Several more patients had wandered in, taking their places on the molded plastic chairs scattered around the large day room.
They moved slowly when they walked and, apart from an occasional twitch or a sudden jerk, barely moved at all while they sat.
They did not speak, and the silence hung heavy in the air, broken only by a short-lived moan or a sob quickly suppressed. It made me think of an old train station, or a bus station late at night, places where strangers wait in crowded solitude the endless hours until it is their time to go.
“They get tired late in the day,” Elliott explained. “The medication has that effect.”
Elliott did not seem tired at all. If anything, he had become more energetic, and more intense, the longer I was there. I thought it might be because of the excitement he must have felt at having a visitor from the outside. I started to get to my feet.
“Perhaps I should be going. We can continue this another time.”
He seized my wrist and held it fast. “No,” he insisted. “There’s no reason for you to go. I haven’t told you yet why I thought you were having an affair with my wife. Don’t you want to know?”
I sat down again and he let go of my arm. “It isn’t true,” I said, wondering why I felt compelled to repeat the denial. Was it because the idea had once crossed my mind, and I felt guilty for the thought if not the deed?
The look he gave me was uncanny. While his eyes bored in on me, trying to reach the back of my skull, they seemed at the same time to dart all around. It was like watching a solar eclipse.
In the middle was a deep, dark, impenetrable point, that for the moment at least stayed fixed, surrounded by a dazzling fireworks of dancing, flying light.
“I saw you talking with her once at a party. She was always doing that, talking to the most attractive men. She liked to know that men, attractive men, found her attractive. It was important to her. It was part of the way she defined herself: a woman who was attractive to men.”
I remembered her all right, sleek, proud, and willful, with golden brown hair and dark, bottomless eyes. Her gaze never left you while she talked, and she drew you so far into her, made you feel so much a favorite, that you almost failed to notice how her eyes moved restlessly around the room when it was her turn to listen.
You could not help but notice her hands, long bony knuckled fingers that looked like they were waiting to snatch at something, to close tight around something, to grab at whatever they could get. I did not like her, and that might have made me want her even more, had she not been married to an associate in my firm for whom I felt a certain responsibility.
“She was a very attractive woman,” I heard myself saying.
“She knew you thought so. After that party she used to tease me about it. She’d tell me how much she liked older men.” He sensed my reaction before I was quite conscious that I had one.
“You were about the same age then, I am now,” he remarked.
“She said that if she ever decided to be unfaithful it would probably be with someone like you.”
Vanity, not hope, is the last thing to die. Why otherwise would I have tried to get the assurance of someone clinically insane that more than a dozen years earlier I was still young.
“Someone older?” I asked, lifting an eyebrow.
Elliott was not thinking of me. “She was always ambitious. I wanted to be a teacher; she wanted me to be a lawyer. She convinced me that I should, told me how great she thought I’d be, told me how much she believed in me. And I believed what she said, because I believed in her.” He looked at me for a moment, pondering something he had clearly thought about before. “I was always defined by what other people thought, people I trusted, people I believed in. Isn’t that what everyone does-think of themselves in terms of what other people think they are or think they should be? The danger of course is that you find out one day that you can’t believe in them anymore, that there is nothing you can believe in anymore, that everything you believed before was based on a lie. Then you don’t know who you are. You’re alone, by yourself, without anything to go back to and without anything to look forward to.”
A sly, cynical grin stole across his mouth. “So they put people like me in an asylum, because, after all, what happened to me could only have been some kind of aberration, a mental disease, a mental defect. But, fortunately, a condition that can be cured, or at least controlled, with the right regimen of therapy and medication. Controlled! Do you know what they mean? Unquestioning obedience, docile acceptance. You agree with everything anyone tells you, do whatever they tell you to do, believe everything they tell you to believe. You become as crazy as everyone else out there. You don’t have to believe in God, but you damn well better believe in golf!”
“What?” I asked, startled less by what he had said than by the fanatical look that had entered his eyes. “Golf?”
He looked at me like I was crazy. “Yes, golf. Recreation is good; getting along with other people is good. Taking life as a game.
It’s good. Not getting upset at the insanity of the world. That’s good. Everyone believes in golf.”
His eyes became wilder, and his head began to swing from side to side. “Jean liked golf, and tennis, and swimming, and horse-back riding.” He stopped, a shadow of doubt in his overheated eyes. “I think she drew the line at bowling. Not that she had anything against the game itself, you understand. Jean believed in games. She just didn’t think the right sort of people played that particular game. Bowling at one end of the scale, chess at the other. Too intellectual, she thought. Whatever else she was, she was always upwardly mobile. As a matter of fact, I think…”
It happened again, that same terrifying seizure that took possession of him like some demonic force, shaking his body like a limp rag while he tried desperately to find the one key rhyming word that would open the lock and let him go free.
“I think… blink… ink… wink…” His eyes bulged out, his face turned red. “Stink… chink… mink… fink.”
It was over. The life came back into his eyes, his skin became pale again, and from the tone of his voice you would have thought you were talking to a completely normal man.
“What were we talking about?” he asked, as if he had just for a moment forgotten what he was saying. “Oh, yes,” he said as soon as I reminded him. “Jean. She wanted success, and when she met Jeffries and realized how much he wanted her, I don’t think she thought about resisting. I was still several years away from the possibility of a partnership. Why would she wait for something she could have right away?” He looked at me, a whim-sical expression in his eyes. “In your world-the sane world-
isn’t instant gratification what everyone wants?
“Of course I didn’t know anything about it at the time. I still thought Jeffries was my friend. I had proof of it. Of all the people he knew, of all the lawyers he could have asked, I was the one he chose when he had to have his wife declared incompetent. And after that happened, after he was all alone, we spent even more time together than we had before.”
Elliott now seemed perfectly calm, almost relaxed, as if we were trading gossip about someone we had once both known.
“What made you think she was having an affair with me?” I asked.
“She started to lie to me. She came home two hours after her shift ended and told me it was because someone on the next shift called in sick. But because I was worried, I had called the hospital and been told she had left at the normal time. She fumbled for some excuse, something about it happening at the last minute and the switchboard did not know anything about it. I believed her. But things like that started to happen more and more often.
Each time she had an excuse. Each time I believed her, or tried to. My questioning became more intense, more frantic, and she began to replace explanation with analysis. She was worried about me, she insisted. I was imagining things; I was in danger of becoming paranoid. Finally, after she had come in late and made up some story that made no sense at all, I came right out and accused her of having an affair.