Acquainted with the Night (3 page)

“What apartment?”

“Didn’t he tell you? He’s got an apartment with this Cheryl, on Dorchester. He arranged it all last month, before we knew.”

Paul hung his head over his knees. “He can’t get away with this,” he mumbled.

“Would you like some dinner?”

“I don’t know. I don’t feel like eating anymore.”

“I’ll make something anyway. You’ve got to try.”

It was odd seeing her in the tiny kitchen by herself. They had always done their fancy dishes together. Paul watched from the living room: Nan moved in slow motion, opening cabinets with faltering hands and a vague air, very slowly taking cans and boxes off the shelves and staring at their labels for long moments as if she had never seen them before. Then she opened the refrigerator door and stood looking inside it for a long time. Paul stared at her back; her shoulders began to shake as though she had opened the door onto a pathetic scene.

“Oh, forget it, you don’t have to cook.”

She finally removed something wrapped in aluminum foil and let go of the door. “No, it’s all right. I’ve got to get used to it. This is some chicken Kiev left from yesterday. He made it, actually. You see—” and she tossed her head archly—“he leaves something of himself with us.”

“How long have you known?” he asked her while they ate.

“A week. I wanted him to tell you before, to give you some time, but he said no. He insisted. A clean swift break was what he wanted. It’s been absolute hell, knowing all week and not being able to tell you. He’s not himself, Paul, this cruelty, this coldness. That bothers me more than anything else. It’s like a sickness. I think he’s psychotic. I really do. I think he’s sick. It has to do with his mother. He needs help.”

The food was sticking in his throat. Everything he ate felt, dry and scratchy as straw. He kept taking gulps of milk to wash it down, but he could still feel the lumps lying heavily in his chest. “I’m going over there tomorrow to get the piano back. You’ll give me the address.”

His mother pushed her plate away and got up. “I’m going to call him.” She brushed a few crumbs off her blouse and caught them in the palm of her hand. Paul realized how wan and weary she looked. Her face was shiny, her lipstick faded, and her skirt wrinkled as though it had been crushed underfoot. “I can’t just let it fall apart like this. It’s too hasty. It doesn’t make any sense. Maybe I can talk to him about it.” Nan went to the phone.

“Wait. What if she answers?”

“Her?” His mother smiled wryly. “I don’t care a thing about her. As far as I’m concerned, she doesn’t exist. I’ve met her, you know, around the university. We once discussed Karen Horney. Isn’t that funny? She’s nothing at all. Just young.”

“So why ...?”

Nan tilted her head and gave him a peculiar look that he couldn’t decipher, almost a grin, as she raised the receiver. She took a folded piece of paper from her pocket. “His number. How do you like that? I’ve got to consult a scrap of paper to telephone your father.”

Evidently the girl didn’t answer, since his mother began talking right away. “Richard, it’s me. Look, Richard ...” Her voice was shaking, cajoling and vulnerable. Paul felt flushed; he began clearing the table noisily to drown out her words, while his ears strained to hear above the clatter. Nan waved her hand at him to be quiet.

“Richard, look, I’m not calling to pester you or whine, believe me. I want what’s best for you. I mean, whatever you think is right for your particular needs. But I think, I’ve been thinking, this has all been too fast—I mean, I can’t absorb it. Can’t we get together and talk about it, just so it isn’t so abrupt? Maybe,” she added timidly, “even see someone about it, together?”

A very short silence. His mother sat down quickly, perched on a hard chair. Paul scraped the leavings of the two plates into the garbage can.

“All right. But, Richard, can I tell you one thing? Before you get all involved in your—your new life, as you call it, Richard, think about what you’re doing. It isn’t so simple. You have a ... a problem, this is an emotional crisis. Try to see it that way, Richard. I think you need help. Maybe you should go back to see Dr. Jonas alone, have a consultation.”

Another silence. Her lips twitched. “You’ve never talked like that. That’s what makes me think—”

Then, after a dead pause, “All right, if that’s how you’ve decided it’s going to be, I’ll call a lawyer in the morning.” She hung up.

Paul was holding a pot half-filled with reheated rice. He walked slowly into the living room. “But you didn’t mention the piano!”

“He’s really finished. He said ... incredible things.”

“The piano!” he shrieked.

“The piano,” she repeated, as if it were an unfamiliar word. “Oh, the piano. I’m sorry.”

He dumped the rice on the carpet, at her feet, and slammed the pot down after it. Then he grabbed his coat. As he went out the door he glimpsed Nan sinking slowly to her knees and scooping up handfuls of rice.

He skipped school the next day and walked all the way to the Point and back. There had been a thaw after yesterday’s rain, so that the gutters were running with slush. At about seven he went to his father’s place. It was a sleek new apartment building, steel and glass. The doorman stopped him to ask his name and destination, and Paul laughed curtly as he replied. When he got up to the sixth floor his father was at the apartment door, waiting.

“Paul.”

“I came for the piano.”

“Paul, you can’t carry it away.”

“Aren’t you going to let me in? I’m kind of cold.”

His father stepped aside. The girl was sitting cross-legged on the floor, leaning against a pile of crammed cartons. They were apparently in the middle of their dinner, which was Kentucky Fried Chicken. A large paper bucket bearing the face of the jovial colonel lay on its side, spewing out chicken parts and discarded bones. They were drinking wine out of paper cups, Bolla Soave, the same kind his father and Nan drank at home. The girl was pretty much what Paul had expected. It was reassuring yet eerie to see his banal predictions verified. She had short straight black hair that fell in bangs to her green-shadowed eyelids, and she wore a long red and green flowered gypsy dress with a round neck. Silver earrings dangled nearly to her shoulders. Her bare feet, sticking out from under the dress, were very small and delicate. But she was plumper than Paul had envisioned. She had enormous breasts. Paul imagined his father’s head nuzzling the huge breasts while the girl lay naked on the bare wood floor, her legs raised and parted. She wiped the chicken grease off her lips and hands and stood up.

“Cheryl, my son Paul.”

Cheryl came towards him smiling, extending a hand.

Paul turned away from her. “I want to talk to you.”

“Cheryl, would you mind?” It was a disgrace—he was apologetic.

Cheryl went into another room and closed the door behind her. Paul hadn’t heard the sound of her voice.

The apartment was cluttered yet looked bare and unlived in—it could be adapted to any pattern of life his father and this Cheryl fell into. Odd pieces of furniture, cartons, shopping bags, a broom and dustpan, were placed haphazardly, like litter. Looking around, Paul recognized with a slight shock two bridge chairs, a brass magazine rack, a straw wastebasket.

“Where is it?”

Richard finally shut the front door. “Where is what?”

“You know, the piano.”

“Oh, in the living room. This way.”

It stood alone in a large room that was empty except for a cream-colored shag rug on the floor and two more bridge chairs from home.

“Didn’t she bring any bridge chairs of her own?”

Richard cleared his throat and patted his graying hair. “Look, believe me, I know this confrontation is very difficult for you.”

“Oh, never mind that crap. I really didn’t think you’d do it. I didn’t realize what a bastard you were underneath.”

Richard paled. “Well,” he said coldly, “take it. No one’s stopping you.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll have a mover here tomorrow. I’m taking the day off from school.”

“Paul.” His father motioned to one of the old bridge chairs. “Let’s start again. Sit down. Please.” Richard sat. His stomach, as he settled in the small chair, sagged with flab, despite all his running. He was so pathetic that finally Paul sat down too.

Richard’s thinning hair was tousled. Paul wondered if she had rumpled it in a moment of affection. In his white shirt, dark trousers, and silver-rimmed glasses, his father resembled the benevolent village druggist Paul had often seen advertising toothpaste on television.

“I think I’m going to laugh,” said Paul. “You and her.” He motioned with a flip of his hand towards the door where Cheryl had disappeared. He expected, hoped, his father would respond angrily again, but Richard only nodded, as if it were the most natural coupling in the world.

“Are you feeling all right, Paul? Have you talked it over with Dr. Crewes? Don’t hold anything back. Tell her what it’s doing to you. It’s best to get it out, you know that. You think I’m a bastard, fine, tell her. Say anything. She’ll help you deal with it.” His mother was right. Richard spoke in a tinny mechanical way, as if his real self were elsewhere. Once again Paul was forced to think he must be sick.

With pity he went over to Richard and put a hand on his shoulder. “What is it that’s making you do this to us?” he asked kindly.

It was past eleven when Paul left for home. They had had a long and, he felt, meaningful talk. They both cried, Paul copiously, Richard joining in as one might to be sociable. At around nine Cheryl had padded into the room tentatively, but Paul shook his head, no, so Richard motioned her away. About an hour later they moved into the other room, where at Richard’s suggestion Paul ate some cold Kentucky Fried Chicken. Then Cheryl, who must have entered the living room by another route, began playing a Scarlatti sonata on the piano. Richard closed the door.

“She’s very good,” he said. “She never could afford a piano of her own before. It makes her very happy.”

Paul felt much better when he left. He understood, at least partially, why his father had done this shocking thing. According to Richard, the root cause was that he had smothered his rage at Nan’s compulsiveness and rigidity for many long years. Now it had finally erupted, as it had to someday, in this form. Also, according to Richard, he was not sick but healthy for the first time in his life. His pathology, he outlined carefully in simplified terms that Paul could understand, had been in submitting to Nan’s rigid controls. Now, with maybe twenty or more years ahead of him, he was going to start a new life and integrate his personality. It would be, he said, a voyage of self-discovery. He swallowed some wine as he talked of self-discovery, and in his eagerness to explain, a few drops dribbled along his chin. He had had trouble with women, he said, ever since boyhood—his mother got him off on the wrong track, as mothers tend to do (they both smiled knowingly), and as a result his whole marital relationship with Nan had been an unconscious working out of unresolved hostility towards his mother. He sucked deeply on his pipe amid pained reminiscences of his mother. This revelation surprised Paul slightly. His grandmother was a kindly, frail old woman with an unexpected and remarkable sense of humor; true, he thought, she did have a tendency to shower them with food and gifts on the rare occasions when they visited, but he had never realized, until Richard told him, just how controlling she was. As for Nan, Paul knew of course that Nan kept the house neat and worried excessively about getting places on time, but he had never dreamed of the tortuous ramifications these failings might have had in Richard’s mind.

“We’ll see each other often, Paul,” Richard said as he was leaving. “We’ll have an even better relationship, now we can be more open with each other.”

Paul was relieved to find Nan wasn’t waiting up for him. He felt funny—no, he could recognize and accurately name the sensation now, thanks to Dr. Crewes—ambivalent about telling Nan of his visit. He was filled with elation at the true communication he and Richard had achieved, and what he craved more than anything else was to share that elation with someone close. Yet that person couldn’t be Nan since, in some complicated way, it had been achieved at her expense. He had to hide it from her, to protect her from more pain. Paul couldn’t be angry with Nan for her pathology—with his background in treatment he knew better than that; he could only be sad at how it had wrecked the family. With the dim light of the hall behind him he looked in on her from her bedroom door. She was wearing a faded blue flannel nightgown and sleeping discreetly on her side of the big bed, her thumb touching her lips. He pitied her.

He didn’t get up at the usual time the next morning. When Nan finally came to awaken him he said he had a bad cold and wouldn’t be going to school. He was planning to surprise her with the piano.

“I’m sorry you’re sick. It’s all that walking in the rain. Can I get you some aspirins? A cup of tea?”

“No, I don’t have any fever.”

“You were out late again last night. With friends?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” she sighed, gazing sleepily around the room, “I’d better run. I’ve got my battered wives group coming first thing in the morning, then I’m taking a couple of hours off, first to see the lawyer, and then I’m seeing Dr. Steinberg for a consultation. I’ve got to get this thing straightened out in my head so I can start dealing with it realistically. I’m just not able to function this way. Patients talk to me at work and I drift off, I just can’t concentrate.”

“Well, maybe he can help you.”

“You don’t have an appointment with Dr. Crewes today, do you?”

“No, tomorrow.”

“Okay, take care of yourself. I’ll phone later to see how you are. You’re sure it’s nothing more than a cold? Does your throat hurt?”

“No, I’m sure. So long.”

As soon as she was gone he leaped out of bed and telephoned the moving company around the corner. He had worked there last summer, so they knew him well. They would do it on short notice if he offered to help.

When all the arrangements were made he had a sudden doubt—maybe he had better call his father. In the elation of last night he had forgotten to remind Richard to leave his key with the superintendent. Cheryl might not be in, and even if she was, he didn’t feel up to dealing with her yet.