The Children of Hamelin (13 page)

“We understand,” Charley said.

“We’ve all felt it,” Ida said.

“All of us.”

“You’re not alone, man,” Rich said.

Yeah sure, the words were there and maybe they even meant it. But I knew damn well Ida and Charley had never dropped acid, so how could they have
really
felt what I felt. Unless... unless acid had nothing to do with it... But...

“An important thing just happened to you, Tom,” Harvey said. “You’ve started to face the fact that you’re unhappy, that you’ve got an unfulfilled need. That’s what unhappiness is—unfulfilled need. That’s why no one can really be happy till he’s achieved Total Consciousness; unhappiness is the unresolved tension between your ego’s needs and the environment. Didn’t you say you took heroin to fill a void inside? Isn’t the void still there? Isn’t the void your inability to fit in? We all have that void inside because we all want to merge with something greater than ourselves. Everyone who ever lived has shared that desire because some primal wisdom deeper than the ego knows that the sick separation between the internal and the external that we think of as the self is the enemy. The fear you feel when you confront that need is the sickness of the self fighting to preserve its warped existence.”

“The self
is
loneliness,” Arlene said.

I was scared; I admitted to myself that I was scared. Man, I just didn’t know. I couldn’t prove that Harvey wasn’t right, and if he was, everything I believed in, everything I was, was wrong. But if he was wrong—and he couldn’t prove he
wasn’t
wrong—then his voice was the voice of smack, of darkness, of evil. And I just couldn’t know. Harvey had shown me that there was a question at the core of my universe, not certainty. And I wasn’t even sure what the question was. And even if Harvey knew how to ask the right question, that didn’t mean he had the right answer. And, sick or not, my instincts retched at everything he said.

I felt drained, drained and uncertain of where I stood or what was real. But I damn well knew I didn’t want to talk about it any more. What was there left to talk about? Need? Yeah, I felt a need—a need to kick things apart, get back to reality, clear all this metaphysical shit out of my head, let someone else suck up the void for a change.

So I said: “Why did you
really
drag me here, Arlene?”

It worked. I could see their eyes shifting from me to her. If it had been an acid return-trip, then I had come down; this was, after all, just a roomful of pretty screwed-up people rapping on each other.

“Drag you here?” she said. “That’s not fair. I just thought you needed—”

“That’s not what you told me in bed,” I said. Arlene winced. Well, wasn’t this what she had asked for? I could play by their rules too!

“Oh, so you’ve been making it with this guy,” Charley said.

“How was he?” Ida said, trying to sound malicious, but coming on envious despite herself.

“How could I describe it to
you?”
Arlene said. Ida blanched. Ug-ly!

“That’s not the question, now is it?” Doris said.

“Yeah,” said Rich, “the question is, how was
she?
How about it man? What kind of a lay was she?”

What the hell had I started? You shit, you! I told myself. I tried to read Arlene’s face; jaw clenched, eyes expressionless as two chips of green glass. I could tell she was thoroughly uptight, as she had a right to be, but at me? at them? at herself? I tried to tell her with my eyes that I wouldn’t betray her.

“Come on,” Linda Kahn said greedily, “tell us how she was.”

“It’s none of your business,” I said.

“Oh yes it is,” Ida said. “We’re supposed to be totally honest in here. No holding back.”

“So call me a party-pooper. I still say it’s none of your business.”

“He doesn’t really have to tell us, does he, Arlene?”

“Yeah,” said Charley. “You’re wasting your time playing gentleman, Hollander. This sorry creature has been whining about what a lousy lay she is ever since she started coming here. You’ve gotten yourself involved with a real loser.”

“Watch yourself, man,” I said, getting up on the edge of my chair, “Or you’ll find yourself spitting teeth.”

“No violence,” Harvey said, not raising his voice even now. “You don’t understand the rules—no violence is one and complete freedom to say whatever comes into your mind is the other. Those are the only rules in here.”

“Yeah, well shove your rules,” I told him, “Because I’ve just made another: Charley watches his dirty mouth, or I kick his ass.”

Arlene shot me a dirty look, a hurt look. “Please Tom,” she said, “this isn’t doing me any good. I know you mean well, but I don’t
want
you protecting me.”

How does anyone with the standard number of testicles react to
that?

What do you do with a chick that’s so screwed up she defends the creeps you’re trying to defend her from?

“You don’t know her as well as we do, man,” Rich said. “She
digs
telling us what a crummy fuck she is. It’s her thing. Isn’t it, Arlene?”

Arlene started kneading her hands together. Her body was stiff as a board. Fuck their stupid rules! There were higher rules—like the way human beings should treat each other. Stinking sadistic voyeurs!

“I... I... can’t help it...” Arlene said. “I just can’t let go... I can’t feel... can’t let a man—” Her body started to shake, working up to a sob. She seemed to be blinking back tears. I felt a tremendous wave of tenderness for this poor lost chick; and at the same time a red flash of fury. By Jesus, I wouldn’t let these shits do that to her, and I damn well wouldn’t let her do it to herself!

“Take it easy, baby,” I said. “Your only real problem in bed seems to be that you don’t know how good you are.”

Arlene stared at me; her eyes widened but they were cold as ice, maybe even angry. She knew I was lying, but she didn’t appreciate it; she probably didn’t even know why I was doing it. And that was the saddest thing of all. It thoroughly pissed me off. I would damn well be her Knight in White Armor whether she liked it or not!

“Oh wow,” Rich said, “what’ve you been screwing lately, man, dead bodies?”

“What I told Charley goes in spades for you, creep,” I told him.

“You just don’t understand, Tom,” Doris said patiently. “You’re not doing Arlene any good. She’s been telling us how bad she is in every session.”

“Yeah, well did it ever occur to any of you that maybe
that’s
her problem?” I looked around the room: Harvey didn’t seem like the type to ball the clientele, and even if he did, he sure wouldn’t admit it here; Charley was too old; Rich was too young. Seemed like a pretty safe bet.

“Any of you actually made it with Arlene?”

Silence.

“All right,” I said. “Well I have and you haven’t, so none of you can sit here and put her down as a bad lay and have any claim to know what the hell you’re talking about. Only me—and I’m not complaining, dig?”

Arlene stared at me, saying no with her eyes. I stared back and her eyes seemed to change, go softer, widen, as if she were finally at least accepting what I was doing as an expression of, well, love. Jesus Christ, hadn’t anyone ever stood up for this poor chick before?

“You’re just not making it as the defender of feminine honor,” Charley said. “You’re not fooling anyone, Hollander.”

I gave each of them the evil eye in turn, thought hardass images at them: Cagney, early Brando, Bogart; like that.

“I, Tom Hollander, am saying that Arlene Cooper is a good lay, dig?” I said evenly.

Arlene favored me with a grim little smile. Admiration, understanding of the feeling behind what I was doing, maybe even affection. But not the gratitude I deserved.

“Bullshit,” Rich said.

“What did you say?” I whispered, making like Jack Palance.

“I said bullshit.”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“I—”

“Before you open your mouth again, friend,” I interrupted, “You better understand that anyone who calls me a liar to my face had better be prepared to back up his mouth with his fists.”

“The rules—” Harvey started to say.

“This room is your turf,” I said. “But sooner or later, Mouth here is going to have to step outside, and then we play by my rules. That goes for everyone else in this room. I am a dangerous psychopathic ex-junkie and I will kick the living shit out of anyone who calls me a liar. Dig?”

“I noticed that you seemed excited at the prospect of a fight between two men, Ida,” Harvey said smoothly.

That ended that. After a few riffs on Ida’s ambivalence about her well-aged virginity, Linda’s paranoia about men, Doris’ all-too-justified jealousy over Ted’s history of balling everything that moved, and an old Charley’s booze and failure hang-ups, the session broke up.

Outside in the hall, Doris came up to me grinning like a momma cat that just watched her kitten eat its first canary.

“You were very impressive in there,” she said. “I never saw anyone open up that much in their first session.”

“Yeah, well I thought
you
were pretty shitty in there, bringing up all that junk crap.”

“It got you to where you had to go, didn’t it?”

“Did it?”

Maybe I was asking myself the question too. I couldn’t kid myself that
nothing
had happened, but couldn’t that flash have been a standard reaction to Harvey’s standard pitch? He was damn good at his own thing, whatever it was; had to give him that. So maybe he started with whatever handle he could find on every potential sucker and then worked it around to that “void inside” thing; you had to be some kind of psychic superman not to get
some
kind of bad flash off that, even without an acid return-trip to back it up. Yeah, no doubt about it, Harvey had a pretty good Big Question working for him.

But that didn’t have to mean he had any Answer.

Rich passed us on the way to the john. He smiled at me. “You were real heavy in there, man,” he said.

I goggled at him; I had been ready to mop the floor with this cat and here he was acting like we were old buddies.

He must’ve seen it on my face, because he shook his head and said: “Oh, that’s not real in there, man. It’s a separate world. You don’t carry any hassles that go on in a group outside.”

I was going to point out that if I had broken his jaw in there, he sure as hell would’ve carried
that
outside, but before I could get my mouth open, he was in the john.

But it really did seem to work that way for all of them. Ida and Linda, who had been at each other’s throats toward the end of the session, walked towards the stairs yakking with each other like two Bronx housefraus over the fire-escape. Charley nodded to me as he split. I didn’t know whether to be touched or disgusted—it would be unbelievable messy to continue the nastiness that went on in the group in the real world, but wasn’t it sheer gutlessness not to?

“Well, what do you think?” Doris asked.

“About what?”

“The Foundation. Are you going to give it a try?”

Well, fifty bucks for six weeks was less than ten a week and I could sure afford that... I caught myself making the calculation and that brought me up short. I had to face the unpleasant fact that I
was
considering the six week bargain sale. Why? Just because Harvey had hit me with a question I couldn’t answer? It didn’t follow that I would find any more answer here than I had in smack.

But on the other hand, it didn’t follow that I wouldn’t....

I looked up and down the narrow hallway. Except for our group, the place was empty on Friday night, but according to Doris, they had a party of one kind or another every Saturday night; that could be groovy, I suppose. Watch it! You’re letting yourself get sucked into this thing!

Where the hell was Arlene? She was the reason I had come back here in the first place; idea was to get her out of here, have dinner and then try to make all the lies I had told in there come true. Anyway, it would help change the subject....

“Hey, where is Arlene?” I asked Doris.

“I think she’s in the office talking to Harvey.”

“Where’s that?”

Doris pointed up the hall away from the big Foundation living room. “Is there really something between you and Arlene?” she asked.

“You heard what went on in there.”

“Aw come on, Tom,” Doris said. “So you went to bed with her and told a few lies for her. How much does that really mean to you?”

“Who said I lied for her?”

Doris shook her head with that old knowing grin. “It’s
me
you’re talking to,” she said. Yeah, that was the old Doris. For some reason, it made me feel sad.

“Why didn’t you say that in there?”

Doris grinned at me in mock terror. “I was afraid you’d punch me,” she said.

“Tsk, tsk. You mean you didn’t play by the rules?” I pouted like the teacher’s pet.

“You can carry the rules too far,” she said, suddenly serious.

“Just between us chickens, Doris, how much of all this are you really taking seriously? Cross my heart, I won’t tell.”

“I don’t really know, Tom. Ted takes it seriously, and I take Ted seriously... And Ted
has
been faithful to me for the first good long stretch since we were married. That’s real. That’s serious. The Foundation did that. But... but...”

“But you’re not sure whether all this has changed Ted’s head or just made him incapable...”

“Yeah—”A tiny whisper.

“But what’s it done to
you?”

Doris forced a little smile, looked at me with her big sad eyes and shrugged. “Who me?” she said. “I’m just a stable Earth Mother type, right...?”

I almost reached out and hugged her. I really wanted to; she was the best woman I had ever known, had to be to put up with Ted, and she deserved so much better than this bummer. Ah shit, Doris, if you weren’t really in love with Ted and I�Thought-crime!

Fortunately, Arlene and Harvey emerged from the office at the end of the hall and the moment was gone before Doris could sense what I had been about to think.

“Well there they are,” Doris said. “Are you going to try six weeks at the Foundation?”

Something in her voice seemed to say “please.” And I thought I understood why: mind to mind, Doris and I were closer in a way than Doris and Ted or Ted and me. The thing between us had never really threatened to become sexual (although if I believed in that crap, I would’ve thought that Doris and I had been lovers a couple of incarnations ago); but we thought in the same style and Doris, being uncertain about the Foundation beneath all the bullshit, wanted to see how I’d react so she could sort out her own head. I was her place to stand, her alter-ego, her psychic litmus-paper. I suddenly realized that if I didn’t give it the six weeks, I’d be letting her down in a weird way.