The Death Instinct

She looked out the window. 'You tell me nothing. It's just like lying. It is lying.'

'Not speaking isn't lying,' he said.

'It is when it tricks someone. I'd rather you lied. At least if you lied, I'd know you cared what I thought.'

They sat in silence as the train rumbled along the banks of the brown, unstirred Danube. Younger watched her profile. He wondered why or how he saw vulnerability in her, when none showed anywhere on her face or figure. 'I do care,' he said.

'You don't.'

It was a principle with Younger not to say a word more about himself, his past, his thoughts, than he had to – at least not to women. They always asked him to; he never did. Evidently he was losing his principles. 'It was November of 1909,' he said. 'Her name was Nora. Would you like to hear about it?'

'If you don't mind telling me.'

'She was the most beautiful girl I'd ever met,' he continued, 'to that point. Totally different from you. Blonde. So fragile you thought she might break in your hands. Self-destructive too. I guess I liked that. We had a good six months. In my experience, that's not too bad – a good six months. But there were danger signs even then. I remember taking her shopping for wedding gowns. She got it into her head that the mannequin modeling dresses for us – a girl of about sixteen – was mocking her. I made the mistake of asking Nora what the girl had done. She accused me of defending her. I made the further mistake of laughing. That fight lasted two days. But things really began in earnest after the wedding, when she found some notebooks of mine. Psychoanalytic notebooks; case summaries. My women patients tended to – well – they usually began acting as if they were in love with me, which is exactly what's supposed to happen in psychoanalysis. You can ask Freud if you don't believe me.'

'Of course I believe you,' said Colette.

'The notebooks recorded what happened during each hour of analysis: what my patients said to me, my own inner reactions to them, and so forth.'

'And so forth?'

'Yes.'

'You – you liked your patients? And you said so in your notebooks?'

'One of them. Her name was Rachel.'

'Rachel. Was she pretty?'

'Her figure was like yours,' Younger replied. 'So yes, she was pretty.'

'Did she want to sleep with you?'

'She certainly did,' he said.

'You mean you did to her what you tried to do to me – and she let you.'

Younger only looked at Colette.

'I don't blame you,' she said. 'A pretty girl coming to your office every day and lying down on a couch and telling you her secrets? If I were a man, I would have found that – appealing.'

'Many analysts sleep with their patients. Freud doesn't do it. I didn't either.'

'You did with Nora,' said Colette.

'Not before I'd married her. And she wasn't my patient – not really.'

'I see. You didn't do anything with Rachel; you only said in your notebook that you were attracted to her. So you didn't understand why your wife was upset with you.'

'That's right,' said Younger.

'Well, that was very foolish of you.'

'Really? If women want their men never to have been attracted to another girl in all their lives, it's not the men who are being foolish.'

'What did you say to Nora?' asked Colette.

'I chided her for having read my notes, which were confidential. That was an error. She charged me with trying to hide my "romances" from her. She developed an elaborate theory according to which the entire notion of confidentiality in psychoanalysis was designed to allow doctors to have affairs with their female patients. A point came when not an evening would go by without some reference to my "romances." She said that I disgusted her. That I was unfeeling. That I was weak. She began to throw things. First at the walls, then at me.'

'And you were like a stone – impassive.'

'More or less.'

'That must have made her even angrier,' said Colette.

'Yes. She started to hit me. And kick me. At least she tried to.'

'What did you do?'

'Well, she was very young, and she'd been through some nightmarish events. On top of which she was very slight. I found it almost endearing when she tried to hit me. So I took it, suppressing my temper. Actually, I don't think I knew the extent to which my temper required suppression.

'One evening,' Younger went on, 'I came home to find a cheval glass of ours, an antique, a wedding present from my aunt, lying in pieces on the parlor floor. It turned out that Nora had deliberately broken it. That night she fought more furiously than ever. One of her blows landed, and I finally struck her – with the back of my hand, against her cheek. The force of it was stronger than I intended. She fell to the floor. To my astonishment, she apologized. It was the first time she'd ever apologized. She railed at her own folly, praised me for my kindness, and protested her undying love for me. She threw her arms around me and begged my forgiveness. She began to cry. I thought we had finally come to the end of it.

'Instead a pattern had begun. Our quarreling would start again, swell to its old proportions, and then we'd come to blows. Or rather, she would try to land blows until at last I struck her, at which point she would soften and beg to be forgiven. But the strangest thing of all was that I discovered that I could forestall the worst of our quarreling by – a – by cutting straight to the end of the pattern, in our intimate life.'

'I don't understand,' said Colette.

'No, and I'm not going to explain it,' said Younger. 'But it worked. For a while at least; not for long. When we were out in public – on a street, in a theater, anywhere – Nora began flying into rages, accusing me of being attracted to other women. Which I was, naturally, if they were attractive. At first I didn't deny her accusations, but in the end just to quiet her down, I told her she was imagining it – that it was all in her head. She knew I was lying, but she seemed to prefer the lie to the truth.

'Then the young wife of a rich old patient asked me to make a house call. Her husband was dying. I was there a long while. Very sad. When I got home that night, I found myself concealing it from Nora. There was nothing to conceal, but the wife was famously charming – she'd been an actress – and I knew if I told Nora, there would have been an endless night of pointless recriminations. It had all become so boring, so monotonous. So I told her a different story; she believed me. At that moment, I realized I no longer loved my wife.

'About two months later, the same woman called me again. Her husband was dead, and she was resuming her career on Broadway. She said she had a painfulness in her lower back from rehearsals. She asked me to come to her house and have a look at it. I did. After that she asked me to make house calls several times a week. I lied about it recklessly to Nora.

'One day a note from the actress came to our apartment, requesting my presence as soon as possible. Of course Nora saw the note, and of course she understood at once all the lies I'd been telling her. She accused me of the affair; I confessed it. We divorced, scandalously, having been married little more than a year – and the most comic fact was that I hadn't had an affair at all. At least it would have been comic if Nora hadn't died shortly afterward. They wired me the news in Boston. She had fallen from a subway platform into a train. They called it an accident, but I doubt it. The one thing they did discover was that she was with child when she died. Freud says I feel responsible for her death.'

'Do you?' asked Colette.

'It's worse than that. I was happy she was dead. I'm still happy about it, to this day.'

Hutteldorf Station was the end of the line. In the town center of an otherwise bucolic and thickly wooded district stood a few low apartment houses. One of these was Gruber s address, but no one by that name lived there now. Younger discovered nothing useful until he approached a matronly woman sweeping the courtyard.

'Hans Gruber?' she said. 'Who all the girls were mad about? The tall young man with the blond hair and beautiful blue eyes?'