Ghost Town (18 page)

I interrupted him here. I had had quite enough of his tantrum.

—Who are you jealous of, Dan, her other clients?

—Her other clients, he said bitterly. Then: She doesn’t do that anymore.

—Oh she doesn’t. Who then?

But he would give me no more, and his refusal was remarkable for its stridency—almost, I might have said, its passion. But what I did learn from his outburst was that something had happened before he’d met the woman, something to do with the guy who’d died in the
attacks, this Jay, and that there was more to it than guilt.

Later, when he’d gone, I found myself more troubled by his state of mind than I had been before the encounter in the restaurant. He’d told me that Kim Lee didn’t want him to talk to me about her, in fact she didn’t want him to have anything more to do with me. Apparently she thought me evil, and said that I wanted only to destroy their relationship. She had come as close to weeping as he’d ever seen her. Then she had pleaded with him, saying that if he abandoned her she would surely be lost. She needed him. Nor was it difficult to imagine the physical blandishments that would have accompanied this performance. I could see her in his broad lap, her fingers all over him, her face mere inches from his own, her black eyes gazing helplessly into his as she shifted her little Chinese hooker’s body about in his lap—no, not difficult to see where that conversation went!

So it was to Dan’s credit that he did not obey her, but came to see me anyway. He made clear the risk he ran, for if she found out—and now I knew, he said, how little escaped her—she would never see him again, and about that
she had apparently been adamant, and Daniel believed her; this time he knew she meant it.

I didn’t believe she meant anything of the sort. It was not yet clear to me what she wanted of him, and perhaps it was not clear to her either, but of one thing I was now certain: she would not let him go, now that she’d got her claws in him. And something else disturbed me, which was my suspicion, or conviction, rather, that Dan was holding something back. It was connected to the remark he had let slip concerning his jealousy, and then the defensiveness with which he’d refused to elaborate. Who was he jealous of? Surely not the dead lover. That would be tantamount to feeling jealous of a
ghost
, and while this is well within the normal range of human sexuality I felt there was more to it than that. There was something obscure, just out of sight, somewhere in the recent past; and I felt I had to identify it.

I stayed up late that night, and only got to sleep around five in the morning, with nothing resolved in my mind.

The bombing continues in Afghanistan while in America we are under bioterrorist attack. Already eight people have been diagnosed with
inhalation anthrax and three of them are dead. It comes in the mail, or so it was thought until a woman who did not handle mail professionally fell ill, and now fights for her life in the intensive care unit of a Manhattan hospital; the source of the anthrax deep in her lungs is unknown. The government warns us that another terrorist attack is anticipated and that we should be at a heightened state of alert. But alert to what? We are told no more than that.

Episodes of peripheral insanity have erupted, random bits of evil apparently stimulated by the attacks, as for example the deaths aboard a Greyhound bus in Tennessee, when a knife-wielding Croatian slashed the driver’s throat and the bus careered across two lanes of oncoming traffic, then flipped over, killing six. There is an Arab man in custody who enlisted in a Minnesota flying school and aroused suspicion when he expressed a desire to learn to fly large commercial jets but apparently showed no interest in taking off or landing. This sort of thing we deal with every day now. I read my newspaper; New Yorkers speak out: “Nothing feels normal.” “My life is ruined.” “The world is over.” Dan tells me what John Ashcroft’s people are up to, the ethnic profiling, the rounding
up of as many men as they can find of Near Eastern or North African descent. The suspension of due process, the wholesale pullback of traditional American freedoms—

I do not tell him this but I am beginning to think that John Ashcroft is right.

Daniel by this point was pathologically obsessed with his Chinese prostitute, and I saw how difficult it would be to get him to talk about what had happened before he met her; that is, before September 11, a date which was rapidly becoming a watershed in all our lives, a line of demarcation, or a point in time, rather, before which the world seemed to glow with a patina of innocence and clarity and health. And after which everything seemed dark and tortured and incomprehensible, bearing nothing but portents of a greater darkness to come. It was against this black and shifting backdrop that Dan’s affair with the woman was playing out, and I was forcibly reminded of an image that I had once seen of two actors engaged in a furiously complicated drama in front of a screen on which were projected enormous indistinct shadow-figures performing obscure destructive actions which mirrored and at the same time grotesquely distorted the drama going forward
center stage. What I wanted from Dan was that larger perspective.

I called him the day after his last visit but he wasn’t home. Nor was he in his office. I didn’t leave a message, but continued to call him every hour until at last I got him, by which time it was late in the evening.

What followed was one of the most trying conversations I ever had with him. At once I heard the resistance in his voice, his unwillingness even to speak to me on the phone, so seriously alarmed had he been by Kim Lee’s demand that he have nothing more to do with me. For some minutes he was curt and circumspect, and I had to become rather crisp with him. Did he or did he not need my help? Was I to assume he wanted me to break off the therapy and leave him to flounder unaided in the quagmire of delusion in which he now found himself? Did he want to go it alone?

There was, I could hear it, an impulse in him to cry out—Yes! Yes! I want to go it alone—I don’t care what happens to me—I don’t care if I sink, let me just fling myself in, go under with no thought of consequences, careless of the damage I do to myself—but we both recognized the infantilism of the impulse. A kind of suicidal
infantilism, a primal unthinking embrace of the death instinct, this is what I heard awoken in him as I spelled out the alternatives he faced, and the implicit ultimatum they contained. He did not give voice to the impulse. There is in the end this at least to be said for a training in the law, that a kind of professional filter effectively screens one’s drives, one’s emotions—one’s delusions—so that one does not become entirely the slave of pathological forces originating in the unconscious mind. I knew my man. I knew what those forces looked like as they manifested in him at the time, fuelled and propelled as they were by an intense sexual intoxication. He could not abandon me: to abandon me would be to cast himself adrift upon towering seas with no raft, no lifejacket even save his own confused and fragile psyche. He could not do it. Insanity even to contemplate it, though contemplate it he did.

—What is it we have to talk about? he said wearily.

I told him we had to talk about the man who died in the north tower, and in the same weary tone he said he supposed I was right. I told him we should do it now, and again he agreed, and I was surprised to discover there was no resistance
left in him at all. But when I asked him would he come here, or should I come to him, he replied with more alacrity and affect than I’d had from him in a long time that good Christ no, he couldn’t have me in his apartment; he would come to me, of course he would.

—Then I’ll see you in a while.

I put down the phone with the feeling that I still had the situation under control. But there could be no relaxation of vigilance. I felt as though I was engaged in terminal conflict with the prostitute Kim Lee, and the prize was Danny Silver’s sanity.

We were in my apartment and I had told him that I was sure he was withholding information from me, and I asked him how he expected me to help him if I did not know what was going on. I was quite severe with him. I saw his big hand smear across his face, smear the leathery folds of stubbled flesh—he had removed his spectacles—then rub his skull as his eyes drifted unseeing into some, to me, inaccessible place in his mind. He sat forward and stared at the floor, a big, blunt-fingered hand still rubbing at the crown of his skull, his elbows planted squarely on his knees, and his feet set wide apart on the
carpet, the whole a monument to solidity although there was nothing solid there at all. With the compressed precision of a mind trained in the law he gave me the facts of the case.

The affair with Jay began in June, he said. Summer of 2001, three months before he, Dan, had met her, so all he knew about it was what she had told him; and as to the reliability of
that
information I was naturally skeptical. But I did not say this, I told him to go on, for I felt I would be able to at least pick out the bare bones of the thing and superimpose my own interpretive construction. And I was confident that my interpretation would be closer by far to the reality of the events he described than whatever meaning that woman imputed to them.

She’d described to Dan how she’d picked up this good-looking guy at a gallery opening in Chelsea. Jay Minkoff was his name, and he was apparently the son of a prominent New York banker and philanthropist. The details were scanty and it was not, I imagined, an episode Dan was anxious to know much about, given his own feelings for Kim Lee; but he surprised
me. He began to grow animated, and I realized that so emotionally invested in the woman had he become that he spoke about her experience with the same intensity he might have employed to speak about her skin, or her breasts, or the sound of her voice; and the fact that it concerned her previous lover mattered not at all. What mattered was that it was
hers
. So it was giving him vicarious pleasure, this—what?—refracted nostalgia, speaking of the emotional life of the woman he loved even though they were the emotions she had felt for another man.

—He was a rich kid, kind of preppy, and she didn’t really like guys like that but all the same he was the sort of guy she felt she could trust. A very sweet guy. And he was very good at intimacy. She thinks intimacy is what we want. It’s the best part of love. Or maybe passion is the best part of love. Is it passion or intimacy?

—Just tell the story, Daniel.

He
was
learning fast. But this was not my Dan. I heard the Chinese prostitute in every word he uttered. He went on with the story. She was apparently brazen in her approach to him. She told him in the middle of a crowded art opening that she was taking him home to show him her artwork. He said he’d like to see her
artwork. She’d like to show it to him, she said, showing her work gave her almost as much pleasure as sex.

So then he asked her if she was always so direct, and she told him she’d reached an age when it made no sense to be anything other than direct. What age was that, he’d asked her, and she’d told him how old she was, so now at least they had that out of the way. She was sixteen years older than him. They didn’t waste any time because there was so much what she called “bed in the air.” They left the opening and cabbed downtown.

Bed was—satisfactory, said Kim Lee, in response to Dan’s wary inquiry. Jay had to leave early in the morning to go to work, and she didn’t know if she would ever see him again. He traded in futures, apparently. Futures.

Dan shook his head at this sad irony.

—You seem fond of the guy, I said.

—I never met him!

—I know. Go on.

It appears that after Kim Lee’s initial rather lazy and entirely physical response to this sweet man with his high-powered job in a brokerage firm, and his interest in art, the relationship turned serious.

A slight falter here. A new charge of feeling in Dan’s tone. Again the steepled fingers, the frown, the few seconds of silence as he gathered his thoughts.

—She fell in love with him? I said.

He was silent. This was difficult for him. More kneading of his forehead with his fingers.

—Not at first.

But later she did. Hard to know precisely when it happened. Another pause. She was annoyed with herself, he said, but at the same time curious to see if the machinery—this was her word—still worked. And pleased that she had not grown so jaded that falling in love had ceased to be a possibility.

Why was she annoyed with herself?

She said it was so much work. She knew what would happen, she knew she would fall hard, she always did. Then she smothered them and they ran away. That’s the problem with men, she’d told Dan, not that you’re faithless, though you are, but that you buckle.

—We buckle? he’d said.

Poor Dan. He had buckled often, he was seriously structurally flawed, and I believe she was aware of it. I didn’t pursue it then; instead I asked him to try and explain what he had
observed of Kim Lee’s capacity for love. When he was ready to answer me he said there was a kind of—ferocity—in her which he had occasionally seen roused, and when that happened she could be as passionate and possessive as any woman he had ever known—hadn’t she said that she smothered her lovers and then they ran away? And that pattern—men she loved running away—had taught her caution and detachment: all this she had explained to him, apparently, whereas he, Dan, he said, had always believed that falling in love involved the idealization of the other. Kim Lee was incapable of that, he said, but she was more than capable of fighting for her man like a tiger, and giving herself sexually such that after one night with her, any man—

He stopped here, all at once aware of how fatuous he sounded. I said nothing; I just watched him shake his head in mild self-disgust, and rub his big hand across his skull.

—Like a fucking teenager, he muttered.

I decided to be easy on him, at least for a little while. I knew the sort of woman Kim Lee was, about her true nature I had never had any doubts at all. This detachment Dan spoke of, it would of course be an essential component of her personality structure, given that the woman
largely supported herself by prostitution. Hard to imagine, though I did not say this to Daniel, that a prostitute could ever idealize a man. A woman who sold her body would most certainly have mastered a capacity for detachment, and would clearly see—if she didn’t anaesthetize herself—what it was she was doing, and what it was she was dealing with—that is, men. She would become as astute a judge of men as one was likely to find. Whores and psychiatrists—who sees clearer the true shapes and shades of men?