Half-finished drink in hand, George frowned at the kitchen door, from which nothing emerged. He had something to worry about, all right.
That afternoon, George called his doctor, after three calls got Dr. Pallantz in person, and asked him the name of a reliable psychiatrist. The doctor gave him two names, recommended the first more highly, then inquired if anything was the matter.
“I’d rather not say just—I’m quite all right physically, I believe,” George went on, glancing toward the kitchen. “Just thought I’d have a talk with a psychiatrist for an hour. Always less than an hour, I know.” Here George gave a chuckle, which he hated.
That same afternoon, George succeeded in arranging a half hour visit with Dr. Kublick at six-thirty P.M. the coming Monday. George had mentioned Dr. Pallantz’s name, and it had plainly carried weight. George was heartened to find that the weekend brought no further intrusions from the specter. This strengthened George’s belief—the only logical thing to believe—that the trouble was due to some kind of lack of confidence in himself, and perhaps the mere appointment with a psychiatrist had done the trick.
On Monday at six-thirty P.M., George told all. It was amazing how much a man could tell in hardly ten minutes. All about his father and mother in Chicago (hardware store owners, and they had wished to see George go to a good school and enjoy a better life than theirs), George’s marriage with Liz and the breakup. And of course George had begun with the strange visions which had started a couple of weeks ago, the last of which had been Saturday noon. That, specifically, was why George had come, he told the psychiatrist.
“I’m wondering if it’s some kind of schizophrenia in myself,” George added, as the doctor pondered, chin in hand, but with a pleasant, even entertained expression on his face.
Dr. Kublick looked about forty-five, was rather tall, and wore a brown suit with no sign of a crease in the trousers. Through black-rimmed glasses he kept steady eyes on George, and he made no notes. “Schizophrenia . . .” he said finally. “An old catchall. Are you sleeping well lately?”
“As usual. Like a top. I’ve always slept well.”
“No dizziness in the morning? No feeling of faintness?” And at George’s shake of the head, “Do you drink much?”
“Three or four a day. Scotch and water.—I honestly don’t think that’s it.” As the half hour grew shorter, George felt that he had to hurry for an answer, for a bit of help. He repeated, “The reality of that red dressing gown was amazing to me. I could have touched it. That’s the way I felt, anyway.”
“Yet you said when you did swing at the . . . thing backhand, you didn’t feel anything.” The doctor was smiling in a friendly, reassuring way.
“I said I thought I didn’t. But I saw the thing duck.” And the voice. “And the voice,” George continued. “Like my voice. I must admit I heard that. I seemed to hear it. I know it’s an illusion, but I’m not the kind of man to have illusions,” George said forcefully, and oddly his strong voice made the vision more real to him than before. Didn’t the shrink believe him? George was telling the truth!
The doctor said calmly, “All this could be due to tension. Had a lot of strain in your office lately?”
Polyfax. That was a big job, but not one with tension, not even a tough deadline attached to it. “No.” George said.
“Do you feel guilty—about anything?”
The clock on Dr. Kublick’s wall jumped another five minutes. How vulgar, George thought, to have a five-minute-jumping clock in an office where time was geared to money, but thoughts and dreams were not, not even geared to time. Or was the clock, even beholdable by a patient who might be lying on the leather sofa to George’s right, considered by Dr. Kublick to be somehow an asset to the patient? Something to bring him or her back to reality? Dr. Kublick had just asked him a big question, impossible to answer in a few words. Didn’t everyone feel guilty about something or several things? Would it be normal to feel not guilty about anything? “I think I have the usual amount of guilt feelings. I wouldn’t call them serious—or obsessive.”
“About what, for instance?”
Two minutes to go. George pondered desperately, imagining suddenly a woman rummaging through a sewing basket, looking for a thread of a certain color. “I had a woman friend—as I told you—during two years of my married life. That didn’t cause me to be less kind to my wife.” He was not going to start the Maggie story, a teenage mistake. That was not on his mind. Neither was Harrietta, even. He and Harrietta had parted amicably, agreeing that they didn’t care to see each other again. Somehow Harrietta’s proposal of marriage and his agreement had extinguished even their affair. “I honestly think guilt is not the cause of these . . . hallucinations.”
Ping!
It was like the end of a round of boxing. The doctor stood up. So did George, already thinking about paying. The doctor indicated that his secretary could take care of that, and George understood that the doctor wanted to be free at once for his seven o’clock patient.
“You’re under a strain of some kind,” the doctor said as George moved toward his open door. “Up to you to identify, if you can. And if you want to see me again . . .”
George signed a check for fifty dollars. He did not ask for another appointment, thinking he could make one in the next days, if he decided that he should.
He felt dazed, rather than enlightened. What had Dr. Kublick said, after all? And George had dumped all his problems into the psychiatrist’s lap, confessed to some loneliness now. But just what were his sins, if he came down to it? Or rather, what had he done so wrong, in all his life, to warrant visitations from a specter which seemed (George couldn’t get rid of the notion) to be bent on reproaching him?
The question was: Was he really deranged, to have seen that vision of himself? Or had he really seen it, meaning that it really existed (after all, some people believed ghosts existed), and had it some valid meaning in regard to his life? Was there some abstract judge who made an assessment of these things? The abstract judge in George’s mind was not God, but some scale of value which perhaps not even a philosopher of highest rank had yet codified. Therefore one had to struggle and try to do it for oneself. George felt that he had not even tried as yet, and that therefore he was in a moral sense as low as an uneducated peasant anywhere, as low as any animal on four legs, though without that animal’s innocence.
Maybe the vision wouldn’t turn up again, George thought as he prepared a simple meal that evening. He was trying to take some fortitude from the fact that he had seen a psychiatrist and stated the facts. What else could a person do?
As he ate, George thought of something else he could do: speak to Ralph Foreman and say that he would be glad to meet the young man who was interested in joining the firm. Since this was more a social event than a business one, George decided to telephone Ralph now, even though he would see him in the office tomorrow.
Ralph’s wife Nancy answered, spoke to George in a friendly way, then put Ralph on. George said he was sorry that he had not been able to make the dinner date the last time, and could they make another?
“I’d like you to meet Edna Carstairs, too,” Ralph said. “I’ll see if we can get her for Friday. I’m sure Pete can make it.”
Pete was the young man. Had Ralph mentioned Edna Carstairs before?
George felt better, as if he had accomplished something, or at least set himself on a positive course. During that week, George kept to twelve cigarettes a day, counting them carefully. One had to make an effort. There was no “second” cigarette in the kitchen ashtray or anywhere else. Slowly but surely he would erase that apparition, that figment, and finally he’d laugh at the memory of it.
Friday after work, George came home to put on a clean shirt before going to the Foremans’. He chose another tie. As he was putting his jacket back on, he became aware of a dismal depression, as if he we
re exhausted, or had just heard a piece of bad news. George straightened up, even tried to smile at himself in the mirror. It did not help. He could have collapsed on the bed and stayed there all evening. He deliberately strode toward his apartment door, thinking that extra physical effort would wake him up. He glanced aggressively toward his kitchen, walked into it to prove to himself that it was empty.
In the round white ashtray on the kitchen table lay a lighted cigarette, half burned. Had he come into the kitchen when he got home? He didn’t think so. He looked in the direction of the sink. Nothing there.
“Ha-ha.” It was a soft, dry laugh behind him, and George turned.
For an instant George saw himself beyond the kitchen door, in the hall that led to the living room. Then the vision vanished.
The laugh and the figure were both imaginary, George thought. But the cigarette? Well, he must have lit one when he came in, thinking of something else, not counting this cigarette, and it would have been half burned, as it was, by the time he had changed his shirt. Was he conquering, winning, just because the vision had disappeared so fast, because the laugh hadn’t been so audible as before? George stared boldly into the empty living room, as if defying the thing to reappear. But he did not feel in a conquering mood. The depression still clung to him, and he could feel the corners of his mouth turning down, a frown clamping his brows.
“Damn it to hell and gone!” George said. In that instant he felt that his half hour with the psychiatrist had netted him nothing. George squared his shoulders, and smiled in order to erase the frown. He had an obligation to be pleasant this evening, because he was a guest. He took a taxi to East Eighty-fourth Street.
“George! Welcome—finally!” Ralph Foreman slapped George on the shoulder. “Come in and meet—Edna Carstairs.”
A pretty woman in a longish black and gold dress sat on the sofa, smiled at George, and said, “How do you do?”
“And Peter Buckler—from New York.”
A young man with reddish brown hair and a beaming smile got up and extended a hand to George. “How do you do, sir? Ralph says New York because I’m from upstate. Troy.”
“Graduate of Cornell Law,” Ralph added to George.
Ralph gave George a scotch and water, rather a strong one. Nancy had said hello, but excused herself to go back to the kitchen. The woman called Edna had lovely brown eyes whose lids seemed to turn up at the corners, probably due to makeup, but the effect was beautiful. For this reason George avoided looking at her often. She did not talk much, and laughed only when a laugh was appropriate. She was an editor somewhere, at a publishing house. Ralph maneuvered the conversation so that he could state Peter Buckler’s qualifications: a promotion—recently, too—in a firm in which he was not happy, however, for reasons that Ralph made sound valid. George listened, but felt oddly rattled by the heavy colors—dark red with a bit of blue—of the floor-length window curtains, now drawn, opposite him at the street windows. Were they the street windows, or windows on a court? Did it matter? No. Why should he care what was behind those curtains? Did the dark red remind him of his dressing gown?
“We might speak to old Tub. What do you think, George? Introduce Pete. Old Tub can always think of a reason to say no, but I think we could use some new blood.—You with me, George?” said Ralph.
“Yes, why not?” said George. No harm in introducing Peter Buckler, who did look bright and promising. At this moment, the red and blue curtains behind Ralph whirled in a kaleidoscopic way, and formed an image, much vaguer than the others George had seen, of himself in his red dressing gown, with a hint of pajamas at the top. George blinked and looked down at his drink. George was determined: he was not going to countenance the vision tonight, not going to acknowledge its presence. Nancy came in to summon them to dinner, and George was the first to stand up. George felt he had won that round with his hallucination. The vision had been paler. If it ever appeared again, George thought a bit wildly, maybe he should try to seize it, crush it in his arms, join it somehow, or prove to himself that it was nothing but thin air. If there was a next time.
The dining alcove off the kitchen presented a different atmosphere, and George intended to be pleasant, alert, outgoing. The merry faces around him cheered him. And the red wine tasted delicious. Should he invite Edna Carstairs to something? Dinner? The theater? She looked about thirty-eight. Why was she single? What had happened? Well, what had happened to him? Was it a disgrace?
Edna was the first to leave. George thought that Ralph might want to talk a bit with Pete, so George got up also—by this time they had had coffee in the living room—and asked if he might drop Edna off somewhere in a taxi.
“West Sixty-ninth and Broadway?” said Edna, as if she weren’t sure it would be convenient for George. “You don’t have to, really.”
“A pleasure,” George assured her, then said his thanks to the Foremans for the evening.
In the taxi George asked Edna if she liked going to the theater. All kinds of theater, she told him, except stupid sex comedies. In answer to George’s question, she said she was free next Tuesday evening, and George said he would see what he could do about either of the two plays Edna had mentioned. She gave him her card. It had her home address, plus the downtown address of the publishing house where she worked. George said he would telephone her Tuesday to confirm, and he would pick her up around seven P.M. George saw her into her apartment building, then returned to his waiting taxi. He felt happy.
His good humor lasted over the weekend. He and Ralph saw that Peter Buckler got an interview Tuesday with Tub, the outcome of which George did not ask.
George was home before six P.M. on Tuesday, took a shower and changed into a suit fresh from the cleaners. He felt optimistic and sure of himself, even thrilled by his first date with Edna. It was not that he had any intentions in regard to her. She might merely like him as a friend, as the saying went, but this kind of success, even the prospect of it, picked up George’s ego. And she was pretty, the kind of woman he would be proud to escort anywhere. George was about to leave his bedroom when he saw the awful self-image standing to his right, in front of the tall windows, dressed also in the same handsome suit and dark blue bow tie that George wore now. George’s shock turned at once to anger, to a desire to erase the vision, to walk out on it, so he started for the door.
“Optimistic,” said the vision cynically.
George stood up straighter. “There is such a thing as joining me. Joining me, physically,” George said, and moved toward the vision, arms outspread, thinking either to make the vision vanish by reaching for it or—or what? Press it into his own body? “What did I do that was so wrong?—I find you fuzzy—as fuzzy as you look!”
“Ah, the fuzziness of life,” said the vision in an amused way. It moved backward, arms also outspread. “What did you do that was so wrong? That’s the question and that’s for you to answer, isn’t it?”
“Join me,” George repeated. “What’s this joke all about?” George might as well have been talking to himself, but he felt full of courage at that moment. And as he came close, he could feel a slight resistance in the half-solid figure, as if he were finally touching something. He wanted to press the thing into his own body, and to get rid of it in that manner.
The vision seemed to rock in his arms, and George had the impression that it had several arms instead of two. George’s frustration made him angry in a matter of seconds. He opened the French window with his left hand. There was a balcony too narrow to walk out on, and a rail waist-high.
“I’ll throw you over if you don’t!” George meant, if the vision refused to merge with him. George lifted his knee, but his knee hit nothing. Who was pushing or pulling whom? He seized the jacket front in his right hand and lifted, his left hand under the vision’s right arm. “I’ll get rid of you!” George said between his teeth, tugged the thing toward the balcony and lifted. He wa
s hardly aware of a weight, yet there was something, enough to make George lose his balance, and the bulk of his weight in chest and shoulders pulled the rest of him over the rail.
George felt space, a quick sense of release. Then there was an instant’s time for terror, and the realization that he had made an awful mistake. He hadn’t meant to fall out the window himself, not at all!
He fell from the eleventh floor. George’s death was attributed to accident, and the psychiatrist Kublick and the doctor Pallantz both suggested “dizziness.”
AFTERWORD
by Paul Ingendaay
I
Patricia Highsmith’s emergence as a writer is shrouded in mystery, perhaps unnecessarily so. If we look at her earliest stories, published between 1939 and 1949, we cannot but wonder why they were kept under lock and key for half a century. Highsmith herself may have been one of her harshest critics, as demonstrated by her decision on her twenty-fourth birthday to abandon a novel of almost three hundred pages, “The Click of the Shutting.” In a conversation with Austrian writer Peter Handke she characterized the fragment as “quite different from my later books” and “an odd stylistic mixture of Thomas Wolfe and Marcel Proust.”
Highsmith did not judge her early stories as harshly, and there was no need to reject them so formally. Since her school years she had been experimenting in this genre, so that by her middle twenties she commanded a considerable repertoire of narrative techniques. Among her favorite authors at that time were not only psychological realists such as Dostoevski and Joseph Conrad but also the canonic masters of the short story form: Poe, Stevenson, Henry James, and Hemingway. “What I like best when I write is economy,” she commented in her notebook at nineteen, “and that’s why I like Maupassant. What an incredible satisfaction it must be to fashion a story like that!” She then goes on to explain why she uses the term “to fashion”: because in her eyes the technical process of shaping is far superior to simply writing. Because, she adds, it resembles the work of a sculptor, who only liberates his conception by reducing mass—chipping and chiseling away.