That night he had a dream. Lois was being operated on in Cantor’s office by a team of doctors — he counted seven and the shadow of an eighth — all wearing grocer’s aprons.
“The more we learn,” Cantor was saying, “the more complicated this operation becomes. We know so much these days, sometimes it seems impossible to perform the most minute operation, the removal of a wart, for example, without the death of the patient. Besides, none of us is perfect.”
“I want you to stop the operation,” Peter said. “We’ve changed our minds.” Then, as he tried to get through to the operating table, two burly doctors planted themselves in his way.
“It’s too late to stop,” Cantor informed him. “We’ve already removed the head. You’ll be proud to know,” he said, beaming, “that the little creature bears a striking resemblance to its father. You’ll excuse me. These doctors can’t get anything right without my instructions. Good luck.” Cantor patted him on the back, and was gone.
Herbie came by. “Would you like a nurse while you’re waiting? It’ll help pass the time.”
Peter shook his head. “What’s taking so long?” he wanted to know.
“Who knows? Just don’t worry so much. Come on downstairs; I’ll get you a nurse.” Herbie was tugging at his arm.
He fought his way through the mob of doctors to the operating table. Henderson and Cantor seemed to be conducting, between them, some sort of class. “The three-month-old fetus is barely human,” Henderson was saying, holding up a plastic doll, “and in its atavistic way, resembles the New York City cab driver: note the low forehead and large ears.”
The operating table was empty except for some bloody mess in a black tin basin. “Where’s Lois?” he asked, interrupting the lecture.
No one seemed to know. “She slipped away during the operation,” the doctor next to him whispered. “They’ve lost her.”
“Hold him,” someone said. “He may be the one they’re looking for.” Crawling on his hands and knees — the floor slightly tilted — Peter got to the anteroom undiscovered. A three-legged cat bounded over to him, rubbed its head against his knee. He picked it up gingerly, hugged it to his face; it froze in his arms. Lois’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “Peter, give yourself up. For my sake, please give yourself up. No one will hurt you.”
There was a police siren. He continued to crawl, the corpse o fthe deformed can still in his arms. Babies were crying. He begged them to be quiet. A crowd of doctors was pursuing him. One of the baby baskets was unoccupied; on his hands and knees, he crawled toward it. A woman called his name. He twisted himself around to look. Lois was standing there enormously pregnant. He awoke.
He loved her, he told himself in the grip of dark, which, as he knew — he had learned as a fact — was the nostalgia of fantasy. If you don’t love yourself, Cantor’s silence had taught him, you are incapable of loving anyone. So he wept for the death of his eternally unborn child, for the deaths of all of them: his mother, Delilah, Lois, his father, Herbie, Dr. Cantor, Dr. Henderson, for nameless others, for himself, for all he had ever wished dead, but mostly for himself. In his dreams, a man of fantasies, he loved them all.
| 11 |
Peter went to visit Gloria for an hour and stayed three weeks.
The first thing she said to him when he came through the door was, “Peter, I can’t stand being alone. I’m not used to it.”
What could he do but stay with her? (His brother’s mistress, they were practically related.)
So he stayed. But each day — his clothes, most of himself in the rooming house on 113th Street — he planned to leave the next day.
Gloria made no demands on him except that he listen to “Stardust” with her every once in a while. Though no one asked him to, Peter slept alone, had bad dreams, on the Goodwill couch in the living room.
Their evenings together were like wakes. Gloria talked about Herbie as though he had recently died — his tainted memory still fresh. Peter half listened, breathing old ghosts of his own. During the day Gloria worked (so she told him) at Bloomingdale’s, the sullen star of the flying squad, with plenty of room for advancement. But it was only for the money; in her heart of hearts, she was really a singer, among other things. Among other things, she was also something of a dancer. In the evenings, for Peter’s benefit, she practiced her dancing, tried out new and star-making routines, humming like a wounded bird in time to the heavy music of her feet. “I’m really more of an entertainer,” she confided to him one night. Peter applauded, shouted for more. The more Peter appreciated her, the darker was Gloria’s sulk. You could fool a singer maybe or a dancer, but not an entertainer. Entertainers know better. Entertainers know they can’t sing or dance; that’s their secret. What entertainers have is wisdom.
And Peter was numb. No matter what he did, it was as if it were happening to someone else. To whom? To the shadow he dragged alongside him under his feet, which gyrated when he walked as if it were trying to get away from him.
Peter was on the move so much (keep busy, everyone advised), he hardly noticed that he wasn’t there. That he wasn’t where he was. In the early morning he drove a school bus for the Collegiate School for Boys; in the afternoon from one to five he worked in a bookstore on Amsterdam Avenue. Two evenings a week, on Monday and Wednesday from seven to ten, he took classes at Brooklyn College. His latest major, his fifth in four years, was philosophy. He felt at home with epistemology. Unable to feel, he was content for the present merely to know. To know about knowing. In his spare time he juggled relationships, traveled subways (moving underground between two apartments), made deals, read books, forgot himself. And at night he didn’t sleep.
“You know, you look like one of those zombies,” Gloria said to him, turning off the phonograph — a rare moment. “You know what I think … I think you’re going to kill yourself if you don’t watch out.”
“Yeah,” he said.
The silence troubled her — she couldn’t hear it — and reflexively, as one might scratch an itch, she put a new stack of records on the changer. An album of Old Favorites. She snapped her fingers in anticipation.
“Music is the fruit of love or something,” she said, one zombie to another.
“Yeah,” he muttered. “How do you like that?”
She shook her head, pitying him. “You know,” she said, “I think you’re still carrying a torch for that girl.”
He laughed the notion out of court, showing bleeding gums, gray teeth, and other wounds. “I only have eyes for you,” he said, looking at the discolored rug — the stains, wherever they were distinguishable, an improvement on the original pattern.
Gloria studied him through veiled lids. “You’re a liar,” she summed him up, swaying in place to the music. “Dance with me.” She held out her arms.
He knew he had something to do, nagged by voiceless whispers of anticipation, but whatever it was — the ghosts of his nerves told him — it had long since ceased to matter. The flowering wallpaper bloomed and died in a moment’s vision. “I’ll just watch,” he said, getting up, changing his seat.
“You do that.” She shook, shaking everything, the music like wind in her sails. “We never do anything,” she said. “Never but never but never do anything, anything. Anything.”