Loving Time

twenty-nine

“Bobbie, what are you up to?” Gunn Tram scolded the ringing telephone in Bobbie’s apartment as if it could hear her and pick up. “Dr. Dickey was asking about you today. Bobbie, don’t you try to hide from me. If you’re in trouble, I got to know.”

The phone didn’t care. It just rang on and on, as if mocking her distress. “Come on, Bobbie, pick up.”

He wasn’t picking up, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t there. Gunn Tram trudged up and down the three flights of creaking stairs between their apartments all Friday evening looking for him.

“Just because I have a phone doesn’t mean I have to use it,” he had told her on the other occasions when she complained about having to come down the stairs to find him. “Maybe I don’t want to be found.”

That night he didn’t want to be found. Even if Dr. Dickey hadn’t come down to her office asking a lot of questions about “people who had grudges against the Centre,” Gunn would have been worried. Bobbie had the look in his eye that something was bothering him. When something was bothering Bobbie, Gunn knew, he usually did something about it that bothered other people.

Gunn was scared for him. Bobbie didn’t mean to get in trouble. But like today, when Dr. Dickey asked if Bobbie could possibly still be hanging around the Centre—well, trouble just seemed to come to him. It hurt Gunn that Bobbie made people mad when he hadn’t done a thing. He was like a magnet for bad luck. She didn’t understand why the doctors cared so much about crazy people they couldn’t even help, and didn’t try to help Bobbie who’d been such a good nurse to them.

Around eleven Gunn walked over to the French Quarter bar on Broadway looking for him. Brian said he hadn’t been in. She sat drinking beer at the bar until midnight. At midnight she walked home slowly.

Bobbie’s apartment was in the space that used to be the kitchen when the brownstone was a private home. It was just below ground level at the back of the building. Steps up to the back door led to a long-unused garden. His two windows were not visible from the street.

Gunn knew, from the long list of grievances about him, that Bobbie often came in and out the back way, frightening the neighbors at odd hours. And she had to agree with them that the way Bobbie did things was a little peculiar. Often when he came to see her, he climbed the fire escape and entered through an open window. Gunn saw him as eccentric and attributed his strangeness to his unusual childhood in Louisiana and the terrible things he had witnessed in Vietnam.

All her life, Gunn had been interested in people. The sameness of the population in Sweden had been the real reason she left home at sixteen, all alone, to come to America. She had wanted a different kind of life from her parents’ dull repetition of their parents. Even then, she had liked all kinds of people. Their stories fascinated her, especially the sad ones. She felt she could be any one of them and her heart was filled with a powerful desire to help. Gunn worked at the Psychiatric Centre because she craved the tragedy and disappointed dreams she found there. So many sad stories made her own uneventful life seem almost joyful. At the Centre, there were very few happy stories, many damaged people. Gunn had loved Bobbie from the first conversation she’d had with him over fifteen years ago. He had come to work at the Centre with the same wish to help she had. He was good to those poor mad creatures on the locked wards, people Gunn was afraid of being too close to even though the shrinks taught tolerance, and Gunn had tried hard to learn their lessons. Bobbie cared about the little people, and so did she.

All the thirty years Gunn had worked at the Centre the docs had joked about how everybody was crazy, how it was all right to be crazy. Over the years, Gunn had watched the degree of craziness escalate. Now it was spilling out all over the place, and it was still all right. The docs, the patients, the residents—nobody complained about anybody. Even Gunn could tell that some of the young women residents coming in were very strange, very strange indeed.

In the old days, all the iffy things like attitude and sexual preference were watched very carefully. In those days, a person couldn’t be too strange and still qualify as a doc Supervisors were informed about every little thing every resident did. It was hard to get into the Centre, and even after they were in, residents were carefully screened during all the years of their training. Gunn had loved working in Personnel in those days. Little notes about any peculiarity were added to everyone’s files. But not anymore. PCness decreed that everybody had a right to keep whatever baggage they came in with and never mind how it affected the patients or the system. It was scary what people got away with now. Gunn knew for a fact that many of the doctors took a wide range of painkillers; even the great Harold Dickey himself had a weakness for Johnnie Walker that he indulged in in his office throughout the afternoon following lunch. There were a lot of things going wrong that Gunn had to worry about.

The light was on under Bobbie’s door when Gunn returned to the brownstone. She stood in the dim, cramped hallway outside his apartment and knocked timidly.

“Bobbie?”

Inside, she could hear movement, but he didn’t answer. “Bobbie, you in there? I got to talk to you.”

Sounds of the toilet flushing upstairs, then a slammed door. Gunn put her face so close to Bobbie’s door her lips almost touched the faded paint. She whispered urgently, “Bobbie, you remember Dr. Dickey, don’t you?… Dr. Dickey came to see me today. He asked about people with grudges against the Centre, people who hated Dr. Treadwell.… Bobbie, you don’t hate Dr. Treadwell, do you?”

No answer from inside. Gunn felt dizzy in the gloomy silence, but she had something to say, and she was going to finish no matter what. “Of course, I didn’t tell him anything—I didn’t know anything—Bobbie, Dr. Dickey took the files, lots of files. He said he wanted to check out all the disciplinary actions taken against staff for patient errors. He took some patient files, too.…

“Bobbie, he took the files, and there wasn’t a thing I could do to stop him. You know he’s the head of the Committee. He wanted them, and everybody from upstairs was already gone. There wasn’t even anybody to ask if it was all right.”

Gunn could hear Bobbie breathing on the other side of the door, but he didn’t open up. She said, “Something’s going on, Bobbie. Dr. Dickey told me somebody wants to hurt Dr. Treadwell. I feel so bad about it I didn’t know what to say.” There was a pause while Bobbie, unseen behind his door, breathed in and out.

“Oh, Bobbie, I’m afraid. Please … Tell me you don’t hate Dr. Treadwell. You wouldn’t do anything to hurt her, would you?”

Gunn did not like the dark, the tight space, the dense stillness in the decaying building, the slight wheeze at the end of Bobbie’s exhalations. She knew him, knew he sat on her fire escape sometimes in the middle of the night, not doing anything at all except breathing in and out just like this. She remembered Dr. Dickey’s own words so many times over the years: “We’re all a little crazy, Gunn. Don’t let it worry you one little bit. Most crazy people never hurt anyone but themselves.” Gunn had tried not to let the crazy things worry her.

Suddenly the light went off under Bobbie’s door, and his voice came out of the dark. “Go away, old woman. The bastard is looking for someone else, not me.”

Now she breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m glad, sweetheart, because your file was one of the ones he took.”

“Fuck!” Some heavy object crashed against the flimsy wooden door, stressing the lock and cracking the wood. Gunn jumped back, cringing.

“Bobbie? Bobbie, don’t get upset, please don’t get upset. We can talk about this—”

But Bobbie didn’t want to talk about it. Gunn heard him slam the door to the garden and knew he’d gone out again. She started worrying again, this time that he’d go out drinking and get into another fight. She felt real bad about upsetting him.