Trauma (9 page)

Chapter Nine

Y
ou will help me, won’t you, Charlie?
I had no appointments the next morning but I was in my office by nine. The night of the dinner party at Walt’s apartment, I’d heard it then, the almost imperceptible cry for help. I heard it but I paid no attention to it, and why? Desire. Desire accompanied by the almost imperceptible answering cry from somewhere in my own psyche: yes, my darling, I will help you. It is the narcissism of the psychiatrist, or of this psychiatrist, at least, to play the indispensable figure of succor and healing. This is how I appeared to my patients. But it seemed I’d made that same implicit promise to my lover. I had made the promise and she had heard me and now she was telling me it was time.

It was nothing if not oblique. We did the daily traffic, talking about ourselves, our work, other people, food, money and such, and at the same time another conversation was beginning to go forward, on my side renewed sexual suspicion, on hers the discourse of her needs, which she spoke in a strange, hushed, foreign tongue addressed not to me but to a primal absent other with whom her arrangements had been made in early childhood, or so I presumed, probably her father. What was I to do?

Nothing. I wasn’t her doctor. I’d refer her to someone.
There are good reasons why a doctor must not attempt to treat members of his own family and other intimates, as I had learned at great personal cost. It must not happen again. I had no desire to exhume Nora Chiara’s childhood. I had no curiosity, no interest in it at all. When I was working at the psych unit and first became familiar with the posttraumatic disorders, I encountered many horrifying nightmares. I came to recognize them as the expression of memories the mind couldn’t process and therefore repressed. With someone laughing in her ears Nora had run from a destructive force she called the opposite of wind, then woke up and for several seconds remained trapped in the emotional climate of the dream. She was left sobbing and shuddering, and clung to me like a child. I didn’t take this lightly. I was apprehensive the following night, and for several nights after, as to whether there would be a recurrence.

Then came shattering news. For some weeks I’d been worried about Joe Stein. I was aware that there was trouble at home. He was a disturbed man, and to live with him would have been difficult for any woman. I had met his wife once, soon after the beginning of his therapy, and found her to be a competent, mature individual, quite strong enough in my opinion to help steer this tortured man through his crisis. But it seems there came a day when she decided she’d had enough. He had worn her out and used up what to me had looked like a store of goodwill more than adequate to see them through. What had he done to her? Whatever the immediate cause, Stein found himself deserted in his predicament, and rather than go home to an empty house in the suburbs had spent the night drinking whiskey in his office in the financial district.

In the early morning he had climbed out onto the ledge outside his window. High above the street, between the canyon walls of silent office buildings, he had stood flattened against the stone with the wind picking at his clothes and the sun rising over the eastern shores of Long Island, just starting to touch the masonry of the old downtown skyscrapers. I don’t know how long he stood on the ledge. He was six stories up. Then he jumped. The fall would surely have killed him had he not landed on the canopy of a sandwich shop on the ground floor, which broke the fall sufficiently that when he crashed through it and onto the sidewalk below he didn’t die, although he did fracture his spine. When I arrived at the Beekman Hospital he was in a coma. They would know more, they told me, when the swelling subsided. I sat by his bedside for an hour. Uppermost in my mind was the question of why he hadn’t called me. But at the same time I knew why; it was because he’d concluded he was beyond the reach of psychiatry—
I could offer him no hope.
I couldn’t touch his conviction of his own worthlessness, which was of course a function of his guilt at having killed a man.

His wife joined me a little later. She’d come in from Westchester. We left the ward and found the cafeteria.

“I guess I’m supposed to feel bad for walking out on him like I did, but I don’t. Nobody could’ve stayed with him. He didn’t want me. He as good as threw me out. I think he’d already made up his mind, don’t you?”

“I wish you’d have let me know, Mrs. Stein.”

“I thought you did know. I thought you saw him on Tuesday.”

“He concealed it from me.”

“Well, he didn’t conceal it from me!”

She glared at me with damp eyes. She blamed me.

“Go on,” I said.

“I was out of my mind. I couldn’t deal with him anymore. Do it then, I told him. If you want to do it so bad, why don’t you just go ahead?”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing.”

“Was he angry?”

“Not angry, no. He kind of sat down and put his head in his hands and stared at the floor. First I thought he was going to do it, then I thought no, he can’t, it’s not in him, this thing’s eaten him all up, there’s nothing left.”

She was struggling. The tears were starting to come.

“Was there really nothing you could do for him?” she said.

I let this question hang in the air. I sat with my elbow on the Formica table in that bright cafeteria as the early sun came streaming in, my hand covering my mouth.

“Frankly, I didn’t expect this,” I said.

She recovered her composure. She tipped her head to one side and flattened out her mouth in an expression of skepticism and weary disdain. Her opinion of my competence required no further elaboration. She was a small, slim brunette of about thirty-five.

“At least he’s alive. Some small mercy.”

I said nothing.

“They told me they don’t know if he’ll walk again.”

“We won’t know that for a while,” I said.

“Joe in a wheelchair. My god.”

Suddenly she rose to her feet, her chair scraping backward on the tiled floor. A group of nurses at a table nearby gazed at us with tired sympathy. They must be familiar, I thought, with these early-morning dramas involving the family of some poor soul admitted in the night.

“I have to go,” she said. “I have kids.”

I rose too and offered her my hand. She gazed at it and then shook it with that same flat, glum expression and walked away. I left the hospital and stood in the cool air on Gold Street, staring up at the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge and feeling like hell. I couldn’t face going home. I was a five-minute walk from Fulton Street.

When Agnes answered I could hear through the intercom that I’d woken her, but she buzzed me in anyway. Once there had been no intercom, no buzzer, you shouted for whoever you wanted and the key was tossed down in a sock. She opened the door in her bathrobe, blinking and sleepy. It was years since I’d seen this, her early-morning face.

“Is it Cass?” she said.

Cassie and her stepfather were in Florida.

“No, it’s not Cass.”

“Oh, good.” She shuffled off toward the kitchen, yawning. “Come in then, Charlie,” she said. “It’s so early. What are you doing here?”

I followed her into the kitchen and sat down. “I’ve just come from the Beekman. I couldn’t handle going home.”

She was filling the kettle, still three-parts asleep. “Someone sick?”

“Stein tried to kill himself.”

Now she turned to face me. Now she woke up. “Oh my god. How is he?”

“He’ll live.”

She sat down. She frowned. I remember thinking, a man would want to know what he’d done.

“I’m sure it wasn’t your fault,” she said.

To hear those words, was that why I was here? After Stein’s wife had glared at me with her damp eyes, accusing me of not doing enough for her husband—was I here to be
absolved
?

“That’s exactly what I’d been telling him.”

“Don’t let it all compound, Charlie.”

The kettle boiled. She got up and made coffee. The sun was on the Woolworth Building now and it was already a warm day. I felt the tension begin to drain out of me.

“I shouldn’t have woken you. I guess I just needed to hear that.”

She made a grunting sound, as though to say, What are friends for? She poured us each a cup of coffee and put a carton of milk on the table. She sat down. “How’s Nora?”

“She’s okay.”

The tone shifted. I was on my guard where a moment before I’d allowed myself to wallow briefly in her sympathy.
I closed my eyes. Tears came.

“Oh, Charlie.”

She got up and came around the table and sat on my lap, putting her arms around my neck and her face in my shoulder. I held her tentatively. How well I knew the warm body beneath the bathrobe and the flimsy cotton nightgown. It was as though we’d just risen from the same bed. As my hold grew firmer she pulled back a little.

“You do make heavy weather, Charlie.”

“Do I?”

What did this mean? I didn’t care what it meant, I just didn’t want her to get up.

She got up. She stood looking down at me.

“Come back,” I said.

Instead she reached out a hand. “Come on,” she said quietly. “Come to bed.”

•                  •                  •

I sat on the E train computing implications and constructing lies. For reasons I was too tired to work out, it seemed much worse to have gone to Agnes for consolation than for sex. But I’m a pragmatic man, and there was no undoing what had occurred. It couldn’t be more simple, I thought. It will not happen again; no boat will be rocked, no house will fall down. All that was required of me was to look as if I’d spent a number of hours at the bedside of a failed suicide. But I disliked the prospect; it is always shabby to deceive even if in doing so you spare the other pain. In the event I was excused even that piece of business: Nora was in the library all day.

I arrived home that afternoon after my last appointment to find her in the apartment. She was eager to hear about Stein; she, too, had been woken when the call came early that morning. I was aware that I was sustaining my campaign of rationalization, my conviction that this thing I had with Agnes
didn’t really count;
and this being so, the point, the only point, was to protect Nora’s peace of mind. But no suspicion was even hinted at.

We went out for dinner. We had lobster in the Chelsea Hotel, Nora drank a bottle of wine and we walked home along Twenty-third Street. As I prepared for bed I stared in the bathroom mirror. About the man behind the face I felt neutral. I didn’t dislike him but I didn’t particularly like him either. There he was, Charlie Weir, dog. That night the nightmare came back.

I had an idea what to expect now. She would want to smoke a couple of cigarettes while she calmed down. Then she’d want a drink. She wouldn’t want to talk about it. She would then fall deeply asleep and not wake again until morning. And this was what happened. The next day she behaved as though nothing was wrong. We were supposed to be having dinner with Walt and Lucia but she asked me to call Walt and make some excuse. I did so.

“Thanks, Charlie.”

“Let me ask you a question.”

We were in the living room. The sky was still light to the west. She was looking at a magazine. Her hair was pushed up on top of her head in a messy clump, a clip holding it in place.

She looked at me over the top of her reading glasses. She was wary. “Okay.”

“You want to see someone? You want me to refer you to someone?”

Surely there was cause for concern. She couldn’t say I was overreacting.

“Let me think about it.”

She spoke quietly, and I detected no defensiveness. Certainly no anger.

“All right.”

It took her longer this time to regain her equilibrium. I watched her closely. The decision to seek help must come from her alone and without pressure from me. Three or four days later she talked about it. We were reading in bed, and I was about to turn out the light.

“Do I have to see someone?” she said suddenly.

“I think you do.”

“Why?”

“It’s happened three times now.”

“Listen, you live in New York, you have bad dreams, it’s the city. It’s a war zone, Charlie, you have to be a warrior to live here.” She lay back and stared at the ceiling. Then she sat up again. “Can’t I just see you? I mean, if it happens again, couldn’t you just talk me through it? I really don’t want to go into therapy just for a couple of bad dreams.”

I told her I couldn’t treat her. It was out of the question.

She spoke without thinking. “You treated Agnes’s brother”

“Exactly.”

“And you have bad dreams too.”

“Not like you.”

We were silent for a while. Her mood troubled me. It suggested she was in denial about what I suspected might be the symptoms of posttraumatic stress. The nightmares. The heavy drinking. A kind of mental absence at times, a dissociation of affect that occurred even during sex.

“Okay. Turn the light out.”

She was soon asleep. But I lay there in the darkness, irritated that she was so casual about this, and that she could be careless enough to bring up Danny.
You treated Agnes’s brother—
had she no idea of the effect that would have on me? She didn’t know because I hadn’t told her, but my own bad dreams, which produced far fewer theatrical effects than hers, invariably involved Danny. I was the one who found the body.

Joe Stein woke up from his coma and spent several days heavily sedated. I visited him during this period. He lifted a hand off the blanket. He had a tube in his mouth. In his doped eyes I detected an expression of wry resignation. Even at the toughest times in his therapy Stein’s sense of humor would flicker to life. He was always able to detach himself from his anguish, if only briefly.

“You must be pretty worried,” I said.

He lifted his eyebrows. I imagined if he could speak he would have said, Are you kidding me?

“You know there’s every chance you’ll walk again.”

He nodded. I believed he needed to hear this as often as possible. Whatever he’d been feeling when he was out on that ledge, he didn’t feel it now. Apparently he’d got through an entire bottle of scotch. Something occurred to me.