“I have to see you now.”
“Why is it so urgent?”
A small dark-haired girl who resembled Helena from the rear went by the phone booth, her butt bouncing as she walked, Peter following its flight. “I’m going mad,” he said. “I have the feeling that I’m in love with every woman I see. I want to make love to them — every woman, even ugly ones — in the street if necessary. I want to make contact in some way.”
“Take some of those Miltown I gave you.”
The same girl went by again — his phone booth in the basement of the Columbia Bookstore — and he realized, a man with a gift for missing the obvious, that it was Helena, had been Helena. “Can’t talk now, Doctor,” he said, hanging up in a hurry, the phone missing, falling to its length of cord. When he had finally got the phone on its hook and fought his way out of the booth, Helena was gone.
On the wires of instinct he pursued her — the wires bent. He rushed to the Barnard campus, and not finding her there — Helena nowhere in sight — rushed back, soaked with sweat, to look for her in her room. Why, if she didn’t want to see him, should he want to see her? he asked himself. Mind your own business was the answer he got. What business?
While waiting for Helena, sitting on the steps of the 113th Street building, he browsed in his address book; old girl friends blossomed in and out of memory. He reminisced, the sun beating down on his head, accounted the girls he had been in love with, the ones he had made love to, others, nearmisses, Lois. His chest hurt, thinking about it. He read Herbie’s post card:
Dear Kid,
Wonderful climate. This is a place to conjure with. I’ve gotten so healthy you wouldn’t know me.
How’s New York and the people we know? Saw Papa.
Wish you were here. Mean it.
Best,
Herbie
P.S. Don’t give anyone my address. Please. Don’t run amok.
Peter folded the card in half and stuffed it into the zippered compartment of his wallet. What did Herbie mean by “don’t run amok,” he wondered. Had the two of them ever done anything else?
Though it was only eleven o’clock (actually ten to eleven) Peter had lunch at the West End Bar, a roast beef sandwich and two beers, to pass the time between breakfast and lunch, between want and satisfaction. He was still hungry when he finished. He had another beer and a corned beef sandwich, his appetite un appeased. He looked around, the place mostly empty, two women sitting at the bar — an enormous fan blowing sluggish flies in the air. He ordered another beer. One of the women at the bar shot a sultry glance in his direction. Peter daydreamed, sipped his beer, irremediably thirsty.
With a stub pencil someone had left in an ashtray he drew pictures on his napkin, wrote a prose poem to himself which was really, the napkin damp with beer, a fable. He called it:
This is a life? the boy asked in his beer.
Come here, said a witch at the bar. I’ll fix.
Come where?
And when she kissed him
The boy turned into a handsome toad.
Isn’t that better? she said.
Sing to me, my fat toad.
Sing what? he asked, eager to please.
Sing of love, sang the witch. What else?
The toad croaked.
And touched at his failure,
The witch cried real tears.
(Moraclass="underline" Never ask a fat toad to sing.)
Afterward they threw him out of the bar
For impersonating a dead toad.
After another beer his money was gone. He ran through the streets for a while, the beer joggling in his guts, then went back to Helena’s room to wait for her return, but when he knocked at the door she was there.
“Look,” he said, barging into her room. “I know what I want to do now. What I want is to make love to every woman there is without discrimination as to race, color, creed or age. That’s my ambition. I just worry whether there’s enough time.”
“Forget it,” she said. “It’s been done.”
“Who did it?” he said, incredulous.
And the witches, who had never even smiled at him, laughed. It pleased him that they did. They laughed like hell, and laughed. And laughed.
Peter phoned Delilah. A man’s voice answered.
“May I speak to Delli?” he asked.
There was a long silence. “Who?”
“Do I have the wrong number?”
“I don’t know what number you want,” the voice said.
“I’d like to talk to Delilah if she’s there,” he said aggressively, some part of him embarrassed. “Is there a Delilah there?” His voice was thick.
“That’s not possible,” the man said. “Who’s this calling please?”
In despair he hung up. He dialed again, taking his time; his finger slipped on the last digit and he had to begin all over again. The same man answered.
“I’m sorry,” Peter said wearily. “This is the number I have for Delilah.”
“It’s the right number,” the voice said. “Delilah was very sick, did you know that?”
“I heard something …”
“It was incurable.”
“How are you feeling today?” Dr. Cantor asked as if he were genuinely concerned.
“Fine. Not good.” Peter assumed his position on the couch, stretched out, yawned. (Was this what it was like to come home?)
“When you called me the other day,” the doctor said, his voice less bored than Peter remembered, “you felt you were going through some kind of extreme crisis. Do you want to tell me about it?”
After a moment’s hesitation Peter told the doctor of his most recent obsession, recounted in detail as much as he could remember of the madness of the past few days — the frustration eating away at him, the failure, the sense of failure.
“Why doesn’t anything work out the way I mean it to?” he complained to the face of the ceiling as though it were the face of God — a surrogate of the doctor. “Is it all my fault, do you think?”
The doctor cleared his throat. “Do you feel that it’s your fault?”
“You have to admit that I screw up more than most people.” Peter thought to turn his head — the doctor’s face had a way of disappearing from his memory’s eye — but instead he continued to stare at the ceiling. “You never answer my questions,” he said, resentful despite his intention not to be.
“What I think shouldn’t be of concern to you,” the doctor said reflexively. “We’ve been through all that before, haven’t we?”
“Okay. Yes. But what you want, Doctor — don’t take this personally — takes too much time for what it accomplishes.” “What’s the rush?”
The doctor’s responses were never quite what he expected. “Who are you?” he asked.
“Dr. Noah J. Cantor,” the doctor recited. “I’m fifty-six years old. I’m a pyschoanalyst.”
“Are you married?”
“I have two children, both married. One grandchild.”
“Are you satisfied with things — with the way things have worked out for you?”
“That’s not a question I can answer in a few seconds.”
Peter sighed, disappointed, wanting to believe in the doctor, also not wanting to. “Do you love your wife?” he said. “You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to.”