Trauma (8 page)

There was nothing to do but hold on to her until she was exhausted. At last she slumped sobbing in the bed. It was almost over. She lifted her face and stared at me as I held her wrists, murmuring to her in a low voice, saying her name, my own name, telling her where she was. As I held her she grew sleepy and only when the dream began to properly subside was I able to release her wrists. She lay down in the fetal position and at once fell asleep.

Silence.

I rose from the bed and covered her, then sat on the chair by the door and watched her sleep. My thoughts drifted. I remembered the period in my childhood when I’d been awoken every night by a bad dream, and I imagined my mother sitting in my bedroom, watching me as I was watching Nora. It was the dream of my father putting a gun to my head in a dark room and saying he was going to kill me. Mom would come in and comfort me. They were the only times I remember any real warmth and intimacy between us.

The next day Nora’s memory of the night was vague.
Her struggle with me in the bed had been absorbed into the dream, and the dream had sunk back into her unconscious.
She didn’t believe what I was telling her in the morning until I opened my shirt and showed her the bruises. She was horrified. She knew she’d been fighting with somebody in her dream, but had no idea it was me.

“Charlie, this is awful.”

“You want to see someone?”

It seemed a reasonable suggestion.

“Oh no! No, don’t send me to some stranger! Please don’t do that!”

The terror in her face then was not unlike what I’d seen in the night. I told her that no, I’d never send her to some stranger.

Chapter Eight

I
was still seeing Agnes during this period and had kept her abreast of developments in my relationship with Nora. She remained opaque with regard to her own relationship, but I felt no such imperative. Usually we’d find an hour in the middle of the day and meet in a small hotel off Third Avenue that we could both reach easily from our places of work, Agnes being at the time a lecturer at Hunter College.
She took a keen interest in Nora, and after sex she would question me closely about her. She expressed no jealousy, no hostility toward her that I could detect. I didn’t mention the nightmare, though I did tell her about my renunciation of the unconscious on Sundays.

“God, Charlie, I wish you’d tried that with me.”

I was naked, postcoital, stretched out on the bed, my penis damp and flaccid on my thigh. She stood in a bathrobe looking out the window, smoking. She glanced at her watch. We had twenty minutes before we needed to shower and get out of there.

“Was it a problem?” I said.

“You were very earnest. I liked it. You were so political in those days. You’re not now.”

“No.”

“What happened? You’ve become a real cynic.”

Nothing more cynical than a dog, I thought. “I guess I burned out.”

“I guess you did. What a pity. You’re just not all there anymore, Charlie. Something’s missing.”

“What?” I said, alarmed.

“Oh, I don’t know. Forget it.”

She stubbed out the cigarette and came and lay down beside me. It was a noisy room, the noon-hour midtown traffic loud on the street below, but we liked that. It seemed somehow appropriate for illicit sex in the middle of the day in Manhattan. Something
missing
?

“So what’s she like?” she said.

“Can you be more specific?”

“How does she sleep? What’s it like, the sleeping together? Not the sex, the sleeping together.”

I hesitated. Why had she asked me that? Agnes at times displayed what I can only call a scalpel-like ability to penetrate other minds, other lives. It was uncanny. Nora slept badly. Even before the nightmare, several times she’d woken me with her thrashing around in the sheets, legs restless as though in her dreams she were running, and small cries and whimpers—there had been a few disturbed nights like this, but when I’d spoken to her in the morning she had no memory of it and no dreams to report.

“Charlie, it’s a new bed, it takes me a while to settle down. I didn’t keep you awake, did I?”

I told her no, she didn’t keep me awake, but it wasn’t true. Once woken I do not find it easy to get back to sleep.
In the darkness, in the relative silence of the city late at night, anxiety steals in like a wolf. Glimpsing weakness of spirit it circles for the kill, and I would struggle to drive it off but fail, and then I had to go sit in the kitchen and read yesterday’s paper until sleep again became possible. This could take an hour, sometimes two. So yes, it was a problem, Nora’s disturbed sleep. And she had odd little phobias.

“Charlie, the lights on the ceiling—I hate them. Can’t you get someone to move the blinds? You should just replace them, they don’t fit the window.”

I was fond of the patterns of light on my ceiling at night, and told her so. She said she’d try to like them too, though I could see they continued to trouble her. I was reluctant to tell Agnes any more but she kept at me.

“It’s years since you had somebody in your bed all night.
It must be strange.”

“Agnes, I don’t ask what goes on in your bedroom.”

“You better not.”

I never asked her about Leon anymore. I went into the bathroom to shower. How well we knew each other. When I’d first suggested we go to a hotel rather than the apartment, she’d figured out the reason at once.

“So you’re seeing someone,” she said.

Then, when we met there, she said she could tell it was serious. We hadn’t even got our clothes off!

“Why do you think it’s serious?”

I was genuinely interested. I often thought Agnes would have made a better psychiatrist than me. She’d turned with a wry cheerful smile, her hands behind her back as she undid her bra, a black lacy affair she knew I liked.

“It may be the loneliness. It’s not there anymore. You used to carry it around like a sack of stones.”

“And I don’t now?”

She sat down on the bed. Then she stood up again and pulled back the bed cover to inspect the sheets. “So is it serious?”

“It feels serious.”

She looked up at me then, frowning. I held her gaze.
There was no point in trying to conceal it.

“And she’s living with you?”

“Yes.”

There was perhaps the faintest flinch, but I might have imagined it. She smoothed the bottom sheet with her palm and lay down with her hands behind her head and one leg crooked at the knee. She was a long pale bony creature in black underwear.

“She have a job?”

“She does research for an art historian.”

I suspect she might have preferred a salesgirl in Bloomingdale’s, or a flight attendant. “Are you angry?”

“No, god knows you’ve been on your own long enough. I thought you’d get hitched years ago.”

Afterward we must have fallen asleep because when I opened my eyes and remembered where I was, and then looked at my watch, it was nearly one o’clock. Agnes stirred beside me. I sat up.

“It’s almost one,” I said.

“Christ.”

But she didn’t rush. She ran her fingernails down my spine. “That was very nice, Charlie,” she said.

At times I did feel some discomfort about my affair with Agnes, and was aware that I was rationalizing it, telling myself that it didn’t really count. Not an argument that Nora would buy—in her eyes, of course, Agnes would be the worst possible rival, far more dangerous than some casual stranger—but in my eyes, and in Agnes’s eyes, in the eyes, that is, of the perpetrators of this occasional minor transgression, this flimsy infidelity, it didn’t really count.
Agnes certainly didn’t seem to consider it a matter of any great significance, remarking as we got dressed one time that it was like going to bed with an old shoe.

“An old
shoe
?”

“You know what I mean, Charlie. Comfortable and familiar.”

Never a suggestion from her as to when we would meet again, or that very much had happened at all, in fact, other than the pleasuring of an old shoe. At the door, before we parted, she took my face in her hands and peered at me, frowning, with a small smile that was almost maternal in its tenderness, yet somehow more complicated than that.

“You feel better, Charlie?”

Her concern affected me. I was unprepared for the emotion it aroused.

“Go home and look after that woman,” she said.

A few nights later Nora again cried out in her sleep and woke us both. I switched on the bedside light. She was sitting upright with her fist pressed to her mouth, staring straight at the end of the bed as though somebody was there.

“What is it?” I whispered.

She was trembling. I touched her arm and she reacted as if she’d had an electric shock, more a spasm than a recoil.

She turned to me, her face alive with horror. With a kind of muted wail she reached for me, and I held her. She shuddered in my arms. I rocked her gently, murmuring that it was all right now, whatever had happened was a dream, she was safe now.

“Oh Jesus, that was bad,” she whispered.

“Tell me.”

“I want a cigarette.”

We sat in the kitchen and I made a pot of tea and she smoked. So it was not just random material floating up from the unconscious, I thought. This was the second time. It took some persuading to get her to talk.

“It’s not that interesting, Charlie, I’m sure your patients bring you much better stuff.”

“Just tell me,” I said.

I glanced at the clock over the stove. It was after two.
The city was quiet except for a distant siren. Her fingers were playing with the cigarette lighter, turning it end on end on the kitchen counter. Eyes staring out of the window, where south of us the twin towers were cliffs of blackness against the pale glow of the sky, narrow rectangular smears of light scattered across them. There was moonlight on the river.

“Someone was following me.”

Standard stuff of nightmare.

“Go on.”

“But that’s it!”

“Who’s following you?”

She shook her head. I asked her if she didn’t know or if she couldn’t say.

“Is it a man? Is he threatening you?”

She became thoughtful. She wanted to remember. This was good.

“And there’s something else,” she said, “a sound, but it’s kind of negative, like the opposite of wind—”

I saw her suddenly stiffen. I took her hand. She was tense and cold. She was wearing only a T-shirt and pajama bottoms. I asked her if she wanted her bathrobe. She did, so I got it for her. When I came back she had relaxed a little. I helped her slip into the robe. She was still shivering.

“Drink your tea.”

“I’ve ruined your night. But that’s all I can remember.”

“And you’ve never had it before?”

She shook her head. She didn’t think so. She wasn’t sure.

“You could hear something like the opposite of wind. A sucking sound?”

“There’s this noise it makes, sort of a rumble and a clatter. Loud. And there’s a roaring.”

“Is it day or night?”

“Night, I think.”

“Inside or outside?”

Her eyes suddenly filled with tears and again her fist went to her mouth.

“Charlie, can I have a drink?”

“Later. A rumble and a clatter, loud, you said, and a roaring. Like the subway? Were you in the subway, darling?
Was someone following you in the subway?”

“And there was laughing.” She turned to me.

“Someone’s laughing?” I said.

“And he’s coming after me. Oh, Christ.”

“Nora darling, is it
you
laughing?”

She shook her head.

“Who then?”

She shook her head.

“Nora, who’s laughing? In your dream, who’s laughing?”

She lifted her face. “My
brother
!”

Some weeping then. I didn’t want to leave it alone, I wanted her to say it again, but she shook her head. It was enough. After a while I asked if anything had happened to her yesterday that might have triggered the dream, anything she might have seen or read or heard, but she didn’t think so. A little later we went back to bed and at once she fell asleep. But I didn’t sleep. She’d told me she was an only child. So who was laughing in the nightmare?

•                  •                  •

The next day I had appointments until six. When I got home she was in the kitchen with her head in a recipe book.
There was a cigarette burning in the ashtray on the counter and an open bottle of wine. She hadn’t turned any of the lights on. I kissed her, and she asked me not to disturb her for a few minutes, she was trying to figure out how to cook this thing. I sat waiting for her. At last she turned the book over and went to the fridge.

“How was your day?” I said.

She grunted.

“You went back to sleep right away.”

“I’m so sorry. Were you exhausted?”

It was said distractedly. She was intent on assembling her ingredients, onions and tomatoes and such. She pushed her hair behind her ears.

“Did you think any more about your dream?”

“I can’t deal with that now. Would you pour me some wine? And hand me down the oil. How spicy do you want it?”

“I don’t care.”

“We’ll have it spicy. I wish you’d fix this drawer.”

She wasn’t just irritable, she was avoiding me. It was because of the nightmare. She wasn’t going to talk about it.

She wanted it back where it belonged, down in the dark. A little later she complained about my very real inadequacy as a handyman. I suggested that since she was in the apartment all day she could talk to the super. If he wouldn’t fix the drawer, he’d know someone who could.

“I can’t do that,” she said. “It’s not my apartment and anyway, he gives me the creeps. That’s the man’s job. I do the cooking, I do the washing—”

I lifted my hands, I acquiesced. I knew better than to let a question of mere housework provoke an argument. I told her I’d find somebody. I went to embrace her, but she wasn’t having an of that.

“Leave me alone, Charlie, can’t you see I’m not in the mood? I thought you were the fucking shrink.”

This last was too much. Irritability I could tolerate, but this was overt hostility and I’d done nothing to provoke it. I sat down on a kitchen stool and stared at my hands. How to deal with it without infuriating her further? I assumed that by helping her in the night, by making her talk about her nightmare, I’d seen something she wanted to conceal from me, or more probably from herself, so now she was angry with me. But what had I seen? A dream involving her being followed, at night, and a roaring, rumbling, clattering noise in the background. What was following her, probably in the subway, that was so terrifying that even these few paltry details created enough panic that she had to punish me for hearing about them? And of course this sudden appearance of a
brother,
when she’d told me she had no
brother—

I detected fear of punishment, therefore guilt. It was possible, I thought, that what she remembered was not an actual event but a memory imposed on it in order to disguise it. It is a familiar ruse of the unconscious, to create a scenario capable of inspiring terror, but which in fact is just a screen, a disguising symptom, beneath which lies the memory of trauma proper. Had Nora been traumatized? I wasn’t going to ask her, not then. It was by playing what she’d called the fucking shrink that the unpleasantness had arisen in the first place. I left her to the cooking and took a shower.

There was, of course, another possibility, that the laughing man she was fleeing from was not
her
brother, but
my
brother; and that the guilt stemmed from her failure to flee fast enough.

When I returned to the kitchen she came and put her arms around me.

“You will help me, won’t you, Charlie?”