The Group (38 page)

The more Polly read and studied Gus, the more convinced she became that the only thing wrong with him was that he was spending $25 a week going to a psychoanalyst. And she asked herself whether that could be a disease, a form of hypochondria, and whether you would have to go to an analyst to be cured of it.

But if she could not match dear Gus, like a paint sample or snippet of material, with any of the charted neuroses, the opposite, she found to her dismay, was true of herself. She seemed to be suffering from all of them. She was compulsive, obsessional, oral, anal, hysterical, anxious. If her sexual life was not disturbed now, it certainly had been. A sense of guilt transpired from her Sunday-night washing ritual, and she allayed her anxiety by the propitiatory magic of ironing and darning. The plants on her window sills were the children she could not have. She was addicted to counting; she collected buttons, corsage pins, string, pebbles, hat pins, corks, ribbons, and newspaper clippings; she made lists, including this one, and was acquiring a craving for drink. The fact that she viewed this alarming picture with humorous fascination was itself a very bad sign, proving a dissociation from herself, a flight into fantasy and storytelling from an “unbearable” reality. The whole Andrews family, Freud would say, lived in a world of myth.

Joking aside—and there were times when, reluctantly, she had to put joking aside—Polly realized that she was in a deplorable state. Whatever the clinical name for it. Sunday nights she knew that she was terribly unhappy. Again. Love had done this to her, for the second time. Love was bad for her. There must be certain people who were allergic to love; and she was one of them. Not only was it bad for her; it made her bad; it poisoned her. Before she knew Gus, not only had she been far, far happier but she had been nicer. Loving Gus was turning her into an awful person, a person she hated.

That person came to a head on Sundays, like a boil, because Sundays Gus saw little Gus and his wife. She was perfectly conscious of the connection, unlike the patients she read about who could not seem to put two and two together. She was jealous. On top of that, she was conscience-stricken, for, to be truthful, she did not approve of divorce where there were children. Unless the parents came to blows in front of them or one of them was an evil influence. Look at what her own mother has suffered from her father. And yet they were together. Esther had committed adultery repeatedly and she did not sound like a pleasant woman, but Gus had loved her enough to have a child by her. If Polly were not the “other woman”, she would advise Gus to go back to her. At least on a trial basis. No, that was equivocating. Forever.

At the word, Polly’s blood ran cold. She wrapped a dry towel round her damp head and began to darn a hole in the toe of a stocking. It was not she who had asked Gus to marry her, but the other way around. Yet that was no excuse. She was acting like Cain in the Bible and pretending that the divorce was Gus’s business and she had nothing to do with it; she was not Gus’s keeper. But she was. She told herself that it had never entered anyone’s mind but Esther’s that Gus should go back to her. That was not true, though. It had entered Polly’s. Not all at once, but gradually. During the week she forgot about it, but on Sundays, when Gus was not there, it came creeping back. As if, once she had entertained it, she could never turn it away. And in this it behaved exactly like a temptation. She longed to tell Gus about it, but she was afraid that he would laugh at her or perhaps that he wouldn’t. This thought was her Sunday secret. And the whispering of conscience (if that was what it was), far from directing her mind to good resolves, made her still more jealous—just short of the point where she mentally slew little Gus. Here something stayed her hand, always, and instead she slew Esther and lived happily ever after with little Gus and his father.

Polly put down the darning egg. She went to the window and felt her blouses to see whether they were dry enough yet to iron. They were. She wrapped them in a towel and coiled up her hair and stuck two big pins through it. If she ironed, she said to herself, Gus would call to say good night to her, as he sometimes did. She had come to feel that this call was a reward she earned, for if she moped and did not do her ironing or mend her stockings and step-ins, often, as if he knew, he did not call.

She had discovered a sad little law: a man never called when you needed him but only when you didn’t. If you really got absorbed in your ironing or in doing your bureau drawers, to the point where you did not want to be interrupted, that was the moment the phone decided to ring. You had to mean it; you had to forget about him honestly and enjoy your own society before it worked. You got what you wanted, in other words, as soon as you saw you could do without it, which meant, if Polly reasoned right, that you
never
got what you wanted. Practically every other Sunday Polly gaily found she could do without Gus if she had to; climbing the stairs with a stack of blouses still warm from the iron, she would feel quite happy and self-sufficient and think that it might be almost a deprivation to get married. And she wondered if Gus, a block away, puttering around his kitchen, smoking his pipe, listening to the news on his radio, was thinking the same thing. Whether they were not, really, a bachelor and an old maid who were deceiving themselves and each other about the urgency of their desire to mate.

But this was the
other
Sunday. Tonight she needed him and so probably he would not call. It was late, and the house was still. She pondered knocking on Mr. Schneider’s door, to ask him to keep her company in the kitchen while she ironed. Though she had banished the bogeys for the time being, the prospect of the lonely kitchen, in the basement of the house, and of the labor of putting up the heavy ironing board seemed infinitely wearisome to her. And she was afraid of being alone with her thoughts there, out of the protection of her own four walls.

Yet if she summoned Mr. Schneider, he would be bound to start talking politics with her, and this, she felt, would be disloyal to Gus. If it were not the Moscow trials, it would be the war in Spain. Mr. Schneider was hipped on a group called the “Poum” and he also favored the Anarchists, both of whom, according to Gus, were sabotaging the war. But according to Mr. Schneider, it was the Russian commissars who were sabotaging the revolution and thereby losing the war to Franco. Mr. Schneider said the Communists were murdering Anarchists and Poumists, and Gus said they were not and if they were it was because the others were traitors and richly deserved their fate. Polly could see how Gus as a practical man would logically support the Russians, who were the only ones who were sending help to Spain, but she could not control her instincts, which went sneaking over to Mr. Schneider’s side of the argument. Besides, Mr. Schneider was a better arguer than she was, who could only repeat lamely what Gus told her, which meant that Gus was worsted by proxy every time she let Mr. Schneider get started. Gus saw no harm in letting Mr. Schneider “blow off steam,” but Polly felt it was wiser to avoid the occasions of sin, for the truth was that she half liked listening to Mr. Schneider go on. It was a kind of eavesdropping, hearing what the party did not want people like herself to hear. Listening to Gus and then to Mr. Schneider describe the same set of events was like looking at the war in Spain through a stereopticon—you gained a dimension, seeing it from two sides. This was her justification for listening, and she thought that if someone like Mr. Schneider could get Roosevelt’s ear it might persuade him to lift the embargo, for if the Americans sent arms, then the Russians would no longer be in control. But really she was not so much interested in the fine points of the Spanish Civil War as in Gus, and what Mr. Schneider gave her, without meaning to, was another perspective on him. In this perspective, Gus appeared credulous—“the Stalinists and their dupes,” Mr. Schneider was fond of saying. But if Gus was a dupe, she ought not to want to know it.

Yet wanting to know was consuming her. She blamed the psychoanalyst for that. It was the psychoanalyst who had made Gus a mystery man, at least to her, and often, she suspected, to himself. The idea that there was another Gus who came out like a ground hog every afternoon at five o’clock was becoming more horrible day by day. At first she had minded the psychoanalyst because he was an obstacle to their getting married; now she hated him because, the longer Gus went, the more she speculated about what passed between the two of them. She was sure Gus told the doctor things he did not tell her. Perhaps he told the doctor that he was no longer so keen on marrying her or that he dreamed every night of Esther—how did she know? Or perhaps the doctor told him that he
thought
he loved Polly Andrews but his dreams proved he didn’t. He could not be going to an analyst all this time unless he had a “conflict,” but what was the conflict between?

Most of all, though, she hated the doctor because, thanks to him, she had seen things in herself that she hated. If there was another Gus, there was also another Polly. Not only a jealous Polly who engaged in murderous fantasies, but a suspicious, spying Polly. The worst was that itch to know. When she mentally slew Esther, she was not unduly disturbed, because the real Polly would not kill Esther even if she could do it by cosmic rays or by pressing a button. But the real Polly would give anything to be present, in a cloak of invisibility, in Dr. Bijur’s office. Why did she
have
to know? Feminine curiosity. Pandora’s box, the source, according to the Greeks, of all the evils in the world. Bluebeard’s closet. Yet Pandora’s box at least had been primed with genuine troubles, nasty little winged creatures that she let loose on humanity, and Bluebeard’s closet had been full of bloody corpses—the moral of those tales was that it was best to remain in ignorance. Polly did not approve of that moral; no science major could. It was another fable, she feared, that fitted her case—the story of Cupid and Psyche. Gus on the analytic couch, all innocent trust, was the sleeping Cupid, and she was Psyche, with her wax taper, trying to steal a look at his face, though she knew it was forbidden. What had Psyche expected—an ugly monster? Instead, she saw a beautiful god. But when the hot wax of her curiosity seared him, he woke up and flew away sadly. The moral of that story was that love was a gift that you must not question, because it came from the gods. What Polly was doing, to her sorrow, was like looking for the price tag on a priceless present. The penalty was that love would leave her. But she could not stop; that was the trouble with sins of thought. Once Psyche got the urge to see what Cupid looked like, she was done for, poor girl; she could not keep from wondering and speculating between his nightly visits—he came at the end of the business day, just like Gus. It showed gumption, Polly thought, on Psyche’s part, to take a candle and get it over with.

For her own part, she wished she could say “Choose between me and the analyst.” But she could not. She was too soft and pliant. Besides, she had kept hoping that the analysis would end soon. But lately, as though by reverse serendipity, she had been hearing stories that cast a new light on that. Kay Petersen knew a woman who had been going eight years. Why, at that rate, when the wedding bells rang, Polly would be too old, practically, to have children, and Gus would be on home relief. The only bright spot Polly could see was that Gus’s savings would run out before long. Analysts, apparently, did not extend credit; they were worse than the telephone company and Consolidated Edison put together.

Cheered by this thought, Polly went softly down to the kitchen and put up the ironing board. In his room, Mr. Schneider had begun playing his fiddle. She was in the middle of her third blouse when the phone rang on the landing. It was Gus. He wanted to know if he could see her for a minute this evening. Polly unplugged the iron and hurried up to her room to put on lipstick and powder. Before she had time to do her hair properly the door bell rang. He kissed her, and they climbed the stairs together.

“Looks like a laundry,” he commented, entering. “You’ve been washing your hair.” He approached her, sniffing, and dropped a kiss on her topknot. “Smells good,” he said. “Nice shampoo.” “Chamomile rinse,” said Polly. She poured them each a glass of New York State sherry. He glanced around her room. It was the first time he had been here on a Sunday evening. She waited, wondering why he had come; he did not take off his tweed topcoat but walked to her street windows with his glass, looked out idly, and pulled the shades.

“I had a talk with Esther this evening.” “Oh?” “We talked about my analysis.” “Oh?” The second “Oh?” was more cautious. Had he come to tell her that he and Esther had decided to call off the analysis? “She asked me how it was going. Hers is going great. She dreamt she went to her analyst’s funeral. ‘You’re telling me,’ he said, ‘that the analysis is finished.’ Next week she’s having her last hour.” “Well!” said Polly brightly. Gus coughed. “My own news wasn’t so good, Polly. I had to tell her I was blocked.” He fingered the avocado plant that Polly had grown from a seed. “Oh,” said Polly. “Blocked?” He nodded. “What does that mean, exactly?” “I don’t dream,” he said, flushing. “It’s funny, but I’ve stopped dreaming. Completely.” “Is that so serious?” “It’s a hell of a note,” said Gus. “But why? There are lots of people who don’t dream. I remember a girl at college who used to pay me to wake her up in the morning yelling ‘Fire’ to make her dream for a paper she was writing on Freud. That was part of Student Self-Help.” She smiled. Gus frowned. “The point is, Polly, if I don’t dream, I’ve got nothing to say to Bijur.” “Nothing?” “Nothing. Literally. Not a damn word.”

He drained his sherry despondently. “Every day it’s the same story. I go in. ‘Good afternoon, doctor.’ I lie down on the couch. ‘Any dreams?’ says Bijur, picking up his notebook. ‘No.’ He puts down the notebook. Silence. At the end of fifty minutes, he tells me the hour’s over. I hand him my five bucks. ‘So long, doctor,’ and I leave.”

“Every
day
?” cried Polly. “Just about.” “But can’t you talk about something else? The weather. Or a movie you’ve seen. You can’t just lie there without making a sound!” “But I do. It’s not a social occasion, honey. You’re supposed to dredge up stuff from your unconscious. If I don’t have a dream to warm the motor, I’m stuck. I can’t start free-associating in a vacuum. So I just lie there. Once last week I fell asleep. I’d had a rough day at the office. He had to tap me on the shoulder to let me know the hour was up.”