In Partial Disgrace. Charles Newman
a furnished room from their own home, and during viewing hours live in it with their various dogs, so the rest of the populace might visit to compare and contrast their own quarters and pets.
They believed themselves genial and simple folk, much like their dogs, when in truth all they had managed was to connect their dogs in weak analogy to their own messes. Everywhere in the town, rich and poor quarters alike, steaming heaps of meat-flavored, half-digested American cereal products festooned the curbs, mirroring not so much the poor animals who deposited them but the slovenly, lonely personalities of the citizenry. To avoid these matters Felix had to constantly cross and re-cross the street, until finally, in a huge block of flats with innumerable dark entrances on the rue des Carcasses, he found the Professor’s yellowed card on a heavily grated door, reflecting that this second submission to medical authority was at least pro bono.
Up the narrow winding stairwell, the door to the anteroom was slightly ajar, pinned with another yellowed card:
WE ARE ALWAYS HAPPY TO CLARIFY Advice is Extra
The anteroom itself he recognized immediately as one of those strange libraries full of splendid and bulky volumes, complete sets only, books sent to you by someone else, and having never been read, put on display for yet a third order of reader. Where there were no books, large etchings of half-naked allegorical women hung, and from behind a velvet curtain in the corner protruded a silver gynecological stirrup.
Upon being admitted to the inner office (the door seemed to swing open on its own) he was surprised to see not a single instrument, nor an examining table or a nurse, only a shabby pseudo-Turkish loveseat and a desk piled high with empty dossiers, from which he inferred that the Professor had not been in private practice long. But the man who had greeted him so warmly and effusively on his exile territory, kissing his wife’s hand repeatedly and patting his child’s head until he blinked, now regarded him with a somewhat indifferent air, without even motioning for him to take a seat. When Felix asked if he might take the chair by the desk, the Professor said only, “As you wish.”
During their conversation the Professor neither touched him nor made use of any instrument, not even a pen. Indeed, he never came closer than eight or ten feet and barely spoke. Leaning back in his chair, making a tent of his fingers, gazing at the high ceiling, he would occasionally modulate his voice and throw him a glance of rather pointless solicitude and reassurance, but nothing more.
The examination began with three innocent questions: Do you hear voices? Is anyone watching you? Who controls your thoughts? Then the conversation switched to a kind of elevated pubchat about the female of the species, ending only when Felix lashed out in frustration:
“How dare you bring my mother into this?” His voice had risen slightly, and he was covering his nose in what he knew to be the classic symbol of deception. He made his eyes impassive, smiled inappropriately, and refused to maintain eye contact. But the Professor took no notice.
“When you think of the word ‘pocket,’ what does it recall to you? Does the word ‘straight’ bring anything to mind? Why are you playing with that button? Put your hand in your pocket and feel the pennies.”
Whereas Pür had rejected every commentary out of hand, the Professor seemed interested in nothing but his self-descriptions, especially in their vaguest and most speculative aspect—the most disguised complaints, the most ill-described sensations, the most precarious theories, the most tenuous flights of the soul. Felix did his best to fit his long-lived family’s total lack of medical history and their speedy, unsuffering deaths into this universe of physical changes concealed from the natural senses. At one point the Professor stood up and faced out the window, his back to him, hands crossed over his rump, apparently in exasperation. This gesture, rude in anyone else, seemed to be reflective and forthcoming, given the odd context of the meeting.
But then Felix noticed outside the window a large, suspended mirror seemingly designed so that traffic might see the around a corner, and tilted in such a way that he now became aware of the Professor’s face, larger than life, staring back through the window at the patient, and the doctor’s brown eyes suddenly turned almost blue in the convex reflection.
Felix continued to deliver himself of every disease theory and personal crisis he could think of, from heartburn to a recent thump of the prostate, as well as generalized fears of bankruptcy, invasion, and senility, until after moving from organ to organ and from brain to states of mind to soul, he could no longer think of anything to impress the Professor, and embarrassed by a lack of any true symptoms or secrets, he launched into a kind of nonsense, an Astingi camp Latin, running words and puns together—a test to determine if the Professor was really listening.
Kek man camov te jib bollimengreskkoenaes,
Man camov te jib weshenjugalogonaes. (I do not wish to live like a baptized person.
I wish to live like a dog of the wood.)
His interlocutor spun around, acknowledging the sudden discontinuity in his patient’s story, but as if to remind him that he had specified no limitations to their conversation and had not the slightest interest in whether his patient talked shop or Babel, only gazed at him sharply over his reading glasses. This was followed by a mutually sincere pursuit of silences as each pulled a cigar from an inner pocket like a derringer.
The Professor seemed unembarrassed by the vacuum between them, and my father felt grateful that he did not leap forward to engage its awkwardness. Eventually, the Professor responded with a stream of impressions, including a morose allusion to the recent death of his child (a boy of two, from scarlet fever) and the consequent withdrawal of his wife. Felix suddenly realized with an aching heart that his examiner, through the exigencies of private practice, had been forced to lift his eye from the microscope and settle ruefully upon the notion that the tact of a passive observer might wring diagnostic truths superior to more intrusive methods. The Professor apparently was attempting, not without some courage, to put aside his own insoluble griefs and to frame his questions in a way that would not elicit standard answers—and the stranger and more oblique the answer, the calmer he seemed. Felix appreciated this, but knew this was not the time to register it. If Pür was human only in the face of an illness without apparent causes, the Professor seemed to be humbled only by illness which had no physical signposts—indeed, the room lacked that aura of fear present in almost every medical encounter, the sense that the doctor is in mortal terror of contracting the illness he has just diagnosed. Felix did not feel the excitement of having lied, as with Pür; instead, he felt like a schoolmaster’s favorite chagrined by his own tendency to exaggerate every response and be the brightest boy around. Nor did he feel the obligation to reward the Professor by being a happy patient. A large melancholia was over behind that black desk, too deep for any protocols to deflect. So while as yet he felt neither true trust nor respect, neither did he feel impelled to show off or amuse. His interlocutor’s detachment was not defensive as with Pür, and therefore not an offense. He recognized it as a Hebrew version of courtliness, but with a new and harder edge, always staying leewards of a predictable professional or social response. And so their lack of conversation continued, like those ritualistic incantatory chapters in Homer or Virgil which seem totally unnecessary to the story—pure male silence.
In advertising his reluctance to treat, the Professor had taken a page from the old diplomatists, who, knowing the governments they represented to be a sham, try to reach an accommodation based on decreasing confidence, a pact based upon the refusal to make any promises at all, and to buy time at all costs. Felix saw that in his abstracted way the Professor was reaching for that state of neutral grace between an animal and his trainer, when the unspoken bond is simply the understanding that there would be no concentration of willfulness without the other’s leave.
Now here was a man you didn’t have to talk to, and with whom you might one day really have a talk! Father resolved to trade learning for learning, acknowledging the Professor’s gesture with one from his own special repertoire of silences. He reflected for a time on which would be most suitable.
The most adaptable and engaging gesture in this world, more winning than sex or genius, is the puzzlement of perfect temperament, when a mistake