Trauma Read Free Page B

unthinking affection. Such ordinariness struck me as the very acme of human achievement.
    Then other people were crowding in, old family friends, my mother’s few intimates, women like herself if such a thing can be imagined, also the people she’d met in her late-blooming career as a novelist.
    Later, when they had all left, I sat alone with the empty glasses and dirty plates and ashtrays while the housekeeper cleaned up, and felt an alarming plummeting sensation in my body. It was accompanied by what I can only call a wave of the purest blackness. I recognized it as the sort of precipitate mental collapse that had characterized my mother’s depressions, and I felt, too, as I watched myself falling like a stone down a well, that I’d become infected with her illness.
I saw it then, Mom’s depression, as a parasite deprived of its host and finding me instead. A perverse idea, but I understood why my mood had changed so dramatically. In a compressed few hours I had encountered every person with whom I’d ever known intimacy save one, that being my mother, and she was dead. I was estranged from all of them except one, that being my daughter, who lived not with me but with her mother. I was approaching forty and I no longer regarded my life as possessing unlimited potential, or any at all. I felt my own isolation strongly, and while I was still sexually active the possibility of proper human intimacy seemed every day to recede further from me.
    I sat by the window in my mother’s living room as the housekeeper ferried stacks of dishes and trays of glasses to the kitchen. Outside, the light faded as the long winter afternoon came to an end. I could hear the woman working in the kitchen and for a second imagined it was Mom in there. After a while she came back into the living room and turned the lights on. She cried out when she saw me, as though she’d seen a ghost.
    “Are you still here, Doctor?”
    I got up out of my chair and left the apartment. Descending the staircase I remembered a story about a man in an asylum. This man believes that his psychiatrist, whom he has met only once, is busy working on his case, finding the solution to his problem. It keeps him going. Then, after some months, he sees him again. The psychiatrist pats him on the back and asks what his name is, and what seems to be the problem. This was my mood. I felt as though I’d been putting my faith in some absent being who was working on my problem. When my mother died I realized that nobody was working on my problem, in fact no one even knew what my problem was.

Chapter Two
    T he building on Eighty-seventh Street had a small foyer with a bronze pot for umbrellas, an old wing chair and a faded rug. It was always full of shadows, especially in the gloom of a dying day. As I came down the last flight of stairs a figure rose from the chair and moved toward me. She had waited for me. We stood there in our overcoats, facing each other, and then we embraced.
    “Look at the state of you,” she murmured.
    We took a cab in the rain to Twenty-third Street. Agnes had never been in the apartment before, and she moved around it as women do, as cats do, in new places, feeling for the spirit, I suppose. We had barely spoken in the cab. I was very deeply moved by this act of generosity, or affection, or whatever it sprang from; for some reason it made me think of the early days, when I was running the psych unit on the East Side and we stood shoulder to shoulder, Agnes and I, comrades as much as lovers. Now I felt that the bond had endured despite the years of anger, despite everything.
    “You’re going to miss her, Charlie.”
    “Oh yes.”
    Her being with me like this, keeping company with the bereaved—given that I had nobody else, this was a compassionate gesture, though what more it signified I couldn’t say. Agnes remained physically attractive to me, and perhaps as a function of death’s proximity I wanted very badly to hold her close to me then.