I stood up. Even the slight motion made the room race. I faced my parents; my father sat very still, absolutely erect; my mother was tapping her foot and glancing at it. I wanted to throw myself before them, to create a miraculous moment of family and comfort. I felt very weak and very ugly.
“Help me,” I said, bowing my head. I felt my knees going weak and I wanted to fall, but I wouldn’t.
“Help you?” said Rose. “I don’t understand, David. I just don’t get it. What can I do?” She looked at Arthur, her eyes at once frightened and annoyed.
“What’s past is past,” Arthur said, in a murmur. “There’s no turning back. Forgive me for this, David, but I only hope she’s happy.”
“What can I do to help you?” Rose said. “I ask you. I’ve never known. Just tell me. You ask me for help and I don’t know what to do. You’re talking about red pants from twelve years ago, you’re white as a sheet, and I don’t know what to do for you anymore, if I ever did, to be perfectly honest.”
I was sorry I’d said it. I drew myself up and tried to look masterly. It cleared my mind to take a long, deep breath. I walked to the window. I saw a boy named Howard Kerr, dressed in his unvarying black, walking with his parents toward their car in the visitors’ parking lot. The Kerrs walked with their arms around each other while Howard walked in front, his head down, jacketless and hugging himself, his long hair dancing.
“It is for the best,” I said. I watched the Kerrs getting into their LTD. Howard brushed the snow off their windshield with his forearm. “I mean it’s a relief. Otherwise, there’d probably always be a question. I feel a weight being lifted off of me, I already feel it.” I listened to my parents breathing behind me; my legs were aching from the tightness of my muscles. Mr. Kerr rolled his window down and Howard stepped back, bent at the knee to speak. The exhaust from the car darkened the snow to pale ash. Mrs. Kerr’s long red fingernails appeared at the open window, waving goodbye. The car pulled away and Howard stood and watched as the taillights disappeared into the haze of the storm.
“You’d better be going,” I said to my parents. It was dark enough outside to see their reflections in the window, propped up in their chairs like two oddly angled playing cards. “People are already leaving and you’ve got a long drive. In this snow. It’s not letting up, you know.” I saw Arthur beginning to stir; his hands went onto the arms of his chair and he took a deep breath; soon, he’d be at my side, his arms around me. I turned quickly, stopping him. “The best thing, the best possible thing, for right now I mean, it’s kind of strange right now, a little hard to adjust to, so I think you should both leave.”
“We could talk, David,” said Arthur.
I nodded. “I know. But I’ve been talking for about five years and it hasn’t…I’m a little talked out, is what I mean. Maybe we can talk some other time.”
Rose and Arthur left with very little additional protest. I stood at the window and watched them walk to the parking lot; they didn’t touch but they seemed to be talking. As he opened the car door, Arthur turned around and waved in the general direction of my window, but I stepped back, plastered myself to the wall, as if avoiding gunfire. I sat in one of the armchairs, wondering with an empty, obsessive repetitiveness if there was any significance in the fact that I’d chosen to sit in Rose’s chair and not Arthur’s. The volume of the radio someone was playing seemed to have increased and the sound of it climbed up my spine like a monkey.
I stood up, my fists clenched, and I strode out into the corridors. The doors to some of the rooms were open. Families visiting. It was important to remember the whole world wasn’t in a hospital, didn’t meet in tiny rooms with single beds, on Sunday. Finally, I found the radio, on the floor above my own. It was in Bruno Tesi’s room. He held it on his lap, a huge portable with the antennae completely extended and quivering. Bruno was with his older brother, who sat in a trenchcoat with his long legs crossed, smoking a brown cigarette. Bruno, soft and unformed, with skin like flan, smiled when I came into the room. A Steve Miller record was on, monotonous and snide. Bruno turned the volume down because even he knew I’d have to shout to be heard over it. I said in a voice only loud enough to be heard: “If you don’t turn that thing down and keep it soft I’m going to cause you excruciating pain and then I’m going to kill you.”
It was a grave error threatening Bruno. Both he and his brother reported it and my actions came under closer scrutiny. My favored position at Rockville withdrew just as effortlessly as it had appeared, backing out of circumstance’s door, hat in hand.
It was just as well, I felt. My will was largely gone and I felt myself sinking into the marsh of my worst self. I had one last rational thought before letting it all slip out of my hands: perhaps Jade had moved to Paris to increase my chances of release.
The loosely guarded secret of Rockville was that the staff tolerated sexual contact between the patients. It was usually discreet, so much so that in all my years inside I knew only of two or three instances when two people were known as a couple. During my first stay, Dr. Clark told me that if I ever had a romantic encounter with a patient the important thing was that I should not be ashamed of it, that I would speak to him of it, “share it.” This was the Rockville strategy on sex: rather than control it, they wanted to make it a part of the general rehabilitative atmosphere. We were all of us there, after all, to help one another, and this meant genuine human contact—and how could there be genuine human contact with sexuality strictly off- limits?
In April, a couple months after learning of Jade’s marriage, I made friends with a sixteen-year-old patient named Rochelle Davis. Rochelle was quite beautiful in a sultry, unwholesome way. She wore prune-colored lipstick and nail polish, black clothes, smoked Camels incessantly, and presented herself as an authority on suicide. She had categories of suicide: revenge suicide, accidental suicide, instructional suicide, and others that made even less immediate sense, such as lavender suicide, cheesy suicide, and astral suicide. She had no friends, neither inside the hospital nor out. In the world she was too aggressively strange, and in Rockville most felt too vulnerable to risk friendship with someone so fascinated by self-termination. Rochelle—gaunt, green-eyed, her chestnut hair combed Elvis style—gave no evidence of caring what people thought of her, but she did seem very keen on knowing me. It was obvious that my increasingly unstable social position in the hospital was a large part of Rochelle’s interest in me, but it wasn’t that simple, as it never is.
The first time we made love was in the bathroom on the first floor reserved for nurses. It was a strange, fussy little room, with pink walls, dull tile floor, an armchair, and a dressing table holding Johnson’s Baby Powder, dental floss, Arrid deodorant spray, and a spray cologne called “Sunday.” We made love in the armchair, three or four times over—not out of an ever- increasing passion but because each time it was clumsy and the satisfaction we gained only irritated our huge store of static lust. At first, we didn’t have the boldness to take our clothes off—as if it might somehow be better to be discovered with pants down to the knees rather than naked altogether. We made love with Rochelle on my lap, her bony, bluish feet pressed on the back of the chair, her head dangling between my open legs, her navy blue underwear quivering like a trampoline between her thighs as she shook her constricted legs with nervous, discomforted passion. Then we helped each other come with our mouths and then we made love on the cold floor—naked now, but it was too late: we were already growing incurious and it was clear that the yearning we attempted to serve would remain immune to our efforts.
Nevertheless, I became obsessive about her. That night, I lay in bed and when my cock lifted at the thought of her I followed its ascent and was in her room moments later: Nurse Seroppian was asleep at her post, her enormous purple eyelids shuddering, and she was known for the dependability of her nightly doze. I spent the night in Rochelle’s bed and entered her once after she’d fallen asleep. She woke for a moment, didn’t seem to mind, and slipped back into sleep. It went on that way for weeks; we made love like people beating their heads against a wall. It sometimes amazed me she was only sixteen and so bereft of romantic illusion, but mostly I didn’t care. I didn’t discuss this liaison with Dr. Clark—I knew it would give him trouble—but I did slowly gain a secret sexual reputation: for endurance, if nothing else, or just plain availability.
Before long I took a second lover, a girl from Chicago named Pat Eliot, who had curly yellow hair, cupid’s-bow lips, prodigious breasts, and who pronounced her first name in two syllables. Pat was in her early twenties, an actress. She was actually a success in the world: she’d appeared at the Goodman Theater in many plays and had had a good role in a Hollywood movie, though it hadn’t been released. She was a wonderful lover, tender and powerful, without a trace of athleticism. Her breasts fascinated me but they were so huge they also made me shy, which pleased her because I would guess people had made too much of an issue about them. And so I had two lovers, and then a woman named Stephanie was admitted to Rockville.
Stephanie was just twenty and already a graduate student at the University of Chicago. She had brutal nightmares and wandered about in her sleep. I didn’t know her last name. But I was fixated on the idea of making love to her, and as soon as I had an opportunity to approach her, I did. She had no interest in making love with me and not much interest in knowing me. But I pursued the matter with increasing single-mindedness. Like any losing
