After two wrong numbers, he got Dr. Cantor on the phone. “I have to see you,” Peter said. “I’m going mad.”
“I’ll be glad to see you. Who is this?”
It took a while for him to answer. “Peter Becker.”
“Well, how are you, Peter? For a moment there I didn’t recognize the voice.” His own voice careful, gentle, recognizing itself. “When do you want to come in? It’s my recollection that I had a cancellation for next Tuesday at eleven. How would that be?”
“Can’t I see you now?”
“Now? I’m sorry, but I have a patient coming in in about three minutes. I couldn’t see you today without taking time away from another patient. I’ll tell you what, Peter—can you come in at nine tomorrow? I’ll arrange my schedule so that I can see you then.”
“I have to see you now.”
“Why is it so urgent?”
A small dark-haired girl who resembled Helena from the rear went by the phone booth, her butt bouncing as she walked, Peter following its flight. “I’m going mad,” he said. “I have the feeling that I’m in love with every woman I see. I want to make love to them—every woman, even ugly ones—in the street if necessary. I want to make contact in some way.”
“Take some of those Miltown I gave you.”
The same girl went by again—his phone booth in the basement of the Columbia Bookstore—and he realized, a man with a gift for missing the obvious, that it was Helena, had been Helena. “Can’t talk now, Doctor,” he said, hanging up in a hurry, the phone missing, falling to its length of cord. When he had finally got the phone on its hook and fought his way out of the booth, Helena was gone.
On the wires of instinct he pursued her—the wires bent. He rushed to the Barnard campus, and not finding her there—Helena nowhere in sight—rushed back, soaked with sweat, to look for her in her room. Why, if she didn’t want to see him, should he want to see her? he asked himself. Mind your own business was the answer he got. What business?
While waiting for Helena, sitting on the steps of the 113th Street building, he browsed in his address book; old girl friends blossomed in and out of memory. He reminisced, the sun beating down on his head, accounted the girls he had been in love with, the ones he had made love to, others, nearmisses, Lois. His chest hurt, thinking about it. He read Herbie’s post card:
Dear Kid,
Wonderful climate. This is a place to conjure with. I’ve gotten so healthy you wouldn’t know me.
How’s New York and the people we know? Saw Papa.
Wish you were here. Mean it.
Best,
Herbie
P.S. Don’t give anyone my address. Please. Don’t run amok.
Peter folded the card in half and stuffed it into the zippered compartment of his wallet. What did Herbie mean by “don’t run amok,” he wondered. Had the two of them ever done anything else?
Though it was only eleven o’clock (actually ten to eleven) Peter had lunch at the West End Bar, a roast beef sandwich and two beers, to pass the time between breakfast and lunch, between want and satisfaction. He was still hungry when he finished. He had another beer and a corned beef sandwich, his appetite un appeased. He looked around, the place mostly empty, two women sitting at the bar—an enormous fan blowing sluggish flies in the air. He ordered another beer. One of the women at the bar shot a sultry glance in his direction. Peter daydreamed, sipped his beer, irremediably thirsty.
With a stub pencil someone had left in an ashtray he drew pictures on his napkin, wrote a prose poem to himself which was really, the napkin damp with beer, a fable. He called it:
FABLE
This is a life? the boy asked in his beer.
Come here, said a witch at the bar. I’ll fix.
Come where?
And when she kissed him
The boy turned into a handsome toad.
Isn’t that better? she said.
Sing to me, my fat toad.
Sing what? he asked, eager to please.
Sing of love, sang the witch. What else?
The toad croaked.
And touched at his failure,
The witch cried real tears.
(Moral: Never ask a fat toad to sing.)
Afterward they threw him out of the bar
For impersonating a dead toad.
After another beer his money was gone. He ran through the streets for a while, the beer joggling in his guts, then went back to Helena’s room to wait for her return, but when he knocked at the door she was there.
“Look,” he said, barging into her room. “I know what I want to do now. What I want is to make love to every woman there is without discrimination as to race, color, creed or age. That’s my ambition. I just worry whether there’s enough time.”
“Forget it,” she said. “It’s been done.”
“Who did it?” he said, incredulous.
And the witches, who had never even smiled at him, laughed. It pleased him that they did. They laughed like hell, and laughed. And laughed.
Peter phoned Delilah. A man’s voice answered.
“May I speak to Delli?” he asked.
There was a long silence. “Who?”
“Do I have the wrong number?”
“I don’t know what number you want,” the voice said.
“I’d like to talk to Delilah if she’s there,” he said aggressively, some part of him embarrassed. “Is there a Delilah there?” His voice was thick.
“That’s not possible,” the man said. “Who’s this calling please?”
In despair he hung up. He dialed again, taking his time; his finger slipped on the last digit and he had to begin all over again. The same man answered.
“I’m sorry,” Peter said wearily. “This is the number I have for Delilah.”
“It’s the right number,” the voice said. “Delilah was very sick, did you know that?”
“I heard something …”
“It was incurable.”
“How are you feeling today?” Dr. Cantor asked as if he were genuinely concerned.
“Fine. Not good.” Peter assumed his position on the couch, stretched out, yawned. (Was this what it was like to come home?)
“When you called me the other day,” the doctor said, his voice less bored than Peter remembered, “you felt you were going through some kind of extreme crisis. Do you want to tell me about it?”
After a moment’s hesitation Peter told the doctor of his most recent obsession, recounted in detail as much as he could remember of the madness of the past few days—the frustration eating away at him, the failure, the sense of failure.
“Why doesn’t anything work out the way I mean it to?” he complained to the face of the ceiling as though it were the face of God—a surrogate of the doctor. “Is it all my fault, do you think?”
The doctor cleared his throat. “Do you feel that it’s your fault?”
“You have to admit that I screw up more than most people.” Peter thought to turn his head—the doctor’s face had a way of disappearing from his memory’s eye—but instead he continued to stare at the ceiling. “You never answer my questions,” he said, resentful despite his intention not to be.
“What I think shouldn’t be of concern to you,” the doctor said reflexively. “We’ve been through all that before, haven’t we?”
“Okay. Yes. But what you want, Doctor—don’t take this personally—takes too much time for what it accomplishes.” “What’s the rush?”
The doctor’s responses were never quite what he expected. “Who are you?” he asked.
“Dr. Noah J. Cantor,” the doctor recited. “I’m fifty-six years old. I’m a pyschoanalyst.”
“Are you married?”
“I have two children, both married. One grandchild.”
“Are you satisfied with things—with the way things have worked out for you?”
“That’s not a question I can answer in a few seconds.”
Peter sighed, disappointed, wanting to believ
e in the doctor, also not wanting to. “Do you love your wife?” he said. “You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to.”
“Thank you. My wife is no longer alive.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Peter, did this girl you were telling me about remind you of your wife in any way?”
“No,” he said quickly, then conceded, struck as though by insight, that it was not impossible. “In a way,” he said. “How did you know? When Helena wouldn’t see me …”
“Go on.”
Peter closed his eyes in an attempt to see. “I felt betrayed again,” he said with effort, “as if Lois were rejecting me all over again, but really they’re not at all alike, Helena and Lois, except that they’re both in some way …” It was still not quite clear to him.
“Yes?”
His sense of things had a way of eluding words. “They’re both childlike,” he said, stopping to reconsider, “and at the same time experienced beyond what they are, a kind of guileful innocence about them, their capacity for knowing things instinctively—Lois in this way more than Helena—disillusioning her, so that she felt, in order to justify her awareness of the world, she had to …” He felt on the verge of an important insight about his life. “She had to …”
“Excuse me, but you’re intellectualizing,” the doctor said.
“… ruin things, the very things she wanted, satisfaction impossible to accept while so much of the world suffers.”
“Who are you talking about?”
He wasn’t sure. “Lois,” he said. “I’m talking about our life.”
The doctor made a noncommittal sound. “Peter,” he said abruptly, “you said you felt betrayed—I think that’s the word you used—what did you mean by that?”
“Well, that … I meant … you know, betrayed, cuckolded.” He had a sense that no matter where you went, whatever you did, it was impossible not to suffer. And there were worse things than suffering.
“Why does that upset you so much?” the doctor asked.
‘Who’s upset?” A nerve like a horsefly buzzed at the back of his ear. “I admit I was jealous—I was obsessed with being betrayed.” He attempted a laugh which never came out.
“Did you feel rejected? Is that it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you feel that these other men were preferred to you?”
“I don’t know.” On the edge of tears he willed, as a matter of choice, not to cry; the tears came anyway, trickling foolishly down his cheeks. He closed his eyes, the lids sticking, flash bulbs exploding red lights at him from all sides. A thin girl, a red spotlight on her, danced naked in his memory. “I didn’t think about whether they were preferred or not, I don’t think I did—maybe sometimes I did. Even so … , People always seem to expect something from me and then are disappointed. I disappoint them. That’s what bothers me most, that people come to me for help and I fail them. Lois needed me, and with all my good intentions I failed her.” He blew his nose.
“And she failed you. It works both ways, doesn’t it?”
“No, it was my fault. What I mean is, why wasn’t I enough for her?” The question came out louder than he intended it, almost a shout.
“Isn’t that a presumption on your part? Look at it this way: why wasn’t your wife enough for you?”
“She was. Lois was.”
The doctor could be heard shifting in his chair. “But didn’t you tell me,” he said with only the slightest attempt to hide his irritation, “that while you were married you also had relations with other women? Didn’t you consider that you were betraying Lois when you had these affairs?”
“You should have been a lawyer,” he said, lifting his head with a kind of giddy pleasure, a sour taste in his mouth.
“Answer my question, please,” the doctor said sternly.
“Why the hell should I?” Peter sat up abruptly, cramped by the enclosure of the couch. “Excuse me,” he said, “but do I look like a philanderer?”
The doctor coughed, choked on something invisible lodged in his throat. “Who does?” he whispered.
Peter sank back onto the couch, luxuriated in the pleasure of lying down. “When I was a kid,” he mused, “I used to daydream almost all the time.”
‘You’ll have to speak a little louder.”
“I’m sorry. As a kid I had daydreams in which I would come across some beautiful girl, usually someone I knew remotely, being attacked by several guys who were bigger than I was, and I would chase them away, rescue her. In return she would fall in love with me—ha! In the dream it was the heroism that was more important than the love. And I think that at the time, if the circumstances had presented themselves, I would have done what I imagined myself doing. I would have tried … It wouldn’t have made any difference.” He remembered a time …
“About three years ago I was walking with a girl in Prospect Park—it was a few months after I had gotten out of the Army—when these two teen-age kids went by and whistled at her; one made an obscene remark. The girl was upset, so I asked the kids to apologize to her. They refuse. I insist. The wise one says it’s a free country and he can say whatever he likes. ‘If that’s the case,’ I said, ‘then I can break your neck if I like.’ ‘Just try it,’ he said. I couldn’t back down in front of the girl, so I get into a fist fight with these two jerky kids and get my nose broken. When the fight’s over—I nearly had to kill one of them to get him to back down—the girl’s gone. And when I call her up she won’t have anything more to do with me, because of the fight. And I had fought the kids for her. That’s what I mean about having a talent for screwing things up.”
The doctor sighed audibly.
“And another time …” Now that he was started—reminiscences of past failure pouring out of him like sweat—he didn’t want to stop. He told of knocking down a drunk in a bar who seemed to be molesting a woman—everyone else there minding his own business. “I didn’t even hit him,” Peter said, “I just pushed him away, but he lost his balance and hit his head on the floor. He was out cold for about thirty minutes, fish-eyed, his leg twitching as if he was dying. The woman left without thanking me. I don’t think I even noticed her leave. I thought I had killed the man. Even after it was clear that he was all right, I kept thinking, What if I had killed him? So much depending on chance, on accident. Afterward the bartender tells me that the woman was the guy’s wife, a really terrible bitch who deserved what she was getting. And anyway, I had no right to interfere. Do you see what kind of gift I have for screwing up? Last night, coming home from a movie about eleven o’clock, I find Gloria and Herbie’s partner, Ira Whimple, scuffling about in the living room—I told you, didn’t I, that I’m staying at Herbie’s place?”
“Uh huh.”
“Ira and Gloria were sort of dancing, mostly wrestling, when I walked in. Ira was trying to get her onto the couch; Gloria kept yelling, ‘No, Peter will be back.’ Neither of them noticed that I was standing in the doorway. ‘You don’t have to worry about him,’ Ira was saying. You just come to my place, Glory.’ Gloria pushed him away, said something I couldn’t hear—the phonograph drowning her out; then this bastard Ira hit her across the face with the back of his hand. I rushed in before I knew what I was doing and knocked Ira down—I only hit him twice. Gloria was screaming and crying. It took me a while to realize that it’s me she was angry at and not Ira. You’re a maniac,’ she screamed at me, and while I’m looking the other way, thinking what to do about Ira, she hauled off and slapped me across the nose, drew blood.” Peter felt his nose, still sore from the blow. “Then she went over to Ira, who’s curled up on the floor with his hands over his head, and makes these cooing noises over him as if he were a baby. It took a while but finally, between us, we got Ira on his feet, dusted the bastard off and sent him home—all the time Ira cursing me under his breath. Then Gloria started packing her things.”
The doctor coughed. Twice.
“Am I boring you?”
“No. Go on.�
�
“Where was I?”
“You seem to get into a good many fights,” Dr. Cantor observed. “Do you enjoy fighting?”
The ceiling stared back at Peter, one-eyed, a black patch of shadow covering the rest of its face, a secret grin extending from one end to the other. (If he didn’t know better—just a ceiling overhead—he might have thought, the grin unmistakable, that he was looking into the face of some whimsically malevolent god.) “I wouldn’t let her pack, I kept taking her clothes out of the suitcase as she put them in. We have a fight. She tells me she’s going to live with Ira Whimple, and there’s nothing I can do about it. This floors me. ‘I won’t let you go,’ I keep saying while she finishes packing, phones a cab. ‘Don’t try to stop me,’ she says, which I suspect means the opposite, but I just stand there and watch her, not doing anything. Before she leaves, she comes over to me and apologizes for the slap, her hand gently on my face, on the place of the slap, and she looks at me with as much affection as I’ve ever seen her offer anyone. I didn’t know what to say,” he said, touched, trapped in the circumstance of recollection. When he opened his eyes, a night had passed, a day—loss the first condition of waking. He let his eyes close—memory an act of salvage. “When I kiss her she pulls away and says good-bye as though she expects never to see me again … I still don’t understand her. “Why are you doing this?’ I ask. ‘For you,’ she says, marching like the Salvation Army out the door, turning when I think she’s already gone and blowing me a kiss. ‘What do you mean, for me?’ I yell after her. ‘I want you here.’ She returns, smiling her only-I-can-hear-the-music-jerk smile. ‘You don’t know Ira,’ she says. “Why do you think Herbie left town? There are guys …’”
“I’m afraid our time is up,” the doctor said.
Peter lifted his head from the couch as though it were an enormous feat of strength. “Please let me finish.”
A Man to Conjure With Page 20