Ordinary People (16 page)

He straightens up, smiling. There is pressure behind his eyes, and the blood is beating in his head.

 

 

They go upstairs and finish eating lunch. Cal is busy, filling out this Saturday in his mind. A cake, a few presents, nothing fancy this time, nothing big. They will go to Howard and Ellen’s because she makes a big deal over birthdays. She always has felt sorry for Con, as his comes so close to Christmas.

Conrad is whistling; drumming again on the table.

“You’re in a good mood today,” Cal observes. “You like being eighteen, do you?”

He laughs. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“Tell me something,” he says. “You and this Dr. Berger, what do you guys talk about?”

He shrugs; looks surprised. “Anything. I don’t know. Why?”

“Just curious. What kinds of things?”

“Whatever we feel like. He’s an easy guy to talk to. There’s not a lot of jargon. Once in a while he gives a little lecture—” he leans back in the chair, hands on his thighs, in imitation:“ ‘Perspective, kiddo, that’s the key word—’ ”

“What would you think,” Cal says, “if I were to go and talk with him?”

“What for? About me, you mean?”

“No. Just—I don’t know. To get a few things straight in my own mind.”

Conrad sets his beer down; says with finality, “There’s nothing wrong with you, Dad.”

“Nice. How do you know?”

“You fishing? You want a grade? Okay, I give you a B plus.”

“That’s great,” Cal says. “I buy you a new car, teach you everything I know—how to play tennis, how to clean a garage, I let you beat me at golf—and the best you can do is B plus, that’s great.”

Conrad laughs. “So, I’m a hard marker.”

“Anyway it isn’t important. Just an idea I had.”

“See him if you want to, I don’t care. It’s okay with me.”

But, do I want to? Why do I want to? What’s happening?
Nothing is happening, except that now he is imagining. A peculiar, stiff set to Conrad’s shoulders when she speaks to him. But, does she speak to him? She issues directives: “Wear the sweater your grandparents gave you for Christmas,” she says, walking out of the room without waiting for, without having any interest in his reply. And Conrad is cool to her, cool as he lowers his head in a mocking bow: “Yes, ma‘am. No, ma’am.” As for himself, he feels undercurrents at work: tremors in the earth.

Last night, when they made love (she opens to him only in darkness, only in sex), she let him hold her afterward, whispering against his shoulder: “You haven’t been very friendly, lately.”

“Friendly?” he said. “I’m always friendly.”

“Please.” A silky rush of breath against his face. “I need you to love me, Call Please promise!”

“I love you, Beth. God, you know that.” But he could not hold her tightly enough; she clung to him urgently as he stroked her hair, and he was obscurely frightened, because it was not like her, and because he felt beneath them a fault, imperceptibly widening, threatening.

Drifting into sleep, he lost his balance, tipping backward again into memory. A Saturday morning in October, when Jordan was thirteen. Michigan playing Northwestern. They had planned to go to the game with Nancy and Ray, and Jordan had broken his arm playing football on the front lawn. In the back seat of the car, on the way to the hospital, the two brothers had sat, side by side, and he had turned around to scold them. He had been annoyed at having to miss the game, at the prospect of spending his whole afternoon at the hospital while Buck got X-rays and a cast, and he had said, “I’m beginning to think you’re accident-prone, you know it?” Beth had leveled a look at him:
Not now, you idiot!
Buck, his arm held awkwardly in front of him, asked, “How was I supposed to know the kid would fall on me?” “That’s what tackle is, isn’t it? I’ve told you kids a hundred times, that game’s too rough without equipment! Touch, okay; but not tackle!” “Dad, we promise, we don’t do it again.” But it had been Conrad, shaken and scared who answered him, not Buck. Buck had never worried about anything.

 

 

“Coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

He crosses his legs; uncrosses them, tries to relax. God, he has never been so nervous. He surveys the room: its windows are oil-streaked; cloudy with dirt. An overpowering air of disorder dominates, weighs him down. The bookcases are tightly packed with dark, musty-looking volumes.

The man sitting across from him has a wild look: Primitive Man. His hair is a dark and fuzzy halo about his head; his eyes, a sharp, stinging blue. All the jokes, the stereotypes of psychiatrists flood his mind: they are mad, their children are mad. He knew a boy at Michigan, studying psychiatry, who had gone berserk in the dorm one night and cut up all of his clothes, stabbed his mattress, screaming that Eisenhower had called him person-to-person from Washington, telling him to do it. An absurd memory. It has nothing to do with this man. Yet all of his reactors are at work—summing up, evaluating, rejecting. He shifts uneasily in the chair. “I don’t really believe in psychiatrists,” he says.

Berger laughs. “Okay. What do I do now? Disappear in a puff of smoke?”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant that I don’t believe in psychiatry. As a blanket. A panacea for everybody, you know?”

“Okay,” Berger says. “Me neither.”

Helpful. Trying to be friendly. Only, he is too strange, too alien. Cal stares at the overcrowded, sloping bookshelves, reminded suddenly of a professor that he had in law school, whose briefcase bulged with books, scraps of notes, impedimenta that spewed forth whenever he opened it in class. That first year, the briefcase haunted him; reminded him of the inner caverns of his own mind, adrift in terrible disorganization. “I’m not putting you down,” he says. “Or what you’ve done for him. He’s better, I can see that.”

“Well, he’s working at it, now.”

He feels trapped and hot. “I knew something was wrong,” he says. “Even before. But I always thought—

I mean, he’s very smart. He’s been an all-A student since he started school. I just always thought that intelligent people could work out their own problems....” He fixes the bookshelves with a stern look. ”These books,” he says, “are they all about treating people?”

“No. Not all.”

He looks down at his hands, clenched into fists on his knees. “I wish,” he says, “that I knew what the hell I was doing here.”

“I could use an objective opinion on my coffee,” Berger says. “Your son tells me it’s lousy.”

“Yes. All right.”

He gets up and goes to the table in the corner. “I’m getting a feeling from you,” he says, “of heavy guilt. About missing the signals. Am I right?”

“Yes,” Cal says, “sure.” It is easier now that Berger’s back is to him. He hadn’t realized it was the eyes that were making him nervous. “You don’t have something like that happen and not feel the responsibility.”

“Guilt.”

“Guilt. Yes.” He takes the cup Berger is holding out. “Well, I’m guilty. And lucky, too. I was there at the right time. I could have been at a meeting, we could have both been at meetings.”

“Your wife was there, too?”

“Yes.”

Banging on the door, begging to be let in, while Beth
called for an ambulance: “He wouldn‘t, Cal, oh, he wouldn’t!”
.
“Just call!” he had directed her over his shoulder
.

“So, you think of yourself as a lucky man.”

“No, I wouldn’t say so. Not any more. I used to, before —before the accident.” Then his voice shifts, cuts through the film of the windows, through thousands of pages in hundreds of books, “Hell, all life is accident, every bit of it—who you fall in love with, what grabs you, and what you do with it....”

“That sounds more like the philosophy of a drifter than a tax attorney from Lake Forest,” Berger says.

“Okay, I’m a drifter,” he says. “I’m drifting now. I can see myself—I see both of them, drifting away from me while I stand there, watching. And I don’t know what to do about it.”

“What do you want to do about it?”

“Nothing! I don’t want to do anything but sit here on the fence. Until I fall off. On one side or the other.”

Berger sips his coffee. “You see them on opposite sides of the fence, is that it?”

“Yes,” he says. “No. I don’t know.”

Berger nods. He strokes his upper lip with the edge of his coffee cup.

“I see her,” Cal says, “not being able to forgive him.”

“For what?”

He shrugs. “For surviving, maybe. No, that’s not it, for being too much like her. Hell, I don’t know. She’s like a watercolor. They’re hard to look at, watercolors. You disappear in them sometimes. And after, you don’t know where you’ve been, or what’s happened—” Abruptly he snaps his gaze back inside the room. “I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. I’m not a drifter. I’m not on any fence. I’m not any of those things. Except maybe a lousy husband and father.”

“Ah.” Berger nods. “Well, maybe rotten sons deserve lousy fathers. Yours tells me Tuesdays and Fridays what a rotten kid he is.”

“He shouldn’t. It isn’t true.”

“He comes by it honestly, though.” The smile, open and friendly, invites him to relax, and he wants so much to do it.

He leans back in the chair, rubbing his face with his hands. “He used to call the hospital the Zoo. I asked him if coming to see you was like going to the Zoo, but he said no, it was more like the Circus.”

Berger laughs. “That’s either a compliment,” he says, “or damn poor PR, I don’t know which.”

He takes a deep breath; the first since he has entered the office.

“I think I know why I came here. I think I really came to talk about myself.”

“Okay,” Berger says. “Why don’t we do that?”

Exam week. The first day dawns, sunny and below zero. His car barely has time to warm up before he pulls it into the school parking lot. He leaves it unlocked. Someone might want to take a cigaret break in it, cry in it, who knows?

English. On Miss Mellon’s desk is a stack of plain white paper, and next to it, the sheets of exam questions. She has written, in her spiky, up-and-down handwriting across the chalkboard: RELAX. NO BIG DEAL. Nice. She really is a nice person. He sits down near the door and glances out of the window. Shadows of trees, blue on the snow. Everything glittering out there. She has not been trying to smother him, after all; just trying to be nice.
Don’t get distracted!
He looks around the room at the rest of the class: Joel Marks, Buzz Fayton, Neva Welles sitting dutifully hunched over their papers on three sides of him. The room is thick with the silence of concentration. He looks down at the sheet of questions:

1. Discuss Hardy’s view of Man’s control over his inner/outer environment, using
Jude the Obscure
as example.

2. Are the characters in
Of Human Bondage
people of great strength or great weakness? Support your theory.

3. What is Conrad’s viewpoint, as illustrated in
Lord Jim,
concerning action and consequence?

Automatically, he takes out a pencil, even though his mind has gone stubbornly, soddenly blank. Well, that’s that. Three lousy questions to sum up one semester’s work. What does he have to say about them? Nothing. He has read the books. Period. Miss Mellon passes by his desk, and her skirt brushes the edge of it lightly. During A lunch each day she sits with Mr. Provosky, the algebra teacher. They lean toward each other across the table. Miss Mellon’s hands form neat, geometric shapes in the air when she talks. Probably explaining to him how Jude Fawley was powerless in the grip of circumstances. Yeah, probably. He keeps his head down. He needs his virtue intact this morning. She is one of the females whose bodies he imagines in various stages of undress. And other things. This is waking up? He shudders. Not today. Please.
Concentrate, damn you, Jarrett.
He has read the books. Okay, so he is no further behind, no less equipped than anybody else in here. “Relax,” she says.
Okay. Okay.

 

 

At his locker he collects the books he needs for his chemistry exam on Thursday. He notices, then is noticed by a group of girls at the end of the hall. Someone calls out, “Hi.” He waves; out of the corner of his eye he sees them heading for the exit doors. All but one of them. Jeannine. She shrugs into her coat, tying a scarf firmly about her head. God, if she should come down this way! He has not spoken to her since they came back from Christmas vacation. He wonders now, why he ever put 7.
Girls
on the list. To frustrate himself, for sure.
Girl
would have been ambitious;
Girls
was ridiculous.

He takes another cautious look; she is gone.
Nice going kiddo. Another opportunity missed.
So easy, too. She was by herself; no one to see or hear him stammer around—Ha. No one but her. This is worse than any exam. He stares fixedly into his locker, wasting precious seconds; then he slams it closed, locking it in one lightning motion, and sprints down the hall.

He bursts through the first set of double doors, breathless.

She is standing in the tiny, overheated lobby, pulling on her gloves, her books balanced on the radiator.

“Hi.” He sets his books next to hers as he zips his jacket.

“Hi.” Cool and reserved.

And rightly so. Exactly what has he to offer someone like her? Someone with directions, goals, interests. “What did you have today?”

“History. You?”

“English,” he says. “It wasn’t too bad. How was yours?”

“Easy.”

“Big, smart senior.” He grins at her. She smiles.

He opens the door for her and the air hits them, a wall of piercing cold. She shivers, gripping her books tightly. “’Bye. See you.”

“Would you like a ride home?”

She hesitates; gives him a small, grateful smile. “Oh, that’d be nice. Thanks.”