Seven Types of Ambiguity Read online

  He holds Sam upside down by his legs with one hand. He beats him on the back with the other hand. Nothing is happening. He beats him harder. The water comes out in spasms like projectile vomit. There is the faintest orange tinge to it. It keeps coming. Simon lays him down on his back. He wipes his mouth. Anything. In panic, he tries mouth-to-mouth but he doesn’t know how.

  Even if his estimate was inaccurate, it would still be interesting to know how long Simon thinks he waited before pulling Sam from the pool. Can you imagine him behind those trees in your garden? Initially frightened that the ball is going to lead Sam to find him, he watches Sam’s frustration with the ball and with your housekeeper. He sees the splash, or maybe just hears it, but he has no idea whether Sam can swim. He has no idea, from his vantage point behind the trees, whether your housekeeper has been watching, constantly, intermittently, or at all. His own absurdity stings him in those inert moments between the thought that perhaps your son was drowning in front of him despite his own stretching, pulling, and gripping movements to reintroduce oxygen to the boy’s lungs. However long Simon waited, it was long enough for it to dawn on him that Sam’s rescue was not inevitable. Nobody knew Simon was there. If he had not been there, what then? Would Sam have died? And what about you and your husband?

  He had Sam lying on his back with his head tilted back. He had breathed into his mouth. Sam was very quiet. He looked up into Simon’s eyes. He calmed very quickly, exhausted. Simon stroked his forehead and looked down into his eyes. He made some soothing sounds, they may not have been words, and found the part in Sam’s hair with his fingers.

  “Lucky your mum had asked me to have a look at the garden, my friend, or we don’t know where we’d be. You’re a bit of a tiger, aren’t you?”

  Sam looked up at him. Simon didn’t think he had understood him, but it didn’t matter. The terror was going from his eyes, and the sun was just beginning to dry his hair. They were your eyes. There was another song on the radio. Sam seemed about to cry. Something must have been added to the onions or they would have burned by then. There was a fresh sizzling of something from the kitchen, something with a lot of moisture in it.

  “It’s all right, just a big fright, that’s all. You’ll be all right, won’t you, Sam?”

  “Yes,” he said quietly.

  “Mum will be home soon.”

  “Why are you here?” Sam asked.

  “I’m here . . . for the garden.” He combed the boy’s hair with a gentle rhythm. “You can cry if you want to, Sam. It might be a good idea.”

  He kissed the boy’s forehead and left the garden.

  I am sure you are thinking several things. There is no need for you to be feeling guilty about this, if you are. Sam was all right. If you are feeling guilty, I would ask you to put it aside for now. Maybe there is a time for it but not now. Angelique almost convinced Simon to be angry with you. That says a lot about her, wouldn’t you say? She thinks she’ll handle her affairs differently when, having made it as an entrepreneur, she becomes a mother. I shouldn’t be flippant, but sometimes I am amused by the transparency of people’s motives. Anyway, there’s something noble, isn’t there, in planning to protect your unconceived child from swimming pools? No, she wasn’t just talking about swimming pools. Simon said that she was almost able to convince him to be angry with you because she spoke as an expert, about abandonment, the first signs of it.

  11. Have you ever taken a train at eleven o’clock on a weekday morning, a suburban train, and traveled for three hours, only to return to the station you got on at? You have not, by all accounts, shivered with cold and self-loathing on a warm day, or looked out the window of a train and wished the tunnel would never end. Have you ever affected a microscopic examination of the pattern on your automatic teller machine card while you waited for the woman at the bank to confirm your closing balance?

  Simon was shaken after the swimming pool afternoon. Although he had rescued Sam, he periodically felt somehow an accomplice of sorts. No, I can’t readily provide an explanation for this, not one that wouldn’t cause you to cast a truckload of aspersions on my particular version of a trade. He felt what is felt by many witnesses to accidents or traumatic events. Was there something he could have done? But what makes this so difficult to understand is that he did the very thing, the only thing, that stood between Sam and disaster. So, in what way could he possibly have been an accomplice?

  It frightened him. His drinking picked up again. He didn’t shave, couldn’t sleep, kept irregular hours, generally approximated clinical depression. Perhaps it was in part the thought that, after all these years, he might have re-entered your life one hot day as the man inexplicably holding your drowned son. He’s made much of the heat of that day when we’ve discussed it. I tried to find out more about this “accomplice’s guilt.” He would not always acknowledge it, changing his story. I asked him on these denying days why his drinking had picked up so much. He said it was a hot summer. It was. I remember. Simon had been out of work for some time by then. He said he found the heat humiliating.

  Were you ever a silly girl with your head full only of laughter and serious boys who visited your attention with their stern adolescent dumbness? Try to remember. It would have been before you decided to choose between various styles and ideologies, and well before you chose to stop choosing. You see, if you are now the finely honed product of all those years of choosing, what were you before this, before choice? Can you remember how old you were when you ceased to be a tabula rasa? Maybe not precisely, but there had to have been a time before the choice, the choice to speak in a certain tone, to mix a kind of polite forthrightness with a certain reticence. It would have been some time in early adolescence. Something, some event you may not even remember at first, would have launched you into the orbit of choice that led you to be the person you are now. Perhaps you were greatly impressed by something you saw or someone you knew, something you felt? Was there a vaccine, some ampule of humiliation, that immunized you against whatever it was that the girl no one chose to sit next to was riddled with? Do you remember when Sam began to define himself?

  When did Sam start coming home with notes from his teacher and poor results? I caution you against putting too much store on the academic achievement of such a young child. It’s far too early for ominous predictions, no matter what some of my colleagues may say. It’s the reports of the change in attitude that I would want to remind you of and, insofar as the change in his academic results (if his school progress can be called that) is important at all, it is not the results but the change itself. He was (and is) clearly a bright little boy. He used to do well most of the time. By this I mean he was attentive and picked things up quickly. He was well liked by the teachers and the other children. Then, quite suddenly, he was failing most of the time with only the occasional mediocre mark in math and spelling. He stopped picking things up, he lost attention quickly. Why did he decide to fail? I am suggesting that it was almost a conscious decision, as rational as any decision you or your husband might make. I would hazard a couple of explanations, both of them perhaps equally obvious.

  To learn means to grow up (as Bettelheim tells us). If a child stops learning he can, in some way, retard his growing up. Why would he wish to do this? Many children see growing up as the incremental discarding of their mother and of the need to be mothered. Why did Sam find himself craving you again like a very small child? This was the boy others chose to organize the game, a quietly industrious little boy running on his own success. Suddenly he is disruptive, he is failing. Why? What is he feeling?

  The decision to fail is often made in the pursuit of attention. It’s a kind of depression in a way too (and don’t tell me children can’t be depressed, or have you forgotten everything?). There is some anger that he is internalizing. He hurts you by hurting himself and, if he hurts himself sufficiently, surely you will notice. I am broken. Look. Can you bear it?

  It is probably clear to you by now that I do not provide Simon
with much in the way of what might commonly be thought of as advice. It’s not my role, not professionally, despite the popular view. I can’t do it anyway, not even as his friend. His thoughts come faster than my wisdom. I am hoping that I can’t be blamed for this. Angelique can be judgmental. Most people can. My position has always been that the mere provision of a sounding board must be of some help. Simon has trusted me from quite early on. We have never experienced what psychiatrists call transference, where the patient transfers a particular emotional reaction, positive or negative, to somebody in his earlier life to the therapist. Perhaps it is the opposite, some sort of reverse transference. I wanted him to like me, not for his treatment—well, not only.

  In some way, I suppose I tried to guide him, but gently; he is able to resist. What is there to resist, my occasional sporadic outbursts of benevolent common sense? Of course, he needed more than this. He was already hiding behind your husband’s trees long before William ever called me. I didn’t try to stop him when I found out about it. That is true. But I didn’t know he planned yet another visit to that jewelery store on the corner. How could I know that?

  What was he thinking? Yes, that is supposed to be where I come in. Clearly, I don’t know everything. Knowing everything is not my area. It isn’t even supposed to be. I don’t know why you left him nine or so years ago. He doesn’t know. We speculate. Some of at least one of my children’s education has been paid for from the proceeds of speculating about why you left him. He said it was sudden. But there’s no other way to leave someone, is there? You are always with him right up until you’re not. Yes, William’s been paying for this wisdom. And he’s supposed to be shrewd in matters fiscal.

  How could I know Simon planned to return to your corner jeweler, let alone what would follow? He wanted to see the bracelet, to touch it, as though it were an abiding and tangible manifestation of the link between the two of you nine years ago and now. Maybe it is. Why do you wear it? It’s old and inexpensive with a clasp that you can’t rely on. I am sure your husband would have courted you with much better pieces. But you wear it and when it breaks you take it to an elderly man with an accent in a corner shop and he makes promises to you for which you pay, willingly.

  Does the bracelet remind you of Simon or of the person you were when you were with him? Perhaps you just like the bracelet, simple as that. You haven’t been one for hanging on to things that are of no use to you. Somewhere between my wife’s place and my office there’s a wall on which someone has painted: NOSTALGIA ISN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE! We are in heated agreement.

  Even remembering his obsession, I don’t know quite what he had in mind or whether he had anything in mind. What would he have achieved by paying for the repairs to the bracelet and then depositing it secretly in, for instance, your mailbox? He doesn’t know either, but this is not what happened anyway. When he went to the shop and inquired about the bracelet, the jeweler told him that it had been picked up. Simon was a little embarrassed and said that he hadn’t realized you had already picked it up. But the jeweler told him, with Old World European discretion, that it was not you but a gentleman. Simon feigned a familiarity with your husband, even describing him to the increasingly uncomfortable jeweler but, no, it was another gentleman.

  Simon was so taken aback that he momentarily forgot himself and cross-examined the old jeweler as to what the hell you thought you were doing. The jeweler apologized, either on your behalf or, most likely, on his own behalf for giving this well-spoken young man news that so obviously distressed him.

  Another gentleman. Nothing either Angelique or I could have said about you could have made the dent in your pedestal that the jeweler made with these words. For a while, it was all Simon would talk about. Angelique found him either expansive about it in a pseudo-scientific way or else steeped in a familiar melancholic reflection about whether or not you were seeing another man and, if so, why. Would you leave your husband for him and to what extent were your decisions informed by considerations of Sam’s interests? Was it simply that he felt he had a grip on the concept of your husband, who he was, and that, in some sense, he even had his measure? A new man might threaten the order of things even if that order had been dysfunctional. Yes, but I think it was more. There was a quite genuine concern for Sam. Was it better for him to grow up with dissatisfied parents in a sterile marriage, with or without infidelity (the fate of most of us), or with separated parents and all the attendant problems (the fate of the rest of us), but in an atmosphere not without a modicum of hope for the future?

  As always, I tried to discuss the absurd with him with the utmost seriousness. It’s not absurd to imagine that you are having, have had, or are about to have an affair, or even, in spite of your husband’s wealth, your lifestyle, your child, and the sheer bother of it all, that you would someday leave your husband. What is absurd, I thought, was that Simon should imagine that he had some say in all this, some control. Most of us have to fight to gain some control over our own lives and here is Simon, for whom it is sometimes too much to shave, to wash his clothes, to feed himself, or to walk his dog, contemplating whether a woman with whom he has had no involvement for nearly a decade should or should not stay in her marriage. I don’t laugh. I have never laughed. That’s how we know I’m professional.

  And isn’t it interesting to see how bourgeois he is? For all his rejection of his parents and their rejection of him, he is at one with them in thinking there is something intrinsically sacred about marriage, even a sterile marriage, one in which the husband gets more warmth from the prostitute he visits regularly than from his wife, one in which the wife has been too successful in utterly repudiating everything she used to be before she managed to get everything her parents had taught her she would ever want. And Sam. Simon is angry at the possibility that Sam might, in some sense, be abandoned as a consequence of your attempt to mitigate the damage of a hasty decision to marry a man as remote from Simon as you are now.

  12. This, Simon told me, is what happened when Angelique walked into his apartment one afternoon. The door was open and she found Simon sitting on his couch with the customary glass of scotch, listening to music and reading. At first she just stood there looking at him. Empson was asleep.

  “Is this it? Are you just going to sit here for the rest of your life listening to Stephen Cummings and getting yourself shitfaced?”

  “I’ve got some Leonard Cohen somewhere around here.”

  “Simon, okay, you don’t have a job. It’s not the end of the world. You sit around here drinking in this . . . museum, or . . . shrine you’ve built to an ex-girlfriend. That’s all she is. Everyone’s got them and everyone’s out of work.”

  “What’s your problem today?” he interrupted.

  “I don’t have a problem. I’ve got plans instead. If I’m not happy with things, I try to change them. Isn’t that what you’d tell me to do?”

  She stood with her hands on her hips.

  “I never tell you what to do.”

  “Well, that’s bullshit for a start. You gave me all these instructions when I first started seeing you, how I wasn’t to call you without you calling me first and all the rest of it.”

  “You didn’t listen to me,” he said.

  “No, of course not. Who would listen to you? You’re a boring old smart-ass with an alcohol problem and a thing for a yuppie girl you haven’t spoken to for ten years. You’re pathetic, Simon!”

  “Why do you visit me, Angel?”

  She sat on the edge of the couch and took a sip of his drink. “I like your dog.”

  She patted Empson, refilled Simon’s glass, and drank from it. Then she moved closer. “And despite all this, I still think you’re beautiful . . . and you’re funny.”

  Simon put his arm around her.

  “Funny! In what way funny?” he asked.

  “You make me laugh. And you create things out of nothing. With just . . . words. You’re entertaining and”—she gestured to the room around her—“it’s li
ke a place I can escape to. You give me advice.”

  “Yes, now is a very good time to get into property.”

  She put the palm of her hand to his cheek. “Simon! Look at you.”

  “Wouldn’t get much for me in my present state, I’ll grant you.”

  “You’ve got to start taking care of yourself. You’ve really got to get some kind of life, get out more, drink less, eat better.”

  “Now just a minute. I won’t have a thing said against your cooking.”

  “Simon, I’m being serious.”

  He kissed her.

  “Are you staying for dinner, Angel?”

  “No. I’m on tonight.”

  “Anyone I know? Or everyone I know?”

  She got up. “It’s your favorite client, among others. You know, I think he suspects.”

  “Suspects what?” Simon asked.

  “I think he suspects she’s seeing someone else.”

  He stood up. “What makes you say that? You haven’t said anything, have you? Jesus, you haven’t said anything?”

  “You know she doesn’t want any more children?”

  “How do you know that?” he asked.

  “He told me. How else would I know?”

  “I can’t believe the things he tells you!”

  “Yeah, scandalous, isn’t it?” she said, taking another sip.

  “Well, it’s not that it’s private, hell, it’s all private . . . but it’s irrelevant.”

  “Irrelevant! Irrelevant to what?”

  “How the hell can he screw you talking about his wife and child?”