The Horned Man

CHAPTER 4

‘Before we start, I’d like you to take a look at something.’

I felt a stirring in the air behind me, then a disturbance in my field of vision as Dr Schrever’s hand crossed over my prone head, holding a small piece of paper. My heart gave an unaccountable little thump.

The piece of paper was a check. I had signed and mailed it to her the day before.

‘Do you notice something strange about it?’ she asked.

Had I signed someone else’s name? No; the signature looked all right, unless I was truly going out of my mind. The amount was the same as I always made out the checks for. And the date looked right too.

‘What’s wrong with it?’ I asked.

‘You can’t see?’

‘No.’

‘Look who it’s made out to.’

I saw then that I had made the check out to a Dr Schroeder instead of Dr Schrever. The error made me laugh out loud.

‘Why did I do that?’

‘Why do you think you did it?’

‘I have absolutely no idea!’

‘Do you know somebody called Schroeder?’

‘Not that I can think of.’

‘A student of yours, perhaps?’

‘No.’

‘Someone from England?’

I couldn’t think of anyone by that name.

‘I wonder why it made you laugh when you saw it?’

‘I suppose there’s something inherently comical about these little slips.’

‘I’m wondering if you laughed because you recognised some hostility you felt toward me, that embarrasses you to have to acknowledge?’

I told her I didn’t think this was so; she didn’t pursue the point. I corrected the check and returned it to her.

I had come in thinking I was going to talk about Elaine, but something had snagged on the current of my thoughts, drawing them in another direction. After a moment I realised what it was.

‘When you moved your hand over my head just now, I felt myself flinching. I must have thought for a moment that you were going to tousle my hair. My stepfather used to do that. It was his one sign of affection…’

While I was talking I remembered how Mr Kurwen had tousled my hair last night as I went past him into his living room, and I realised that at the back of my mind I had been thinking about my childhood ever since then.

Instead of going on to talk about that, though, I interrupted myself to tell Dr Schrever about my encounter with Mr Kurwen; how he had mistaken me for someone he’d asked to come and help find his glass eye, how in my dislike of confrontation I had half gone along with this error, but how I had then come clean to him instead, telling him he’d made a mistake, and asking him, in my capacity as the ‘prick downstairs’, to keep his TV down.

I went on at some length about how large-spirited I had felt after this outburst of candor.

‘Aside from tousling your hair,’ Dr Schrever asked after a pause, ‘was there some other way this person made you think of your stepfather?’

‘I guess I must have been wondering if he’d mistaken me for his son. Which is sort of the way I always felt about my stepfather. Unsure whether he thought of me as a son, unsure to what degree I was his son…’

‘Go on…’

For a long time now, I had been aware of the gentle pressure of Dr Schrever’s professional interest, urging me to talk about my childhood. I had resisted for two reasons. First, I had no interest in being psychoanalysed: I was seeing her for professional reasons of my own, namely that I was intending to write a book about gender relations in the evolution of psychoanalytic practice. My sources would mainly be memoirs and case histories, but I had felt that some first-hand experience would also be of value, to give me a sense of the particular textures of the exchange that takes place in these rooms. For obvious reasons I hadn’t mentioned this motive to Dr Schrever. Second, even though it was necessary for the purposes of my experiment to reveal certain things about myself to Dr Schrever, even quite intimate things, I felt that she, as an American, simply wouldn’t be able to understand the context in which my childhood had occurred. Certain obvious things I could explain, but there would be countless nuances I wouldn’t even know I needed to explain, so that in all likelihood she would draw a series of entirely wrong conclusions about me.

How, for example, would she know that for a widowed, single mother to get herself badly in debt in order to send her only child away to boarding school at the age of eight, was neither an unnatural nor an unloving act, but, in the context of the niche of English society she aspired to occupy, the very opposite of those things? How could Dr Schrever understand (or if she did, take seriously) the codes of speech and behavior by which each caste of that overcrowded island policed its boundaries; how violently offensive it had been, for instance, for my mother to refer to a napkin as a serviette in the presence of my stepfather’s old schoolfriends, or say pleased to meet you when they were introduced, or stress the wrong syllable of controversy? And if she couldn’t understand these things, how would she understand the intrinsic tensions and faultlines of our household; the peculiar fraught atmosphere bred by the very nature of its inception: the cultured and epicurean company director, with an aristocratic wife and three children at the ancestral manor, becoming steadily intoxicated with the charms of his new secretary; guiltily decanting the choice vintage of his existence from its nobly cellared and patinated bottle, into the dubious, cut-price crystal of my mother’s and mine?

It seemed a waste of time to broach the subject.

‘What are you feeling, Lawrence?’ I heard Dr Schrever say.

‘I’m feeling that I… that I didn’t adequately express how good I felt about my straightforwardness with the old man upstairs. There was something about the simple, man-to-man way I ended up talking to him that made me feel almost… American.’

‘What does that mean to you, to feel American?’

‘Released,’ I said. As I explained my view of America, that everything in it, from its architecture to its patterns of speech, was the expression of the single, simple sensation of release, the buzzer sounded, bringing the session to an end.

I stood up from the couch and went out through the small room where the next patient was waiting. I was just leaving the building when I heard Dr Schrever’s voice behind me.

‘Lawrence, would you mind just stepping back in here for a moment?’

I went back into her room. She closed the door.

‘You seem to have left something for me,’ she said, pointing at the couch.

There on the crimson corduroy lay Mr Kurwen’s glass eye. I had forgotten this misdemeanor. The eye must have been in my pocket ever since I had picked it up from Mr Kurwen’s kitchen floor the night before.

Before I knew it – without even the usual warning – I began to turn the same color as Dr Schrever’s couch. She looked at me quizzically.

‘I can explain -’ I blustered, seeing her little notebook on the shelf by her chair.

‘Perhaps next time?’

She picked the glass ball from the couch with the tips of her fingers and handed it back to me.

Outside it was clear and chilly. Sunlight glinted on the new snow bordering the paths into the park. It must have been warm enough to melt the top layer of flakes, as there was a smooth metallic crust over the surface. I found myself wandering in through one of the small entrances. Up through the trees the sky was a fabulous dark fluorescent blue. I stared at it for several blissful seconds. Looking back down, I saw the woman I had mistaken for Dr Schrever. She was heading out of the park on a path that intersected with mine.

I looked hard, to make doubly sure it was her. Shortish dark hair, olive skin; that particular look of casual elegance… It was unmistakably her. She was wearing a long green coat with astrakhan collar and cuffs, and ankle boots trimmed with black fur or wool.

As she reached our intersection, crossing it ahead of me, I had a sudden urge to catch up with her and accost her. I quickened my pace. She must have been aware of me out of the corner of her eye. She turned and paused, looking directly at me. There under the eaves of her dark hair were two golden earrings. Aretes! I almost said the word aloud as I remembered the woman Trumilcik had met in the photograph line at the INS building. For she had lived, had she not, up here? A block north of the Dakota Building… Smiling broadly, I walked on towards her. At that, with an abrupt tightening of her lips, she moved off; not running, but unmistakably hurrying away from me.

I stopped at once, realising what she had taken me for. I had only wanted to ask her if by any chance she happened to be a friend of Bogomil Trumilcik, and if so, to talk to her about him, but obviously she couldn’t have known that.

Even so, I was dismayed to think that my appearance – smiling, in broad daylight, with other people about – could cause such an emphatic recoil.

I went on down to the lake, feeling extremely angry with myself. Leaving Mr Kurwen’s eye like that on Dr Schrever’s couch had made me look like a liar and a fool. So much for my ‘Americanness’! And now this little incident had made me look like a dirty old man in a park.

In a rather childish fit of pique, I took Mr Kurwen’s eye from my pocket and hurled it into the half-frozen lake. Instead of landing in the water, it embedded itself in a floating island of ice, staring skyward.

Unknown to me at the time, this action was observed from the path above me, by the woman with the golden earrings.