Letting Go (58 page)

Her shoulders drooped. “Where?” she asked finally.

“Wherever you like,” he said.

“You won’t mind,” she said in a thin voice, “if I just sit for today.”

He extended one of his hands and said with a mild kind of force, “Why don’t you sit.” Oh, he was nice. A little crabby, but nice. She kept her shoes on and sat down in the straight chair.

And then her heart took up a very sturdy, martial rhythm. She looked directly across the desk into a pair of gray and inpenetrable eyes. She had had no intention of becoming evasive in his presence; not when she had suffered so in making the appointment. But the room was a good deal brighter than she had thought it would be, and on top of her fear there settled a thin icing of shyness. She was alarmed at having all her preconceptions disappointed; and she was alarmed to think she had had so many preconceptions. She could not remember having actually thought about Dr. Lumin’s height, or the decor of his office; nevertheless there was a series of small shocks for her in his white walls, his built-in bookshelves, his gold-colored carpet, and particularly in the wide window behind his desk, through which one could see past the boulevard and down to the lake. She had not been expecting to find him with his shade raised. The room was virtually ablaze with light. But of course—it was only one o’clock. One-twenty.

“I stopped off at Saks on the way up. I didn’t mean to keep you.”

With one of those meat-cutter’s hands, he waved her apology aside. “I’m interested—look, how did you get my name? For the record.” It was the second time that day that she found herself settled down across from a perfect stranger who felt it necessary to be casual with her. Dr. Lumin leaned back in his swivel chair, so that for a moment it looked as though he’d just keep on going, and fall backwards, sailing clear through the window. Go ahead, she thought, fall.
There goes Lumin
 … “How did you find out about me?” he asked.

With no lessening of her heartbeat, she blushed. It was like living with an idiot whose behavior was unpredictable from one moment to the next: what would this body of hers do ten seconds from now? “I heard your name at a party,” she said. “You see, we’ve just come to Chicago. A few months ago. So I didn’t know anyone. I heard it at a party at the University of Chicago.” She thought the last would make it all more dignified, less accidental. Otherwise he might take her coming to him so arbitrarily as an insult. “My husband teaches at the University of Chicago,” she said.

“It says here”—the doctor was looking at a card—“Victor
Honingfeld.” His eyes were two nailheads. Would he turn out to be stupid? Did he read those books on the wall or were they just for public relations? She wished she could get up and go.

“Your secretary asked on the phone,” she explained, “and I gave Victor’s name. He’s a colleague of my husband’s. I—he mentioned your name in passing, and I remembered it, and when I thought I might like to—try something, I only knew you, so I called. I didn’t mean to say that Victor had recommended you. It was just that I heard it—”

Why go on? Why bother? Now she had insulted him professionally, she was sure. He would start off disliking her.

“I think,” she said quickly, “I’m becoming very selfish.”

Swinging back in his chair, his head framed in the silver light, he didn’t answer. “That’s really my only big problem, I suppose,” said Libby. “Perhaps it’s not even a problem. I suppose you could call it a foible or something along that line. But I thought, if I am
too
selfish, I’d like to talk to somebody. If I’m not, if it turns out it is just some sort of passing thing, circumstances you know, not me, well then I won’t worry about it any more. Do you see?”

“Sure,” he said, fluttering his eyelashes. He tugged undaintily at one of his fleshy ears and looked down in his lap, waiting. All day people had been waiting on her words. She wished she had been born self-reliant.

“It’s been very confusing,” she told him. “I suppose moving, a new environment … It’s probably a matter of getting used to things. And I’m just being impatient—” Her voiced stopped, though not the rhythmic thudding in her breast. She didn’t believe she had Lumin’s attention. She was boring him; he seemed more interested in his necktie then in her. “Do you want me to lie down?” she asked, her voice quivering with surrender.

His big raw face—the sharp bony wedge of nose, the purplish overdefined lips, those ears, the whole huge impressive red thing—tilted up in a patient, skeptical smile. “Look, come on, stop worrying about me. Worry about yourself,” he said, almost harshly. “So how long have you been in Chicago, you two?”

She was no longer simply nervous; she was frightened.
You two.
If Paul were to know what she was doing, it would be his final disappointment. “October we came.”

“And your husband’s a teacher?”

“He teaches English at the University. He also writes.”

“What? Books, articles, plays?”

“He’s writing a novel now. He’s still only a young man.”

“And you, what about yourself?”

“I don’t write,” she said firmly. She was not going to pull her punches this second time. “I don’t do anything.”

He did not seem astonished. How could he, with that unexpressive butcher’s face? He
was
dumb. Of course—it was always a mistake to take your troubles outside your house. You had to figure things out for yourself.
How?
“I was working,” she said, “I was secretary to the Dean, and I was going to school, taking some courses at night downtown. But I’ve had a serious kidney condition.”

“Which kind?”

“Nephritis.” She spoke next as a historian, not a sympathy-monger; she did not want his sympathy. “I almost died,” she said.

Lumin moved his head as though he were a clock ticking; sympathy, whether she wanted it or not. “Oh nasty, a nasty thing …”

“Yes,” she said. “I think it weakened my condition. Because I get colds, and every stray virus, and since it is really dangerous once you’ve had a kidney infection, Paul said I should quit my job. And the doctor, the medical doctor”—she regretted instantly having made such a distinction—“said perhaps I shouldn’t take classes downtown at night, because of the winter. I suppose I started thinking about myself when I started being sick all the time. I was in bed, and I began to think of myself. Of course, I’m sure everyone thinks of himself eighty percent of the time. But truly, I was up to about eighty-five.”

She looked to see if he had smiled. Wasn’t anybody going to be charmed today? Were people simply going to listen? She wondered if he found her dull—not only dull, but stupid. They tried to mask their responses, one expected that; but perhaps she was no longer the delightful, bubbly girl she knew she once had been. Well, that’s partly why she was here: to somehow get back to what she was. She wanted now to tell him only the truth. “I did become self-concerned, I think,” she said. “Was I happy? was I this? was I that? and so forth, until I was totally self-absorbed. And it’s hung on, in a way. Though I suppose what I need is an interest really, something to take my mind off myself. You simply can’t go around all day saying I just had an orange, did that make me happy; I just typed a stencil, did that make me happy; because you only make yourself miserable.”

The doctor rocked in his chair; he placed his hands on his belly, where it disappeared into his trousers like half a tent. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “What, what does your husband think about all this?”

Her glands and pores worked faster even than her mind; in a moment her body was encased in perspiration. “I don’t understand.”

“About your going around all day eating oranges and asking yourself if they make you happy.”

“I eat,” she said, smiling, lying, “the oranges privately.”

“Ah-hah.” He nodded.

She found herself laughing, just a little. “Yes.”

“So—go ahead. How privately? What privately?” He seemed suddenly to be having a good time.

“It’s very involved,” Libby said. “Complicated.”

“I would imagine,” Lumin said, a pleasant light in his eye. “You’ve got all those pits to worry about.” Then he was shooting toward her—he nearly sprang from his chair. Their faces might as well have been touching, his voice some string she herself had plucked. “Come on, Libby,” Lumin said, “what’s the trouble?”

For the second time that day, the fiftieth that week, she was at the mercy of her tears. “Everything,” she cried. “Every rotten thing. Every rotten despicable thing. Paul’s the trouble—he’s just a terrible terrible trouble to me.”

She covered her face and for a full five minutes her forehead shook in the palms of her hands. Secretly she was waiting, but she did not hear Lumin’s gruff voice nor feel upon her shoulders anyone’s hands. When she finally looked up he was still there, a thick fleshy reality, nothing to be charmed, wheedled, begged, tempted, or flirted with. Not Gabe; not Paul; not an extension of herself.

She pleaded, “Please just psychoanalyze me and straighten me out. I cry so much.”

He nodded and he said, “What about Paul?”

She almost rose from her seat. “He never makes love to me! I get laid once a month!” Some muscle in her—it was her heart—suddenly relaxed. Though by no means restored to health, she felt somehow unsprung.

“Well,” said Lumin, with authority, “everybody’s entitled to get laid more than that. Is this light in your eyes?” He raised an arm and tapped his nail on the bright pane of glass behind him.

“No, no,” she said, and for no apparent reason what she was to say next made her sob. “You can see the lake.” She tried, however, to put some real effort into pulling herself together. She wanted to stop crying and make sense, but it was the crying that seemed finally to be more to the point than the explanations she began to offer him in the best of faith. “You see, I think I’ve been in love
with somebody else for a very long time. And it isn’t Paul’s fault. Don’t think that. It couldn’t be. He’s the most honest man, Paul—he’s always been terribly good to me. I was a silly college girl, self-concerned and frivolous and unimportant, and
brutally
typical, and he was the first person I ever wanted to listen to. I used to go on dates, years ago this is, and never listen—just talk. But Paul gave me books to read and he told me thousands of things, and he was—well, he saved me really from being like all those other girls. And he’s had the toughest life. His parents have been bastards, perfect bastards. That’s true—
miserable cruel bastards!
” Though her eyes seemed hardly able to deliver up any more tears, they somehow managed. “Oh honestly,” she said, “my eyeballs are going to fall out of my skull, just roll right on out. Between this and being sick … I never imagined everything was going to be like this, believe me …”

After a while she wiped her face with her fingers. “Is it time?” she asked. “Is it two?”

Lumin seemed not to hear. “What else?”

“I don’t know.” She sniffed to clear her nose. “Paul—” Medical degrees and other official papers hung on either side of Freud’s picture. Lumin’s first name was Arnold. That little bit of information made her not want to go on. But he was waiting. “I’m not really in love with this old friend,” she told him. “He’s an old friend, we’ve known him since graduate school. And he’s—he’s very nice, he’s carefree, he’s full of sympathy—”

“Isn’t Paul?”

“Oh yes,” she said, in what came out like a whine. “Oh
so
sympathetic. Dr. Lumin, I don’t know what I want. I don’t love Gabe. I really can’t stand him if you want to know the truth. He’s not for me, he’s not Paul—he never could be. Now he’s living with some woman and her two kids. Two of the most charming little children you ever saw, and those two are living together, right in front of them. She’s so vulgar, I don’t know what’s gotten into him. We had dinner there—nobody said anything, and there was Gabe with that bitch.”

“Why is she such a bitch?”

“Oh”—Libby wilted—“she’s not that either. Do you want to know the bitch? Me. I was. But I
knew
it would be awful even before we got there. So, God, that didn’t make it any easier.”

He did not even have to bother; the next question she asked herself. “I don’t
know
why. I just thought, why shouldn’t we? We never go out to dinner, we hardly have been able to go out anywhere—and that’s because of me too, and my health. Why shouldn’t we? Do you
see? And besides, I wanted to,” she said. “It’s as simple as that. I mean isn’t that still simple—to want to? But then I went ahead and behaved worse than anybody, I know I did. Oh, Gabe was all right—even she was all right, in a way. I understand all that. She’s not a bitch probably. She’s probably just a sexpot, good in bed or something, and why shouldn’t Gabe live with her anyway? He’s single, he can do whatever he wants to do.
I’m
the one who started the argument. All I do lately is argue with people. And cry. I mean that keeps me pretty busy, you can imagine.”

Lumin remained Lumin; he didn’t smile. In fact he frowned. “What do you argue about? Who are you arguing with?”

She raised two hands to the ceiling. “Everybody,” she said. “Everything.”

“Not Paul?”

“Not Paul—that’s right, not Paul.
For
Paul,” she announced. “Everybody’s just frustrating the hell out of him, and it makes me so angry. It makes me so
furious!
That John Spigliano! Gabe … Oh I haven’t even
begun
to tell you what’s happened.”

“Well, go on.”

“What?” she said helplessly. “Where?”

“Paul. Why is this Paul so frustrated?”

She leaned forward, and her two fists came hammering down on his desk. “If he wasn’t, Doctor,
oh if they would just leave him alone!
” She fell back, breathless. “Isn’t it two?”

At last he gave her a smile. “Almost.”

“It must be. I’m so tired. I have such lousy resistance …”

“It’s a very tiring thing, this kind of talking,” Lumin said. “Everybody gets tired.”

“Doctor,” she said, “can I ask you a question?”

“What?”

“What’s the matter with me?”

“What do you think’s the matter?”

“Please, Dr. Lumin, please don’t pull that stuff. Really, that’ll drive me nuts.”