The Secret History (76 page)

“It’s not that,” Francis said angrily, glancing up.

“All right, all right. Something else it could be is a panic disorder.”

“What’s that?” I said, carefully avoiding looking in Francis’s direction.

“Like an anxiety attack. A sudden rush of fear. Heart palpitations. Trembling and sweating. It can be quite severe. People often think they’re dying.”

Francis didn’t say anything.

“Well?” said the doctor. “Do you think that might be it?”

“I don’t know,” said Francis, after another confused pause.

The doctor leaned back against the sink. “Do you feel afraid a lot?” he said. “For no good reason you can think of?”

By the time we left the hospital, it was a quarter after three. Francis lit a cigarette in the parking lot. In his left hand he was grinding a piece of paper on which the doctor had written the name of a psychiatrist in town.

“Are you mad?” he said when we were in the car.

It was the second time he had asked. “No,” I said.

“I know you are.”

The streets were dream-lit, deserted. The car top was down.
We drove past dark houses, turned onto a covered bridge. The tires thumped on the wooden planks.

“Please don’t be mad at me,” said Francis.

I ignored him. “Are you going to see that psychiatrist?” I said.

“It wouldn’t do any good. I know what’s bothering me.”

I didn’t say anything. When the word
psychiatrist
had come up, I had been alarmed. I was not a great believer in psychiatry but still, who knew what a trained eye might see in a personality test, a dream, even a slip of the tongue?

“I went through analysis when I was a kid,” Francis said. He sounded on the verge of tears. “I guess I must’ve been eleven or twelve. My mother was on some kind of Yoga kick and she yanked me out of my old school in Boston and packed me off to this terrible place in Switzerland. The Something Institute. Everyone wore sandals with socks. There were classes in dervish dancing and the Kabbalah. All the White Level—that was what they called my grade, or form, whatever it was—had to do Chinese
Quigong
every morning and have four hours of Reichian analysis a week. I had to have six.”

“How do you analyze a twelve-year-old kid?”

“Lots of word association. Also weird games they made you play with anatomically correct dolls. They’d caught me and a couple of little French girls trying to sneak off the grounds—we were half-starved, macrobiotic food, you know, we were only trying to get down to the
bureau de tabac
to buy some chocolates but of course they insisted it had somehow been some sort of sexual incident. Not that they minded that sort of thing but they liked you to tell them about it and I was too ignorant to oblige. The girls knew more about such matters and had made up some wild French story to please the shrink—
ménage à trois
in some haystack, you can’t imagine how sick they thought I was for repressing this. Though I would’ve told them anything if I thought they’d send me home.” He laughed, without much humor. “God. I remember the head of the Institute asking me once what character from fiction I most identified with, and I said Davy Balfour from
Kidnapped
.”

We were rounding a corner. Suddenly, in the wash of the headlights, a large animal loomed in my path. I hit the brakes hard. For a half a moment I found myself looking through the windshield at a pair of glowing eyes. Then, in a flash, it bounded away.

We sat for a moment, shaken, at a full stop.

“What was that?” said Francis.

“I don’t know. A deer maybe.”

“That wasn’t a deer.”

“Then a dog.”

“It looked like some kind of cat to me.”

Actually, that was what it had looked like to me too. “But it was too big,” I said.

“Maybe it was a cougar or something.”

“They don’t have those around here.”

“They used to. They called them catamounts. Cat-o-the-Mountain. Like Catamount Street in town.”

The night breeze was chilly. A dog barked somewhere. There wasn’t much traffic on that road at night.

I put the car in gear.

Francis had asked me not to tell anyone about our excursion to the emergency room but at the twins’ apartment on Sunday night I had a little too much to drink and found myself telling the story to Charles in the kitchen after dinner.

Charles was sympathetic. He’d had some drinks himself but not as many as me. He was wearing an old seersucker suit which hung very loosely on him—he, too, had lost some weight—and a frayed old Sulka tie.

“Poor François,” he said. “He’s such a fruitcake. Is he going to see that shrink?”

“I don’t know.”

He shook a cigarette from a pack of Lucky Strikes that Henry had left on the counter. “If I were you,” he said, tapping the cigarette on the inside of his wrist and craning to make sure that no one was in the hall, “if I were you, I would advise him not to mention this to Henry.”

I waited for him to continue. He lit the cigarette and blew out a cloud of smoke.

“I mean, I’ve been drinking a bit more than I should,” he said quietly. “I’m the first to admit that. But my God, I was the one who had to deal with the cops, not him. I’m the one who has to deal with
Marion
, for Christ sake. She calls me almost every night. Let
him
try talking to her for a while and see how he feels.… If I wanted to drink a bottle of whiskey a day I don’t see what he could say about it. I told him it was none of his business, and none of his business what you did, either.”

“Me?”

He looked at me with a blank, childish expression. Then he laughed.

“Oh, you hadn’t heard?” he said. “Now it’s you, too. Drinking too much. Wandering around drunk in the middle of the day. Rolling down the road to ruin.”

I was startled. He laughed again at the look on my face but then we heard footsteps and the tinkle of ice in an advancing cocktail—Francis. He poked his head into the doorway and began to gabble good-naturedly about something or other, and after a few minutes we picked up our drinks and followed him back to the living room.

That was a cozy night, a happy night; lamps lit, sparkle of glasses, rain falling heavy on the roof. Outside, the treetops tumbled and tossed, with a foamy whoosh like club soda bubbling up in the glass. The windows were open and a damp cool breeze swirled through the curtains, bewitchingly wild and sweet.

Henry was in excellent spirits. Relaxed, sitting in an armchair with his legs stretched out in front of him, he was alert, well rested, quick with a laugh or a clever reply. Camilla looked enchanting. She wore a narrow sleeveless dress, salmon-colored, which exposed a pair of pretty collarbones and the sweet frail vertebrae at the base of her neck—lovely kneecaps, lovely ankles, lovely bare, strong-muscled legs. The dress exaggerated her spareness of body, her unconscious and slightly masculine grace of posture; I loved her, loved the luscious, stuttering way she would blink while telling a story, or the way (faint echo of Charles) that she held a cigarette, caught in the knuckles of her bitten-nailed fingers.

She and Charles seemed to have made up. They didn’t talk much, but the old silent thread of twinship seemed in place again. They perched on the arms of each other’s chairs, and fetched drinks back and forth (a peculiar twin-ritual, complex and charged with meaning). Though I did not fully understand these observances, they were generally a sign that all was well. She, if anything, seemed the more conciliatory party, which seemed to disprove the hypothesis that he was at fault.

The mirror over the fireplace was the center of attention, a cloudy old mirror in a rosewood frame; nothing remarkable, they’d got it at a yard sale, but it was the first thing one saw when one stepped inside and now even more conspicuous because it was cracked—a dramatic splatter that radiated from the center
like a spider’s web. How that had happened was such a funny story that Charles had to tell it twice, though it was his re-enactment of it that was funny, really—spring housecleaning, sneezing and miserable with dust, sneezing himself right off his stepladder and landing on the mirror, which had just been washed and was on the floor.

“What I don’t understand,” said Henry, “is how you got it back up again without the glass falling out.”

“It was a miracle. I wouldn’t touch it now. Don’t you think it looks kind of wonderful?”

Which it did, there was no denying it, the spotty dark glass shattered like a kaleidoscope and refracting the room into a hundred pieces.

Not until it was time to leave did I discover, quite by accident, how the mirror had actually been broken. I was standing on the hearth, my hand resting on the mantel, when I happened to look into the fireplace. The fireplace did not work. It had a screen and a pair of andirons, but the logs that lay across them were furry with dust. But now, glancing down, I saw something else: silver sparkles, bright-needled splinters from the broken mirror, mixed with large, unmistakable shards of a gold-rimmed highball glass, the twin of the one in my own hand. They were heavy old glasses, an inch thick at the bottom. Someone had thrown this one hard, with a pretty good arm, from across the room, hard enough to break it to pieces and to shatter the looking-glass behind my head.

Two nights later, I was woken again by a knock at my door. Confused, in a foul temper, I switched on the lamp and reached blinking for my watch. It was three o’clock. “Who’s there?” I said.

“Henry,” came the surprising reply.

I let him in, somewhat reluctantly. He didn’t sit down. “Listen,” he said. “I’m sorry to disturb you, but this is very important. I have a favor to ask of you.”

His tone was quick and businesslike. It alarmed me. I sat down on the edge of my bed.

“Are you listening to me?”

“What is it?” I said.

“About fifteen minutes ago I got a call from the police. Charles is in jail. He has been arrested for drunk driving. I want you to go down and get him out.”

A prickle rose on the nape of my neck. “What?” I said.

“He was driving my car. They got my name from the registration sticker. I have no idea what kind of condition he’s in.” He reached into his pocket and handed me an unsealed envelope. “I expect it’s going to cost something to get him out, I don’t know what.”