Trauma (5 page)

Chapter Five

T
hen my life changed. It was sudden, and while it took me by surprise, in retrospect I see that I had been unconsciously preparing myself for just such an event. I met a woman. Her name was Nora Chiara. Now I should tell you at once that by this time in my life I was not a catch. On a busy street in Manhattan your eye would not be drawn to this harried-looking figure, above medium height, conservatively dressed and older, apparently, than his almost forty years. I had a failed marriage behind me, I lived for my work, I never left town, and the people I saw most often were my daughter and my brother and his family, who’d moved into the apartment on Eighty-seventh Street left to them by my mother.

The first time I saw her she was in a restaurant called Sulfur, one of the new places then opening downtown. It was popular in those days and may be still for all I know, but it always reminded me of a railroad station. The noise of so many people beneath so high a ceiling made me think of trains, or of
missing
trains. The fear of missing trains. I was in private practice by then and had a small office on Park
Avenue. One of my patients at the time, Joseph Stein, dreamed of missing trains, and this is why I mention it, for he was on my mind that night: this was a man who through no fault of his own had killed a pedestrian when he’d lost control of his car on an icy road. Having taken a life he didn’t know why he himself should be allowed to live, and this was causing me some concern. We had established trust, and what I was trying to elicit from him now was the trauma story itself: what happened, what were the details of the thing, what did he feel, what did his body do, what did it all mean. Only when we had the trauma story, and he’d assimilated it into conscious memory—into the
self—
could we move on to the last stage, which involved reconnecting him to the world, specifically his family and the community in which he lived.

There was a long bar of dark wood, the open cabinets behind it rising to the ceiling and stacked with bottles of red wine that gleamed black as billiard balls. You could sit at the counter and eat hard-boiled eggs with your wine, if you wanted to. From the ceiling, large yellow globe-lamps spread a penumbral half-light on the scattering of tables on the mosaic tile floor far below.

That night, a wet night in early April, I’d been supposed to dine with Walt but he canceled at the last minute. I was already downtown, so rather than go back to Twenty-third Street I’d come in out of the rain and asked for a table for one. I was seated in the corner, and over my newspaper I watched the owner’s wife, Audrey, pull up a chair at a noisy table and engage in a low-voiced conversation with a small, dark-haired woman I’d noticed the moment I stepped into the place. I guessed she was in her early thirties. She possessed the sort of beauty I associate with French actresses of
a certain age, and she gave off a faint, subtle suggestion of recent grievous suffering. Her heart had been much broken; or so one felt, watching her.

I ordered a salad and a piece of grilled fish. At first I thought she must be a celebrity of some kind, though in this I was mistaken. She was famous only for destroying men. That night she wore a dark gray cashmere shawl around her shoulders, also an air of distant indulgence, laughing occasionally but giving the impression that this was a mere flurry on a sea of private pain. She was attached to nobody, yet they all in a way performed for her. Only her friend Audrey seemed able to bring a spark of life to her gravely composed features. I watched her with some curiosity, for if it was a performance—as I assume all public behavior is, at root—then its accomplishment was to seem anything but, which perhaps was why the entire table sought to amuse her.

She didn’t move from her place—no table-hopping for this one—and sustained her composure throughout the evening; and when the table began to break up she showed no effects of the wine she’d drunk, six glasses of Chablis by my count. I watched her as she paused at the door for a last word with her friend. She touched the other woman’s cheek and murmured what looked like “Bless you,” then disappeared into the night.

Then, a week later, quite by chance, or at least I assumed it was, I encountered her again. Walt had asked me to dinner to make up for the evening we’d missed at Sulfur. It had been a long day. Joe Stein was beginning to display a fixation on his trauma, a worrying development. He told me that his mental life was now entirely focused on the death of the pedestrian. When his wife called to remind him of his mother’s birthday, he at once thought of the birthday of the mother of the man who’d died, and then of the dead man’s birthday, or rather of the fact that for him there would be no more birthdays, and why? Because—and so he was back to it.

“Because I killed the poor bastard!”

Stein was a slim, bald, dapper little man, a commodities broker with an office on Wall Street. The trauma was obsessing him. He was starting to structure his entire mental life around it. Not good. Not uncommon, but not good.
So I really wasn’t in the mood for company, but Walt had insisted. There was someone he wanted me to meet. I left my apartment with some irritation, but managed to find a cab right away. The driver was from the Soviet Union.

“You want the highway, you want local?”

“Highway.”

Night was falling. Stein had told me he was thinking about suicide. Though I was fairly sure he didn’t mean it, I’d been wrong before. I remember staring out at the river and imagining him jumping from the George Washington Bridge, then listing all the reasons why that wasn’t going to happen. For one thing, he had the support of his wife, and while this may be heresy in my profession, it is often by means of simple courage and a good woman that psychological problems are overcome, and without any help from people like me.

By the time I got out of the cab I’d succeeded in putting all thoughts of suicide out of my mind. I stood outside what I still thought of as my mother’s building and gazed down the block to the park, where the trees massed in the now-fallen darkness. A misty rain had begun to fall, slanting through the streetlights. It was one of those deceptively still, mild nights that occasionally occurs in New York, when the city seems to collapse, exhausted from its relentless roaring and surging, and pauses briefly to gather its immense energies before starting up again. What I really wanted was to find some little place on Columbus Avenue and have dinner alone.

Walt, wearing a striped apron, opened the door of the apartment with a glass of wine in his hand. He liked to cook now. He considered himself a nurturing man. He was a good thirty pounds overweight.

“Doctor Charlie,” he said.

He put his hand on my shoulder and we walked down the hall, whose walls fairly bristled with art and into the big atelier, what had once been our living room, the high windows shaded by pale slatted blinds now and a large Twombly hanging over the fireplace. As I came into the room Lucia, Walt’s wife, shouted to me from the kitchen, and I caught a glimpse of their eldest child, Jake. A man and two women were sitting on the sofa. To my astonishment the dark-haired woman, the one I’d seen in Sulfur, was one of them.

“Charlie, a good friend of mine, Nora Chiara.”

I almost said,
But I know you.

I couldn’t define her. I knew she was vulnerable. Despite the tough, urbane cast of the woman, the mature intelligence, the sophistication—the whiskey-throated laughter—she was certainly vulnerable. We are all of course
vulnerable,
and I can’t pretend that I didn’t see it at once, or draw the obvious inference regarding our mutual attraction. There were a number of indications. The twitching foot, or rather the anxiety it couldn’t mask, this suggested damage. She had reached for my hand without rising from the sofa, and I’d known then, or thought I did, why Walt had asked me to come: his so-called nurturing included getting me hooked up again. Her gleaming hair was blue-black and cut in a clean line at chin level, exposing the back of her neck and her soft throat. She was wearing a clingy black dress and her shoulders were bare. How small she was, how perfect the swell of her breasts against the black material. How creamy and white her skin. She half-turned on the sofa, an arm thrown over the back, and looked me over rather coolly. She wasn’t French, as I’d idly imagined, she was from Queens. I thought of the cashmere shawl that had covered those shoulders and breasts a week ago. I myself was in a gray suit and a black shirt, and by chance a tie the exact same shade as that shawl.

“So you’re the shrink,” she said.

“I’m a psychiatrist.”

There was a sort of sharpened gleam about her, as though she sniffed conflict and liked it. For a second I glimpsed her teeth, small and feral, very white against the red lipstick.

“Psychiatrist, then.”

She was certainly direct. Her legs were elegantly crossed at the knee but there was a slight tremor in the lifted foot with its vertiginous stiletto. Her black stockings were sheer, with a seam, and her skirt was riding high on her thighs.
And I, freighted with my narcissistic need to be the fixer, the healer, of course I was attracted to her. Moth to a flame.
So I did not go in blind.

But the next day, waiting for Stein in my office, when I tried to describe her to myself I had some difficulty, and I’m someone who describes people to himself for a living. I had a couch in the office, an old chesterfield from my Johns Hopkins days, a commodious piece of furniture upholstered in oxblood leather much cracked and creased, and very comfortable. I stretched out on it and closed my eyes.
A host of vivid impressions arose which I will not catalog here, apart from this. We’d got out of the cab and were walking toward my building. The night was wet and windy, my arm was around her shoulders, hers around my waist, and we nearly stumbled. “Fuck,” she shouted, “these heels!”—but I saw quite clearly what had happened. She’d been trying to avoid a crack in the sidewalk. She wouldn’t step on it.
It was a fleeting thing, but it stayed with me: a brief glimpse of childish superstition in this very grown-up woman.

When I rose from the couch and prepared for my appointment with Joe Stein I was aware of new feelings stirring in me. Hope, for one.

We decided, that night, to meet in a restaurant. The decorum required in a public place would allow us to negotiate the tricky currents of this unknown sea, this sudden other person. There is trepidation attached to an intimacy embarked on without warning or preparation. Neither of us wanted to go to Sulfur, so I suggested a place in the West Village.

She was wearing a short black jacket over a man’s white shirt unbuttoned to her breasts, and a short black skirt. Her hair was slicked back with some sort of gel, and she wore glasses with heavy black frames. Bare legs, black shoes with low heels. I told her later that she looked like a librarian with a secret. Later still I told her she was wanton. But first we had to get through dinner. When she first came into the restaurant I’d watched with quickened heartbeat as she spoke to the waiter, who’d turned to point at where I was waiting with my arm uplifted in the shadows at the back of the room. As I rose with stiffening penis to greet her, she paused, then kissed me lightly on the lips. She was fragrant.

“I couldn’t see you,” she said. “It’s like a crypt in here.”

“Are you all right?” I said.

She’d sat down and was dealing with her bag, frowning, sighing, but at this question she grew still and gazed at me.
I was saying, Do you regret last night? The sex had been, for me, at least, deeply interesting. She was a restrained lover, almost to the point of passivity: a small, pale, fleshy, pliant doll of a woman in bed, but she talked throughout, which I liked, husky, dirty talk. She had excited a strange fierceness in me that I didn’t trouble to analyze. Sex is sex, after all; there are few rules. Do no harm.

“I’m fine, Charlie. How are you?”

I told her I was all right too. We sat in silence until the waiter arrived, drinks were ordered, menus scrutinized.

“I’m starving,” she said.

I thought at first she was just going through the motions, having dinner with me to be polite. And that that would be the end of it. She was behaving not like the vampy creature who’d flirted with me at Walt’s, then spent the night in my bed; rather, she was the demure woman I’d seen that evening in Sulfur. But after several glasses of wine she began to warm up. She was with me because she wanted to be, and remembering how we were then, when it was all promise, with nothing to ruin it but folly, or fear, I see us as though from a camera attached to a track on the ceiling: a lean, lanky man with his hair cut short,
en brosse,
in a creased linen suit with one elbow propped on the candlelit table, his chin cupped in his fingers, the other arm thrown over the back of his chair, listening with a smile to this peachy woman gesticulating and smoking on the other side of the table. She ate only a little of her pasta and barely touched her steak. She drank several carafes of white wine, I didn’t count, while I nursed a glass of red. She must have smoked seven cigarettes over the course of the meal, but a number of them she crushed out after only one or two drags. I idly wondered why some cigarettes got smoked right down to the filter and others were crushed out at birth.

I paid the check and we emerged into the night. We were a couple of blocks west of Seventh Avenue. She took my hand. We stepped away from the restaurant, and there were flowers for sale in the deli on the corner. I asked her if she’d like some.

“No, Charlie,” she said. “Let’s just go home.”

Home. My apartment, she meant. Which no woman had entered for many months, excepting Agnes, of course.
In which I had become accustomed to retire from the world at the end of the day and there indulge the stark pleasures of my solitude. I experienced a flicker of misgiving at the prospect of relinquishing that solitude, but it was only a flicker. For a woman to refer to a man’s apartment as home is of some importance, for it suggests trust; and this had come from a woman I’d known barely twenty-four hours.
One of the rewards of maturity, I told myself, in a rare burst of complacency, is the ability to make a rapid decision on a matter of profound emotional significance and have confidence in its soundness. The folly in this line of thinking didn’t become apparent until later, though even then I was aware, somewhere in the engine room at the back of my mind, of a needle flickering across a gauge and entering the red zone, signaling danger.