Trauma by Patrick McGrath

Author:Patrick McGrath [McGrath, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307268709
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-04-07T12:00:00+00:00

There was now no doubt that Nora and I were in a state of crisis, and that if our relationship were to be saved it would have to be me who did the saving. Knowing this, why then did I continue to see Agnes? In retrospect it seems clear that I intended things with Nora to break down, that I wanted her to leave me but was unable to act on that wish because I recognized her fragility and suspected how deeply she was damaged. I certainly didn’t want to be the agent of her breakdown. So I was providing asylum, protecting her, and from what? From myself. I had in fact become her doctor without intending to, and as her doctor I was shielding her from the man to whom she’d given her love but who’d grown weary of her and wished now to push her out. I was a divided man, doctor and lover, each contending with the other over the unstable psyche of Nora Chiara. For a number of days the two opposing impulses existed in a state of near-perfect equilibrium, but I was not so much a body at rest as a body in paralysis.

We coexisted in a state of mutual detachment. We were largely silent, coolly polite to each other, but each for our own reasons unwilling to initiate the argument we knew would involve saying things that could never be unsaid. For both of us this awful icy silence was preferable to an apocalyptic row after which life would never be the same. There is a conservative element in most relationships and it tolerates much that is outrageous, or that later comes to be seen as such.

Nora and I were neither of us ready for upheaval. She was stronger than I expected. She’d steeled herself to what she saw as my iceman nature and was prepared—this seemed her unspoken position—to sustain the status quo until it could be sustained no longer, which would be a time of her choosing. I had resumed visiting Agnes, coming downtown in the middle of the day when Cassie was at school. I told her what was happening at home.

“You don’t need that, Charlie,” she said. “Not with everything else you have to contend with.”

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