PART TWO
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Vertigo Vertigo Vertigo
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[INT. Scottie’s Bedroom (NIGHT)]
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There is no dead matter. Lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown forms of life.
(Bruno Schulz, “Treatise on Tailors’ Dummies, or The Second Book of Genesis”)
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Vertigo Vertigo Vertigo
In this book, a man goes through a painful divorce. He believes his wife has cheated on him, and she maintains her innocence. They scream at each other about every little thing. Any time she’s late, even by a minute, any time she has to leave the house early or unexpectedly. He starts checking her computer, her cell phone. The whole thing goes on in the only way it can until the two finally decide they can’t live with each other anymore. We never learn whether the wife really was cheating on the husband. She takes a job in another city, and the man grieves. He loved his wife, but he couldn’t stand the thought of her cheating on him. It is, he thinks, the thought that she didn’t love him as much as he did her, that in some way, she had the better end of the deal, because she could just walk away. He gets upset thinking about it. He thinks that this thought is itself a sign of some sort of instability. He starts seeing a therapist.
This man is an instructor at the university. One of his students looks almost exactly like his ex-wife, though he does not see the resemblance. The whole thing is related to us by a third-person narrator, not the man, who tells us that the student looks like the ex-wife, and tells us the man doesn’t realize it: The student is a brunette and his wife was a blonde, but in other ways, the two are nearly identical. The student graduates and takes a job in publishing. The man sells his next book, a study of the film Vertigo, to the publishing company she now works for. The two reconnect at a party and begin seeing each other. The man’s friends mistake this former student for the man’s ex-wife. They comment on how young she looks, how much they like her hair, how good it is to see the two of them together — all these innocuous comments that are just vague enough they don’t tip off the man or his student that the man’s friends think that she is really his ex-wife. The student has never met the ex-wife, and the man doesn’t have any pictures of her — too painful; he has thrown them away — so she has no idea that she looks so much like the ex-wife.
The man and his former student decide to get married. They go to visit the former student’s parents. It is an awkward visit. The parents are polite, but it is clear they do not approve — there is the difference in their ages to consider, and the fact that she is his former student. On the last night of the visit, the father asks the man to accompany him on his nightly walk. While they walk, the father tells the man a story.
The former student was adopted; when she was a child, the father says, she was homeless for a year, the year before they adopted her. Her birth mother, who had been raising her on her own, was a schizophrenic. The father had been in construction, and had fallen to his death from the fifth floor of a building he was working on. He died on their anniversary. That morning, after he left for work, the mother had looked around the house for her present. She could be childish like that. There was a box, hidden high up in the closet, with an old dress in it; old, but very beautiful, and very fragile. Thinking it was a present for her, she put it on, called the babysitter, and went to the job site with a picnic lunch. She talked the foreman into giving her a ride up on the construction elevator. When she stepped out of the cage of the lift, she said, her husband backpedalled. It looked like he had seen a ghost, she said. She saw him go over the edge. She saw him hit the ground. She never forgot.
Mostly her schizophrenia had been controllable with medication before, but now she forgot to take the medication or the doses were not strong enough to compensate for her missed doses. In either case, she began seeing the dead husband. She went into screaming fits, shouting incoherently. She had superhuman strength when she was having one of her fits, and no one could get near her without bruises or blood. Her child, the former student, was neglected, and sometimes, mistaking her for the dead father, the mother would scream at her and strike her. The former student was frightened. She ran away from home. She was safer on the streets.
The former student’s adoptive father is telling the man all this because he wants him to know that she — the former student — is predisposed to the disorder, and has shown signs of disorganization in her thinking and even possible hallucinations. He wants the man to be prepared. He asks the man, point blank, whether he would be willing to care for her if it turns out she does have schizophrenia, whether he has that kind of patience. The man tells his future father-in-law that he will stand by her no matter what, but after that he falls silent, remembering the time that she asked him what he was doing at the mall that day, on a day he hadn’t gone near the mall. No matter what he said, she would not believe it, until finally she got so angry she walked out. She hadn’t answered her phone or her door for days. At the time, he hadn’t understood why she was so upset. He is not so sure he can care for her, if it turns out she is schizophrenic. He isn’t a doctor, or not a medical one, anyway, and, well, he’s not sure about his own mental stability.
At this point, the book breaks off the story of the man. We follow a new narrator, a first-person narrator who is obviously a young child. It isn’t faux-naïf, but the diction is simple and the words aren’t especially complex or erudite. This narrator is running around a house, hiding. The hiding spots are described meticulously, one after the other, each a little better, a little smaller and more out-of-the-way than the one before. We can’t be sure whether this is a game or not, but the narrator doesn’t seem frightened. Just when we begin to lose patience with these descriptions of hiding places, the child’s father finds the child. Through dialogue, we find out that the child’s name is the same as the ex-wife’s name from the first story. The child is a girl. At first — because we are still seeing things from the girl’s viewpoint — we think that the game is over and the father has won, but then we begin to think that something else is going on, that maybe there is something sinister happening, because of what the father says to the child. He is pretending it is a game, but he is clearly nervous and repeatedly tells the girl to be as quiet as she can possibly be. The two of them haven’t left the girl’s hiding place, and it is uncomfortable for both of them to be hiding there. The father proposes a new game — let’s see who can be quietest while walking to the car. The girl doesn’t understand the point of the game, and she doesn’t like games like this one — her father has played them with her before — but she goes along with it. When they get to the car, the father leans over and buckles the girl in, putting the car into reverse and backing out of the driveway just as the child’s mother comes out of the house, screaming the child’s name. Where are you taking her, the woman shouts. Where are you taking my child? The woman bangs on the hood of the car and smashes the rear window with a brick.
Now we return to the first story, but it is before the events that we’ve already read. The instructor and his wife are still together. They are up late, lying next to each other in bed. They are talking about having kids, about what the rest of their life together will be like. They make a list of things they think they’ll need to have before they can have a child: they should each have insurance coverage the other can be on, so that the bills won’t be astronomical, they should have a house in a quieter neighborhood, near a good school, she should have a job that will allow her a decent amount of maternity leave, he should have a job that is a little more stable, so on and so on. She tells him these are all good things. He tells her he worries some of these things may just be a way of putting off having a kid, making it so that things will never be right so that they never end up having a kid. She asks him which things it is he’s talking about. Her cell phone buzzes on the nightstand, but she just looks at him. He wonders who would be calling now, almost midnight. He wonders why she wouldn’t be curious, too, why she won’t answer or at least look at the number.