a female body, or something much simpler, that this distinguished biochemist has at long last reached the stage where he can masturbate to orgasm without guilt and is now ready for the next step, to develop a relationship with another person? For Shenker it would be a triumph! I cannot leave this magazine on the table, I put it away in a drawer in my study. Is it to study my reaction to it once again? I look and I am forming analyses of each of the women in my head, a ridiculous exercise. A rose is a rose, but to me the vagina is a flower with a stem that leads straight up the spinal cord to the brain. When Shenker comes the next time I hand him the magazine and say "I believe you left this." He says "It's not mine," and I know I have lost him for another year of circumlocutions and evasions of the fact that his mother taught him to despise his sexuality as she despised hers.

  And so, as I walk, my thoughts lead me inevitably to where they have led again and again, Francine, the intelligent child on the couch rehearsing her yesterdays in order to rationalize her tomorrows, talking, talking, while I see her stretched out, hips and legs and breasts and beautiful hair within touching distance of my two hands, which clasp each other for safety. Gunther, I tell myself, an old penis attached to an experienced brain is a dangerous weapon. My loins fill, my testes rise, I hurry my walk to a brisk pace, taking deeper breaths of the night air I can feel filling my lungs, determined to go home and call one after another of my widow friends, to make dates, to see them on a regular basis in the hope that the prospect of a continuing life with one of them will be acceptable so that once again, as with Marta, I can go to movies in peace. What a liar I have become! It is in bed I long for companionship much more than in the movie house. I camouflage my lust for Francine in intellectual garbage! Do you think I could make anyone understand this? Perhaps my own analyst, long dead. I must keep my silence like the man who is having a heart attack in a street empty of people.

  I turn the key in the lock. Did I leave the door unlocked? Never! No one has the key except the superintendent. This is New York, home of drug addicts, burglars, thieves, psychopaths who kill without reason, had I better go back down and telephone the police? If I telephone they may or may not come these days. And if they find nothing, if it is all anxiety in my head nurtured by my apocalyptic epiphany on the way home from the movies, I will be put down as another of the aged cranks who sees substance in shadows.

  I go in. Do I hear any sound that is out of place? If I did, it has stopped. I look in the living room, the bedroom, nothing. But I hear it again, and I swear I know what it is, the unmistakable sound of a drawer in a file cabinet closing slowly.

  "What is it?" I say in a loud voice, opening the door to my study, and it is not my imagination, but a man I have dreaded seeing all my adult life. I don't know who he is, this man who is taller than I am, in his thirties, wearing sports clothes, holding a group of file folders in his hands as he turns toward me. He is the intruder of my fears.

  Calmly, he says to me, "I thought you were at the movies." This is not an accidental intrusion, a burglar trying random doors of an evening, he has come here now because he knows I was supposed to be elsewhere. Fool, I should have obeyed my first instinct and called the police!

  "What do you want?" I say, wishing my voice were as calm as his.

  "You sit right down there, doctor," says the man. He points with the file folders to the chair behind my desk.

  We are all of us inexperienced when finally a nightmare visits us. Who makes up our dialogue on such occasions? Though we may have imagined, as I did, a dozen times, what an intruder would say and how we would answer, it is a useless rehearsal. I say, "You cannot take anything. Those are private patient files of no value to anyone except me."

  The man reaches into his jacket and pulls out a pistol. He doesn't point it at me, just puts it down on the file cabinet. "Sit down the way I told you and you won't get hurt, doctor."

  He is so calm you would think he has done this a hundred times. Maybe this is his regular occupation. I sit obediently at my desk. I think I bought a four-drawer cabinet for patients' files that has a lock at the top that I never push in. What is the use of an unused lock? Would it have made a difference? Don't these people all know how to open locks? Such locks benefit only the lockmaker. How much money do I have in my wallet? At least fifty dollars that I remember.

  My mouth dry, I say to the man, quietly, reasonably, "Those are private files. They are very precious to my work and to my patients. They are of no use to anyone else."

  "Shut up!" he says.

  "I will give you fifty dollars to leave the files alone." />
  He laughs out loud this Nazi. At that moment, squatting near the bottom drawer, he finds the file he is looking for. Toward the end of the alphabet. Intuition tells me it is Francine Widmer's.

  I take the five tens out of my wallet and put them down on the far side of the desk.

  "Thanks," he says, taking them.

  "Now please go."

  "Sure." He leaves the files he doesn't want on top of the cabinet, takes the pistol and puts it in his Jacket pocket. He has the file he wants and he is at the door of the study. There will be no way to find him. I do not know who he is.

  "You took the fifty dollars. You must leave the file."

  He looks at me as if I am mad.

  "We agreed."

  "Fuck you, doc."

  I have to tell you I have noticed the darts before this and have put them out of my mind, but his breach of what I thought was our agreement stings me, and his insult stings me, and I feel the energy of all my lifelong complaints against the injustices of the world, as I pick up the dart and throw it straight at him, instantly thinking he will pull out that pistol and shoot me dead, but the man screams the most impossible scream I have ever heard, falls back against the door jamb, and slides down to a sitting position, pulling at the dart, screaming, the blood running down his face, and I see all too clearly that it has gone into his right eye nearly up to the feathers. He tries to pluck at it, but it must cause greater pain, and I pick up the telephone and dial 911, and thank God there is an answer soon, a Spanish-accented policeman, and I tell him an intruder in my apartment, with a gun, I have wounded the intruder, he gets the address, the apartment number, and I hang up, my hands shaking, my heart beating, I cannot go past his thrashing body on the floor, what is he doing?

  I realize he is trying to get the gun. The file folder, its contents spilled, with blood on the pages, scattered all over. He has the gun, can he see me to shoot?

  "You fuck!" he yells like an animal. I crouch behind the desk as the gun goes off, an explosion of noise, the bullet landing somewhere behind me. Do I dare crawl to the other side of the room, farther away, or is the safety of this desk my best protection, God God, what have I done? It is impossible not to look, so around the corner of the desk I stare to see him suddenly retch, vomiting over the hand with the gun, the files, the carpet, this once human being, out of his bloody eye a dart sticking thrown by my own hand.

  Every minute of waiting seems an hour, then, at last, I hear unmistakably the sound of the elevator in the hallway, the clatter of feet, the front door open, and I see the two policemen as in slow motion, their guns drawn, and they see the vomit-covered disgust of the man against the door jamb, and I stand only to see that one of the policemen is pointing his gun at me, and I shake my head and point to the slumped man. He takes the gun out of the man's hand almost without effort.

  "Jesus!" says one of them, looking at the face with the dart. The man's lips now open and close like a fish, pink bubbles appearing when the lips part.

  "You throw that dart?"

  I nod.

  The policeman wraps the man's gun in something — a handkerchief? — and the other one says some gibberish about anything I say can be held against me, I have the right to observe silence, I am under arrest.

  "I am Dr. Koch. This is my apartment. This man is a burglar. I came in when he was looting my file cabinet. He threatened me with his gun." And I stop. Had he actually threatened me? It is so hard to be sure. "The dart was the only weapon I had. It was self-defense."

  "I'm sorry, doctor," says the policeman, looking back at the mess, "we'll have to book you. You can call your lawyer if you want, after I call for the ambulance."

  Thirty-four

  Thomassy

  I told Francine she'd have to wait in the car.

  "I didn't bring anything to read," she said.

  "I'll leave the key. Turn on the radio."

  "It'll drain the battery."

  "I won't be long. Lock the doors from inside. Sit behind the wheel. If anybody tries to bother you, take off. When you get somewhere, call this number." I gave her a slip with Tarbell's phone. "Don't memorize the number," I said. "It's one you don't ever want to have to use without me fronting for you."

  Tarbell answered the door, a large, curved pipe hanging from the side of his mouth. He removed it to grunt a greeting, led the way through the disorderly wilderness of his apartment, down a long hallway with closed doors on both sides like sentinels. We passed the open door to the kitchen. A woman sitting at the kitchen table nursing a cup of coffee nodded at me. His wife? Cleaning woman? What was behind all those doors? I'd been in the apartment only once before. I glanced around his so-called study at the end of the hall. I'd forgotten what a mess of papers and casebooks littered the room.

  "A flash fire'd put you out of business," I said.

  "Nah," said Tarbell. "The best stuff's on microfilm."

  "Brady's?"

  "Natch. Have a seat." He flopped a fish hand at a Naugahyde armchair with a stack of file folders in the seat. "Just put them on the floor," he said, plopping his three hundred pounds into a swivel chair and passing me a stapled affidavit of about a dozen pages. "You'll see she signs it both ways. That Anna Costello, that's her real name. Her customers know her as Anna Smith. Her good customers know her as Anna Banana."

  I was trying to be polite enough to pay attention to him, but my eyes were skimming the affidavit.

  "Why Anna Banana?"

  "Oh it's a thing she does. It's in there."

  "What does she do for Brady that Mrs. Brady doesn't do?"

  "Brady's on page seven. She refers to him as Mr. B."

  "How do I prove it's Brady if I have to?"

  "His social security number's in there. Anna's a smart lady."

  I skim-read pages seven and eight.

  "Useful?" asked Tarbell.

  "The kind of people he works for wouldn't like to think their mouthpiece was into something this kinky. They'd think he freaked out."

  "Other people's sex always looks crazy."

  "This is straight out of Krafft-Ebing."

  "Let me unstaple it. You can take pages seven and eight. Just bring them back."

  "I'd like to take the whole affidavit."

  "You're not paying for the whole affidavit."

  "I'd like to fill myself in on Anna's kind of shtick, just in case I need to know more about her than how she services Brady."

  "Well, skim it."

  "I've got a lady waiting in the car."

  "Skim it here."

  I did. It was pretty awful stuff. I like to think I'm broad-minded, nothing human is alien to me and all that, but maybe some of this stuff isn't human. "Okay," I said when I had finished.

  Tarbell took the staple out and handed me pages seven and eight. Then as an afterthought, he handed me the first and last pages also. "You might need those, the beginning, and then the signature page."

  I stood up. I guess I wanted to get out of there.

  Tarbell held his hand out.

  "Sorry. Almost forgot." I gave him the envelope with the bills. I waited till he counted them. He wasn't part of Widmer's trusting world.

  "By the way," he said. "He goes to Amsterdam at least once a year. Interesting."

  "How'd you get that?"

  "Other people go to Amsterdam. A little money helps finance their trip, and builds my inventory."

  "Tarbell," I said, "do you have a file on me?"

  I could swear his cheeks reddened. "Sure," he said. "Small one."

  "Think I could guess what's in it?"

  "Doubt it."

  "Could I buy my own file?"

  "What the hell would you want to do that for, George?" he said.

  "Just testing."

  "Get the hell out of here before I get angry."

  "I should be the angry one."

  "If I'm not covering everybody, people won't come to me first, they'll go to Broderick in New Rochelle. Listen, you don't like what I do for a living,
you just get me reinstated in the bar, okay?"

  I didn't want to get on the wrong side of Fat Tarbell. "Don't think I don't understand," I said. "My life is your business."

  He laughed. "You're okay, George." He showed me down the long hallway to the door. "Come back soon."

  Francine was sitting in the driver's seat. She unlocked the door and slid over when she saw me coming.

  "Sorry it took so long," I said. "Some of the stuff I had to read on the premises."

  "What's he got on Brady?"

  "I'd just as soon not talk about it. It might put me off sex for a week."

  I had meant to phone my service from Tarbell's. I guess reading that junk had distracted me. I pulled up at a public phone and called.

  "A Dr. Koch called. Sounded very upset. Asked you to call soonest." She gave me Koch's number. I wondered what was up. I looked over at Francine in the parked car. She seemed restless. I decided I'd return Koch's call when we got home.

  When we reached my place, I took my jacket off, lowered the knot of my tie, and sat down to read the Brady pages in Anna Banana's affidavit once more before putting them somewhere Francine wouldn't come upon them accidentally. I guess she'd say I had an old-fashioned point of view as to what a woman should and should not be exposed to. A double standard for kinkiness.

  Francine got the ice, made the drinks as if it was her place. The whole thing had a domestic feeling about it. Was I bothered by that? I didn't want a woman to wait on me. Some guys get married for the service. A bachelor gets used to doing his own.

  Jesus, I nearly forgot about old Koch. I stashed the Brady stuff away in the other room, then dialed Koch's number. "Oh," said the lady in the answering service as if she was waiting for my call. "He's very anxious to talk to you. As soon as possible." She gave me an unfamiliar number. I wrote it down, thanked her, and redialed.

  "Sergeant Heller." It was a police station. A wave of thoughts skittered through my head. Koch'd been mugged. Couldn't be too bad or the old man'd be in the hospital.