“But you tell me you were also in love with Lila, Doris and Gloria, so what am I to make of your answer?” He cleared his throat, coughed.
“Doris and Gloria are the same person,” Peter said.
“You’re not responding to my question. What I’m asking is whether you and your former wife had sexual problems?”
Closing his eyes, a dizzying experience, he fell headlong through an opening in the floor, was in bed again with his wife, his former wife. She turned to him like a flower. “Be gentle, Peter,” she was saying. “Hurt me.” He flew out the window.
“I’m not asking you these things to pry,” the doctor said gently. “It’s important to know how you feel about certain things. Do you understand?”
“Yeah.”
“Go on please.”
“Where? What was I saying?”
The rustling of pages, labored breathing like the buzz of insects. A clock was ticking somewhere in the distance. “What do you want to talk about?”
“Lois was always afraid of becoming pregnant,” he lamented, “and I …”
“Go on.”
“It made it difficult.”
“I understand. Go on.”
“That’s all.”
“But you were married. Why should she be afraid of having a child?”
“That’s obvious, isn’t it?” He was tired of being prodded, tired of the perverse will of his memory, tired of everything.
“Not to me. I’d like you to tell me what you know.”
“I’d rather not talk about it.”
“Talk about whatever you like.”
He imagined the doctor looking forlornly at his watch, sluggish minutes prodding the dull nerve of his patience. “It wasn’t too bad,” Peter said, “until after the abortion.” A concession to the hours of failure they shared together. “After that …”
“I can understand. You were …”
“She wouldn’t stop bleeding. She bled — it was supposed to stop — for a full day and a half; it wouldn’t stop. I called the doctor — the man who performed the abortion — but he didn’t answer his phone, no one answered. I was going to go down there and kill him, but I was afraid to leave her while she was bleeding, and the night before — right after the operation — I had left her alone.” His throat turned to sand, spilled into his chest.
“I’m afraid I lost you,” the doctor said, his tone weather-less as always. “Did you leave her while she was hemorrhaging?”
“I didn’t. I left …” He couldn’t talk. The bones of his chest stretched beyond endurance.
“Take your time. No one’s rushing you. What happened after you left her? Why did you leave her alone?”
“I left her …” It was difficult to talk. “I left her a few hours after the operation, after I put her to bed. She said then — I was tucking her in — that it was my fault, everything was my fault. I held her hand. I was suffocating. She said she wanted me to go away. She said she no longer loved me and wanted me to go away. I was suffocating. Her hate. I had to get out of there. I went to a movie. Then it struck me what I had done. I left in the middle. When I got home she was lying in a pool of sweat, white as a ghost.”
“You wanted to escape. It was a natural impulse. You see that, don’t you?”
“No. I shouldn’t have run out. If it could be undone, I’d do anything now to be able to undo it.” He thought he heard the doctor say something (the word “self-indulgence” remained in his mind), but when he turned around — the doctor’s face impassive — he saw that he had been mistaken.
“Do you want to add anything,” the doctor said, “or are you through for today?”
Peter looked at his watch. They had gone five minutes over the allotted time. It was a victory of sorts. When he got to his feet the room turned over, the desk spilled match-sticks, the yellow rug flying on its side caught fire. Peter had to hold on to keep from falling. He burned in one piece, upright.
“A profitable session,” the doctor said in his toneless voice.
That night Peter, who hadn’t talked to his wife in months, phoned her at her parents’ house where she had been living since their separation.
“Let’s try again,” he said.
“Who do you wish to speak to?” It was Lois’s mother. They had the same voice on the phone.
“I want to speak to Lois. Let me speak to Lois, please.”
“Who is this?” the voice full of wary terror. “Lois isn’t here at the moment.”
“Mildred, let me speak to Lois, please.”
There was a moment of hesitation. “I told you she isn’t here,” she said, the voice murderously cold. “Now stop bothering us, please. There’s nothing for you here.”
“I want — ” he started, but Mildred hung up before he could finish, the idiot silence haggling insanely in his ear.
Peter raged.
Doors opened somewhere, slammed of themselves, as though the place were haunted. It was to be expected. He was in a rooming house on 113th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, where he had been living for the past two weeks, the phone hanging black on the wall of a coffin-sized kitchen he shared with five other ghosts.
He called again.
“I want to speak to Lois,” he roared into the phone.
“I’m sorry, Peter,” her father said softly, “but Lois hasn’t been well and I don’t think she ought to talk to you.”
His face simmered with sweat. “What’s the matter with her, Will?” he asked gently, his voice hoarse, unnaturally solemn.
He could hear Mildred’s voice in the background. “Hang up, hang up, hang up — what’s the matter with you? Hang up.”
Will endured. “She’s been sick,” he said, a sigh in his voice — a man of perpetual grief. “She’s been … troubled.” The word delicately chosen.
“I’m sorry, Will,” he said, as though he were apologizing for something he had done. “Would you let me talk to her for a few minutes? It will be all right, Will, believe me. I wouldn’t say anything to hurt her.”
“I can’t, Peter.”
“It’s important to me, Will.”
“There’s nothing I can do, Peter, if she doesn’t want to speak to you. I’m sorry about it, but that’s the way it is.”
“She doesn’t want to speak to me? She said that?”
“Those are her orders, Peter. Sorry.” He lowered his voice. “The last time you called — about a month ago I think it was — Lois was sick afterward. We have the brunt of it; she gets these fits of depression, Peter, where she cries all the time and won’t eat anything. I think it’s better …” He trailed off, as though the effort of talking had exhausted him.
Peter looked around the kitchen. A girl, an undergraduate type, was boiling water. She smiled, showing thousands of perfect teeth. “The last time I called,” he said into the phone, “was over two months ago, Will. I don’t call often.”
“Is it that long? It seemed to me that I remember you calling about a month ago.”
“Let me speak to her, Will.”
“I can’t. I’m going to have to hang up now, Peter.” He sighed his regret. “One minute.”
Peter waited. He heard Lois’s voice arguing with her mother, Will also involved, apologizing about something; then suddenly, before he had a chance to steady himself, Lois was on the phone. “Is that you, Peter?” she said in a voice that seemed to be coming from the other side of the world. He could hardly hear her. “I can’t stop crying, baby.”
“Lois?” He couldn’t think of anything to say.
“What, Peter?”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m all right.” She laughed, sobbing. “It’s just that I don’t want to do anything.”
“Take care of yourself,” he said absently, becoming aware, despite himself, of an almost illegibly scrawled message on the wall next to the phone. No one is ever home when I call, it said.