Saint Peter’s Wolf Page 2

  “And Mrs. Byrd wants you to telephone her.” She referred to my wife in this formal way, but I did not really mind. A touch of formality makes routine palatable. What did worry me was that Cherry never called me here. She never even called home to tell me she might be late. I had taken to believing that the telephone did something to my voice that rendered it unpleasant to Cherry’s ear.

  “Is Orr around?”

  “He doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

  It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen him much, if at all, in recent weeks. He was often traveling.

  But I caught Tina looking away from me, and I should have guessed that she knew something.

  From my office I called the veterinarian. The receptionist there seemed to have taken a dislike to me. “Doctor is still preparing Belinda for surgery.”

  Could she call me and tell me how it went?

  “Doctor will have to be the one to decide that. I will certainly tell him you called.”

  My wife did not answer the phone. Something must be wrong. I was glad she hadn’t answered because I didn’t need another worry, but I was reaching the point at which I was saturated with emotions and desperately needed to go for a long walk.

  My first client for the day—in truth, my only client scheduled—was smiling wanly in the waiting room. Your practice, I told myself, is a little too thin at the moment. It was not my fault. My office partner, who co-leased the offices and shared the waiting room with me, had been on local television five times in recent months. Orr was a celebrity. I could not compete with him.

  But as I sat listening to Porterman, a man who had lustful desires toward his eleven-year-old daughter, I had to force myself to concentrate on his monotone. He was a nuclear physicist with the University of California. He had explained to me once about quarks and charm, a fascinating forty-five minutes before I remembered that he was paying me and that I had no right to use up his time on my ignorance.

  We had both agreed, months before, that a man in real danger of molesting his daughter would not have sought professional counseling, and, since no one can keep the mind clear of unpleasant desires every moment of the day, that he was to be commended for his desire to be a protective father and to assume responsibility for his lust.

  Thus encouraged, he had decided to undertake an in-depth study of his dream life. I welcomed this. Dreams fascinate me. But Porterman had dreams about buying a new suit at Macy’s, of choosing frozen spring rolls at Safeway, of starting a subscription to the Examiner. His dreams were like those films we had to watch in high school, legendarily dull films produced in remote decades when everything was in black and white and everyone wore baggy clothes and had, on reflection, baggy faces. Films on the sandy strata that made Idaho’s Famous Potato the Tuber King. Films on the birth of the economy, with faded, camera-conscious amateurs bartering chickens for rutabagas. Films called From Pulp to Packaging or Heroes of the Decimal System. This was Porterman’s psyche. A back lot of visions too dull for any other human mind to create, let alone recall days afterward.

  Still, Porterman was earnest. He wanted to understand what made him lie awake at night, why, setting aside his lust, his daughter filled him with dread as she went off to school, to a friend’s house to sleep overnight, to a movie which Porterman had not seen yet and which might “have almost anything in it. You can’t be sure.”

  I couldn’t tell him that dread was normal. Many people feel contented rarely, if ever. And it seemed to undercut my role as healer to take the position that a little illness was standard. And yet that was the truth. Perhaps I merely did not want to risk losing one of my few remaining clients by leading him to understand that he was no more troubled than the people all around us, beyond the walls.

  I did not have a child of my own. I had a stepchild, Carliss, my wife’s son, an eight year old who played video games in which he killed soldiers with an appliance which attached to the television and which looked, for all the world, like a Colt .45 automatic.

  Carliss had been tested by experts. They all agreed that the child was emotionally troubled. Carliss and I had differing views on many matters. I had been married a scant two years, and felt that I had barely begun to know my wife. It was my first attempt at marriage; probably I had waited too long to make that effort of living with someone. To make the effort while a mentally disturbed eight year old carefully sabotaged the marriage was a curious challenge.

  I stopped myself in the midst of this sardonic reflection. Carliss was a child, with a child’s quickness, and a child’s gift for joy. I should spend more time with Carliss. I envied him. For him, the world was still new.

  When Porterman left I called Cherry.

  “Carliss has done something awful,” she said.

  “Awful in what way?” I wanted to ask: awful to what?

  He had already drawn beards and glasses on a priceless Rubens cartoon. It would cost four figures to get the art repaired. The man at the lab, an old friend of mine, had nearly wept.

  “Please don’t be mad at him, Benjamin.”

  “What has he done?”

  “He’s emotionally sick. You knew that when you married me.” Her voice trembled, and I had the definite feeling that she had been about to say “when you married us,” thinking of herself and Carliss as an inseparable unit.

  “Tell me what he did.”

  “You know that medical encyclopedia?”

  “No!”

  “The one you keep on your desk?”

  “It’s not possible!” It was a nineteenth-century medical dictionary, not remarkably valuable, but one of my favorite books. I waited for her to agree that it wasn’t possible, but she said nothing. I was, I told her, on my way home.

  But I wasn’t, for a moment. I sat shaking my head. I was wondering how I really felt about all this, and the truth was that I felt very little else than a sense that the day would eventually end and another day would take its place, one probably not as disturbing. What patience I could not summon, I would pretend to possess. I would endure. If I was a hypocrite, I was of the benign, necessary sort.

  Far away, in the world beyond my office, a fire truck wailed, a pulse of sound I had come to find almost comforting. An acoustical engineer had soundproofed our rooms, but he had not blocked the fire engines. Our building was at the corner of Washington and Sansome, in the Financial District, and all the other offices were occupied by attorneys, the kind with thin Florentine briefcases. Orr had convinced me that this was the ideal location for “our kind of stress.” Orr had thrived here.

  Orr would be able to live my life much better than I could. For a moment, I was alight with admiration for him. He was difficult to have around at times, but he was vibrant, full of color. I wanted to have even a fraction of his command of life. He was in communion with an essential part of himself, something animal and electric. Orr had that core of vitality which I had, at some point, lost.

  I tried calling the veterinarian once more, and the answering machine kicked in. The blank, self-consciously alluring voice of the receptionist invited me to leave my name and number, but I declined, wondering if the doctor was at lunch, or consoling an inconsolable woman.

  Three

  If it were not for hypocrisy we would be noble creatures. But then perhaps we would not be human. I sometimes think that the reason adults want to hide sex from children is that the adults feel that once the truth is out the children will find it impossible to feel respect for any adult, ever. I was entering what I told myself was a period of readjustment. I think I was beginning to realize that I would never understand myself, Cherry, or much of anything else. What puzzled me was that I accepted this smoggy view of things with something like detachment. Was this the grand view of things I had promised myself as a youth? This habit of looking forward to a cup of coffee and a hot shower, letting all hope of epiphany wither, was not necessarily the beginning of wisdom. It might be merely the beginning of age.

  Our home had a view of the Golden Gate Bri
dge. It was a tall terra cotta and beige house with wooden balconies and yellow-leafed wisteria fluttering in the breeze. It had been my family home, and I remembered my father coming through the oak door, cigarette in his smile; He had been by profession an architect, but his true gift had been for staying at home as much as possible, enjoying my mother’s company.

  The house was quiet. The kind of quiet I hate. I closed the front door carefully behind me. My father, in my place, would have hurried across to the fireplace where even now the silver martini shaker gleamed. He would have used those tongs shaped like talons for a dash of musical ice on crystal, and a long lunch would have been underway.

  Cherry met me. “I’ve already talked to him.”

  “I want to see it.”

  “It’ll just upset you.”

  “Cherry, what earthly good will it do to put it off? Can you imagine what I’m picturing in my mind?”

  “Whatever you’re imagining, Ben, the truth is worse.”

  The medical encyclopedia is the size of a very fat slice of bread. It had been bound in London in the early nineteenth century, and the calfskin had aged to a tobacco-leaf gold. I was not careless, but I often left a treasured book out on my desk. To hide things is furtive and contrary to the spirit that makes me love books.

  I approached the book feeling weak, each step slower until I stopped and could not move.

  The book was fatter than when I had last seen it. There was a bump in it, and the small volume could not close completely around an obstruction.

  I steadied myself, and stepped to the desk.

  I stretched out my hands, wishing that I did not have to do this, that I would not have to see what had happened.

  At the entry for “nematodes” was a squashed rat. Its eyes were open, two black seeds. Much of what had been inside the rat was now outside it, a scarlet bandana that flowed from between its teeth.

  It was a small rat, dark gray, with a long pink hairless tail that drooped from the volume like an unusual bookmark.

  “He’s emotionally disturbed,” she whispered. “We’ve always known this.”

  I sat trembling, aghast at what was before me. “Yes,” I agreed. “He’s very unhappy.”

  “I was hoping after the last time that it was out of his system. But he wants to tell you something. He wants so much to—”

  “To hurt me. And he has.” But despite my shock and distaste for what I saw, at that very moment I had the strangest thrill. Imagine, I thought, being a child again. Imagine being able to scribble on this, ruin that, with no feeling of restraint. Imagine feeling that liberated.

  “We’ve been a terrible burden for you, Ben.”

  I should have paid closer attention to what she had just said, but at the moment, sad and dazed, I simply shook my head. I had a responsibility to Carliss that was more important than my affection for my books. “We’ll send him to Beecher. He’s the best child psychologist in California.”

  “What are you going to do about the book?”

  “The encyclopedia can wait. I want to talk to Carliss.”

  “What will you say to him?”

  I uttered what seemed like the deepest truth. “I don’t know.”

  “Please don’t hurt him. He wants your attention, you know that.”

  I looked up, surprised. “Of course I won’t hurt him. What sort of person do you think I am?” Two years is not really long enough to discover all the back roads in another’s emotional countryside. I was amazed, though, that Cherry had so little faith in me. It demonstrated once more that while I knew her fairly well, she did not know me at all.

  Or, I asked myself, did I really know her? In the first days of our marriage we had delighted each other. We had both liked the same operas, the same fresh peaches, the same old movies, the same cool, fog-rich wind on the long walks we took together. It was a discovery for both of us, like breathing pure oxygen after a long swim underwater.

  But then her career began to simmer. She was a political consultant, a whiz at publicity, press packets, television ads. A former mayor called her the “Einstein of demographics.” The phone began to ring. The calendar in the kitchen darkened with notes, phone numbers, names. I was always on my way to the airport, always in a hurry to get to an auction on time. She was always just back from a meeting, jotting notes as she listened to her answering machine. The time came when we did not know each other.

  “Benjamin, you’re so kind,” she was saying. “It stabs me here to see you so kind.” She put a hand over her breast.

  She was given to emotional overstatement, but I could not understand why she expressed herself in exactly that way.

  “Because,” she continued, “I have something to tell you. Something that’s killing me. I’ll never be able to talk about it.” She wept. “I’ve ruined our life.”

  I was saturated with crisis, but I had enough feeling left to put my arms around Cherry and try to comfort her. I am an organized man, capable of focusing on one thing at a time. Just now I did not know what sort of crisis consumed my house, but I would set about quelling it step by step. The problem was that I did not know what first step to take.

  “What he did to the book is my fault,” she said. “I’ve been neglecting him.”

  Just like Cherry—either blind indifference or staggering guilt.

  “I’ve been out of the house a lot lately,” she continued. “I’ve been.…” I did not like the way she searched for words. “Distracted. I should have told you this before. I waited too long. I can’t stand myself. I’m going to explode.”

  A bad feeling pricked me, a warning: you don’t want to hear this.

  I had been away during recent days, in Los Angeles for a conference and a visit with an expert on Degas. And before that I had been in New York, and before that I had given a paper in Chicago on symbolic castration. I blamed myself for neglecting Cherry and Carliss. I had been away too long, and even when I was here I was preoccupied with my collection or my thoughts. This had been a mistake. The words appeared in my mind like a homily framed and nailed to a wall: Nothing is more important than my family.

  Say something rational, I told myself. Something sensible. You’re supposed to know so much about the heart, the psyche, the human soul. “It’s not your fault,” I offered.

  “No,” she howled, “you don’t understand!”

  I stared at the rat. Like a conductor listening as first one instrument and then another strays out of tune in mid-symphony, I wanted to begin the day, my life—everything again. I took a deep breath.

  “I can’t tell you, Ben. I just can’t. It’ll kill you when I tell you.”

  What, I asked without making a sound. But Cherry was gone, vanished, and I heard the distant rattle of a plastic lid, and capsules spilling with a faint, beady whisper. Her newest tranquilizer, her rod and her staff.

  I closed my eyes. Be calm, I told myself. Use your powers of thought. Be logical. Be methodical. First talk to Carliss.

  He was at his computer, shooting ducks. He shot three of them as I stood in the doorway, sighting two-handed, with his legs apart and imitating recoil, pulling the gun back hard after each shot. The video ducks rose, exploded, and spun down.

  I cleared my throat. “I have seen the rat,” I said. I considered what I had just said, proud of such a cogent beginning. It had, I thought, a noble simplicity.

  Another duck blew up.

  “I wanted to tell you a little bit about the book that you have damaged.”

  Another duck exploded.

  “You didn’t ruin it, exactly. But you did damage it. I know a scientist at a lab who can probably fix it. But it’s an old book. An old book that I like a lot.”

  More ducks, spinning through the air.

  I stepped to the computer and fumbled, found the button, and the display went black. A high whine continued from the computer itself, and when I found that switch, the machine was silent.

  Carliss continued to stare at the screen, holding his handgun.<
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  I folded my arms. “If you wanted to shock me, or to get my attention, you succeeded. Here I am, Carliss. Talk to me.”

  Maybe he expected me to rage and swear. His actual father, a man who flew in from Philadelphia on business, was a man I did not know well at all, the sort of man who seems obscure even when you know him. Perhaps he had raged and shaken his fist at’ such times. Perhaps he would have beaten this quiet, brooding child. He was a salesman, but he had changed companies so often, selling disk drives for computers one week and the next California cognac, that he seemed to be several men at once.

  He had been based briefly in San Francisco when he sold reading labs to elementary schools. He had always been out of town. That was when I began to see more and more of my neighbor, and then very much more, until by the time the husband called from New Jersey to have a heart-to-heart about a woman he had met, his wife was already entangled in what I had to imagine as my gill nets, an affair I felt vaguely guilty about except for the genuine love I felt for her.

  I sat on the bed with Carliss. “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “Fine.” Not looking at me, a tight, noncommittal voice.

  “How did you expect me to feel about seeing a squashed rat in one of my favorite books?”

  One shoulder lifted one millimeter.

  I pursed my lips. “I don’t feel fine, exactly.”

  “I should have used a frog.”

  “A squashed frog?” I inquired, as though the subject were of only passing interest.

  I could see, from behind, the very slight nod of his head.

  For a moment I entered into the problem. What was, after all, more effective? I had to envy Carliss. Perhaps, I thought, he was right and I was entirely wrong, blinded by years of traffic jams and news bulletins. If you’re sad or angry, take your choice: rat or frog.