I thought of how she must have felt sitting there in the faculty dining room, anxiously waiting, unsure perhaps of her choice of outfit, her new hairdo; a little dazed, still, by what she had done, yet elated by it, carried forward by the momentum of her liberated passion, looking at her watch, thinking that at the very worst she would have a story to tell her grandchildren if she were lucky enough – blessed enough – to have any, and then looking up to see, as if in a vision, me, walking uncertainly toward her in my black-buttoned blue shirt, a blue wave of love, rippling through her with the miraculous force of an answered prayer…
Such are the phantoms we create out of each other. And although as phantoms went it was an improvement on the ‘prick downstairs’, the idea of it left me with the same sense of depleted reality, as though I had been improperly replicated, and grown correspondingly lighter and flimsier in myself. No wonder, I thought, that so many people end up feeling like the human equivalent of a Bulgarian coin.
CHAPTER 4
‘Before we start, I’d like you to take a look at something.’
I felt a stirring in the air behind me, then a disturbance in my field of vision as Dr Schrever’s hand crossed over my prone head, holding a small piece of paper. My heart gave an unaccountable little thump.
The piece of paper was a check. I had signed and mailed it to her the day before.
‘Do you notice something strange about it?’ she asked.
Had I signed someone else’s name? No; the signature looked all right, unless I was truly going out of my mind. The amount was the same as I always made out the checks for. And the date looked right too.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ I asked.
‘You can’t see?’
‘No.’
‘Look who it’s made out to.’
I saw then that I had made the check out to a Dr Schroeder instead of Dr Schrever. The error made me laugh out loud.
‘Why did I do that?’
‘Why do you think you did it?’
‘I have absolutely no idea!’
‘Do you know somebody called Schroeder?’
‘Not that I can think of.’
‘A student of yours, perhaps?’
‘No.’
‘Someone from England?’
I couldn’t think of anyone by that name.
‘I wonder why it made you laugh when you saw it?’
‘I suppose there’s something inherently comical about these little slips.’
‘I’m wondering if you laughed because you recognised some hostility you felt toward me, that embarrasses you to have to acknowledge?’
I told her I didn’t think this was so; she didn’t pursue the point. I corrected the check and returned it to her.
I had come in thinking I was going to talk about Elaine, but something had snagged on the current of my thoughts, drawing them in another direction. After a moment I realised what it was.
‘When you moved your hand over my head just now, I felt myself flinching. I must have thought for a moment that you were going to tousle my hair. My stepfather used to do that. It was his one sign of affection…’
While I was talking I remembered how Mr Kurwen had tousled my hair last night as I went past him into his living room, and I realised that at the back of my mind I had been thinking about my childhood ever since then.
Instead of going on to talk about that, though, I interrupted myself to tell Dr Schrever about my encounter with Mr Kurwen; how he had mistaken me for someone he’d asked to come and help find his glass eye, how in my dislike of confrontation I had half gone along with this error, but how I had then come clean to him instead, telling him he’d made a mistake, and asking him, in my capacity as the ‘prick downstairs’, to keep his TV down.
I went on at some length about how large-spirited I had felt after this outburst of candor.
‘Aside from tousling your hair,’ Dr Schrever asked after a pause, ‘was there some other way this person made you think of your stepfather?’
‘I guess I must have been wondering if he’d mistaken me for his son. Which is sort of the way I always felt about my stepfather. Unsure whether he thought of me as a son, unsure to what degree I was his son…’
‘Go on…’
For a long time now, I had been aware of the gentle pressure of Dr Schrever’s professional interest, urging me to talk about my childhood. I had resisted for two reasons. First, I had no interest in being psychoanalysed: I was seeing her for professional reasons of my own, namely that I was intending to write a book about gender relations in the evolution of psychoanalytic practice. My sources would mainly be memoirs and case histories, but I had felt that some first-hand experience would also be of value, to give me a sense of the particular textures of the exchange that takes place in these rooms. For obvious reasons I hadn’t mentioned this motive to Dr Schrever. Second, even though it was necessary for the purposes of my experiment to reveal certain things about myself to Dr Schrever, even quite intimate things, I felt that she, as an American, simply wouldn’t be able to understand the context in which my childhood had occurred. Certain obvious things I could explain, but there would be countless nuances I wouldn’t even know I needed to explain, so that in all likelihood she would draw a series of entirely wrong conclusions about me.
How, for example, would she know that for a widowed, single mother to get herself badly in debt in order to send her only child away to boarding school at the age of eight, was neither an unnatural nor an unloving act, but, in the context of the niche of English society she aspired to occupy, the very opposite of those things? How could Dr Schrever understand (or if she did, take seriously) the codes of speech and behavior by which each caste of that overcrowded island policed its boundaries; how violently offensive it had been, for instance, for my mother to refer to a napkin as a serviette in the presence of my stepfather’s old schoolfriends, or say pleased to meet you when they were introduced, or stress the wrong syllable of controversy? And if she couldn’t understand these things, how would she understand the intrinsic tensions and faultlines of our household; the peculiar fraught atmosphere bred by the very nature of its inception: the cultured and epicurean company director, with an aristocratic wife and three children at the ancestral manor, becoming steadily intoxicated with the charms of his new secretary; guiltily decanting the choice vintage of his existence from its nobly cellared and patinated bottle, into the dubious, cut-price crystal of my mother’s and mine?
It seemed a waste of time to broach the subject.
‘What are you feeling, Lawrence?’ I heard Dr Schrever say.
‘I’m feeling that I… that I didn’t adequately express how good I felt about my straightforwardness with the old man upstairs. There was something about the simple, man-to-man way I ended up talking to him that made me feel almost… American.’