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
“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
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