The doctor coughed. Twice.
“Am I boring you?”
“No. Go on.”
“Where was I?”
“You seem to get into a good many fights,” Dr. Cantor observed. “Do you enjoy fighting?”
The ceiling stared back at Peter, one-eyed, a black patch of shadow covering the rest of its face, a secret grin extending from one end to the other. (If he didn’t know better — just a ceiling overhead — he might have thought, the grin unmistakable, that he was looking into the face of some whimsically malevolent god.) “I wouldn’t let her pack, I kept taking her clothes out of the suitcase as she put them in. We have a fight. She tells me she’s going to live with Ira Whimple, and there’s nothing I can do about it. This floors me. ‘I won’t let you go,’ I keep saying while she finishes packing, phones a cab. ‘Don’t try to stop me,’ she says, which I suspect means the opposite, but I just stand there and watch her, not doing anything. Before she leaves, she comes over to me and apologizes for the slap, her hand gently on my face, on the place of the slap, and she looks at me with as much affection as I’ve ever seen her offer anyone. I didn’t know what to say,” he said, touched, trapped in the circumstance of recollection. When he opened his eyes, a night had passed, a day — loss the first condition of waking. He let his eyes close — memory an act of salvage. “When I kiss her she pulls away and says good-bye as though she expects never to see me again … I still don’t understand her. “Why are you doing this?’ I ask. ‘For you,’ she says, marching like the Salvation Army out the door, turning when I think she’s already gone and blowing me a kiss. ‘What do you mean, for me?’ I yell after her. ‘I want you here.’ She returns, smiling her only-I-can-hear-the-music-jerk smile. ‘You don’t know Ira,’ she says. “Why do you think Herbie left town? There are guys …’”
“I’m afraid our time is up,” the doctor said.
Peter lifted his head from the couch as though it were an enormous feat of strength. “Please let me finish.”
“I have another patient waiting outside. How much more is there?”
“Not much. Five minutes.”
“Five minutes,” the doctor agreed. “I’d like to give you more time but I can’t, Peter. You understand. We’re already a few minutes over.”
Peter closed his eyes — Gloria, the shadow of her, in his doorway, a cab outside honking its horn. “There are guys owe Ira a favor,” she was saying, “who’d just as soon kill you as look at you. Don’t worry, Peter, I know how to handle Ira — he’s not so bad. Be good, tiger.” And she was gone. “I let her go,” Peter said. “I could have stopped her.”
“You wanted her to go,” the doctor said.
It was a revelation. “Do you really think I did? Why? Do you think I’m afraid of Ira?”
“I think we’d better save it for another hour.” Dr. Cantor walked over to his desk, sighed at the weight of his task, looked through his appointment book — Peter still lying on the couch. “Good,” the doctor said to himself. “Peter, I can see you again at this time a week from today. How’s that workout?”
Peter sat up with great effort, enormously tired, the room in motion. “I’d like to get out of the city for a while,” he said. “It’s an insane city, New York. You stand on any street corner long enough and some old lady you’ve never seen before is likely to hit you over the head with an umbrella. You know?” He looked at the doctor for verification. Getting none — the doctor involved with his appointment book — he laughed foolishly. “I thought I might visit my brother Herbie who’s in Arizona — my father’s out there too somewhere; Herbie writes that he saw him. Anyway, I’d like to see the West. I know a guy — he was with me at Brooklyn College — who’s a forest ranger somewhere in Colorado. He does nothing, he tells me, but ride a horse all day and think about what he wants to do — when he grows up.” Peter laughed, the doctor’s quiet patience unnerving him. “I think I’d like to do something like that, ride around all day on a horse and think, though I suppose I’d begin to miss people after a while.”
The doctor stood up, making it clear to Peter, with the special tact of gesture, that it was time for him to leave. “Why don’t you call me, Peter, when you decide whether you want to come in. I’ll hold the same hour open for you, for a few days anyway. As a matter of fact, on considering it, I think the trip west might be a good idea. There’s nothing for you in New York now, except painful associations.” He smiled generously, an indulgence of concern.
Peter took a last look at where he was. “Wouldn’t taking off like this, now, be running away?” Peter asked, shaken with a kind of tremulous joy, a man without responsibilities, the room slowing down, coming to a stop. “It’s too easy for me to go away now. I don’t have the right to go. People are suffering because of what I’ve done, what I’ve failed to do. What I ought to do is … Do you really think going to Arizona is a good idea?”
The doctor closed his eyes, a vision of the West behind the New York City owl of his glasses. “Why not?” he said.
“Why not?” Peter echoed him. “I can always come back and …” It remained unsaid — the sentence never to be finished.
And they shook hands on it, like two lone cowboys separating at the end of the trail.
Outside the doctor’s air-conditioned office, New York raged soot-skied in the August heat. Peter spent the rest of the day in Central Park, getting used to the feel of grass against his feet, the smell of country, getting a sense of the West, guilty at his freedom, frightened, lonely, sweating, a Western hero in his Central Park dreams. (Hi-yo, Silver — away!) A dreamer.
Part ii
| 1 |
One forgets. Peter had forgotten. Or else when you come back to them after too many years, cities (like people) deceive you, pretend you never knew them, act in fact as if you had never been there at all, as if (the final contempt) you had never been born. The weather in Manhattan on the best of days is heavy. Something to carry around on your back. People commit suicide in San Francisco; in New York you carry the weather on your back.
Peter Becker wandered the city, looking at store fronts and faces. Some were familiar, as if at some time, in some dream of his life, he had known them. The sun was out though unseen, steaming through the haze, a warm day for February. Not warm, not cold, Peter sweated, wiped his face with a dirty handkerchief. And walked, carrying the weather with him. He walked along Broadway from Seventy-eighth Street to Houston Street, stopping on the way in bars, in Chock Full o’ Nuts. He had breakfast at a Bickford’s — the special was still the speciaclass="underline" eggs and bacon, and potatoes and applesauce, English muffin and coffee. For a moment — among the other dispossessed, one of them — he was home. He had a second cup of coffee before he went out into the air. And then for the hell of it he began to trot, gradually increasing his pace — he crossed against the light, out-racing a car determined on its right of way — running like a kid, a young man at forty, a seasoned traveler, a bum. After two blocks of running, his chest hurt, and he walked very slowly after that so as not to joggle anything out of its natural order. In Washington Square Park he shared a bench with a pigeon. Neither minded, Peter less than the pigeon; it was like having company without the burden of making talk. Shooing the pigeon away with a rolled-up Daily News, a small white-haired man sat down next to him, exhaled a sigh of comfort. “Not so cold today,” the man said. “Not so warm either.” Peter nodded. The old man read his newspaper (yesterday’s, Peter noticed), glancing at Peter occasionally as though he wanted to talk, muttering to himself, glowering. “They want trouble, they’ll get trouble,” he said. “Trouble is what they’ll get.”