“Go on.”
Peter opened his eyes — a wonder to see the ceiling where he left it, darker now, tilted. “I had to knock down the door with my shoulder to get into several of the rooms. It was always the wrong room.”
The doctor was writing furiously. “Go on.”
Peter raised his head. Where?
“The woman was calling you,” the doctor suggested.
“The voice always seemed to be coming from just beyond the next wall.” As he went on, Peter became less and less certain as to what he was making up for the sake of the story and what actually took place in the shadow reaches of his dream. “I kept going from room to room,” he said, caught up in the pursuit, “and I had the impression — don’t ask me why — that the building I was in was a kind of funeral parlor. The place smelled of death. I had the feeling that the woman who was calling me was the only one in the building still alive.”
“And you awake before you reach her? Is that how it happens?”
No. His eyes closed, Peter crashed through the last wall, a double thickness of brick, which gave way, like some heavy liquid, at the impact of his shoulder. There were no more rooms after that. He was outside, in a garden, among roses. The woman was there, waiting impassively (for him?) in a long feathery white nightgown, fragile as a ghost. So that she would recognize him, he flew to her, the ground going down as he went up. It was suddenly dark, the exquisite white figure of the woman as if imprinted on the shadowy outline of the garden. He approached her like the floating lover in a Chagall painting, kissed her cold mouth, then fell, landing on her pedestal. She was a statue. Had she always been?
“I asked you …” the doctor started to say but stopped himself. Peter was weeping. “Anyway, our time is up for today.”
“Tell me some more about your parents,” the doctor asked him on another occasion, after a prolonged silence.
“There’s nothing to tell. What I mean is, Dr. Cantor, we weren’t much of a family.”
“How so?”
“Well, as I told you, my father played in a band that traveled a lot, so he wasn’t home very much of the time. My mother died at fifteen — when I was fifteen,” he corrected himself. “She died in childbirth.”
“I see.” Sound of pencil scratching on paper. “What was your mother like?”
He hardly remembered. “She did her best,” he said in mitigation of her failure. “Herbie and I were wild kids and Papa was home less than six months out of the year.”
“What were your feelings about your father being away so much? Did it upset you?”
Peter discovered that his foot was asleep. “A little, I guess,” he said, shaking the foot, which seemed only circumstantially a part of him. “Most of the time I got along pretty well with him, he wasn’t a bad man — he could be very nice — though he was always a little distant, as if we were just another one of his audiences to be warmed up for his performance. I got along all right with him, but Herbie fought with Papa all the time they were together. They loved each other. They fought constantly.”
“Do you know what you just said?”
Peter sat up. “What?”
“You tell me,” he said in his bored, gentle voice — his middle-aged, professional voice. “It’ll be better if you lie down, however.”
“I told you that my father was never home,” Peter guessed, adjusting his head to the pillow, unable to find a comfortable spot.
“No, something after that. About your father and Herbie.”
“That they fought?”
“Yes. And what else?”
“They used to bait each other for no reason except it was the only way they knew how to talk. Is that what you mean? For example, Papa used to call Herbie the world’s biggest bum, and Herbie would say that everything he was he owed to his father.”
“But these fights between them were a means of communication, a means of affection? Isn’t that right?” “Did I say that?”
“You said they loved each other.” The doctor was writing again.
“In a way they did.”
“Do you think your father loved Herbie more than he loved you?”
The question embarrassed him. Peter looked at the ceiling, didn’t answer.
“You don’t want to talk about it, do you? Do you understand why?”
“I think Papa loved us all when we weren’t around,” Peter whispered. “When he didn’t have to be with us, he loved us.” It hurt him to say so.
“Then you did resent him somewhat, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t resent him,” he insisted in a loud, childlike voice, remotely recognizable as his own. “It wasn’t his fault he was out of town when my mother died. He couldn’t know she was going to die, could he? Anyway, I think our time is up, Dr. Cantor.” He laughed foolishly.
“That’s all right. Go on.”
“What should I say? Herbie was bothered about it more than I was. He really hated Papa for not being there. They …”
“What about you? Did you hate him?”
Peter leaped to his feet as though awakened from a dream. He confronted the doctor face to face, an owl-glassed middle-aged man. “I didn’t hate him,” he said. “It wouldn’t have mattered to Papa if I hated him or not.”
After a month of saying nothing — nothing coming of nothing — Peter told the doctor about Gloria and Delilah, changing their names (Gloria was Doris, and Delilah, Lila) to protect them from the violation of Cantor’s knowledge.
“I don’t know if this makes any sense to you,” Peter said, “but I felt that I was in love with Lila, Doris and Lois at the same time. In different ways. Is that possible? What I mean is not that I loved Lois, Doris and Lila all at once, though sometimes I did, but I loved each one when I was with her or was thinking of her.” Lois, Doris, Lila, Peter: they seemed merely names now, pseudonyms in some wish-blown purgatory. When Lois left him they all died.
“When you say ‘love,’ do you mean you wanted to have intercourse with these girls? I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”
“What do I have to do, define love for you?”
The doctor cleared his throat. “Not for me,” he said gently.
Looking at the ceiling, Peter found the cunt again, a deformity of its former self, an obscene grin like a scar on its face.
“I really had rocks for Gloria,” he confessed.
“Gloria?”
“I mean Doris. I used to get a hard-on just thinking about her.”
The doctor was writing again. “I don’t understand. Who’s Gloria?”
Peter couldn’t explain without admitting his deception; his guilt sweated his palms. “When I said Gloria I meant Doris,” he said — a deathbed confession.
The doctor found a laugh in his throat and gave it up. It was infectious. Peter began to laugh, though tensely unamused — the laughter tearing its way painfully out of him. He was unable to stop.
“Did your wife know about these other women?” the doctor asked, raising his voice sternly against the wail of sound coming from the couch.
Seizures of mirth continued to erupt in a painful rattle of sound, then stuttered to a death. Peter shook his head, withholding tears as a vanity of will. “I don’t think so,” he said; it was the first answer to come to mind. “If she did, she never mentioned it.”
“Did you have intercourse with these other girls? Doris, Gloria …?”
No answer.
“Was your wife a disappointment to you — you know what I mean — as a sexual partner? Is that why you looked elsewhere?”
Peter stared the ceiling blind. “I was in love with her,” he muttered — still, for all he knew (which was, God knows, little), in love with her.