The Night Companion
by Jeffrey Greene
Chapter 3: The Hour of Obsession
Part 1 appears in this issue.
part 2
I opened my eyes, and saw a young woman standing in the doorway, staring at me with the oddest expression on her face: an open-mouthed alarm arrested by indignation, as if she had been about to warn me of some danger and then recognized me as an enemy. She was tall and slender, her face framed with thick, wavy, honey-colored hair parted in the middle and resting on her shoulders. She was dressed in a rust-brown peasant dress over a black leotard, with lacy black sleeves ending at the elbows, leather sandals, and a barbarous profusion of rings, necklaces and bracelets.
Her dark-blond hair and clothing contrasted dramatically with her pale complexion and large blue eyes which, though they stared unblinkingly into mine, seemed preoccupied, glazed with inwardness. Still shaken by the gruesome intensity of the dream, I was embarrassed to realize that I’d been returning her gaze with the demoralized expression of a dreamer soiled and betrayed by his own depths.
She moved finally, stepping into the room, and I sat up straighter in my chair.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, and as soon as she spoke I saw the resemblance to her mother.
I started to say, “Working,” but that didn’t sound right, considering she’d just caught me sleeping, and answered instead: “I’m a friend of your mother’s,” which didn’t sound right, either.
“’Friend?’” she repeated, her tone deriding the whole idea. Her eyes fell on the mushroom book. She picked it up, glaring at me, and replaced it on the shelf. “This just seems really strange to me,” she said, standing behind me like an interrogator, so that I had to twist around to face her. “Who are you, anyway?”
Before I could reply she said: “You come in here off the street, make yourself at home, cozy up to my mother, mess with things you have no business even touching... I don’t get this. What’s in it for you?”
I got up and faced her. “It’s a job, and I happen to need the money. And I like your mother.”
She nodded like a teacher listening to a tardy student’s lame excuse. “Oh, I see. You like her. You like her money and you like her. How nice for you. Nice gig you’ve got here. You get to dress up and pretend to go to work, be a professional ‘companion’ to a crippled woman desperate enough to buy your friendship. That’ll look nice on your résumé.” She turned and headed toward the door with a swish of fabric and a jangle of bracelets, the movement charging the air with her subtle perfume, and I caught myself staring at the charm of her hips in movement.
At that moment Carla spoke from the intercom: “Tom? Dinner’s ready.” Catherine Morhan stopped and looked back over her shoulder in the direction of her mother’s voice, then rolled her eyes to regard me balefully.
Meeting her stare, I said, “I’ll be right there.”
There was a sound of boots on concrete. She turned and nodded in their direction. When she turned back to look at me, I saw a fading smile, transfiguring her face with a piercing, almost dangerous beauty. She spoke without anger now, in urgent tones: “Why don’t you go get a real job and leave us alone? We don’t need you.”
“I’ll let your mother tell me that,” I replied, still startled by that smile, which had closed on her beauty like a vanishing door.
A tall, lanky man — boy, really — stepped into the light, carrying two suitcases and dressed as if he’d been called away from a rodeo, in a big straw cowboy hat, checked western shirt, tight jeans, and pointed cowboy boots. His thin, sunburnt face wore a dazed and tentative smile, which he turned on me with a puppet-like nod of the head, clearly uncertain whether to be jealous or simply uncomfortable, then fixed an adoring gaze on Catherine. Expecting to be introduced, he heard her say to me: “Just do yourself a favor and go home.” He turned to look at me again, this time with a puzzled expression.
Reluctant to end the exchange without justifying myself, I said: “Maybe if you’d been here, she wouldn’t have needed me.”
Anger flared in her eyes, and I knew it was only the presence of her boyfriend that kept her from losing her temper. Mastering herself, she said with a chill and heavy-lidded contempt, “You don’t know anything,” then turned her back and walked away, her teenaged cowboy in tow.
My body was radiating an unpleasant heat when I walked into the kitchen, hands shaking and head filled with her words and mine, both real and imaginary, and I hardly noticed the smell of fried chicken and mashed potatoes. It was three a.m., the hour of obsession, and I knew that I’d be thinking about our encounter for the rest of the night, editing in my own triumphant ripostes, until my anger was finally spent. “You don’t know anything,” struck me again like a whip, and I lowered my head. Carla sat dejectedly before her empty plate, her head in her hands, and didn’t look up until I pulled out my chair and sat down. I saw that she’d been crying.
“Pass your plate,” she said, her voice still shaky, and loaded me up, as usual, with more than I could eat. She took tiny portions for herself and picked at them.
We ate for awhile in silence. Finally, I said: “Your daughter disapproves of me.”
She looked up and nodded slowly. “Yes.”
I waited for something else, then said, “She thinks I’m exploiting you, taking your money. In fact she told me to leave.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said I’d let you tell me that.”
She smiled. “I’m glad you said that, Tom. You know of course that I want you to stay. But I had to let you stand up to her yourself. She can be overpowering, like her father.”
“Well, she certainly overpowered her Texan. He looks completely lost.”
“He is. But there’s nothing I can do for him.” She looked at me with narrowed eyes and smiled again. “Did I glimpse a shade of green in your aura? It was only a flash, when you mentioned the cowboy.”
“She got my goat. I’m still mad. You know, I said something to her I probably shouldn’t have: that if she were here more often, you wouldn’t have needed me.”
She frowned. “You’re right, you... shouldn’t have said that. Remember I told you that Roland has his reasons for keeping ferrets?”
“Yes.”
“Well, so does Catherine. So do I. I have my upside-down life, she has her boyfriends. She comes back to see me and Roland, not her father. She was always his favorite and still loves him, but from a distance now, and very carefully. She comes bearing gifts. That’s her defense.”
“You’re doing it again,” I said.
“Doing what?”
“Making cryptic statements and expecting me to understand them. I don’t.”
“No, of course not. I’m sorry. I abuse your politeness with too much talk about the wrong things. I only wanted to explain — or talk around — the running argument between myself and Catherine. She knows that I understand why she brings these men home. She also knows that I can’t condone it.”
Still puzzled, I said, “I don’t see how she could expect you to.”
“She expects very little from me, or anyone else, for that matter. She hasn’t been the same since Patrick died.” She closed her eyes and began kneading her temples, as if trying to massage away a headache. “None of us has. They were so close as children, like identical twins almost, feeling each other’s moods, protecting each other from harm. They weren’t allowed to have friends over, you see, their father’s decree: no ‘destructive or inferior influences’ on his special and gifted children. So they became inseparable. What friends they made in high school had to be smuggled in, and there weren’t many willing to sneak into the ogre’s castle and risk his wrath. One encounter with the professor was usually enough to discourage a second visit. Did I tell you that Patrick, Jr. studied medicine?”
“No, you didn’t,” I said, feeling a twinge of guilt for already knowing it.
“He wanted to be a neurosurgeon. Medicine was going to be his escape route. But he wasn’t strong enough. It was Catherine who inherited her father’s strength.” She stopped talking, as if just becoming aware that she’d implied her son’s death was not a natural one.
“I’ve read accounts of death camp survivors,” I said, afraid of scaring her off the subject. “Survivor’s guilt is very common. Maybe Catherine’s, uh... promiscuity — forgive me — is her way of dealing with the guilt she felt when her brother died. Or am I just blowing smoke?”
She grinned and lit a cigarette. “Lord, what a pair of gossips we are. Catherine wouldn’t like this, not one bit. You’re right, though. She felt guilty for surviving Patrick, though debasing herself as a form of penance might be stretching it a bit, Herr Doctor.”
I got up and began clearing the plates. “I’m curious about Roland, which shouldn’t surprise you. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if he really exists.” I said it playfully, never certain with Carla where the lines were drawn.
“No, he’s just a wax dummy in a room filled with cobwebs. Would you like to meet him?”
“Yes, I would.”
“All right, I’ll set it up. First I’ll slip a written request for an interview under his door, informing him that I would like to bring a guest. If he’s in the mood, he’ll send me an invitation to call on him during the eleven o’clock news, which, being mostly a re-run of the six o’clock news, won’t conflict with his TV programs, all of which are terribly important to him. I read somewhere that an artist has to choose between the perfection of his life or his work. Roland’s choice was between the screen and his life. The screen won.”
“Sounds pretty awful.”
She held up a warning finger. “Don’t waste your pity. He’s quite content. Roland is the most perfect solitary. He learned that skill the hard way, being several years younger than Patrick and Catherine, who pretty much shut him out of their private world. He’ll greet you politely and give you his full attention but, when you leave, it will be as if he’d seen you on TV, just another program in the daily continuum.”
“And if he get’s lonely, there’s always the ferrets. But what about girls?”
“Plenty of them on TV.”
That comment stayed with me for the rest of the night. She’d meant it cynically, but an unintentional emphasis on the word “them” had betrayed the possessive mother in her. She wanted Roland right where he was, ensconced in his burrow two doors down from her bedroom, the last warm body between herself and the enemy she’d married.
Driving home toward the pink swirl of dawn, I felt battered and exhausted, and was more grateful than usual for the free weekend that lay ahead. With a sense of gathering momentum, I was being drawn deeper into Carla’s confidence, and I wasn’t at all sure that five bucks an hour was worth the emotional risk of becoming indispensable to her. Her daughter’s unpleasantness, coupled with my strong attraction to her, had been a nasty surprise.
And then there was the demonized professor. Something about that brief glimpse had been bothering me all evening, but it wasn’t until my head touched the pillow that an image from the nightmare came back and I realized who the sunglassed torturer, with his gray, scraggly hair and large head had resembled: Patrick Morhan.
Copyright © 2021 by Jeffrey Greene
