Envy (12 page)

“Why would you need to rehearse?”

“I'm shy.”

Will lets this one go and watches while she bites her nail, taking the finger out of her mouth, examining the damage, putting it back in for another leisurely go before continuing.

“What I've described doesn't make you feel suicidal?” she demands. “Picturing that? Shiny old shins dressed up in serial-killer socks and garters?”

“No.”

“Well, okay. Fine. Whatever. There's stuff like sock garters and toupées that don't match the person's actual hair color that are just too depressing.”

“Why is that?”

“Because they are! Why do you pretend to be stupid!”

“I—”

“In fact, his sock garters are so inclined to inspire suicidal ideation that I ask him to do me a favor, and he says what, and I say take me to the student center and give it to me in a stall. He sits up, checks Mr. Crash to see he's not all gummy with spooge. ‘In a stall?' he says, looking more than willing.

“‘Yeah, ' I say, ‘like the women's room, or the men's, I don't care— just so it's public.' ” The girl stops talking. “What are you writing down?” she demands when she sees Will noting her use of the words
suicidal ideation,
a term that only someone with experience of psychiatric texts or treatment might use. She sighs dramatically when he doesn't reply, returns to her story.

“‘That would be the lavatory in the basement under Kent—the Starr Library, ' he says, and I'm like, ‘Why there?' ‘Because it's open until midnight and guaranteed to be deserted, ' he says. ‘Stalls for you. Safety for me.' I tell him I prefer the student center. He shakes his head. ‘Student center no, Starr Library yes. Take it or leave it.'

“I take it. We pull up our scanties and head over to Kent. I don't know if you remember last Friday, but like, wow, a record low for November fourth. I'm getting head-to-toe frostbite, and it's not as if I'm a girl who wears sensible shoes, the soles are, like, nonexistent. Anyway, we arrive and, as promised, the library is open and empty. Except for the librarian, who's in a vertical coma of boredom, basically, and the bathroom downstairs is suitably vile. Shocking, really, considering tuition, but a place to keep in mind for the future.

“I don't know what it is, my inner gay man maybe, but I am majorly turned on by public toilets—I love metal stall doors with the enamel chipping off the corners, a little rust, dirty words that won't scrub off—you can see where the poor janitor has scrubbed the thing dull trying to get
cunt
or whatever off the damn door, but it's there forever. Words like that—they have a life of their own, don't you think? Also, I love the fluorescent light and even that gross smell of disinfectant. I get all itchy and sex-starved just walking into a public
loo.
Which is what my mother calls it in certain company. Unbelievably pretentious and irritating. I mean, as if! She's about as British as Oprah.” The girl checks her watch and buttons her coat.

“It unfolds according to my script: inside the stall, up against the door so the whole thing kind of squeaks and moves, and despite being taller than me and not so young that I can assume buff thigh muscles, Mr. Italian Renaissance is very good on the tricky upthrust. It only takes a few minutes for us both to get off. No sock garters in view, praise the Lord, so we end on a good note. Polite parting in the corridor, a handshake—quite weird—and we're off in opposite directions.”

“Weird?” Will says.

“Don't you think?” She stands and swings her backpack up onto one shoulder. “I mean, we've had sex, what, four times in an hour— thrice in his office and once in the lavatory—and he's holding out his hand to shake mine like we've just been introduced at some dread sherry-and-cheese mixer.” She approaches the door—it's exactly ten of three—and pauses, apparently struggling with the knob. “Do you mind?” she says. “I'm having this, like, carpal tunnel flare-up.”

Will stands to open the door, notebook casually (he hopes, dear God, he hopes) hiding his erection, the fact of it preoccupying him enough that he doesn't see what's coming. Like a cartoon character who steps into the noose attached to a bent-over sapling,
zoing,
he's flying in the air—What's up? What's down?—Will is without a clue.

She's got him with his back to his office door, a hand on either side of his face, her tongue deep in his mouth. He makes an ineffective noise, something between a gargle and a moan, a noise intended as protest but received as encouragement. The tongue does a little somersault, and one hand leaves his cheek, drops down to his fly.

“I thought you'd like that story,” she says, her breath warm on his face and smelling like her tongue tastes, of caramel or toffee, something sugary. She rubs him harder, seals his mouth with hers so he can't respond. But what was he going to say? Already he's forgotten. After months of panic over his own barely controlled lust, he's been—he's
being
—jumped by a patient, forced up against his own door, his tongue sucked so hard that it aches at the root, his cock very aware of each one of her moving fingers.

11

He's always loved dreams—his own, other peo-ple's. With respect to analysis, they're invaluable, like having a wiretap on someone's soul. Even the most cryptic yield to examination, and a mere fragment can get a session going. But, as transparent as Will finds his patients' dreams, suddenly he's become clumsy, even dim-witted, with respect to his own. Take the one he had last night, when at last he fell asleep, having told Carole what had happened with the girl without managing to communicate what really happened, which was not that a patient had pulled some highly inappropriate stunt but that he'd been aroused by it.

He'd refused himself the relief of masturbating to dismiss the erection that popped up shortly after he'd made love with Carole— his traitorous cock stirring even before she fell asleep—because there was no way he could beat off without again reviewing the kiss and the feeling of the girl's avid fingers, their tips that seem less chewed now than burned by corrupt explorations. His memory of what she'd done, what he'd allowed her to do, was—
is
—all too pungent: three parts horror, say, to one part intoxication, a scene highlighted as if by a mental klieg light, a thousand watts of attention issuing from some dark corner of his head, trained on the two of them at the door. Familiar clichés apply: she's caught red-handed, he with his pants down.

When he woke from the nightmare—at least he doesn't have to deal with sweet dreams following upon guilty fantasies—he remembered it in detail. Commented to himself that it was obvious, almost formulaic. But then he couldn't interpret it. The longer he tried, the slipperier it grew, until now he finds it's acquired the quality of a koan, a riddle that confounds as much as it compels.

In the dream, he's engaged a third party, an agent to whom he entrusts a sum of money to hire a private investigator. This detective's assignment is to tail Will—Will himself is the object of the hunt— and the detective is to use whatever powers of surveillance are required to mark Will's passage through each day. Spy cameras, hidden mikes, infrared periscopes—the man is outfitted with all the paraphernalia of male paranoia, an array of absurdly compact devices like those that saturate a James Bond movie: potent, shiny, and impossible.

The dream detective makes notes and tapes and photographs. He captures Will as he sleeps, showers, works, as he has sex with his wife and, as this is a dream, with other women as well. When the report comes back, when Will is shown the evidence collected against him, he's shocked by what he sees.

The detective's photographs and videotapes have an unimpeachable authority. Black-and-white, blurred, grainy, they look illicit, as one expects of images that have been snatched. Will stares at them in loathing. Despite the snow on the video monitor, and despite interfering, vertical lines—as if all the action unfolds in a jail cell—Will sees that it is, in fact, his face that leers at him, his features twisted with malevolence. But can this really be how he appears to other people? The man's face is his own, but the sinister expression, the animosity, even hatred, the intent to wreak havoc: it's a person he can look at for only so long.

The pictures frighten and disgust him; he wants to destroy them; yet he cannot deny that they render the very thing he's paid to be shown: a monstrous and unredeemable someone who must lurk within him, but whom he couldn't find without the help of a private eye.

It's only after he's fully awake, after he's been awake long enough to have left behind the murk of his unconscious, that Will realizes the face in the dream was never more than half revealed. In every image, a dark swath has fallen across the man's features, leaving the right half of his face black. Shadowed, Will assumed in the dream, but perhaps all along the man in the pictures, the man the detective trailed, was the wrong man.

Not Will. Mitch.

Beside Will, Carole sleeps. It's not yet light outside. She's kicked the covers off and is facedown with her nightgown bunched up around her waist, arms and legs spread, showing him more than enough of herself to summon an erection. Apparently, nothing can kill off lust, not his lust. It's always there, undeterred by illness or by lack of sleep, by mourning, by nightmares. And Carole has an appealing butt, plump and defiant, the arrival of middle age halted with— what else?—yoga. Sometimes he feels like he sees it more often than he sees the rest of her.

Not looking into each other's eyes: wasn't this one of the accommodations they made after Luke died, a tacit one? How could they have risked the chance of recognizing it: the other's anguish? But because it had been an unspoken adjustment, not so much a decision as a reflex, they'd never undone it. Just as no one said
let's,
neither has either of them said
it's time we stopped.

It used to be that Will considered himself among the self-aware, but something—what?—seems to have taken away some essential knowledge he had of himself, his true character. As if there exists a key—Will's key—to his own psyche, a key he once owned and now has lost. He's misplaced it, or someone has taken it. Is that even possible?

He tries the idea out on Daniel. “Does that make sense?” he asks, and receives the standard analytic riposte.

“It only matters if it makes sense to you.” Daniel raises his eyebrows, and Will, reading the expression as a request that he continue, goes on talking.

“Well, there are two possibilities—two that I see. Two points at which I might have, I don't know, lost touch with myself, I guess. First, my brother's disappearance, which, since the reunion, has taken on some new weight of significance. I don't know why. But it feels even more personal than it used to. His rejection or abandonment or whatever you want to call it.

“And second, I'm guessing the loss of Luke, also in the past, but the recent past, relatively speaking. I mean, I didn't even feel as if I'd woken up, as if I were genuinely conscious and aware of my surroundings, until a year or so afterward. And he was my son. Myself projected into the future. Not finite. At least not in any way I had to admit. Because in the natural order of things I would die first. His death would never exist for me. It wouldn't be possible to be abandoned by my child, the person in whom I placed my essential self.”

“Without your son you discover mortality? Your mortality?”

Will stands up. He shoves his hands in his pockets and looks at the ceiling and then back at Daniel. “Are you ridiculing me?” he asks.

“Not at all.” Daniel shakes his head. “Do you think what you've said is ridiculous?”

“No. But I do find it banal. And I wasn't talking about mortality. At least I don't think I was. Certainly, it's a topic that preoccupies me, but just then I was talking about how I'd managed to lose touch with myself.”

“Why banal?”

Will sits back down. “Isn't this the crisis of faith I was supposed to have as a kid, when my dog died? The standard-issue if-my-dog-died-there-is-no-God crisis?”

“Who said anything about God?”

Will laughs, at himself, shakes his head. “Touché. I think it must have been me, the guy with the God problem.”

Daniel raises his eyebrows, folds his hands on his desk. Hanging on the wall behind him are so many framed diplomas and citations that he has no more space to put any of the newer ones. Instead, he opens old frames and slips one in front of another so that in a few cases two sets of words appear, ghostly writing from the document on the bottom showing through the paper of the one above.

“Forget the key. The idea of a key or something to unlock me. My secret self. I want to come at this a different way. The context for the dream is, I think, my continuing to dwell on the reunion.”
The
girl, the girl,
Will prompts himself,
tell him what happened with the girl.
But he goes on without mentioning what he was stewing about when he fell asleep. “The context aside from my knowing we would be meeting today, that is. Because I realize that for the last few weeks I've been remembering what I dream the night before I see you, so I can bring it here, like a cat with a dead bird.”

Daniel raises one hand, a signal for Will to stop, but his innate politeness makes it a slightly deferential gesture, tentative, like an uncertain student's rather than the person whose name is presented in all those frames above his chair. “You haven't forgotten to be suspicious of those dreams?” he asks.

“Because of the likelihood of their being a defense?”

Now both of Daniel's hands are in the air, palms up and empty. “What might we talk about if we weren't busy deconstructing your dream?”

Will starts to laugh. “Maybe Carole's right. Maybe analysis does depend on masochism.”

“Self-absorption.”

“Was that the word she used?”

“I think so,” Daniel says. “I could look it up.”

In years past, before Daniel's wife died, the four of them—Will, Carole, Daniel, and Jessica—often ate out together, arguing companionably around the window table of a Korean barbecue restaurant, a place none of them had liked particularly but that no one disliked enough to sacrifice the ritual aspect of gathering around the same table time after time. They always shared a couple of bottles of wine, and if anyone said something Daniel found interesting or amusing, he'd inscribe it in a notebook he used for that purpose.

Will shrugs. “Don't bother. The part I liked was her idea that psychoanalysis should adopt a symbol like that used by physicians. You remember, instead of two snakes coiling around a sword, there would be only one, swallowing its own tail.”

“Right,” Daniel says, and he laughs. “She drew a picture for me. In my journal.”

“Anyway,” Will says, “admittedly, the reunion is over and done with. Well, no, not done with, actually, because it's had so long a fall-out. Subjected me to what felt like an interrogation. Which was the reason Carole refused to go, and why she didn't want me to go, because of all the questions people were bound to ask. I'd have to talk about Mitch and about Luke. Obvious, right, but I didn't see it coming. I never anticipated it myself, and whatever Carole said, I didn't hear. In fact I was so deliberately unprepared for what happened that I find myself wondering if my being interrogated wasn't the point. Wasn't what I wanted, deep down.

“Of course, once I'd seen Elizabeth's page and read her bio, I did want to ask her about her daughter. And I certainly seem to have been talking from the depths of some unconscious sinkhole when I embarked on that unfortunate line of inquiry. But way before that, as far back as last winter, when the reunion was just an idea rather than a collection of particular individuals, I wonder if I wasn't planning to use it as a . . . a . . . I was going to say crowbar, but a better metaphor would be solvent. If I hadn't wanted, unconsciously, to immerse myself in an environment that would have a caustic effect on whatever defenses I'd built around my psyche, a solvent that would eat away at them and force me to deal with what I've hidden from myself. Issues that need to be examined—or maybe just acknowledged—but that I wasn't ready to approach before now.

“And then in reaction to this—this interrogation or crowbar or solvent or whatever I'm calling what I'm applying to my defenses—I take on too many patients, I run myself ragged chasing down other people's problems, because I'm fearful of my own. Part of me prefers being defended. So I'm conflicted, I'm ambivalent, unresolved conflicts are filling me with anxiety. Anxiety I try to keep at bay with obsessive sex fantasies. Does that make sense?” Will sees Daniel's expression and answers his own question. “Yes,” he says, “it does. It does make sense to me.”

Daniel smiles. “Well, your interpretation would satisfy my favorite analytic axiom, one I know you must be sick of hearing, that the unconscious . . .” He leaves it to Will to finish the thought.

“Is always on your side,” Will says. “My side, in this case.”

“Exactly,” Daniel says. “I'm afraid you don't really need me, Will. I'm just an old dog whose tricks you already know.”

“No, no. I do need you. I need you because it isn't until I'm sitting before you, determined not to disappoint whatever faith you may have in me, that I see myself at all.”

The two men are silent until Daniel speaks. “What are you feeling, Will?” he says.

“Not much.”

“Care to guess why that might be?”

Will, who is leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, drops his face in his hands. “I imagine,” he says without looking up, “that I've successfully protected myself—defended myself—from my feelings by being so hyperanalytical, so . . . so cerebral, in reference to my defenses.”

Daniel nods. “You're a good psychoanalyst,” he says.

“And a crummy patient.” Will looks up. “But I still don't think I'm wrong.”