Other People's Lives (7 page)

“What did Elliot get?” Matthew said. His voice was high-pitched, his mouth was thick with peanut butter and jelly; he looked, Louise thought, like a little boy just checking up on someone else's special present.

“Look at him, Maria! Just look at that face—that adorable, precious facet He looks exactly like Dennis…But what are you feeding him, darling?
Peanut
butter? I feel
terrible!
You know me with my cooking, I
love
it, I would have made you
anything.
Never mind the limitations I have to put up with here and the broken boiler.”

“It's all right, Rebecca,” Maria said. “I didn't anyway know where we would be coming and I don't believe ever to stop in the highway places.”

“Darling, I know it. The food is inedible, it's American Bland—that's what
I
call it, and who knows what crap they put into it! I
always
took along my own wonderful things. Breads and meats and cheeses and pt! Of course, now everyone does it, but they buy them from Zabar's and they think they're being so original. And they don't even
believe
me when I say that
I
made everything myself. Because I wasn't afraid to experiment, and as far as foods go, in my opinion, all they are is Nouveau Gourmet.”

“An apple, Matthew, baby? Or a tangerine? Which?”

“Tangerines, tangerines—that's the one thing I have plenty of,” Rebecca said, hopping again through the swinging door. “That's the least I can do for you, and don't think I forgot about Matthew and his peanut butter. Remember when he was little? How I always kept a jar of peanut butter waiting specially for him? Because who else do I know who would touch it?”

“Rebecca,” Maria called out. “Your nephew Elliot. What do you want him to ask me about?”

“Oh, Elliot? I
told
you, Maria. He's going on a very special scientific exchange program to the Soviet Union, and he's going to be in Leningrad and he was practically hand-picked. And it's absolutely marvelous and exciting and I knew you'd be able to tell him everything.”

“Leningrad I think is very cold,” Maria said. “I wasn't ever there. Where it's warm, I think, is the Crim? Crimea? I don't know how you say it—they took us only to Moscow, also very cold, but people said always where it's nice, pleasant, is the Black Sea.”

“Oh, it's
all
wonderful, I knew you'd think so. You're exactly the right person to ask and I'm so glad I thought of it.” Rebecca returned with a cellophane bag of tangerines which she cradled under her layers of clothing.

“Tits,” Matthew whispered to Julie, giggling. “Look at all her titties.”

“Aren't children wonderful, Maria? Even in times like these they can find things to laugh and be happy about. And
we're
the ones who take it away from them. I don't know why and I don't know how, but it's something I was always very careful about and people can say I have a childlike nature, I don't care. Because it keeps me young in my attitudes and that's what everyone always appreciates about me.”

Rebecca put the bag of tangerines out on the table and said, “I know this isn't very fancy, I didn't put it in a bowl or anything, but I never believed in being bourgeois. Come on, girls, aren't you eating?” It was the first time she seemed to realize that Louise and Julie were there. But it was not Louise whom she was looking at. Naturally. “Darling,” she said, turning to Julie, “you look very familiar to me. Tell me your name again. How do I know you?”

Pulling her wool cap down as far as it would go, Julie stared straight at the andirons. She looked extremely sullen, but clearly didn't worry that other people might think so. Why should she? It wouldn't make them wonder about
her
mental health…

Louise's new doctor, who was two bus rides away, was named Dr. Vinograd. On the New York City busses, which she had forgotten, his name chuffed toward her like a Russian train station—Vino
grad
Vino
grad
(whistles blew in the icy expanse)—and when he came out into the waiting room to greet her—balding and heavy-set—he seemed to be chuffing, too: last train out, the barrier down, the station-master swaying with his lantern in regret and stamping his feet in the cold. His size surprised her: so large and broad-shouldered amid the exact neatness of scaled-down, precise waiting-room furniture, how did he not bump into things? Intent on keeping her thoughts in one line, she looked up into the roundness of his face—expanding, creasing forehead and unending, puffed-out cheeks—and tried to find in it a map of Russia. Other than a vague idea of vast and lonely endlessness, she did not know what the map of Russia looked like.

In fact, though she had been given very exact directions, Louise had missed her stop. In the late-afternoon January slush, she had been watching two sets of children coming home from school, carrying notebooks and art projects, each with their mothers. Louise noticed the first set as soon as they got on the bus: a small, dark-haired, small-featured mother and her two daughters. One of the girls had short, dark, curly hair like her mother's and the other's long, straight hair, clasped back in a pony tail, came out in child's runny strands beneath her rain hat. The mother, to Louise's eye, was obviously European. She spoke very quietly, with a trace of a British accent, and smiled at her two little girls in a kind of wonder as they chattered together, unaware of the bus or the rain. The girls' voices, excited but indistinct, rose occasionally in the bell-like shrillness of childhood.

“Rachel! Evie!” their mother said, as she half raised a finger to shush them. She smiled as she said it, and seeing that Louise had taken it in, she looked up directly and smiled at her, too.

Because of this smile, Louise could not look at them any longer and finally, having passed her stop, she stood up to pull the cord and saw that Rachel, Evie, and their mother were no longer there. They had secretly climbed out of the bus before she could climb into their lives.

As far as Louise could see, the most important thing to tell Dr. Vinograd first was the faces she kept seeing everywhere. Literally, they would not let her rest. In her room in Maria's apartment, creases in the sheets and the pillows, cracks in the ceiling and the walls, each of them, all of them gave back strange, changing faces. First they were vague and cloudlike, but they changed immediately as she looked at them into odd, distorted, devouring shapes. They were not animals, not people, but freaklike pieces of features: a round, growing, man-woman's cheek stretching into a smirk or a howl. It would dissolve into a small, sharp, barking dog's single sharp, triangular ear. Or the curtain would stir and there would be a certain monkey's lean, vicious face-leering, ridiculous—till the leer itself turned into a curling, switching, bodiless tail smelling of a zoo.

“Don't be afraid of the noises,” Maria had said the first evening. “He's only crazy.” She did not mean the awful clang of the plumbing which went on constantly, vibrating through all the apartments on that line whenever it was used, but the nightly noises of the man in the next-door apartment, whose bedroom wall was on the other side of Louise's. Every night he yelled the same wild karate commands and apparently knocked over large pieces of furniture. He kept it up for a long time and when the throwing and yelling part was over, he laughed in a loud, stupid, braying voice; beside it you could hear a girl's voice giggling and shrieking, high-pitched and equally stupid.

“It's only foreplay,” Maria said. “I don't know how he pays the rent. His father, maybe. He used to be in advertising, advertisement—
I
don't know. Now he doesn't have a job. He has a motorcycle. This girl has been for a long time, I think maybe she has a job. He has always the same maid—s
he
has a job, the laundry also. From his parents, probably.
I
think.”

At the bathroom sink, Louise did not arrange her toothbrush and face soap, but stared at the drops of water as they gurgled into the drain. They clung to the basin in groups, separating singly, dismally, as they were forced, without control, toward the drain.

It was all this, Louise knew, that she had to tell Dr. Vinograd, but though she began to, he did not ask her to go on, nor did he ask her about dreams. He talked to her instead about registering for courses.

“I
can't
go to school,” Louise said. “I'm not ready. You know what happened before.”

Dr. Vinograd pulled at his tie, it seemed to be a characteristic gesture. “It wouldn't have to be for credit, you could do it non-matric. Take two or three courses and see what you like. You're testing
them,
you know.”

“I'm not taking cello
anyplace.”

“You don't have to,” he said, and smiling boyishly, pleasantly, seemed to mean it. The smile was inward; it fogged his glasses and gave his large, round face a momentary nostalgic look. “You could take history.”

“I
hate
history,” Louise said, surprised at her own vehemence, and knew that what she meant was she hated her own. That was the other thing she had to tell him about, get it over with now, but Dr. Vinograd was on the phone. It seemed to go on ringing incessantly, and at each new call he scrupulously said, “I'm sorry,” or shook his head in what might have been genuine dismay.

Louise was not sorry: she turned to look at the one wall lined entirely with bookshelves. It was the same wall of bookshelves she had been looking at since her early teens. What did familiarity breed? Dr. Vinograd's voice went on at the telephone: a woman's nightmare, maybe, had burst out into the middle of the day, a boy had flunked out of school and was going to be drafted, a girl's father had died suddenly and she had run out of medication. Maybe. Maybe. Dr. Vinograd turned through the pages of his appointment book. Maybe they were just all canceling their appointments because something better had come up. It was more likely; in other people's lives, it was always more likely.

“About ten?” Dr. Vinograd said. “I thought you said about two. I know, I know, it's only my own wishful thinking.”

About. About. A-boat, was what he said. He had a Canadian accent.

The Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud,
the Ernest Jones biography, the
Physicians' Desk Reference, Psychosomatic Medicine, Childhood and Society, The Origins of Psychoanalysis, Organization and Pathology of Thought, Disturbed Communication, A History of Medical Psychology, Schizophrenia as a Human Process, Psychoanalysis of the Neuroses, Psychoanalytic Education in the United States, Community Programs for Mental Health
…What familiarity bred was a dazed, dumb sense of safety and the giddiness of something slightly ludicrous.

To Louise, Dr. Vinograd said very seriously, “I'm terribly sorry we've had so many interruptions.” He pulled at his tie; any minute now, he would certainly say, “What are you thinking about?” It was not foreknowledge, it was not
déja vu,
it was simply familiarity.

“What were you thinking about all that time?”

A-boat. A-boat. To stop herself from laughing, Louise said very quickly, “I
know
why my sister wouldn't write to me.

Elisabeth walked around the streets of Stockholm, her blondness the same as the city's pure white light, her cold, even features the same as its architecture. Cameras were slung over her shoulders and her small eyes squinted into the distance, envisioning in it a building which did not yet exist. Her clothing also seemed blond, which in these streets appeared unremarkable like everything else about Elisabeth, but, exactly like the photograph in the
Times,
was the purposeful opposite of what was true. She stopped now and then to buy things; she smiled though she did not mean it, she spoke in perfect Swedish, she counted up her change and left. At an outdoor stand she bought flowers, and in her stark, blond, grainy apartment, placed them in a dark-red cut-glass vase. The vase did not exactly belong with the apartment, but stood out in its own old-fashioned vivid beauty just for that reason. It had belonged to her husband's family for generations, and had been given to Elisabeth as a wedding present. She walked with it carefully, nimbly, quietly to the kitchen, where she filled it with water and, still carrying it, managing it easily, went past her sons' bedroom. It was neat and colorful, this room, filled with unusual, ingenious European toys. The two little boys, Per and Arne, tiny and towheaded, were playing together, rolling on the floor, giggling and shrieking. Elisabeth smiled and raised one finger to shush them; it was possible, even, that she might have hugged them, but she was carrying the flower-filled vase, which she did not return to the living room. She walked on with it farther back into the apartment and put it down finally on a small white ledge in the study. In this room, wide-windowed and curtainless, the light was ice cold and the stillness absolute: it was exactly what Elisabeth liked. Two high, slanted drafting tables and raised high-backed chairs were facing opposite walls. On one of the chairs sat Elisabeth's husband, his body straight, long, and lean, his hair very fair but slightly curly. Only the back of him was visible, he was concentrating on a blueprint on the slanted drafting table. The phone rang—the short several buzzing rings of European phones. Elisabeth's husband got up to answer it. He did not say hello, but said, “Bjelding,” and after a brief conversation consisting mainly of Swedish monosyllables, hung up the phone and noticed the vase and flowers on the sill. He smiled at Elisabeth and more or less grasped her hand. They stood that way for a few minutes, and then sat down, both of them, on their high-backed chairs which faced opposite walls. Occasional Swedish monosyllables floated between them in the ice-cold light of the room which Elisabeth loved. She had climbed directly onto the screen of a Bergman movie, and had allowed nothing and no one to stop her.