“Who were you speaking to?” he said, a man who was suspicious even of the water tap.
“I’m borrowing my father’s car for tomorrow.”
He nodded. It was a fact.
After Lois’s announcement there was no longer anything to argue about, so husband and wife — Peter and Lois — became friends again, compromised into peace by the irreversibility of fact. Peter thought that even in slacks and her father’s shapeless white shirt, Lois looked beautiful. And she was willing to believe that — his hair a monument to disorder, a hole in his head — he looked better than usual.
They spent the night as friends.
It was one of their best nights. In the morning she said, “I understand now why you let Windsor go.”
“Why did I?” he wanted to know.
“Because you’re a good guy; you don’t like to hurt people. Isn’t that right?”
“No,” he said.
“Why then?”
He kissed her — his wife, his child, the mother of his hopes, his Lois.
“You did it,” she said — the soft cry of a languid bird, “because you had to. Am I right?”
“I did it because you have big breasts,” he said, kissing one nipple, then the other.
“They’re tender,” she cried, “but I don’t mind.”
Then he kissed her belly, which trembled like a pulse.
“I understand,” she said. “You did it because …”
Then her mouth. Her mouth.
“I love you terribly, Peter,” she said when she could breathe again. “Do you believe that?”
(And Stanley.)
“Do you love me?” she asked.
It was like that. In the morning. In the afternoon, at three-thirty, they drove in Lois’s father’s black Ford to Dr. Henderson’s office; in the evening Peter returned the car himself, a son-in-law, a member of the family. And Lois … his wife — she bled …
| 10 |
Lying on Dr. Cantor’s couch, Peter would study the ceiling, its cracks and panels, its clouds of shadow, as though he were looking at the secrets of the universe. On his second visit he asked the doctor, who was sitting somewhere, invisibly, behind him, “Why do you think Lois walked out on me, Doctor?”
“What do you think?” the voice — kindly, soft, slightly bored — asked him back.
Peter shook his head, his mind an ultimate blank, thousands of miles of desolation from ear to ear. “I told you what I thought yesterday,” he heard himself saying.
He heard the shuffling of pages, the breath of movement. Briefly. “You said something about sexual difficulties.”
Peter didn’t want to talk about sex with someone he couldn’t see. He found a cunt on the ceiling, a cosmic box, cradled in the shadow of two enormous breasts.
It became a battle of silences. The doctor waited for Peter to talk, but Peter, studying the erotic pleasures of the ceiling, was wary of giving anything away. Peter was interested in answers. The doctor, insofar as Peter could tell, was interested in questions, also in his notebook. Also in his watch.
When the silence began to oppress him, Peter turned around, twisting his neck, to see if the doctor was still there. Dr. Cantor looked bored. Who could blame him?
“Do you think I need this?” Peter asked, sorry to be wasting the doctor’s time.
“Relax,” Dr. Cantor said gently. “It’s better if you forget that I’m here. Just say whatever comes into your head.”
He nodded. Of their own perverse will, tears pierced the skin of his eyes. “I miss Lois,” he said hoarsely.
“That’s understandable. I’m afraid …”
“I miss her, Dr. Cantor, and I don’t know why.” The words like pinpricks in his throat.
“Peter, I’m afraid our time is up for today. We’ll talk again on Friday.”
Between appointments — a charity case, he went twice a week — Peter worried about having nothing to say to the doctor, worried about boring the guy who seemed in his secretive way to be an all-right guy for a middle-aged psychiatrist. On the subway Peter had his best ideas. Riding the IRT to school, Peter could think of hundreds of things to tell the doctor — dreams, secret longings, fears, imaginary conversations, insights — but in Dr. Cantor’s office he choked; silence possessed him like an interminable dream.
“Where were we at the end of last session?” the doctor had the habit of asking. “Do you remember?” The sound of notebook pages, of falling leaves.
Nowhere. (They were two of a kind.)
Embarrassed about their failure to communicate, worried that the doctor was losing confidence in himself, Peter made conversation — a terrifying effort — with the painful self-approval of a man giving his last dime to charity. “My dreams,” he said one Tuesday, no longer interested in the ceiling, “would you like to hear about them, Doctor? I have a dream in which a woman is dying and I feel for some reason that it’s my job to save her.” He waited for the doctor to engage himself.
“Do you know who this woman is?”
“No, who is she?”
The doctor cleared his throat, a cough of a laugh, a sound like the cracking of dry twigs. “It’s your dream, Peter, not mine. I was asking if you recognized this woman as someone in particular, someone you know.”
“It could have been anyone.”
“Go on.”
“I want to save her. I know that much in the dream … It isn’t always the same.”
“Uh huh.”
“Should I tell it to you from the beginning?”
“Go ahead.” The voice full of the pumped-up cheer of boredom, weary to death of other men’s sick and sour dreams.
“Would you rather I talked about something else?”
“Don’t worry about what I want to hear. Tell me about the dream if you want to talk about it.”
Peter noticed that there was a hole in the big toe of his right sock. He wiggled the toe and watched it with bemused detachment, as if it were being moved by a will outside his own. “My ambition,” he announced — a joke on himself, “is to do something better than anyone else can do it.”
“To do what better?”
“Something,” he said, choking on a laugh.
“Surely you can be more specific than that. What are you most interested in?”
“I’m interested in being a painter, a writer, a philosopher, a historian, an architect, a lawyer, a lover …” He laughed self-deprecatingly, a nervous noise rattling in his chest and throat — the doctor judging him somewhere, invisibly. “Sometimes I think I’d like to get on a horse and ride off into the country and not come back.” He listened to himself, his voice coming back at him from some distant wall like an echo. “The thing is I can’t … Maybe I’d better tell you about the dream. Okay?” He waited for the doctor’s approval.
“If you want to.”
“The dream …” he started. He felt like a little kid on an auditorium stage reciting his piece. “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred Lord Tennyson. “It usually starts with my hearing a woman’s voice calling for help,” he said. “At first I don’t know where I am or where the voice is coming from. Then I discover that I’m in some kind of enormous building, an apartment house or a hospital, with hundreds of rooms, and the woman is calling to me from one of them. All she says in this desperate voice is ‘Help me, Peter. Help me.’ She repeats it over and over again, until listening to it becomes painful. I wanted to help her, Doctor, but I couldn’t tell where the voice was coming from.” When he closed his eyes he was there, running frantically from room to room, the voice — the woman of the voice — always somewhere else.