Island, p.4
Island, page 4
“Are you married?”
“I am divorced.”
This was getting dangerously intimate, but he was still floating on the euphoria of emotional exhaustion, and he asked:
“Are you ever lonely?”
“Everyone is lonely.” Hennerkop’s tired eyes stared deep into his, a tender look full of peril.
He decided to move Hennerkop’s blond patient to the island. She cooked delicious steaks for him there. Afterward he would light a fire in the fireplace he had seen through the window that time. He would sit down on a fur rug, and she would kneel in front of him and slowly unbutton his shirt. He would unbutton her shirt (a prim silk one such as she wore for her appointments). Then he would reach around behind her and unsnap her bra, and her breasts would pop out (small ones; he knew they had to be small from the way she looked in Hennerkop’s waiting room, but by God they were beautiful). On and on like that. And the next time he saw her he got an erection right there in the waiting room, but still he didn’t say anything to her.
But he did manage to speak of it to Hennerkop, who said nothing.
The feeling he had about that patient was so hot that it stayed with him after his session was over. Instead of sitting in the park that day, he decided to try to walk the feeling off, up Fifth Avenue on the park side. The blonde left, and Fran took her place—very strong. He caught glimpses of her everywhere: across the street, running down the steps of the museum…. He walked around the reservoir and then back down Fifth and sat on the stone bench of the fountain opposite the Plaza Hotel, and he saw Fran going up the steps of the hotel and into the lobby. He almost got up to follow, but he knew she would never go into the Plaza alone—unless she had another man by this time.
That was a black thought, so he walked some more and his legs got tired and his spirits went spiraling down and the old need returned and he went over to Eighth Avenue to one of those bars for just one bourbon and water to lift him up a bit. Sometime during the evening he phoned Hennerkop to ask him for the name of his blond patient. Hennerkop refused to give it.
Later—he wasn’t sure when; he was very drunk by that time—he called Hennerkop again. Hennerkop hung up on him.
“I guess I just slipped.”
Silence.
“These last couple of sessions—I don’t know, they’ve shaken me up. I was all shook up when I left here yesterday. I felt a drink would, you know, pull me together. Maybe I should make it a rule not to drink anything.”
“That would be wise.”
“Before, I just quit. It was so awful before, and after I got talking to you I just stopped.”
“I said you would stop.”
“I know. It wasn’t that hard. It was just that yesterday …”
Silence.
“I mean, I guess I’ll be hit by yesterdays again. And if I make it a rule not to drink, period …”
“That would be best.”
“I’m sorry I called you up last night about that girl.”
Nothing.
“What is her name, by the way?”
“It is not proper for me to give you her name. She is my patient.”
“Then I’ll just ask her myself the next time she comes out of here.”
“Please do not.”
“Why? Am I poison or something?”
“It would not be good for you or her.”
“But—”
“Please. We do not discuss my patient further.”
She got stuck there in his mind. He moved from steaks in front of the fire to walks on the island, through thigh-high waving grasses in an imagined island landscape and a plunge down into fragrant grass with that old sweet feeling of salt and sun on bare skin.
He risked a good hard look at her the next time she walked out of Hennerkop’s office, and if anybody needed a friend, it was surely she. She looked like death. Death with small tits.
Hennerkop apparently did not trust him. He must have changed the blonde’s appointment, because he didn’t see her the next time, or any time thereafter. He charged Hennerkop with that.
“It is best not to discuss her with you.”
Obsessed now, and with nothing better to do, he decided to wait her out. The next Monday, a little before nine, he was in the window of the restaurant across the street, nursing a coffee. She didn’t come out at nine. In fact, she neither came nor went all day. He was there again on Tuesday.
“You some kind of detective?”
“Just a stakeout on the building opposite. Nothing for you to get excited about.” Bogart—without the fedora.
She never came that week.
Naturally he said nothing of this to Hennerkop. But the tendrils of warmth that had been sprouting died away into the old suspicion and hostility. The bugger obviously didn’t like him, didn’t even trust him enough to give out the name of one of his patients. And when he was blindsided by another thought, he was still so angry that he didn’t stop to analyze what he would do next. He would show the bugger. He went down to the public library and asked for all the daily papers of the last two weeks and began looking for certain stories: found dead in apartment, jumped or fell, young, female. He came up with three names.
Cruelly now: “That blond patient. Her name’s Miriam Fein—right?”
“I told you I will not discuss my patients.”
“Janice Wellgood.” And by the look on Hennerkop’s face, he knew. It was a look of such desolation that he could not meet it. Waves of shame poured through him as Hennerkop got up and went to the window with his back turned. He forced himself to go over, take Hennerkop’s shoulder, and turn him around. There were tears in Hennerkop’s eyes. With a new kind of grief roaring in him, he took the doctor in his arms.
“I’m sorry.”
Nothing.
“You care for your patients.”
“Yes.”
“Even me?”
“Of course.”
That was excruciating.
4
REMORSE, SKIN-CRAWLING REMORSE, ABOUT THE blonde effectively banished her from the island. But the island itself stayed, and grew brighter. Finally Hennerkop said:
“It would be a good idea if you went back to that place.”
“What for?”
“It is serving no further use as a fantasy. It is time to get it out of your system.”
That didn’t suit him at all. In fact, it was a rotten idea. What was the sense in confronting, and possibly destroying, something so comforting? Go back? Oh, no. Right there in Hennerkop’s office, he felt the grab of fear that he knew so well, and as it hit him he had the fleeting realization that for some months he had been feeling all sorts of other terrible emotions, but not fear.
Now, suddenly, it was back, and he skidded away from it. He had to find something else. And he hit on running. He found himself running toward running. Hennerkop knew he was a runner; he had let that slip out earlier. But he had never talked about it much, never felt the need to because it was one of the few things he had been successful at. It didn’t seem to require any discussion. So, as artfully as possible, he steered the talk away from the island and toward running. Not directly—that would have been too obvious—but in a roundabout way.
“The island’s a long way off, you know.”
Silence.
“You need a boat to get there.”
Silence.
“I mean, it would take me a couple of days to get there and hire a boat and come back.”
“You have more important things to do these days?”
“I guess what I’m saying is that it scares me a little. I mean, we’ve talked about being scared and anxious. Scared by competition, scared by people.”
“Yes.”
“Well, you know, you don’t have to be scared. Take running. I was never exactly scared when I was running. Well, nervous maybe.” He had got there, he hoped smoothly.
Running, mercifully, took some explaining. Although it was competitive, although it was built around the concept of there being winners and losers, losing never got to him deep down. It hurt, make no mistake; he wanted to win—fiercely. But when he lost he was not revealed as contemptible.
When he lost he lost, and anyway he didn’t lose very often. He was good at running, right from the beginning. Furthermore, it was something he did by himself, his own body responding to his orders, in a sense competing with itself as much as with others. He ran alone, inside himself, commanding himself to run even when he no longer could, punishing himself. And he could also practice by himself. A great sport for a loner. Even though he ended up in stadiums, watched sometimes by large crowds, essentially he ran alone.
Running had done a lot for him. It had lifted him up from the bottom of Whittington High and deposited him comfortably in the middle, for although he was still a very odd and spooky kid, he now had a talent that had to be respected. By graduation he had a strange niche of his own, lofty and remote, because in his senior year he came in second in the state championships, and nobody from Whittington had done anything like that before; he was a school hero.
It started when Mr. McGaw, who was his math teacher and who doubled as track coach, asked him to come out. Always obedient to authority, he showed up. It was a cold day in early April, and there was a gang of kids down at the far end of the athletic field. Some were dressed like him, in sweaters and sneakers. A couple had on track shoes, shapely light things with spikes. He looked around and was relieved to find himself surrounded by familiar faces he had run away from many times in the past. (Frenchy LaValle, who would go on to become a professional football player, was not there; he was captain of the baseball team.)
The first thing Mr. McGaw did was to line everybody up for a practice hundred-yard dash. He loped along, deciding to finish a respectable third. But halfway through, something got to him. He turned it on and ended in a dead heat with Billy Solomon. All those years when he was running home scared from school, he had been too preoccupied to notice that Billy was running too.
The next thing Mr. McGaw did was run the group four times around the football field. There it was a little harder to disappear. After the second lap there were kids strung all around the field. He hung behind the only one who seemed to be able to run at all, but that one slowed down too, and he finished easily about a dozen yards ahead of everyone else.
“You’ll run the mile,” said Mr. McGaw.
He was given a pair of running shorts and track shoes, and two weeks later ran in a dual meet against Milbury. He won. How he managed it was rather mysterious. There were so many conflicting things going on inside him that he couldn’t concentrate on the matter of running. He felt conspicuous, slightly sick to his stomach, exposed in a strange place, lined up in a kind of daze with three other boys—one from his school, two determined and unstoppable-looking ones from the other—and he wished he were somewhere else.
But he felt light. His new track shoes were light; they fitted him perfectly. When the gun went off and he started running, he ran lightly and easily but in a daze. He could see the entire scene as he ran, trees and school buildings and knots of kids yelling from the sidelines, and two pairs of purple shorts pumping along ahead of him. Again unwilling to get conspicuously out in front, he ran behind the purple shorts. By the second time around, he could hear some of the kids yelling for him. Kids who had always yelled at him were now yelling for him; it was a fantastic feeling, and yet he was still unwilling to push out in front. By the third time around, they were screeching. Some of the daze left him, and one of the pairs of purple shorts disappeared, and he realized that he had been running much faster than he had in practice and was having trouble breathing, and he wondered if he would get to the finish line at all, let alone get by the one kid who was laboring along just ahead of him. He reached down for something—every distance runner he would talk to later put it in those same corny but accurate terms: he reached down. When he was ready to quit because his lungs were burning and his legs wouldn’t work anymore, he reached down and ran by the other boy.
A week later he reached down again, but it didn’t help. The other kid hung on and won. Strangely, it didn’t matter that much. He had done his best, actually run a faster race than the week before. Mr. McGaw said: “Four forty-three. Tough, Fred—that should have been enough to win.”
Billy Solomon, sitting next to him in the bus going home, said: “Good race.” That, coming from Billy, who hadn’t even qualified in the sprints and must have been feeling low because of his failure, from the boy with whom he had not exchanged a word since the day back in grade school when Billy had hit him in the mouth, flooded him with an unfamiliar feeling. He wanted to extend a hand, acknowledge Billy’s generosity, apologize for that other time. But he was far too shy. He mumbled his thanks. That summer, working the fountain at Hoffman’s, he made it a point, when Billy came in, to give him an extra scoop in his malt. He wasn’t sure if Billy knew this and, again, was too shy to mention it. But he did have the feeling that Billy could become a friend, his only friend in that school, in that town, in his world.
Experiences like that were so rare that he remembered Billy. Even in later life, when he ran into anti-Semitism in the business world, it was Billy who reminded him that he didn’t really look down on Jews the way some people did. It was more something that was expected of him and that he was not self-assured enough to deny.
The spring of senior year was a good one. He practiced with the other members of the track team and in that way associated with them. He penetrated the school locker room, a clanging place with its steel lockers and yelling boys, a place he had been too timid to enter before. He was changing his socks there alone one afternoon when two kids came out of the shower and began talking in the next bay.
“Joanne, never.” It was Frenchy.
“She would, I bet.”
“I tell you, never. What she will do, she likes to have her tits tickled. What she will do, she puts her tongue in your mouth and gives you a hand job.”
“She does?”
“Gives me a hand job. I doubt she would give one to you.”
Joanne Fensler. His daydreams about her became more graphic. Still, he never spoke to her. Even after he came in second in the state championships and was a school hero he didn’t. He spent that summer in Hoffman’s. And the word got around that when Mr. Hoffman wasn’t there he was good for an extra scoop and more malt in the malteds. The kids came in, and he achieved a relationship based on the respect he had earned as a runner and on the favors he could dispense at the fountain, and he learned to kid along—but just a little, because he was getting his first inklings of what he would learn so much of later: to move deliberately and appear calm when he wasn’t, to say little when he was nervous and nothing when he was really nervous.
Be calm but friendly. And not act jerky and awkward, which was what he could not achieve when Joanne came in alone one afternoon. The place was empty. Mr. Hoffman was out in back. She sat down at the middle of the counter.
“Hi, Fred.” The first words she had ever addressed to him.
“Hi.”
“I’d like a vanilla malt. I hear you make those special ones.”
“Vanilla malt.” He clattered around, trying to assemble it. He kept his back to her. He put in three spoonfuls of malted milk powder. Finally he had to turn around and give it to her.
“Oh, that’s good. Fred, you make the best.”
From where he stood, the malt seemed snuggled between her breasts. Her head was bent over the glass, her mouth wrapped around the straw, her hair falling down and her eyes looking up at him.
“Enough malt?”
“Just right.” The tongue that would be in Frenchy’s mouth when she did her next hand job on him showed in a flicker as she licked vanilla from her lips. And there in front of him, spread out on the counter, surrounding the malt, two feet from his sweating hand, was what liked to be tickled. Why not just reach out and give one of them a stroke? He willed himself to do it, to move his arm muscle so that his hand went forward to encounter the fuzz of the sweater and the softness beneath. But he was riveted by shyness, by the glare of the sun, by the glitter of all that afternoon light bouncing from the fountain fixtures. And Joanne looked up at him again, and the malt went down in her glass, sip by sip. And Mr. Hoffman came out from in back. And that was the closest he ever came to Joanne Fensler.
“You did not tell me you ran so much or so well.”
“Didn’t I?”
“Is it one of those superior things you have saved?”
“I don’t get you.”
“Is it one of those things you keep to yourself so that you can impress me at some other time?”
“No. Oh, no.” God’s truth, it wasn’t.
“We need not talk only about bad things.”
“But they’re what I worry about.”
“Why did you choose to talk about running just now?”
He couldn’t remember. He had gotten so engrossed by those first high school races and by the memory of Joanne Fensler.
“Perhaps I can remind you. We were talking about your island fantasies and the need to dispose of them.”
“Oh, yes.”
Silence.
“Honestly, I wasn’t holding back on running. Believe me.”
“I believe you.”
“But if you want to hear about it, there’s a lot of college stuff, and—”
“You wish to talk about running now?”
“Well, we might as well get through with it.”
“You do not want to talk about the island now?”
“It seems to me we just had the idea that I was talking about the island too much.”
“The idea is to examine why we choose to talk about things and when we choose.”
