Acquainted with the Night Read online

  Acquainted with the Night

  Stories

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  For Tobi Tobias, for all those years when she asked for more

  Contents

  The Age of Analysis

  The Middle Classes

  Sound Is Second Sight

  Mrs. Saunders Writes to the World

  The Wrath-bearing Tree

  Plaisir d’amour

  Over the Hill

  The Accounting

  Life Is an Adventure, with Risks

  The Death of Harriet Gross

  Grand Staircases

  The Sunfish and the Mermaid

  The Opiate of the People

  Epistemology, Sex, and the Shedding of Light

  The Man at the Gate

  Acquainted with the Night

  THE AGE OF ANALYSIS

  PAUL HAD ALWAYS HAD an analyst, ever since he could remember. It began long ago, when, after several days of kicking, screaming, and gobbling handfuls of soil from his mother’s potted plants, he was carried by his parents, working in tandem, into the car and on to Dr. Trowbridge’s office in a tall building on North Michigan. How old he was then—eight, ten, six—Paul couldn’t recall precisely. But he did remember quite clearly that first sight of the analyst.

  Dr. Trowbridge struck him as a comfortable, grandmotherly woman. She sat calmly in a leather chair behind a formidable wooden desk, smiling a friendly greeting as his parents dragged him in. She had short wavy gray hair, plump cheeks, and very thick glasses with pale-pink frames; she wore a cotton print dress with short sleeves. It must have been summer. He remembered they had no coats. Later on, in their private sessions, when she used to come out from behind her desk to stroll around the green-carpeted office, he noticed that she wore black oxford shoes with laces, old-lady shoes. Her ankles were thick.

  Once he was in the office that seminal afternoon, he ceased his kicking and screaming. No one knew exactly why. He was distracted, perhaps, by the new surroundings, by the abstract mobile of colorful shapes hanging from the low ceiling, by the soft artificial light and the numerous framed documents on the paneled walls. He caught his breath and shut up, impressed that he had driven them to do something about him at last, to stop him, as if he were a runaway windup toy on which they had placed an overdue restraining hand. And what they had done was this relaxed elderly woman who smoked with a slender black cigarette holder, something he had never seen before.

  He grew very fond of her and she allowed this fondness. Now, at fifteen, Paul didn’t remember much of what they had done or said together except for the mazes. Dr. Trowbridge was very keen on maze games. She produced a new one almost every time Paul came. They bored him, but he felt it would sound impolite or ungrateful to tell her that, particularly as she appeared to enjoy them so. As time passed, he graduated from large, wooden block mazes to small cardboard or plastic structures, to dittoed sheets, the most abstract. (Yes, she said, when he remarked on the dittos, she had other young patients. This bothered him, the idea of other children bending their heads with her over the same dittoed sheets, basking in her endless, soothing calm, especially since he never saw them in the small waiting room that hummed with white noise. But as they talked it over he came to accept a nonexclusive relationship.) He hadn’t understood the purpose of mazes at first, and performed aimlessly, until Dr. Trowbridge explained that the purpose was to find the most direct way out. Even then they didn’t make much sense—why not linger, he thought, on the intricate paths—but he tried to be cooperative. She taught him to work backwards from the goal. Dr. Trowbridge didn’t take things as seriously as his parents, nor was she appalled by his lapses into violence. And as she listened and nodded in her quiet way, it began to seem that there was space in him to absorb still another shaming incident with a bit of compassion. This lack of seriousness in her puzzled him, though, for he knew what her purpose was. She was hired specifically to take him seriously, to find out what made him so difficult. She was a superior being who lived above the fray. At least that was what he inferred. Her office was hushed like a holy place. With her he was not difficult.

  Then, one nasty day, she announced that he was getting too old for her. She was a child psychiatrist, she explained, and he at thirteen was no longer a child. He was ready to move on to a specialist in adolescence. Paul made a scene, of course; it was the least he could do to preserve his self-respect. He ripped the mobile from the ceiling, tangling and cutting his fingers in the wires, and shouted bitter accusations, which she sat through quietly as if she had expected them.

  “I know how you feel,” she said. “Separation anxiety.” That phrase from the occult language was a further betrayal, and sent him further into rage. He was heading for the curtains, the blood pounding in his head, lunging to fling them down, when she said, “Please, Paul. It’s so hard to get curtains. They have to come and measure, and bring samples of fabric. It takes weeks. Please.” She smiled mildly, and he stopped.

  By now he had forgiven her and thought about her with gentle nostalgia, since he was fairly well settled in with Dr. Crewes, whose office was just off Lake Shore Drive. Dr. Crewes was not like Dr. Trowbridge, either in spirit or in appearance. She was much younger, for one thing, maybe thirty or thirty-five, he guessed. Sometimes he thought she was smarter, too; she sounded smarter, in any case. She chain-smoked and fiddled with things on her desk and had a sharp, knifelike voice that sometimes echoed gratingly in his ears hours after he left her. She wasn’t easygoing, but to compensate, there was a simmering excitement in talking to her. Lately a pleasant sexual buzz hovered around him when he sat opposite Dr. Crewes. They talked about it, naturally, and she said evenly that it was quite all right. It was to be expected. She smiled and showed two perfect rows of small sharp teeth. Dr. Crewes had a broad face, wide green eyes, and shoulder-length straight brown hair that she dashed nervously off her forehead. She never removed her very large round tinted glasses. Usually she wore pants suits with soft sweaters and odd loops of beads. Once, on a rainy day, she had worn blue jeans. Paul encountered her sometimes in his dreams wearing a succession of bizarre costumes, but he never touched her. Either he was afraid, or she drifted away when he reached out.

  With the professional help of Drs. Trowbridge and Crewes, Paul had inched his way through youth as through a mined field. He had reached his second year of high school, a better than average student, though there had been months now and then of neglecting his studies and becoming obsessed by games—first backgammon, then chess, most recently horse racing. He won $150 at the track last summer, which he never told his parents about, but he told Dr. Crewes. She seemed proud of his skill in calculating odds, and made clever, provocative analogies between games of chance and real-life situations. Paul told her everything. Even the things he deliberately planned not to tell—in bouts of resistance—she somehow got out of him, or else once they passed by undiscussed, they came to seem insignificant.

  Now, Monday, he had made a special appointment with her, apart from his scheduled Thursdays and Saturdays, to discuss the calamity. His parents, after nearly two decades of marriage, were, incredibly, intolerably, separating. Immediately. His father had told him only last night. There had been a vicious scene, during which his mother retreated to the bedroom while he and his father shouted at each other. She was the one being left. His father was going to live with a woman about ten years older than Paul. The very thought of her was intolerable.

  His father was a psychoanalyst, his mother was a psychotherapist, and his father’s girlfriend was a psychiatric social worker in training, who had first appeared as his student in a seminar. Paul did not have the naive illusion that the membership of all three part
ies in what his parents called “the helping professions” was any guarantee against emotional upheaval. No. He had matured that much since Dr. Trowbridge. The wretched triangle of experts did not strike him as bizarre, any more than the fact that each of them continued daily to counsel others in torment. He had more than once overheard his parents remark on how the prolonged work of clearing the treacherous paths of the self disposes one to instability. Just like coal miners get black lung, thought Paul.

  Indeed, among their friends, largely pairs of analysts, therapists, and social workers, Paul had already witnessed suicide, alcoholism, recurrent infidelity, breakdowns, and violence. So the source of his feeling of utter shock was merely that he had always believed Richard and Nan perfectly matched.

  This was what he sullenly told Dr. Crewes now, after which she asked in cool tones, “How does it make you feel?”

  He replied by resting his head on her desk and weeping. The sounds of his sobs were ugly to him, great gasping noises like the screeching of gears in an immense and overloaded machine.

  Dr. Crewes played with the button of a ballpoint pen lying on her desk while she waited. “It’s terrible for you, I can see, especially after all the progress we’ve made.”

  “I can’t understand it,” Paul wept. He blew his nose and tried to control the trembling of his shoulders. “The worst thing is that I can’t believe it. How could he go and do this to us, after all those years? How could he? I’d like to ...” His bony boy’s fingers locked and tugged and twisted like an interpreter’s making signs for a deaf-mute. “I could tear him to pieces.”

  “You seem to be identifying strongly with your mother.”

  “Well, for Christ’s sake,” said Paul, “it’s not a question of identifying. I mean, look what he’s doing to me! Shit, I didn’t do anything to him except get born, and now ... I don’t know, maybe it is me. Maybe he can’t put up with me anymore.”

  “Ah,” said Dr. Crewes. “You see, your guilt is coming out. What did I do to deserve this, and so forth. You did nothing. You have to separate that out. What exactly did he say to you?”

  “After dinner last night he said he had to have a talk with me. So we sat down. He said he was leaving right away, and he couldn’t really explain but it was no longer possible—that’s what he said, no longer possible, get that—for him to go on living with my mother. Then he said he was in love. In love! At his age!”

  “And what did you say?”

  “Nothing. Not until he started on the piano. See, I was being very quiet. I couldn’t say anything, I was so shocked. And at that point my mother was puttering around the dining room table, clearing the dishes away like she just worked there or something. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of answering. But then he got started on the piano. Which was right there, too, staring us in the face. Well, you know about the piano.”

  The baby grand piano had been a joint acquisition. Paul and his father both played extremely well. They had shopped for it together two years ago to replace an old upright, when it became obvious that Paul’s was no ordinary talent. Paul still remembered what a good time they had had in the showrooms, trying out all the models with snatches of sonatas and popular tunes. Finally they settled on a large black Steinway. Paul cared for it like an attentive parent, cleaning its keys and polishing its glossy surface. He was as fussy about his piano, his father used to joke, as Nan was about her expensive carpeting.

  “So he says”—and here Paul mimicked his father’s thin raspy voice and ponderous delivery—“‘Paul, I know this will seem unfair to you, but I have to have the piano.’ ‘Over my dead body,’ I said. Then he started yelling and running around the room, about how he’s tired of giving and has to start taking for himself. And then ...”

  “Well?”

  “Well, I sort of got hysterical and tore the place up.” Paul grinned, a tentative flicker of light, then his mouth set sullenly again. He stared at the harsh Van Gogh print of sunflowers above Dr. Crewes’ head, which often had a semihypnotic effect on him.

  “You look proud of yourself.”

  “Well, then to calm me down, I guess, he said okay, he’d leave the piano. Then a minute later, no, he’d take it. Meanwhile my mother went off to their room. She said she was tired and going to sleep, and he could handle this scene since the whole thing was his idea anyway, and he should have given me more time to adjust to the change. Honestly, by the time it was all over I swear I didn’t know if he was taking it or leaving it.”

  “What about your mother’s going off to her room? How did you feel about that?”

  “What? Hell, I don’t know. I guess I thought she could have stuck up for me more. But she’s got her problems too. Listen, I’d like to kill the both of them. What the fuck am I going to do?”

  “You’re filled with rage and guilt, Paul. As is to be expected. You have to understand that, and that’s what we’ll have to work on, whatever happens. We’ll have to deal with your rage and guilt.”

  “Deal with! Deal with!” Paul leaped up, his thick gray sweater hanging loosely from his shoulders as he waved his arms violently in the air. He was a tall, sandy-haired boy with gaunt cheeks and a wide mouth. He had ice-blue eyes that in moments of excitement became flecked with pale-green flamelike shapes. “Is all of life one long process of dealing with things? Is that all there is to it? Hell!”

  Dr. Crewes flashed her teeth in one of her courteous, enigmatic smiles. With a familiar final gesture, she reached for her appointment book. The fifty-minute hour was over.

  “Thanks,” said Paul. “I must say I expected more sympathy from you. I mean, simply as a human being. You’ve known me all these years.”

  “Yes,” she said, “you’re disappointed. I can see that. But if I gave you the sympathy you want, it wouldn’t help the treatment. I understand how you feel—we’ll have to deal with that too.”

  He set out to walk the mile home, though the cold winds off the lake were fierce. Night was falling. The sky was a dull gray. He had heavy schoolbooks to carry and his bus was right at the corner. But he felt like walking, masochistic or not. Thinking, out in the cold. He was disturbed at how he hadn’t been able to get across to Dr. Crewes that his reaction was not yet loss or sadness but only shock. It was inconceivable that they were not happy with each other. He had thought of them, sometimes with mild sarcasm, as practicing experts in marital happiness.

  They left for work together in the morning—his father would drop his mother off at the Carl Rogers Institute, loosely connected with the university—leaving Paul alone to clear the breakfast dishes. Often, calling goodbye from the kitchen as he heard the door click open, he had felt like the parent, sending the youngsters off to school with a sense of release. Then his father picked her up at five-thirty. Sometimes they stopped to shop on the way home. They cooked dinner together—Nan was a meticulous and inventive cook—while talking over their cases. The last year or two, Paul had found the daily progress of these cases rather tedious, so he had taken to staying in his room until they called him to the table. But they seemed to enjoy it, that was the crucial point. Finally at dinner they would ask, “And how are things going with you, Paul? Everything under control at school?”

  It was beginning to rain. Little pellets of ice hit his face and clung to his eyelashes. He trudged along Fifty-fifth Street, thinking. Once a week his father went out again in the evening to give a seminar to social work trainees. Paul turned a windy corner, winced with pain and cold as a fluttering twig blew at his cheek. As he blinked, he could see some faceless dark feline creature leering at his father, raising her hand often to impress him with pretentious answers, luring him away from home, where he belonged. He was not going to think about that part of it.

  They had been happy—he had watched them for years at it, and if he couldn’t trust what he saw anymore, then what could he rely on? In school they were learning about a dead philosopher called Berkeley, who said that nothing we see is really there. Of course Paul had th
ought it was pure nonsense, but maybe Berkeley was right. Maybe everything in the world was deceptive, his parents included.

  Richard and Nan generally did not go out on week nights since they got up so early every morning. They read side by side, or else his mother made phone calls to her friends while his father did paper work at the small desk in the living room. Occasionally people dropped over, therapists who talked about their cases. Paul would greet them—they liked to scrutinize him; he had something of a reputation for his violent tendencies, and he rather enjoyed their veiled curiosity. He might listen to them talk for a while, then go to his room. They did not stay late. But weekends were another matter entirely, devoted to pleasure. Nan and Richard would wake early as usual, and as soon as the few chores were done, take off in their shorts and running shoes along the Midway—weather permitting, as they said. In the winter it was swimming in the university pool. They seemed to have a passion for rhythmic movement which Paul did not share. When he was twelve he had rebelled, declaring that he no longer wished to accompany their leisure-time rounds like a pet—their five-mile runs, their serious movies on social themes, their bargain-hunting expeditions, their drawn-out dinners in foreign restaurants, their eternal Sunday afternoons at friends’ houses, drinking cocktails and eating through numberless bowls of salted nuts. His mother was hurt, but his father smoothed it over. “Typical of adolescence. He’s finding his own style. It’s natural that he should be bored with us. Let him alone.” “All right, Paul,” Nan said, in a voice straining not to sound resentful. “From now on you can make your own plans. You have your keys to come and go.”

  Of course they were happy, thought Paul, wiping the wetness from his face with his glove. It was unmistakable. Sometimes they seemed such a closed, snug unit that he felt like an intruder. They had spent years alone together before he was born, and he suspected that they had never grown used to the fact of his presence, or sensed quite what to do about it. One evening last fall he was studying in his room and didn’t come out to greet them when they returned from work. When he finally emerged at seven o’clock they were busy in the kitchen, earnestly reconsidering one of his mother’s drug addicts. “Why, Paul, my goodness, I forgot all about you,” his mother said, and rushed over to kiss his cheek. “You must be starving. Here, have some crackers while we finish getting dinner ready.”