John Domini - Bedlam and Other Stories

Nonetheless he was grateful for the time. Grissom progressed soon enough to a point where he was able to ask for the less demanding job, in the jet-aircraft line, without shame. Once there, also, he found himself prospering. After he reached middle age, after his father had died, Grissom didn’t bother keeping his work with the doctor a secret any longer. Indeed he became a regular advocate of analysis for management-level employees. Couple years on the couch, Grissom took to saying, and you’ll die a rich man.

But he suffered, nevertheless, some lower-grade infections left from his night before the prostitute’s vanity mirror. These remained hard to put into words. Really, the slack hell of the last twenty-five years was rendered best, in capsule version, on the night of his return from that first executive-level trek. Oh, he could say he’d done some other things in the interim. He’d remained faithful to Syl. He’d gone back to the Church, finding his place among those crowds whispering to themselves with eyes closed. He’d raised two sons during the 1960’s, he shouldn’t forget that. Yet really, it had all been in the return.

Two or three more nights had passed since the insanity in the hotel room — impossible, rough-cut dark hours stained with dreams of being born and then going to work at once, still trailing the greasy umbilicus. Impossible nights. So when Grissom did in fact make it home, his young hand was shaking so hard it took him three tries to turn the kitchen doorknob. And—? “Yaaaay, Grissom ! He’d stumbled bang into the raised glasses and popping flashbulbs of a surprise party. Syl had been so proud of him for earning the right to go on such a trip, and his birthday fell near enough to make such an excuse. So neighbors, relatives, even slight office acquaintances had been brought over. Syl and he, in those days, were trying to expand their circle.

When his wife rushed out of the crowd and hugged him, fiercely, Grissom had burst into tears and shrieked something hysterical, Godgodgod or something, at which everyone in the room laughed and said: Awww. Look at that, awww , what else can you say? He returned Syl’s hug, tight, tight, burying his face in her neck to avoid seeing these loosened smiles and roving eyes that had come at him out of the darkened rooms of his own home. Syl had finally told him loudly, party-volume, to loosen up his hold , hey come on darling. The crowd found this hilarious. The people who’d laughed too raucously, or who’d made the wrong sort of jokes, Syl and Grissom had never seen again.

And—? His reaction had been nothing short of a miracle. He didn’t call the party off. Yes of course Grissom wanted to avoid a scene; yes too he was hungry and the baklava Syl had baked reeked of sweet honey. Yes, most importantly, he’d been too frightened to go through any more high emotions for a while. So, a miracle, Grissom stayed on his feet. Manfully he circled among the wisecracks about growing old and the fearsome traces of a perfume that would be right for a sophisticated lady in a big-city bar. The night followed the pattern, in capsule version, for that brutal cross-country running around that a man at Grissom’s level of the business was supposed to do: racing from the freezer to Kansas City, then catching a late-night shuttle for Savannah, with a connection for the baby’s bedroom…. Hours had passed. He’d stayed on his feet. Then finally and without knowing how it had happened, he’d discovered himself alone with his wife for the first time all evening. She was sitting in the after-party dark, lying back nearly, on the sofa. She’d brought their son downstairs and, her breast like a softening in the smoke and upholstery, she was nursing him. Grissom watched. The infant’s large eyes were closed; her own were lowered to see him suck. They might both have been asleep, except that she was murmuring to the child in babytalk. And the wife had the second child sitting up in her belly already, that’s how fast you went about such things then. So Grissom had come to believe, as he stood watching the two of them, that he would never again take part in this world of Syl’s, this drowsy continuous talking and touching. The calm fullness of bellies and the tongue living inside the kiss: never for him. Syl had made too fragile a web, a wisp strung between two monsters, for the boom and bust of Grissom’s inner life. When he saw the baby’s saliva start to dribble down his wife’s breast, Grissom had to turn away.

Yet he’d remained faithful. After the second baby was born and Grissom’s numbness in the sack continued nonetheless, Syl had broken down and screamed at him, weeping, to see a headshrinker, see one. Then he’d punched in his hours on the couch. He’d taken also his more conservative medicines, the Church and raising children. In time there had come a night when Syl could go farther than merely laying a hand on the back of his thigh to let him know the choice was still open.

And after more time still, Grissom came to yet another — what could he call it? — another moment of private graduation. This time it happened at the office. A late September day. He was then 52, his night on acid twenty years behind him already. He was standing at the urinal in the executive washroom, looking over his company’s latest annual report. He tried always to bring some work with him into the men’s room, so as not to have his concentration broken. The place, with its aluminum and Muzak and air-freshener, could rub your brains clean in a minute. There Grissom had noticed that his photograph at the front of the report appeared odd, incorrect somehow. Moving to the basin to wash his hands, he thought it over. And then, on an impulse, he’d splashed the water up onto his face and looked into the mirror, bright and humming with Muzak. Like that, the answer came to him. Of course: the boys in Design & Layout had airbrushed his picture, so he wouldn’t look too old.

That morning, that day…again his mysterious failure of speech afflicted Grissom. He couldn’t say with any precision why this retouched photo in his company report, a simple matter of good business, should pick up his spirits as much as it had. But he went back to his desk at a strut. He felt so with-it he invited the other vice-president on his corridor to lunch. And in the restaurant, Grissom had shocked the man by ordering good imported Scotch straight up before the meal.

Indeed, that last graduation had picked him up too high, too fast. Every one of Grissom’s shot glasses, these past five years, had dropped like a small bomb behind his ribcage. He’d gone back to hard stuff, after all, at an age when he should have been switching to milk.

In this business, too, Syl had impressed him. Any time he reached for a third highball, she would start reminding him of the two or three men in their circle who’d already had their first heart attack. She would lay her broad hand (she had a fisherman’s hands, he’d always thought) over his whenever he began to pour an unnecessary J&B. She’d ask: you forgetting who you are, Grissom? Yes with that mock-businesslike way she had of using his last name as if it was something serious enough to joke about. Hey Grissom, she’d say. You trying to catch up with somebody out there? Grissom, settle down a little, don’t just stand there talking to yourself. Hey, look at me. Hey Grissom, talk to me .

It might have worked, her familiar needling gab. Those fisherman hands might have hooked the right words in the darkness beneath Grissom’s thoughts. She could have made him tell her how he’d wanted to define himself as one way or another, in that hotel bar a generation earlier, how he wanted to see himself without any gray areas showing. But no dice. After his first heart attack, a man gets everything from a new perspective.