Trauma by Patrick McGrath Page A

Christ.”
    “Nora darling, is it
you
laughing?”
    She shook her head.
    “Who then?”
    She shook her head.
    “Nora, who’s laughing? In your dream, who’s laughing?”
    She lifted her face. “My
brother
!”
    Some weeping then. I didn’t want to leave it alone, I wanted her to say it again, but she shook her head. It was enough. After a while I asked if anything had happened to her yesterday that might have triggered the dream, anything she might have seen or read or heard, but she didn’t think so. A little later we went back to bed and at once she fell asleep. But I didn’t sleep. She’d told me she was an only child. So who was laughing in the nightmare?
    •                  •                  •

    The next day I had appointments until six. When I got home she was in the kitchen with her head in a recipe book.
There was a cigarette burning in the ashtray on the counter and an open bottle of wine. She hadn’t turned any of the lights on. I kissed her, and she asked me not to disturb her for a few minutes, she was trying to figure out how to cook this thing. I sat waiting for her. At last she turned the book over and went to the fridge.
    “How was your day?” I said.
    She grunted.
    “You went back to sleep right away.”
    “I’m so sorry. Were you exhausted?”
    It was said distractedly. She was intent on assembling her ingredients, onions and tomatoes and such. She pushed her hair behind her ears.
    “Did you think any more about your dream?”
    “I can’t deal with that now. Would you pour me some wine? And hand me down the oil. How spicy do you want it?”
    “I don’t care.”
    “We’ll have it spicy. I wish you’d fix this drawer.”
    She wasn’t just irritable, she was avoiding me. It was because of the nightmare. She wasn’t going to talk about it.
    She wanted it back where it belonged, down in the dark. A little later she complained about my very real inadequacy as a handyman. I suggested that since she was in the apartment all day she could talk to the super. If he wouldn’t fix the drawer, he’d know someone who could.
    “I can’t do that,” she said. “It’s not my apartment and anyway, he gives me the creeps. That’s the man’s job. I do the cooking, I do the washing—”
    I lifted my hands, I acquiesced. I knew better than to let a question of mere housework provoke an argument. I told her I’d find somebody. I went to embrace her, but she wasn’t having an of that.
    “Leave me alone, Charlie, can’t you see I’m not in the mood? I thought you were the fucking shrink.”
    This last was too much. Irritability I could tolerate, but this was overt hostility and I’d done nothing to provoke it. I sat down on a kitchen stool and stared at my hands. How to deal with it without infuriating her further? I assumed that by helping her in the night, by making her talk about her nightmare, I’d seen something she wanted to conceal from me, or more probably from herself, so now she was angry with me. But what had I seen? A dream involving her being followed, at night, and a roaring, rumbling, clattering noise in the background. What was following her, probably in the subway, that was so terrifying that even these few paltry details created enough panic that she had to punish me for hearing about them? And of course this sudden appearance of a
brother,
when she’d told me she had no
brother—
    I detected fear of punishment, therefore guilt. It was possible, I thought, that what she remembered was not an actual event but a memory imposed on it in order to disguise it. It is a familiar ruse of the unconscious, to create a scenario capable of inspiring terror, but which in fact is just a screen, a disguising symptom, beneath which lies the memory of trauma proper. Had Nora been traumatized? I wasn’t going to ask her, not then. It was by playing what she’d called the fucking shrink that the unpleasantness had arisen in the first place. I