Free Trauma by Patrick McGrath Page A

You’re staying for supper, by the way. No argument.”
    Walt and Lucia’s boy Jake was just a year older than Cassie, and there were two younger girls and a baby only a few months old. She was in some sort of basket on the kitchen floor, kicking and gurgling. One of her sisters shuffled into the kitchen. This was Giulia, an ethereal, golden-haired little creature dressed for ballet in tutu and tights, also wearing a pair of her mother’s shoes. She peered at her baby sister for a few seconds, then clomped away in her oversized shoes. We chatted for a minute or two and then I said I wanted to have a look at Mom’s furniture. Walt gave me the basement keys. “You want me to come down with you?” he said.
    I told him I knew the way. I wanted to go down alone. I knew it would be difficult for me to look at her things with equanimity, particularly seeing them among other tenants’ abandoned possessions, objects no longer of use or value in the world of the living.

    The basement was reached by a metal stairwell from a door at the back of the lobby. It was dark. Bulbs hadn’t been replaced, dust and cobwebs abounded and the clutter of detritus I found when I unlocked the door at the bottom of the stairs—rusted tools, bicycles, cans of gasoline, untidy trays of rat poison, boxes of mildewed clothes—would’ve made a city inspector slap an injunction on the building in a second. The junk blocked the passageways between the fenced pens where trunks and file cabinets and such had been displaced and forgotten like so many bad memories.
    Mom’s stuff was in the very back. It was cold down there and the floor shook whenever an A train came rushing through the nearby tunnel. The air smelled stale and faintly rancid. It would have been a dull-witted psychiatrist who failed to recognize this as a representation of the unconscious mind as we knew it, as we encountered its manifest products in our consulting rooms. All her belongings had been handled carelessly, and no attempt had been made to protect the huge old bed with the carved teak headboard, which had come down through generations of the Hallam family and was now piled high with boxes, chairs, luggage and pictures. I realized at once that if it wasn’t soon protected from dust and rodents—from time, neglect, predation—it wouldn’t be worth storing at all.
    Walt opened the door when I returned to the apartment, and I told him I was going to see to it that everything was properly wrapped in those protective blankets they used.
    “You go right ahead,” he said. “Have them send the bill here.”
    In the kitchen they were still drinking wine. I sat down next to Nora. She leaned over toward me and put her hand on mine but kept her eyes on Walt, who was telling a story.
I asked them how they’d met each other; Nora had told me once, but I’d forgotten. It turned out that the book she was working on—she was a freelance art researcher—involved a notoriously difficult critic Walter knew when he was starting out.
    “She handled him beautifully,” he said. “Max
Green. Such a tricky guy. Such a prick. He’d come to your space and just watch you. He never said anything. He’d let gaps open up in a conversation, just to unsettle you. We don’t like silence, people will say anything, then he’d have the advantage. He was like a shrink that way. That’s why I introduced you two.”
    He was drunk. He grinned at me.
    I disliked these half-playful barbs of his. “So it was all your doing,” I said.
    “Charlie, I look out for you.”
    He lifted his wineglass to his lips and gazed at me as he drank. Why, so often, this veiled hostility? What had I ever done to him? I glanced at Lucia, who was busy with the pasta. It still worried me that I’d first seen Nora the night Walt had failed to show up at Sulfur, then a week later there she was in his apartment. Freud said there was no such thing as an accident, and this coincidence was odd. I hadn’t made sense of it.