Walker Percy - The Thanatos Syndrome

Now, I don’t know where he got this, from Ramakrishna, Dr. Jung, or Matthew 13:44. Or from his own sardonic Irish soul. But there it is. “Okay, that patient may look like a loser to you — incidentally, Doctors, how do we know you don’t look like losers to me, or I to you?” said Dr. Sullivan, a small ferret-faced man with many troubles. But there it was, to me the pearl of great price, the treasure buried in a field, that is to say, the patient’s truest unique self which lies within his, the patient’s, power to reach and which we, as little as we do, can help him reach.

Do you know that this is true? I don’t know why or how, but it is true. People can get better, can come to themselves, without chemicals and with a little help from you. I believed him. Amazing! I’m amazed every time it happens.

Very well, I am an optimist. I was an optimist with Donna. I was willing to explore her romanticism with her. What I believed was not necessarily that her knight might show up — who knows? he could — but rather that talking and listening ventilates the dark cellars of romanticism. She needed to face the old twofaced Janus of sex: how could it be that she, one and the same person, could slip off of an afternoon with Daddy, her seedy Atticus Finch, do bad thrilling things with him, and at the same time long for one look from pure-hearted Galahad across a crowded room? Daddy had got to be put together with Galahad, because they belonged to the same forlorn species, the same sad sex. She was putting it together in me, who was like her daddy but had no designs on her and whom she trusted. She could speak the unspeakable to me. Sometimes I think that is the best thing we shrinks do, render the unspeakable speakable.

So here she is two years later. I watch her curiously as she comes up the porch steps. She looks splendid, a big girl yes, but no fat girl she. She’s wearing a light summery skirt of wrinkled cotton in the new style, slashed up the thigh and flared a little. Her hair is pulled up and back, giving the effect of tightening and shortening her cheek. With her short cheek, flared skirt, and thick Achilles tendon, she reminded me of one of Degas’s ballet girls, who, if you’ve noticed, are strong working girls with big muscular legs.

I try to catch her eye, but she brushes past me, swinging her old drawstring bag, and strides into my office. She ignores the couch. Seated, we face each other across the desk.

Her gaze is pleasant. Her lips curve in a little smile, something new. Is she being ironic again?

“Well?” I say at last.

“Well what?” she replies equably.

“How have you been?”

“Oh, fine,” she says, and falls silent. “How about you?” Yes, she is being ironic.

“I’m all right.”

“I see”—and again falls silent, but equably and with no sense of being at a loss.

“Do you wish to resume therapy?”

She shakes her head but goes on smiling.

“It was you who called me, Donna.”

“I know.”

I wait for her to start up. She doesn’t. I decide to wait her out.

Finally she says, “I knew you were back.”

“And you wanted to wish me well.”

“I saw you in the store.”

“I see.” Something stirs in the back of my head.

“I often see your wife in the store.”

“Is that right?”

“She’s your second wife, isn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“She is often with that famous scientist, or is he a bridge player, anyway a close friend, I’m sure.” Again the lively look. Again the stirring just above my hairline.

“Donna, I’m sure you didn’t come here to tell me you saw my second wife at the store.” “No.” She opens her mouth and closes it.

When patients get stuck, you usually get them off dead center by asking standard questions, as if you were seeing them for the first time.

“Are you still working at the clinic?”

“Yes”—neutrally. Again she falls silent, but without a trace of the old unease or hostility.

“How does it go?”

“Oh, fine.”

As we gaze at each other, the stirring at the back of my head comes up front. I have the same nutty idea.

“Where do you live now, Donna?”

“In Cut Off, Louisiana.” Her reply is as prompt and triumphant as if I had at last hit on the right question.

“I see. Where is Cut Off, Donna?”

Her eyes move up a little as if she were consulting a map over my head. “Cut Off, Louisiana, is sixty-one miles southwest of New Orleans.” There is no map over my head.

“Very good, Donna. Donna, where is Arkansas?”

Again the eyes going up into her eyebrows. “Arkansas is bounded on the north by—”

“That’s fine, Donna, I see that you know. Give me your hand, Donna.”

She gives me her right hand across the desk. I had thought she was right-handed, but needed to be sure. I look at it, the broad thumb, the short nail. I remember dreaming of her once, making much in the dream of a certain stubbiness of hand and foot. Her foot does in fact have an exaggerated arch, like a dancer’s. A broad quick little hoofed mare of a girl she was in the dream.

I look into her eyes, which are dilated and dark with pupil. Again she reminds me of Degas girls, with their big black eye dots.

“Are you taking any medicine, Donna?”

She shakes her head quickly. How do I know, as certainly as if she were a four-year-old, that she is telling the truth?

“Donna, make a circle with your thumb and forefinger like this and look at me through it, like so.”

She does. She looks at me through the circle with her left eye. Ordinarily in a right-handed person, the right eye is dominant.

I am musing but rouse myself. I’ll muse later.

“Donna, is there anything I can do for you?” She shakes her head, almost merrily.

“Donna, why did you come to see me? What do you want?” Although I had not yet got onto this peculiar business, I already knew — with her as well as with Mickey LaFaye — that I could ask her any question in any context.

Her eyes are focused above me. She nods toward something. “That.”

I turn around in my chair. There in the bookshelf, in a space between two bookends, squats a little pre-Columbian figurine, a mud-colored, sausage-shaped woman with a large abdomen. A patient with mystical expectations from a trip to Mexico and some Mayan ruins had given it to me. Her mystical Mexican expectations didn’t pan out. They seldom do.

“You like that?” I ask Donna.

She nods.

“Would you like to have it?”

She nods eagerly, the same quick assent of a four-year-old.

“Why?” I am curious. Is it because it is fat and fertile? Because it is mine? Because it is Mexican? Does she have the Mexican itch?

“Something I need.”

“It is something you need?”

“Yes, I need.”

I need? A curious expression. I get up to get it to give it to her. Not hearing her chair scrape, I am startled when at the very moment I turn around, I run into her. She has come around my desk, barefoot and silent. She backs into me.

“Oh, sorry,” I say automatically, moving sideways to my chair, but she has already reached behind her, seized my hands, brought them around her clasped in hers and against her. She presses the figurine in my hand against her body.

“What’s this about, Donna?”

By way of answer, she cranes her head back into my neck and begins turning to and fro. I begin to free my hands. She tightens her grip. “You know.”

“Know what?”

“Donna needs you.”

“No, Donna doesn’t. We’ve been through all that, remember? First the hatred, then the love, neither of which had anything to do with me. We got past it, remember?”

She’s turning to and fro. “I always liked to smell you. You in your seersuckers, not young not old, but like—?”