The Company She Keeps (25 page)

My gostly fader, I me confess,

First to God and then to you,

That at a window—wot ye how?—

I stale a kiss of grete sweteness,

Which don was out of aviseness;

But it is doon not undoon now.

My gostly fader, I me confess,

First to God and then to you.

But I restore it shall doubtless

Again, if so be that I mow;

And that to God I make a vow

And ells I axe foryefness.

Gostly fader, I me confess,

First to God and then to you.

T
HE EYES GLEAMED BENEVOLENTLY
behind the glasses. If she turned her head on the cushion, she could see them, and she kept doing this from time to time, hoping to surprise them in an expression of disapproval, of astonishment or regret—anything but that kindly neutrality. But they did not change, and finally she gave it up, dropped her head back on the cushion, and tried to relax. It was really against the rules (she supposed) to be flopping around there like a fish. He had never scolded her for it; now and then he would say gently, “Don’t worry about what
I
think. Just let your own thoughts come.”

“I dreamed I was seventeen,” she said, “and I was matriculating at a place called Eggshell College.” She could not resist a teasing smile and another glance up at him. “I must have dreamed that just to please you. It’s custom-made. The womb fantasy.”

“Go on with the dream,” he said.

“Well,” she continued, “there was a sort of an outing cabin. We had one at college. It was supposed to be great fun to spend the week end in it. I never did. I thought it was silly—you know, a vestigial trace of the goofy old days when they had chafing dishes and spreads and college sings and went to the Cider Mill for a binge. My aunt had the idea that college was still like that,” she went on. “She tried to give me an electric doughnut-maker to take away with me when I was a freshman. It was the only present she ever offered me.”

She knew without looking that she had coaxed a smile out of him. It was all right, then; she could go on. He understood her attitude toward the outing cabin. Often it was not so easy. She would spend half a session trying to show him, say, that a man they both knew was a ridiculous character, that a movie they had both seen was cheap. And it would be hopeless, absolutely hopeless, for he
was
that man, he
was
that movie; he was the outing cabin, the Popular Front, the League of American Writers, the
Nation,
the
Liberal,
the
New Republic,
George S. Kaufman, Helen Hayes, Colonial wallpaper, money in the bank, and two cocktails (or was it one?) before dinner. When she had worn herself out, he would remind her patiently, “It doesn’t matter what I think, you know.” But it did matter, of course. Sometimes it seemed to her that her analysis could never be finished until he could purge himself of the maple furniture in his waiting room, the etching of the cathedral at Chartres that hung above his desk, the subscription to
Newsweek
that never ran out. Someone had once suggested to her that all this was a matter of policy, that a psychoanalyst in the decoration of his professional quarters aimed deliberately at that colorless objectivity, that rigorous job-lot asceticism that can be seen in its purest form in the residential hotel room. The notion was pleasant but not really plausible. It was impossible to think of Dr. James as a male Cinderella who lived dangerously every night after office hours, and all day Sundays.

“What are you smiling about?” he asked.

“I’m thinking rude thoughts about you.”

Damn my stream of consciousness, her mind said. Why must it keep harping on this embarrassing topic?

“Let’s have them,” he exclaimed, with that ghastly, hand-regulated cheerfulness that seemed to spurt out of him the more eagerly, the more unpleasant were the facts to be faced. To listen to him, you might think that someone had just set a wonderful dinner before him.

“Oh, Dr. James,” she sighed. “Let’s skip it this time. You know what I think about you. It doesn’t give me any pleasure to say it to your face.”

“But your picture of me is very important,” he said, in his pedagogical manner. “Not for what it says about me, but for what it says about
you.
”

This angered her slightly. So he took no stock in her opinion, labeled it “aggression against the analyst,” and dismissed it from his mind. Very well, then….

“I was thinking,” she said, “how utterly fantastic it is to imagine you on a tear.”

“Don’t you suppose I have any fun?” There was a certain wistfulness in the question that must have got in by mistake.

“No doubt you do,” she said, “but I think you must have to work awfully hard at it.”

“What do you suppose I do for relaxation?”

Relaxation,
she thought; there is the key word. There the poor pedant betrays himself.

“Well,” she said, “you see about six plays a year. Your wife makes a list of the things that are really worth while, and you check them off one by one. You get the tickets well in advance, and you generally take another couple with you. You never go on the spur of the moment; you never take standing room. Sometimes somebody in your party knows the girl who is playing the ingénue, and then you go backstage afterwards. You meet some of the actors and think it’s a lot of fun. Once in a while, you go to a benefit concert with your mother or your wife’s mother. Myra Hess for the British Relief. You like the movies, and you never miss one that the
New Yorker
recommends. Now and then, if your party is feeling particularly reckless, you go to a swing-music joint. You’re not much of a dancer, but you ask the other guy’s wife to dance once; after that you sit out because the floor is too crowded. In the summer you commute to your mother-in-law’s place at Larchmont or Riverside. There is a nice crowd of young doctors there, and you kid each other about who is going to go into the water first. Probably there is a certain amount of splashing, but nobody loses his temper, and afterwards you play medicine ball on the beach. Your wife likes tennis, but you don’t go in for it, on account of your eyes. Your wife has a three-quarter-length silver-fox coat and several very dear girl friends. You take excellent care of your health. You have small feet and are proud of it, and this is your only foible.”

“What makes you so sure of all this?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I’ve got a good eye for social types, and I’ve had a lot of practice. When I was in college, I was a perennial house guest. I never went home for vacations, you know.”

She was anxious, now, to change the subject. She had enjoyed doing that malicious portrait, but suddenly toward the end her self-confidence had wavered. Supposing she were wrong? He would not tell her. She would never know. It was like doing an algebra problem and finding that the answers were missing from the back of the book. She felt the ground give way beneath her.

“Nothing I could do would surprise you?” he said.

She began to cry.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “Why do you lead me on so? It’s not fair! You make me say all these awful things to you, and then you won’t even tell me whether I’m right or not.”

The tears streamed from her eyes. She opened her pocketbook and found, as usual, no handkerchief. He took a box of Kleenex from a drawer and handed it to her silently.

“Thank you,” she said, still sobbing. “Do you keep that specially for me or do all your patients weep?”

He did not answer. He never answered questions of this sort.

“What made you cry?” he said at length, in that falsely casual tone he used whenever he asked her an important question.

“You made me feel like a fool,” she said. “I extended myself and you sat and watched. It was like one of those exposure dreams. You go into a restaurant and you think how beautiful and chic you are. You even pose a little, toss your head, draw off your gloves very, very slowly, like an actress. And then all of a sudden you look down and you see that you have nothing on but a pair of pink pants. And the worst of it is that nobody shows the slightest surprise; there is no commotion; the headwaiter doesn’t come and ask you to leave. Everyone goes on eating and talking, so that you think that maybe your eyes have deceived you, and you look stealthily down again, hoping to find your clothes back on. But no; you are still in the same condition. Then you try to tell yourself that perhaps nobody has noticed anything, that if you behave very, very quietly and do not call attention to yourself, your lapse will pass unobserved. But all the time you know that this is not true. They are all watching you, but out of cruelty they will give no sign. If one of your companions were to say, “Why, Meg, you’re undressed,” the situation would be saved. You could exclaim, “Why, gee, I am,” and people would lend you things and laugh and fuss over you, and the whole thing would turn into one of those jolly Embarrassing Moments that readers send in to the
Daily Mirror.
“‘
Imagine my mortification, but there I was without a stitch of clothes!
’”

Dr. James laughed.

“Yes,” he said. “But what is there about you that you don’t want me to see?” He spoke softly now, in the tone of a conspirator in a Grade B movie. “What is it, Meg, that you are so ashamed of?”

She pressed her hands wearily to her forehead. If he would give up this whispering, she could forgive everything. It made them both ridiculous. She longed to reply in a sepulchral voice, “Dr. James, when I was a little girl, I buried my four-year-old cousin alive.”
(Sensation in the courtroom!)
“But don’t tell anybody.” However, these miserable jokes of hers wasted a great deal of time. She knew exactly what would follow. He would scribble furiously in his notebook for a few seconds, and then the questions would come. Did you ever play with a four-year-old cousin? Did you ever want to bury anybody alive? Where did you get this idea of interment? And so on, through
The Last Days of Pompeii, A Cask of Amontillado,
and the giant, whatever his name was, who slept restlessly under Aetna. Matthew Arnold, Empedocles. And Karl Marx: “weighs like an Alp” on the something-or-other.

“Nothing, Dr. James, nothing. There’s nothing I ever did that I haven’t told you.” (But what about the time she had stolen the ring from the five-and-ten and her aunt had made her take it back and confess to the manager? Could it be that? Oh, surely not, her common sense replied. All children steal, and she had already told him of a half a dozen other childish thefts: the cookies from the pantry, the small change from her aunt’s bureau, the dime for the collection plate she had spent on candy. Oh, surely not! And yet … What if it
were
important and she failed to tell him? What if her reluctance to delay over a trifle really masked an unconscious fear? In this room, you never knew whether you were putting obstacles in the way or clearing the path. It was a question of relevance, but how could you determine
what
was relevant to the Unknown?)

Fortunately, he was speaking and she did not have to decide.

“Understand me,” he said. “I don’t think it’s anything you
did.
It’s a feeling that you have about yourself, a feeling that there is something about you that you have to conceal.”

He means sex, she thought with relief. It was not the ring, after all. She could feel her mind wrinkle into a smile. We are heading for the castration complex, she told herself, the horror of the little girl when she discovers that an important part of her is missing.

“I don’t believe in it,” she said aloud.

“Don’t believe in what?”

“All this castration nonsense.”

“How do you know I was going to mention that?”

“Weren’t you?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I was.” (Ah, she thought, without pleasure, I can read him like a book.) “But,” he continued, “I am not trying to foist this idea on you. It was you who brought it up.”

“Oh, Dr. James,” she murmured reproachfully. “You turn everything to your own advantage. If I can read your mind, you say that I put the idea there.”

“No,” he said. “Think! What are the pink pants in your dream there for? What are they hiding?”

She looked quickly up at him, struck by his question, proud of him for having asked it. Perhaps he was not so stupid as she feared.

“It’s true,” she admitted, “when men have exposure dreams, they’re always completely naked. Most women, too. The pink pants are a little idiosyncrasy of my own. Maybe you’ve got it, Dr. James.” She felt suddenly excited and gay. Everything was going to be all right. They were on the scent. The fugitive, criminal self lay hiding in a thicket, but the hounds of the intellect were hot in pursuit. Ah, she thought, thank God for the mind, the chart, the compass. Of course, the universe had to be meaningful. There can be no question without an answer; if you throw a ball up, it must come down. Her life was not mere gibberish; rather, it was like one of those sealed mystery stories where the reader is on his honor not to go beyond a certain page until he has guessed the identity of the murderer. She had come to that imperative blank page again and again and stopped and retraversed her ground, looking for the obvious, unobtrusive clue, the thing that everyone overlooked and that was nevertheless as plain as the nose on your face. “
The Clue of the Pink Pants,
” she said to herself. “The publishers take pride in announcing a new kind of detective story by a young author.” But, seriously, if that were really it …

Then she could go on. She paused to examine this phrase, the vague, dramatic resonance of it, the hollowness of the two
o
’s echoing in a triumph of onomatopoeia the emptiness of the mind that framed it. It was a phrase that came to her lips a dozen times a day. Bumping along on a Madison Avenue bus, she would find herself hammering her fist on her knees and crying out to herself in a sort of whispered shriek, “I can’t go on, I CANNOT GO ON.” And at home, in the apartment on Sutton Place (“not one of the really smart ones, my dear, just one of Vincent Astor’s remodeled tenements”), she would suddenly set her fork down on her plate and say to her husband, “I can’t go on. Listen to me, Frederick, I can’t go on.” She would watch the surprise invade his anxious face, the pain, the irritation, the Do-we-have-to-go-through-all-this-again, the doubt (tact or brutality, which was the better method?), the desire to get through the meal in peace, the final decision to humor her until the maid brought the coffee in. “Finish your supper, my dear,” he would say, calmly, easily, so as not to put pressure on her. In the end, she would pick up her fork again and, with an exaggerated listlessness, begin to eat. This was what she could not forgive herself: the capitulation. If she had any strength of character, she would commit suicide. But they would never find
her
body in the river. Ah, no, not she! She knew which side her bread was buttered on. Better a live coward than a dead hero, as her colored maid always said. “Cemetery’s full of heroes,” she could hear the soft, wicked Negro voice.
Lacedaemonians, shed a tear … Maestius lacrimis Simonideis.
The distich of grief was not for her. She remembered how in boarding school, bemused by sad poetry out of an anthology, she had sat half one night with her feet hanging out her window, knowing that she would never have the heart to jump, yet telling herself from moment to moment that
of course
in five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen, she would. When, at last, she had crept back into her bed, cold and dispirited, the romantic melancholy had blown away, leaving her with a mild, depression, for she had in truth seen her own grave, the narrow, schoolgirl’s bed with its regulation blanket which she would always, however late, return to. It was characteristic, she thought now, that she had not even caught a cold.