“You too.” A whisper: a secret.
The girl, a young witch, watched her water lovingly, added salt and toad’s blood and stirred.
The floor pressed against his feet. “I want to see you, Lois,” he whispered, cupping his hand over his mouth to prevent the young witch at the stove from eavesdropping.
“I can’t hear you.”
“Can I see you some time?” he muttered. The kitchen was boiling.
There was no response at the other end — no sound of life — as if Lois were no longer there. He waited without faith, holding his breath.
The pug-nosed witch went by, carrying her potion in a coffee mug, winking her butt at him as she passed. He stared at the wall. No one is ever home when I call, it said.
“Lois, say something.”
“I can’t.” Her speech punctuated by sobs. “Every time I look in the mirror I start to cry. Something about the way I look — it’s funny — makes me cry … Leave me alone, Peter. It’s better if you leave me alone.”
“I can’t,” he said.
“Go away. Please.” Her voice rose almost to a scream. “Go away. All I want out of life is for you to leave me alone. That’s all. Why won’t you leave me alone?”
“All right,” he said in a tremulously brave voice. “All right. All right.”
“You don’t have to,” she said softly.
He laughed brokenly — a man reprieved after the execution.
“I think about you,” she whispered. “Yesterday, I remembered a time we went to the country together; it was on a Saturday, I think, and we were just friends at that time, not even lovers yet, just friends. It was in April or early May and it was a beautiful day — do you remember? — with no sun at all. We sat in the grass and just talked, sometimes in silences we talked — you know. Everything came back to me just as it was. You were chewing on a strand of grass. We hardly even touched that day. It was like the silence. Everything just happened.” Her voice wistful, strange.
He had no recollection of it. “Where in the country did we go?”
“Bear Mountain. Don’t you remember? You were wearing a blue shirt.” He tried but couldn’t remember the occasion she had described.
“I tell you what — why don’t we go to Bear Mountain next weekend?” he said, exhilarated, afraid — terrified — of being refused.
“Do you really want to? Really?”
The witch-girl had come back into the kitchen, smiling teeth and gums; it distracted him. “You must be fond of that phone,” she whispered. He nodded.
“Peter?” Lois said. “I don’t know.”
“Either Saturday or Sunday is all right with me,” he said, his sense of defeat quickening. “Whichever is better for you is better for me.”
“I can’t, Peter.”
“Some other time?” he suggested, compelled to lose everything.
“Peter,” she said gently, pitying him, “it wouldn’t be any good. It wouldn’t.”
“All right.”
“I just can’t,” she said, as if it were a physical impossibility. “You can’t live things over, once they’re over; it’s never the same — you know that. It’s less painful if we don’t see each other.”
“All right.”
“Don’t be hurt,” she said, a trace of malice in her concern.
“Who me?” he said savagely. “Nothing touches me.”
“I’m just trying to be strong,” she said piteously.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Let me have a number I can reach you at. It’s better that you don’t call me here. You understand.”
He read the number off the dial. “It’s a public phone.”
The witch laughed.
“Hold on,” Lois said.
He waited. The witch-girl was standing at the window, munching an apple, her back to him. The receiver pressed painfully against his ear; his arm ached from the effort of holding it up. Voices from somewhere within. Then Lois was back. “My mother doesn’t want me to talk to you,” she said. “She thinks it’s bad for me.” Starting as a laugh, a series of dry coughs racked her. “I’ve been smoking too much. It’s a form of compensation.”
“I’ve been sleeping too much,” he confided. “It’s impossible for me to stay awake. I fall asleep on subways and ride past my stop. The more I sleep, the tireder I feel.”
“I can’t seem to sleep,” she said mournfully. “Peter, why do you want to see me again? I have to know the reason.”
It wasn’t easy to explain. “Because I want to see you,” he said. “I miss you.”
“That’s no answer.”
“Because …” Could he tell her what he didn’t know himself? His reasons were his reasons. What else could he say?
“Why?”
“I want to make you whole,” he said. The words came by themselves; he merely spoke them.
Lois moaned softly, a painful yield, her strained breathing like a pulse in the phone. Then, as he waited for her, she was gone, the connection choking almost painlessly. He hung on, the dead receiver at his ear, waiting for the impossibility of her return. The witch-girl smiled and smiled.
“Why did I say that to Lois?” he asked the doctor at the start of their next session.
“What do you think?” Dr. Cantor said.
“I’d rather hear your explanation,” Peter said, suddenly suspicious of the doctor’s professional reticence. Perhaps the man had nothing to say.
“I think it would be better if you told me,” Cantor said gently. “Try to recall what you had in mind, what you were feeling when you made the remark.”
“How do I know you understand what I tell you, if you never tell me what you know?”
“Why should it matter to you what I understand?” the doctor said. “It’s what you understand about yourself that’s important. I explained this to you before.” The same weary benevolence.
“What if I don’t believe it?” he said, sitting up as an act of defiance, though looking at the floor and not at the doctor.
“It doesn’t matter to me whether you do or not. If you’re trying to hurt me, let me tell you that it’s having no effect. Are you ready to continue?” The doctor was writing in his notebook again.
When Peter didn’t answer, his mind somewhere else, the doctor repeated the question.
“I’d rather not,” he said. “I have no faith in it.” He had the feeling of being trapped in an airless place, suffocating, as in a dream, without hope of relief. “Nothing is happening,” he said. “Nothing happens.” He stood up cautiously and began walking, as though on a ledge outside a ten-story window, across the yellow rug toward the way out. During all this time, the doctor said nothing.
“I’m leaving,” Peter announced, in case Cantor hadn’t noticed.
“I can see that,” the doctor said. “If you want to continue with our talks sometime, Peter, feel free to call.”
“Am I making a mistake?” he asked.
“That’s for you to say,” Cantor said. “I don’t want to influence your decision. Whether you know it or not, you’ve made a good deal of progress since you started.”
“I hope I didn’t bore you too much.”
“Good luck.”
“You too.” He hung on, liking the doctor, regretting having to leave, wondering why it was that a few minutes before, he had been in such a panic to get out. “Good-bye,” he said. “I’ll certainly call you, Dr. Cantor, if I feel I need this again.”
“Remember,” the doctor said, “it’s the nature of human beings to be imperfect. To be imperfect is merely to be human.”
He came out into the air, aware of the legacy of his humanity, a free man, with no place he wanted to go, nothing he really wanted to do. He wandered the streets hungrily, as if he had just come into the world, oppressed after a while by the futility of his freedom; then he went home to his furnished room to sleep. He had a sense of being merely imperfect. He valued his loss.