Lying with the Dead (5 page)

Quinn

On my daily hike through Hampstead I carry the
Oresteia
, reminded of years at the University of Maryland when I crossed the campus feeling simultaneously self-conscious and self-congratulatory about the paperback in my hand. I never went anywhere, not even a football game, without something to read. There wasn’t a moment to spare in my forced march of education and improvement.

But whereas those books buoyed me up with promises of a vivid future, the
Oresteia
has been dragging me down and into the past. Say what you will about Aeschylus, he isn’t reluctant to depress his audience. A close reading of the trilogy, much of it out loud to savor the cadence of the verse, has left me, as I guess Greek tragedy is meant to, more than a little heartsick. It’s been like plunging into a submarine cave wearing a defective air tank and a mask that wildly magnifies every detail. I can see where I’m going, but have no confidence I’ll get out alive.

Curses that run on for generations, dead fathers, frenzied mothers, sacrificed children, and pursuing Furies. At times I have the impression that I’m not reading so much as reliving my family history. Seven pages into
Agamemnon
, I trip on a line that tempts me to abandon the whole project. “We cannot sleep, and drop by drop at the heart / the pain of pain remembered comes again.”

I don’t want to remember the pain. I thought I had put it behind me when I settled in England. But now after nights of violent dreams, I stand in the bathroom each morning under the pulsing nozzle of the power shower and try to wash Aeschylus off me. It doesn’t work.

Is there any bigger bore than one who inflicts his nightmares on a captive audience? In plays and movies, dream sequences strike me as pretentious at best, lazy exposition at worst. I detest the trite symbolism, the dark foreboding, and Freudian mumbo-jumbo. And yet the pressure to keep my dreams private seethes in my skull. Memories rush over me like those yobs on the tube who elbow passengers, itching for a fight.

Some days I wake convinced that I’ve committed a great crime and I’m haunted with guilt. It’s then that I recall Mom’s promise to me as a kid. She swore she’d always love me. She swore she’d love me even if I killed somebody. I didn’t doubt her for a second. After all, she loved Maury. But she repeated her vow so often, I started to suspect that she had a person in mind for me to murder.

Ratcheting up my nerves and irascibility these days, negotiations with BBC have turned, as Mal pungently expresses it, tits up. They say they still want me. And despite my disquiet over the
Oresteia
, I still want them. I desperately want the part, both out of pride and frankly because of the payday. But they’ve oh so politely declined to meet my quote.

Like every actor of my stature, I have “my quote”—the price I feel I should command. BBC has offered a “no-quote” deal, a low-ball figure that they promise will never be made public. We’re in an industry, however, where there are no secrets and everyone can calculate your value down to the last decimal point. As soon as you accept a no-quote contract, you can kiss your quote good-bye and gird yourself for a career of cut-rate paychecks.

As the dickering drags on and Aeschylus eats deeper into my dreams, I find that the random abrasions of daily life—a shoulder bump on the High Street, an inept bank clerk, an impertinent question from an interviewer—fill me with unreasonable anger. The English winter seems gloomier, the view from my conservatory dull, lifeless. Suddenly I start to stumble on the brick pavement and curse out loud.

Then things turn worse. I get into a scuffle at a cab stand when a drunken couple breaks into line ahead of me. In the States the incident would pass unnoticed. But in the UK, the bottom-feeding tabloids are omnivorous and they play it as a man-bites-dog story. “Furious Yank Actor Defends British Queue,” reads the headline. Friends notice I have a black eye and rib me that I’d better mind the booze or else take boxing lessons.

The good-natured joshing stops when I explode at a press conference. Fed up with an outrageous line of rottweiler questioning, I clamp a hand over a reporter’s mouth and shout that I won’t speak again until the harassment ceases. That the reporter is a woman doesn’t help matters. The upshot—an out-of-court settlement and a caution from my accountant that further impersonations of Russell Crowe should be shelved until my assets match the Australian’s.

I downplay these dustups, urbanely citing the show biz mantra that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. It’d worry me far more, I maintain, if my outbursts didn’t make the papers. But inside I’m spoiling for trouble.

One drizzly afternoon as I cross Golder’s Green en route to my weekly doubles match, two teenagers shout, “Look at the fucking tennis tosser.” I call them a couple of assholes. Insult follows insult, menace leads to menace, everything expressed in alternating British and American obscenity. It might have been amusing, laughable, if one boy didn’t pull a shiny object from the pocket of his hoodie. Sure it’s a knife, I unsheathe my racket, a male menopausal model brand-named the Thunderstick, and let both of them have a taste of it. One lout comes away with a fractured wrist, the other with a string pattern on his mug. I come away with an unflattering picture in the evening papers and charges of serious affray. What I imagined was a knife proves to be a cell phone. The boy claims he was terrified by my behavior and intended to dial 999.

In America, this series of farces might lead to a plea for the court’s mercy and an agreement to enroll in anger management. But to avoid the full weight of British justice, I have to submit to a battery of assessments and a course of treatment by a bona fide, pipe-sucking psychoanalyst. His offices are not far from me, at the bottom of Fitzjohn’s Avenue, down near the Tavistock Center, where a bronze statue of Sigmund Freud broods over the stalled uphill traffic.

Dr. Rokoko, a burly New Zealander of distant Maori antecedents, looks as if he belongs on a rugby pitch. When he rolls up his shirtsleeves, it’s a shock that he doesn’t have tribal tattoos on his massive forearms. Far from the caring-sharing type, he has a scrum half’s blunt, no bullshit manner. Or perhaps this is just the position he takes with antisocial offenders assigned to him by the court. Our sessions commence not with an invitation to confide my problems, but a pugnacious interrogation delivered in a clipped antipodean accent.

“Inny histry of childhood vilence?”

“Are you asking what I experienced or what I observed?” Eager to get this over with and to reveal no more than absolutely required, I start off with the intention of speaking as little as possible about Mom, Dad, and Maury. I figure any mention of Dad’s murder is likely to keep me in mandatory observation for the rest of my life.

“I’m asking did you git in many fights growing up?”

“Very few. Actually none.”

I don’t mention that this was the one advantage of having a convicted killer for a brother. Nobody messed with me for fear that I might prove to be as unhinged as Maury. By the time I reached high school there were a few hard-ass delinquents who might have relished taking their chances, but by then Maury was home on parole to protect me.

“So you claim,” Dr. Rokoko says, “that you never hit anybody until recently?”

“Correct.”

“And no one hit you?”

“Never.” I deliver the lie with complete aplomb.

“Inny histry of ibuse?”

“Physical? Verbal? Sexual?” I ask.

“Sexual. Let’s start with that,” he says, tamping tobacco into his pipe.

It’s difficult to suppress my normally expansive nature; my impulse is to be a raconteur, an entertainer.

I’ve long dined out on comic tales of Mom’s bare-knuckled discipline. In addition to leaching the sting from old wounds, people’s laughter allows me to savor the humor myself. A tiny woman terrorizing her family and everybody else who crosses her path—the very idea has intrinsic hilarity. But Dr. Rokoko’s question about sex abuse taps into unrehearsed territory, and I have no better explanation of what surges from me than I do of the berserk episodes that sentenced me to a shrink in the first place.

Behind our house, I tell him, there was a copse of woods. As a boy, Maury had a tree shack back there. By the time I was in school, nothing remained of it except rusty nails in an oak tree and a clear patch around its trunk. On warm afternoons, this lonely latchkey kid sat in the shade doing his homework or daydreaming until Mom and Candy got off work and fixed dinner.

One day, to my amazement, a man had pitched camp under the tree and was roasting hotdogs over a bonfire. He must have been in his early twenties, a dozen years older than me. My automatic instinct was to run. Yet I stayed. Worse, I stepped into the clearing.

Mom had warned me about strange men—never talk to them, never accept a car ride or candy. If a man touched me, I was supposed to scream bloody murder. Her cautions didn’t extend to what I should do in the case of strange women.

What kept me rooted to the spot was what should have raised the shrillest alarm. The guy had a gun—a .22 rifle—and cartridges slung bandolier-style across his chest. From the webbed belt around his waist dangled a Bowie knife and a pair of handcuffs.

“How about a hotdog and a beer?” he asked me.

“I’m only eleven.”

He laughed. “That’s old enough.”

“Not to drink.”

“Good. That means more for me.” He popped a can of Gunther with a church key from his knapsack.

Every bit of his equipment excited and unsettled me in equal measure. I longed to handle the weapons. The man had to have sensed that. “Like to see my rifle?” he asked. “Don’t be afraid. It’s not loaded.”

He handed over the .22 and sidled around behind me. “Press it against your shoulder and pull the trigger.” Encircling me in a loose embrace, he inserted my finger into the trigger housing. The click of the firing pin was no louder than a snapped twig. Although discomfited by his closeness, his laying on of hands, his breath on my neck, I still didn’t run.

“Wanna see my knife?” He yanked it from the scabbard and flipped it at my feet. The blade sank in soft leaf mulch between my tennis shoes. “Go ahead. Pick it up.”

I hefted the knife by its carved bone handle. Nothing had ever seemed more seductive and beautiful to me.

“Do me a favor and you’re free to keep it,” he said.

“My mother won’t let me.”

“Let you what?”

“Have a knife.”

“Hide it from her. Don’t you have secrets?”

I told him that I didn’t.

“I don’t believe that,” he said. “Me, I got plenty. Even where I am and where I go’s a secret. I’m traveling around the country meeting young fellas like you and looking to get laid. Can you help me?”

“I’m only eleven,” I said again. “I don’t know any girls your age.”

He laughed soundlessly. “Me neither. But we have each other. If you wanna be friends and have some fun, you’re welcome to the knife.”

“I gotta go home. My mother’s waiting dinner for me.”

“Hold on a sec.” He grabbed the waistband of my blue jeans and shoved a hand down into my underpants, all the way to the sack of my balls. “I won’t hurt you.”

I thrashed to get away, but he tightened his grip. His whiskery chin scraped my face. I screamed, and while it wasn’t the kind of bloodcurdler Mom recommended, he let go.

“Hey, I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “Go ahead and keep the knife. And keep your trap shut. Nothing happened.”

I told Dr. Rokoko that I grabbed the knife and raced home. I didn’t mention that Mom wasn’t there yet, allowing me time to think things through. I went up to my room and lay in bed with the knife on the covers beside me. The blade had a dull sheen and was cold to the touch. The bone handle was smooth and warm.

The man, I decided, had been right about one thing. Nothing had happened. Or not much. But if I confessed to Mom that I stayed in the woods with a stranger when I should have run, she’d beat me black and blue. Then she’d call the cops and I’d have to own up to them that the guy stuck his hand down my pants. They’d ask where he touched me and why didn’t I fight back? Why didn’t I use the knife? Did I want to do what he said? And what exactly was that? I had a hard time imagining sex with a girl. I couldn’t picture what the man was suggesting.

After the cops caught him, there’d be a trial and I’d have to repeat the story in front of a flock of people. Then the guy would go to prison. All because I didn’t do what Mom told me to. All because, as she frequently complained, “You’re never happy unless you’re making other people miserable.” All because I had been spellbound by the knife, and because the man had sex on his brain, something I had more and more on mine. He wasn’t to blame. I was.

So I never told her about him, just as I didn’t admit to Dr. Rokoko that I hadn’t emerged from the incident unscathed. But the scar wasn’t emotional. When Mom found the knife hidden in my closet, and I refused to say where I got it, she whipped my bare ass with a wire coat hanger. She whipped me so hard I bled. “Don’t you understand what knives have done to this family?” she screamed. “Don’t you understand?”

In the face of my silence, Dr. Rokoko draws ruminatively on the tobacco-filled pipe that he hasn’t lit. He puffs and appears to be mulling over the story, evaluating it and me. “What am I supposed to do now?” he finally asks. “Applaud? Offer you a curtain call and a standing ovation?”

“What am I supposed to do?” I shoot back. “Go ballistic so you’ll know what I’m like when I lose my temper?”

“I’d rather that than listen to more glib BS. Save your anecdotes for talk shows. Were you breast-fed?”

“Oh Jesus, spare me the psychobabble.”

“I bet your mother’s milk dried up. You’re a very hungry man. That’s why you talk so much crap. You have a mania for force-feeding people because you weren’t fed.”

I sigh and say nothing. I don’t care to add credence to his diagnosis by talking more. Still, I realize I can’t stay silent forever if I hope to avoid being hauled back into court. So in subsequent sessions, I narrate a highly selective account of my childhood. I concede that Dad’s dead, but don’t add that he was murdered by my brother. I describe Mom as a Penelope-like figure, struggling with three kids instead of a houseful of suitors, but I don’t acknowledge her seismic temper. I speak of Candy’s polio, and in a politically correct manner, I admit that Maury’s “an Aspie,” an example of neuro-diversity. But I don’t tell him how deeply this distressed me. I refer to our family as dysfunctional, but don’t reveal just how truly fucked up we were.