On the screen the vehicle, a marked police car, zipped away.
A hell of a note, Vince thought glumly. Sign of the times; more repressive, scared legislation by the establishment. So who am I going to get help from if Julie’s departure causes me to break down mentally? As well it might. I’ve never consulted an analyst — I’ve never needed to in my entire life.
But this … nothing like this, precisely this bad, has ever happened to me. Julie, he thought, where are you? Now, on the TV screen, the scene changed, and yet it remained the same. Vince Strikerock saw a new crowd, different police, another psychoanalyst being led off; another protesting soul taken into custody.
‘It is interesting,’ the TV set murmured, ‘to observe the loyalty of the analyst’s patient. And yet, why not? This man has placed his faith in psychoanalysis possibly for years.’
And where did it get him? Vince wondered.
Julie, he said to himself, if you’re with someone, some other man right now, there’s going to be trouble. Either I’ll drop dead — either it will kill me outright — or I’m going to give it to you and that individual, whoever he is. Even if, especially if, he’s a friend of mine.
I’m going to get you back, he decided. My relationship with you is unique, not like that with Mary, Jean and Laura.
I love you; that’s it. My god, he thought, I’m in love! And in this day and age. Incredible. If I told her, if she knew, she’d laugh her head off. That’s Julie.
I should go to an analyst, he realized, for being in a state like this, for being totally psychologically dependent on a cold, selfish creature like Julie for existence itself. Hell, its unnatural. And — it’s folly.
Could Dr Jack Dowling, leading psychiatrist of the Vienna School in Bonn, Germany, cure me? Free me? Or this other man they’re showing, this — he listened to the newscaster, who droned on as the police vehicle drove away — Egon Superb. He had looked like an intelligent, sympathetic person, gifted with the balm of empathetic understanding. Listen, Egon Superb, Vince thought, I’m in deep trouble; my tiny world collapsed this morning when I woke up. I need a woman whom I’ll probably never see again.
A.G. Chemie’s drugs can’t help me with this … except, perhaps, a mortal overdose. And that’s not the sort of help I’m after.
Maybe I should roust out my brother Chic and both of us join the Sons of Job, he thought abruptly. Chic and I swear fealty to Bertold Goltz. Others have done so, other malcontents, others who have dismally failed, either in their private lives — as I have — or in business or in their social ascent from Be to Ge.
Chic and I Sons of Job, Vince Strikerock thought eerily.
In bizarre uniform, parading down the street. Being jeered at. And yet believing — in what? In ultimate victory? In Goltz, who looks like a movie version of a Rattenfanger, a rat-catcher? He cringed from the notion; it frightened him.
And still the idea remained lodged in his mind.
In his apartment on the top of The Abraham Lincoln Apartments, thin, balding Chic Strikerock, Vince’s older brother, awoke and peered nearsightedly at the clock to see if one could manage to remain in bed a bit longer. But the excuse was not valid; the clock read eight-fifteen. Time to get up … a news machine, noisily vending its wares outside the building, had awakened him, fortunately. And then Chic discovered to his shock that someone was in bed with him; he opened his eyes fully and made himself rigid as he inspected the covered outline of what he saw at once, from the tumble of brown hair, was a young woman, and one familiar (that was a relief — or was it?) to him. Julie! His sister-in-law, his brother Vince’s wife. Good grief. Chic sat up.
Let’s see, he said to himself rapidly. Last night — what did go on here after All Souls, anyhow? Julie appeared, didn’t she, distraught, with one suitcase and two coats and telling a disjointed story which boiled down to a simple fact, at last; she had broken up with Vince legally; she no longer had any official relationship to him and was free to come and go as she pleased. So here she was. Why? That part he couldn’t remember; he had always liked Julie but — it did not explain this; what she had done concerned her own secret, inner world of values and attitudes, not his, not anything that was objective, real.
Anyhow, here Julie was, still sound asleep, too, here physically but withdrawn into herself, curled up, retracted mollusc-like, which was just as well, because for him it all seemed incestuous, despite the clarity of the law in this variety of matter. She, to him, was more like family. He had never looked in her direction. But last night, after a few drinks — that was it; he could not drink any more. Or rather he could, and when he did he underwent a rapid change for what at the time seemed like the better; he became outgoing, adventurous, extroverted, instead of morose and taciturn.
But here was a consequence. Look what he got involved in, here.
And yet on a very deep, private level he didn’t object as much as all that. It was a compliment to him, her showing up here.
But it would be awkward, the next time he ran into Vince checking everyone’s ID at the front door. Because Vince would want to discuss it on a profound, meaningful, sombre basis, with much intellectual hot air wasted in analysing basic motives. What was Julie’s real purpose for leaving him and moving in here? Why? Ontological questions, such as Aristotle would have appreciated, teleological issues having to do with what they had once called ‘final causes’. Vince was out of step with the times; this had all become null and void.
I had better call my boss, Chic decided, and tell him — ask him if — I can be late today. Should settle this with Julie; what’s up, and so forth. How long is she staying and is she going to help pay expenses. Basic unphilosophical questions of practical nature.
He fixed coffee in the kitchen, sat sipping, in his pyjamas.
Turning on the phone he punched his boss’s number, Maury Frauenzimmer; the screen turned pale grey, then white, then cloudy as an out-of-focus portion of Maury’s anatomy formed. Maury was shaving. ‘Yeah, Chic?’
‘Hey,’ Chic said, and heard it sound forth proudly. ‘I got a girl here, Maury, so I’ll be late.’
It was male-to-male business. Did not matter who the girl was; no need to go into that. Maury did not bother to ask; he showed on his face the involuntary, genuine admiration, then censure. But — the admiration came first! Chic grinned; the censure did not bother him.
‘Goddam you,’ Maury said, ‘you better get into the office by no later than nine.’ His tone said: I wish I were you. I envy you, damn you.
‘Aw,’ Chic said, ‘I’ll be in, soon as I can.’ He glanced towards the bedroom and Julie. She was sitting up. Perhaps Maury saw her. Perhaps not. In any case it was time to conclude the conversation. ‘So long Maury, old man,’ Chic said. And rang off.
‘Who was that? Julie said sleepily. ‘Was that Vince?’
‘No. My boss.’ Chic put on the coffee water for her.
‘Hi,’ he said, walking back into the bedroom and seating himself on the bed beside her. ‘How are you?’
‘I forgot my comb,’ Julie said, pragmatically.
‘I’ll buy you one from the hall dispenser.’
‘Those measly little plastic things.’
‘Um,’ he said, feeling fond of her, feeling sentimental. The situation, she in bed, he sitting beside her in his pyjamas — it was a bittersweet situation, reminding him of his own previous last marriage of four months ago. ‘Hi,’ he said, patting her on the thigh.
‘Aw god,’ Julie said. ‘I wish I was dead.’ She did not say it accusingly, as if it was his fault, or even as if she meant it passionately; it was as if she were resuming a conversation from the night before. ‘What is the purpose of it all, Chic?’ she said. ‘I like Vince, but he’s so goofy; he’ll never grow up and really bear down at the business of living. He’s always playing his games of being the embodiment of modern organized social life, the estab-man, pure and simple, whereas actually he’s not. But he’s young.’ She sighed. It was a sigh that chilled Chic because it was a cold, cruel, utterly dismissing sigh. She was writing off another human being, severing herself from Vince with as little spilled emotion as if she had returned a book borrowed from the building’s library.