Saint Peter’s Wolf (2 page)

“She is a young dog. A year old,” said the doctor. “She has that youth going for her.”

Johanna turned to follow the doctor into the office, and then turned back to say, “I am so selfish. There you are, so patient. Surely I am keeping you. You are so kind.”

She looked into my eyes again, a direct gaze that made me feel that she knew me well, knew and understood me. At such moments she was not the person in need, shaken and afraid. She seemed to know something about me that had allowed her to accept my help. I nearly thanked her.

It would be a long time, the doctor told me pointedly, before they would know anything. I had the feeling that he wanted this attractive woman to himself. The receptionist glanced my way. If I stayed any longer, everyone seemed to say, it would begin to look suspiciously as though I had injured the dog through negligence, or even maliciousness, and now wanted to linger here either to assuage my guilt or to prey on this sorrowful woman. They were protective of their clients. I was an outsider.

And Johanna's manner had changed. There were x rays, now, and surgical procedures. She was an intelligent woman, and given information she could begin to see for herself what hope, or what sorrow, lay before her. I could go.

Before I left I pressed my card into her hand, feeling the act to be painfully inappropriate. And yet I wanted to hear from her again, and as the door swung shut behind her I stood there, thinking: don't die.

Please don't die.

Two

I did not want to leave.

I had not seen her give me her card. The act must have been invisible. But I stared down into my hand, and read her name. Johanna Fisher.

I said her name to myself as I sat in my car. I was reluctant to drive this instrument of harm, but I did have places to go after all. And now I had something of hers in my wallet, her card, her name, a talisman to guarantee that I would see her again.

As I drove I wondered at what she had told me. The accident, and her pale hands, had captured me. I was a fool, I told myself. I would probably never know Zinser, but more importantly I would probably never see this alluring woman again. I would have Tina make arrangements to pay for the dog's injuries, and I keenly wanted to learn whether or not the dog survived. But our moment of closeness was over. Crisis had brought it about, and now that the emergency had become a medical ordeal, I had no more emotional role to play.

I was puzzled, as I found my usual parking place, that I had told her only certain things about myself. I am not a secretive man, but it had been as though I had sensed that she would understand my interest in collecting. Many people did, but many did not. I was, by profession, a psychologist, and although money left to me by my family supported my collecting, I had found satisfaction and respect in my practice, and at the age of thirty-eight I was beginning to enjoy my life as never before, balancing my love for unusual treasures—even very strange artifacts—with a desire to help people.

But I had not even mentioned my profession to her. I was used to questioning myself. It was the result of years of training, and a mental tool I valued. Was I in fact a little tired of my office and my clients? Was I finding my clients too easy to help? Listening—and I had always thought of myself as a “good” listener—was becoming all too easy for me lately.

I tended to know what people were going to say before they said it. I saw, like a weary priest, much of what there was to be seen during the first few minutes. To help my clients see themselves was still very demanding. But the excitement of participating with them in this search for hope was no longer as stirring as it had been. Perhaps this was why I had let my practice fall fallow during recent months.

Tina looked up from her computer. It was “her” computer because she had sighed and wheedled and sulked her way into forcing Orr and me to buy it. Now neither of us could possibly tell any of our clients how much they owed. I am familiar with computers, and I am not afraid of any machine, but Tina had chosen a filing system so difficult and code-ridden that she was now more indispensable than ever. She had just asked for and gotten a raise. She wore a silk blouse even fuller and more brightly colored than the vet's receptionist, and in recent days she had taken to wearing makeup for the first time, just a little blush on her cheeks—or perhaps it was the flush of triumph.

“Mr. Porterman is here early,” she said.

“Splendid,” I said, running my hands through my hair, staring around at the walls as though I had never seen them before.

“You look.…” I have never known Tina to suffer a loss for words. I was concerned. I knew I felt shaken. How bad did I look? “A bit off. Beside yourself, actually,” she said.

Tina would always choose a somewhat bookish phrase in place of a more normal, idiomatic choice of words. So I gathered that I looked merely rattled, out of breath. Tina was the only person I knew who said “in future” instead of “in
the
future,” and even, from time to time, “on holiday” instead of “on vacation” in reference to one of Orr's frequent absences. She had been born in Van Nuys, but a couple of years before had spent a few weeks at a summer program in Oxford. She was attractive enough to figure in an amazing number of my clients' erotic dreams.

“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 Bridge. 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.