Trauma by Patrick McGrath Read Free Book Online Page B

pleasure encourage lovers to reveal all.
    “What would happen if he found out?”
    “If you don’t stop, I won’t come here again.”
    “It’s not so odd that I should ask, is it?”
    “I know what you’re doing, so just quit it.”
    “What I’m doing is very simple. I just want to know what this is all about.”
    “You don’t like it? Relax, Charlie. Stop thinking.”
    The idea of stopping thinking struck me as amusing. I knew Agnes knew she was being unreasonable by refusing to disclose any motive or explanation, but I also knew she knew my curiosity would not be bound by the normal parameters, that in this regard I was not a normal man: I was a psychiatrist. She knew my need to excavate far beyond what was comfortable, beyond what was even reasonable, logical or comprehensible. But she wouldn’t allow the door to open so much as a crack, and while this frustrated me it also became a source of keen intrigue.
    “I wonder if what you want is that I uncover what you’re hiding by means of your body.”
    I wasn’t altogether clear what I meant by this. I had been reading about a theory of memory that rejected the idea of storage and instead posited memory as dynamic somatic imprinting.
    “Charlie!”
    “Your resistance is almost pathological.”
    At this she walked out of the bedroom. A few minutes later I was standing in the hallway in my bathrobe, where I at least made an attempt at amends.
    “Okay, I was being psychiatric. I’m sorry.”
    But she came back. It wasn’t as though we had nothing else to talk about. There was Cassie, who according to Agnes became more precocious and more eccentric every day; more difficult, she meant. She was worried, and I tried to tell her that our daughter was simply growing up, becoming an individual. I didn’t ask her about our daughter’s relationship with Leon, which I strongly suspected was turbulent, Cassie being of an age now to fall in love with her real daddy—me—and treat my rival with breezy disdain. We talked about Agnes’s sister, Maureen, the onetime hippie earth mother who now ran a secondhand bookstore on Fourth Avenue; and of course about her brother. About Danny’s suicide, and Agnes’s gradual change of heart in this regard—her acceptance of the idea that I couldn’t have prevented it, that it would have happened anyway. Probably. I was surprised by this, and heartened.
    “But then to leave me!”
    For once I didn’t challenge her, although I still believed I’d been right to leave. Instead, tentatively, I asked whether her changed attitude regarding my responsibility for Danny’s death was what had made her wait for me after my mother’s funeral, and kept bringing her back to my apartment. I didn’t know if this would anger her.
    “Of course it did. You think I’d come here if I hated you?”
    “So do you love me?”
    “Don’t get carried away, Charlie. All I said was, I didn’t hate you. I
did
hate you, but I don’t now. It’s such hard work hating someone.”
    “I’ve never hated anyone. Except my father. And Walt, of course, but that’s complicated. That’s not true hatred.”
    “What is it then?”
    “You want me to tell you a story about Walt?”
    I was watching her closely. Did she want me to tell her a story about Walt? I took a strong interest in what others felt about my brother, and it was a source of astonishment to me that people didn’t see right through him. When Agnes first met him, Walt was a hairy, hard-drinking painter-man whose abstract aesthetics were tempered by a ferocious ambition he did little to conceal. This wasn’t something I could talk to him about. Walt derided me for supposedly upholding some outdated myth of the artist in the garret, and I told him that his cynicism made a mockery of any aspiration to integrity he might claim. On one occasion, and this was the story I told Agnes, I had accused him of being indifferent to the war—this at a time when the streets of American cities were