by Steve Tesich
So I drink my drink. She is both concerned and reassured.
Our wine arrives.
I start in on the wine.
Our salads arrive.
4
Over salad, while I wonder when to bring up the subject of Billy’s mother, Dianah launches into her lament. Her lament spills over from the salad to the main course, which is lamb chops for me, sea bass for her, with a side order of creamed spinach.
She interrupts her lament to inquire how I like my lamb chops. I in turn inquire about her sea bass. We’re both delighted with our selections and then her lament continues.
Actually, “lament” is not the right word for it. It’s some new genre. A divorce dirge? An oratorio for a long-lost marriage? I don’t know what to call it.
She marvels at herself for having survived our marriage intact. Other women, she is sure, would have been completely destroyed by being married to a man like me.
“When I think of what I’ve been through,” she says, shakes her head, and goes on.
I drink my wine and eat my lamb chops and listen to her version of that marriage of ours. She’s in brilliant voice, absolutely brilliant. The story of our marriage is broadcast to diners beyond the immediate vicinity of our table. They become as enthralled by her telling of it as I am. Although I was married to her for all those years, I remember no such marriage as the one she is describing at the top of her lungs.
“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” she says, “there were moments of bliss. Conjugal bliss. We had more than our share of bliss, I suppose, but for the most part, correct me if I’m wrong, for the most part, our marriage was one long bloodbath in which we tore at each other. We tore each other to shreds time after time, and only then …”
I remember neither the bliss nor the bloodbath and although I am invited to correct her, I don’t. It would be needlessly cruel of me to insist now, over lamb chops and sea bass, on the truth that our marriage was neither blissful nor bloody, but merely tedious.
There is an innate sense of fair play in me. Having lied to her for all those years, the least I can do now is not contradict her and let her lie to me. There is something else, too. Her need to lie moves me.
“I suppose,” she goes on, “we were always closer to being a couple of wild animals than a man and wife. Our claws sharpened, our teeth bared …”
When a woman lies to me, as Dianah is doing, it’s as close as I get to feeling loved. Whenever one of the women in one of my many short-lived love affairs faked an orgasm, I was always deeply moved by such a selfless act of generosity, genuinely moved to think that she actually cared enough about my feelings to go to the trouble of faking. Their occasional real orgasms were not nearly as moving.
Dianah’s description of our marriage is not just a fake orgasm but a fake orgasm in public and as such even more appreciated. Hearing myself described as a wild animal with sharp claws and bared teeth, and knowing that those at the tables around me can hear the description, helps me to feel again like a burly six-footer with a manly beard and not someone whose spine is contracting and bulk is expanding as he sits there gnawing on his lamb chop.
A cake with candles goes past us, carried by a waiter, and a moment later we hear the “Happy Birthday” song.
5
Our waiter brings us the dessert menus. While I ponder what to have for my dessert and while Dianah ponders what to have for hers, while we read and reread the selections listed on the menu in both French and English, I listen in to the conversation of the four people, two couples, at the table next to ours.
They are talking about a recent event that to me seems like something that occurred years ago. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall. A woman at the table is telling her three tablemates that she was there at the Wall to witness the event for herself. People hugging each other. Crying with joy. History in the making. A multinational audience listening to Leonard Bernstein conducting a multi-orchestral performance of Beethoven’s Ninth. A man sitting across from her remarks how strange it makes him feel, although he wasn’t there, that a whole city once called East Berlin is not east anymore. In his opinion, there is hardly any east left in the world. A bit of south to be sure, and a bit of north, but in the main “there is only the West now. The West and the rest,” he says.
Over coffee and dessert, which is a peach tart for Dianah, a heroic slice of gateau au chocolat for me, I intend to bring up the subject of Billy’s mother, but at the last second I change my mind and bring up the subject of my father’s camel-hair overcoat instead.
I tell Dianah how I saw an old homeless man on Broadway wearing my father’s overcoat, several Saturdays ago.
“I told you,” she tells me, “I warned you repeatedly that if you didn’t come to get your father’s things, I would give them away. I’m not a warehouse, darling, for the living or the dead. I have my own life to live.”
I don’t know why I’m telling her this story, unless it’s to avoid telling her another, more pressing one. I continue. I tell her how I followed the old man uptown. The turtle pace and which he walked. His overall turtlelike appearance. I tell her how I spent an hour or so sitting on a bench next to him, with my dry-cleaning bag draped over my lap.
“You are sick, darling,” Dianah tells me. “You’re a very sick man. A complete neurotic.”
“I may be sick, but I don’t think I’m neurotic in the least.”
“Of course you don’t think you are. That’s because you’re neurotic. Neurotic people never think they’re neurotic. That’s one of the side effects. Don’t you understand that a man who goes around the city following his father’s clothes is somebody who is totally out of control?”
“I wasn’t out of control in the least. I knew exactly what I was doing.”
“You always think you know what you’re doing. You have this image of yourself as someone who’s always in charge. But you’re not. You’re just a marionette, sweetheart, that’s all you are, responding to the tugs and pulls of the strings from your subconscious mind. How many times have I urged you, pleaded with you to go see …”
She’s off again. The people at the Berlin Wall table are all ears, and being unusually candid about being so. My kind of audience.
“The subconscious mind …” Dianah goes on.
She believes in the subconscious the way hard-line Catholics believe in the Trinity and the doctrine of transubstantiation. To her, the subconscious explains everything and it allows her, therefore, to issue recriminations and dispensations on subconscious grounds. You can be both doomed and redeemed by the same source, depending on the mood of the issuer.
“All your problems, darling, every single one of them …”
According to her, all my problems, every single one of them, are caused by the turmoil in my subconscious mind. My drinking. My faithlessness in marriage. My sorry record as a father. My constant lying to myself and others. My pathetic, scraggly beard. My disregard for the feelings of others. My lack of respect for the way I look.
“Look at yourself,” she exclaims, and I feel the eyes of the foursome at the Berlin Wall table turning to look at me. “You’re getting fat, darling. You are, you know. You really are. You’re not just overweight anymore. You’re fat, sweetheart. I can’t even see the chair you’re sitting on. For all I know, there is no chair. For all I know, you’re just crouching there with your elbows on the table. And that miserable-looking beard you’re growing isn’t fooling anyone. All men who’re ashamed of their appearance grow beards. Especially fat men. At this rate, God forbid, you’ll soon start wearing black turtleneck sweaters as well. And why? Do you know why? Do you want to know?”
She knows. And she tells me. Lodged deep in my subconscious mind is a desperate need for self-expression that is constantly frustrated and aggravated by working as a rewriter on other people’s scripts. This constant frustration leads to anger and hate. According to her, I am full of both.
“You are, darling. You really are overflowing with anger and hate. Yo
u’re a potential madman with an assault rifle, who bursts into an all-night convenience store and guns down a dozen people in a fit of rage. What you need is professional help to help you to come to terms with yourself. Because if you don’t …”
Her analysis of my problems is so sweet, so innocent of the true and terrible nature of my many diseases that I can only wish that she were right. I could cure myself completely in a matter of days, if all it took were coming to terms with myself.
If I am a madman, as I very well might be, then I am some new improved madman, with a new and improved madness that allows me continually to come to terms with myself. The millstones of my mind constantly grind and reduce to powder whatever disturbing matter enters its territory.
The matter of Laurie Dohrn is a good example. In a few days after that dinner with Cromwell I came to terms with what I had done and allowed to be done to her.
It was all for the best. It was a good thing I had done. Her attachment to me, had it continued, might have arrested her emotionally and caused her to feel an overdependence on me for the rest of her life. This attachment, although very flattering to me, was not in her best interest. As her father figure, I had performed a final act of selfless love by setting her free from my influence. Some day, when she was old enough, she would realize that … etc., etc., etc.
The last thing I needed was professional help in helping me to come to terms with myself. If anything, I have a nostalgic craving for that time in my life when terms existed that I could never come to terms with.
6
“Listen,” I finally begin, as the whole dinner is coming to an end, “there is something I need to tell you. I need your opinion on this matter. It’s something …”
And so I begin.
“It’s about Billy’s mother.” I make the mistake of blowing the punch line of the story right at the top and then wave my hands stupidly as if trying to erase it. I begin again.
“I was asked, this man I know asked me to take a look at the first cut of a film he produced, to see if there’s anything I can do to …”
Once again, I make a mistake and start getting sidetracked by telling her about the film itself. How wonderful it is. I’m not only talking about something that’s not germane to the subject at hand, I’m doing a bad job of describing the film in question. I’m making it sound like any other film. So I light another cigarette and begin yet again.
I tell her about the video.
About the waitress.
About her laughter.
“As soon as she laughed, I knew, I mean, I really knew that she was the same …”
I stop in midsentence because I suddenly realize that although I told Dianah about my telephone conversation with that fourteen-year-old girl all those years ago, I didn’t mention anything about her laughing on the phone. So I backtrack hurriedly and insert that piece of information into the narrative. I also try, because it’s crucial to the story I’m telling, to describe the quality of her laughter that made it unforgetable. But try as I might, my description of her laughter is not successful. I’m doing a bad job of it. I feel like a nightclub performer who’s losing his audience. Out of desperation, I bring up examples of actresses whose laughter has the approximate quality of the girl’s.
By the time I get back to the subject of Billy’s mother, I discover that I have nothing more to say on the subject. That I have said everything but somehow managed to leave out everything.
I worried all evening about the impact my story of Billy’s mother would have on Dianah, and now that the story is over, I realize that it seems to have no impact on either of us. Neither on me who told it nor on her who heard it. The significance of the story is no more or less significant than anything else we said to each other over dinner.
I sit there puzzled, unable to tell if the story’s lack of impact is the result of my having told it badly, or if its lack of impact and significance accurately reflects my current state of mind. Perhaps I waited too long to tell it. Perhaps by viewing that scene in the restaurant over and over again, I used up whatever significance it had to offer. I feel exactly as I felt when I pitched my Ulysses in Space movie to a studio executive and, in the process of pitching it, managed to lose not just his interest in my story but my own as well.
I light another cigarette. Dianah sits across from me, watching me smoke. She is scrutinizing me in silence, as if waiting for some further elaboration. I have none to give.
“You are worse than I thought,” she finally says. “You really are. You remembered her laughter? You? After twenty years you remembered the sound of her laughter? Is that what you said?”
I nod my head, but not with conviction.
“You can’t even remember to call your own son once in a while and you expect me to believe …” She leaves the sentence unfinished and sighs.
“Oh, Saul,” she says and shakes her head. “You’re a sick man. Much sicker than I gave you credit for being. It doesn’t really matter if you actually believe in this fantasy you told me, or if you made it up just to hurt me. What it shows, all it shows, is the extent of your decline into some mental illness I’m not equipped to handle. It torments me to see you like this. It really does.”
She sighs. Her lovely hand, with her lovely long fingers, flutters in the air and comes to rest gently on her chest.
“You know the way I am. You, of all people, must know that if I am anything, it’s nurturing. Overly nurturing, in fact. It torments me to see suffering of any kind, but especially suffering which even I can’t alleviate. You remember what it did to me, how devastated I was, when that seagull crashed into the windshield of our car on the way to Sag Harbor that summer. We stopped at that fish restaurant afterwards and you, you were fine …”
The people at the Berlin Wall table, having drifted away during my story, are back with us again. They’re listening to every word Dianah says. They seem to know the restaurant in Sag Harbor. Perhaps they’ve eaten there themselves.
“You were perfectly fine. The poor dead seagull meant nothing to you. There you were, eating those crab cakes and your clam chowder and I, if you remember, I was so shattered, so devastated by its death, that I couldn’t eat a bite. Not a single bite. And then, later on that evening, when we went to the McNabs’ party, it was their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and we drove over to Southampton? Remember how both George and Pat thought that I was ill? They both commented on how pale I looked. How distraught I seemed to be. And that was over a seagull. I don’t even like seagulls, and yet I was devastated by the incident, completely devastated. Don’t smoke anymore. Put it away. Do it for me. Please. So, what I’m saying is this, a time comes when even I must admit defeat. It’s not that I’m giving up on you, Saul, it’s just that I have no choice. I wish I could nurture you back to health. I’ve tried. God knows, I’ve tried. I’ve spent the last couple of years of our marriage, while we were still living together, doing nothing but trying …”
I am enchanted by the fiction she is spinning, moved by whatever is moving her to tell me the lies she’s telling me. In a way, I feel unworthy. Do I really merit lies this good?
“And I probably would have gone on trying, if you hadn’t left. It was you who left me, Saul. It was you who moved out, and now look at yourself. You’re worse than ever. Instead of taking some positive step forward and trying to come to terms with yourself, you’re running around with that unattractive beard on your face, following your father’s overcoat around New York, and now this. Either making up some fantasy about a girl who laughed on the phone or believing in the fantasy yourself. I don’t know which is worse. All I know is that if I, with all my nurturing nature, can’t nurture you back to health, then nurturing is not the answer. This is a job for professionals. You should commit yourself. There are many fine, reputable psychiatric institutions in the city and you belong in one of them. And don’t think that I wouldn’t visit you there. I would. Every day. But I just can’t bear to go on seeing you like this, watching hel
plessly from the sidelines as you fall further and further apart. Don’t you understand what it does to me to see you like this? I can’t … I just can’t … Excuse me.”
Tears well up in her eyes, she rises and departs with great dignity in the direction of the ladies’ room.
I turn in my chair to watch her and admire, yet again, the dancelike way she has of crossing a crowded room. The stately swing of her shoulders in counterpoint to the sway of her hips.
7
The cigarette I had meant to light earlier, but which she had pleaded with me not to light, I now light.
My conviction that the actress in the scene in the restaurant was Billy’s mother is no longer with me. Perhaps, I think, Dianah is right. Some kind of fantasy on my part. The chances of my remembering that fourteen-year-old girl’s laughter seem very slim. We play tricks on others, memory plays tricks on us. It now seems highly unlikely that the waitress in the movie was anything but some poor actress in a bit part. There are so many of them in that age bracket. Mid-thirties to early forties. The conventional wisdom says that if they haven’t made it by their mid-thirties, they never will. You’re either a leading lady by then or, for the rest of your life or career, whichever ends first, you’ll be acting in bit parts, in scenes that belong to others.
It’s true, I’ve invested a lot of hope and time in thinking about her, and through her, as Billy’s mother, in the prospect of my own redemption. Now that the whole central premise is in doubt, I have no idea what to think. I am temporarily in between thoughts until some new mood comes along to trigger a thought into being.
I turn my attention to my colleagues at the Berlin Wall table. They have been kind enough, with a few understandable lapses, to listen in on the melodrama at my table, and my sense of social responsibility bids me to return the favor.