The Complex Man

CHAPTER ONE



I want it understood now that Dr. Kelly was a brilliant man.

He had all the outer trappings of one: severe good looks, money, methodical speech. His mind was clean and logical and worked in whirring order. He dissected and analyzed. Not for Kelly was the abstract guess, the poetic supposition. His world was white and black, angles and squares.

Whatever he is now, I want it understood here and now that Kelly was astonishing, despite his flaws.

I want it understood that Kelly was threaded with greatness.



Avery Bilkins was a man of much thought and few words, a grizzled, lanky bear of a man who snarled into his cigarettes and at his students as he passed them in the hall, a man whose intelligence was unbearable to those who disliked him—and these were many.

He was a man of considerable literary prowess, and keen, unnerving intellect. He was also a jackass. Dr. Kelly, his psychiatrist, denoted once an incident which Bilkins himself described in his laconic drawl.

“Sir,” a student, a skinny, awkward red head named Aurelia had once asked. “I don’t believe there is a definitive answer to this question—I don’t believe there’s an answer at all.”

Bilkins was an English teacher, the sort who taught English and used it as a weapon against humanity rather than a tool; he and his kind gloried in questions with no true answer.

“Of course there’s an answer,” he deadpanned, not even looking at poor, paling Aurelia. “There’s an answer to everything. You, Goldberg,”—he always addressed the girls by their surnames—“are making the mistake of looking for the right answer.”

This was not the only time he was guilty of such malice; he spouted off these sorts of things all the damned time. I didn’t even know the man intimately and I knew this.

Kelly, for whom I secretary-d, told me of Avery Bilkins, the little that he could, and his sometimes unbearable cleverness. Bilkins, whom I knew, for a time, solely by his scrawl in the “Sign-In” book, was not a man fit for this world; frequently, Kelly said the only world he was fit for was the underworld. It seemed to be true; I had spoken to him, once or twice. To me, the comment had not seemed unwarranted.

If symbolism existed on this earth, certainly some austere, angelic people—people like Kelly—could argue that Bilkins’ symbolism was positively Satanic.

He exhuded his own peculiar brand of brimstone, which to many smelt of stale cigarettes and the pages of old books being constantly thumbed. The lakes of fire were his eyes, which were a pale and unearthly shade of green—the color of greed, and money, and sin. Avery’s whole person was a disgusting manifestation of walking symbolism, and he knew it, which in itself was symbolic of something. His subject invaded every plane and pore of his miserable life; irony was inhaled through a foul cigarette, and exhaled a few seconds later in a smoky plume of keen satire. His cold, gravelly drawl, acquired from somewhere in the South, was like the jab of a dozen demonic pitchforks. Kelly, a man of orderly and methodical note-taking, managed to get several crucial key points scribbled in his legendary Blue Binder on the first meeting.

Afterward, he left this binder on a shelf in his room.

I found it, digging through his old things.

Kelly would have been apoplectic with horror if he had seen me stuff it under my arm. After all, it was Confidential, sacred to the virginal eyes of Kelly and Kelly Alone.

“A psychiatrist,” he would say, quietly, proudly, “is nothing if not trustworthy.”

But I was not like Kelly; I was no follower of Life’s Commandments, and so the binder went with me.



I opened it when I returned.

I had a woman at the time—that is, someone to idle with in bed and out of it. Not a lover, because love never entered the equation; we were simply mutual enjoyers of each other’s benefits. Her name was Caroline: large eyes, bright hair (red, though I always said orange), pale skin. A nice amount of freckles. An occasional, interesting one idling on her breast.

But the point is that she was there and I wasn’t in love with her.

“Henry, what’s that?”

“Kelly,” I said, staring at the steely cleanness of the thing, its sensible blue color, its neat, neat, too neat pages, all nicely annotated, all labeled.

“Kelly? Isn’t that the man you used to—”

“Yeah.”

Her mouth was orange-pink and it pulled down; Caroline had an almost motherly instinct. She was a hell of a woman. Almost as much so as Gina.

“Do you want to be alone?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

She left, the sun turning her white and shocking orange as she went. I, meanwhile, opened it, scanned the first few pages, irreverently making note of some of Kelly’s more revealing annotations on this or that person…

It was only a few pages in when I came to his.

Avery Gamaliel Bilkins.

I stopped, deep in what Kelly might have called the calculations of thought. I recalled a tall, thin man with an aggressive sort of attractiveness and a nicotine addiction, a man with a perpetual, vulpine smirk.

Avery Bilkins had been—still was—a man of some complexity, a man who laughed his snarling, smoky laugh at the sorting of humanity, a man perhaps to be loved—and certainly to be hated. I can only wish it had been known at the time.



I shall begin this narrative with a few basic tidbits of information.

The first is that Kelly was married.

The second is that he had a very attractive wife.

The third is that he was a man of unbroken success in the nosy, burrowing field of psychiatry, a man regarded by his peers as something of a deity. He, like the immortal Hercule Poirot—the reader will forgive my fondness for detective stories—had a fanaticisim for order and method; they were his tools, his scalpel for dissecting the diseased mind.

A few facts about Kelly: he was thirty three, almost (but not quite, as he was wont to remind me) one third of one hundred. He was a tall man, goodlooking: brown hair, brown eyes, a cleanshaven jaw—except for Christmas time when he was apt to grow a small, well-kept beard.

Women thought him attractive; he thought them fascinating psychological studies.

According to the notes in the Binder, Avery Bilkins walked into Kelly’s office in the middle of June—precisely the middle. June 15th.

I have taken the liberty of imagining their little meeting, for Kelly, of course, could hardly transcribe it verbatim.



Forgive me if the style is somewhat romantic; I could never restrict myself to Kelly’s stark pragmatism. God knows what would be if he were to write this.



The man was tall and dark; he wore an ugly plaid shirt and pretentious teacher loafers. There was a flick of auburn hair on his forehead, a forelock reminiscent of the Fuhrer.

He lit a cigarette and sat with loping impudence on the sofa. The smoke curled in forbidden gray spirals; the psychiatrist coughed and gestured discreetly toward the sign on the door.

No Smoking

He—the loping smoker—nodded, laughing quietly as he extinguished the foul thing on his pants.

“I apologize, Doctor,” he said, but the “Doctor” was as lazy and scornful as the smoke itself. The psychiatrist nodded.

“Think nothing of it.”

“I intend to.”

So saying, he stretched himself upon the couch, staring up at the ceiling, ignoring the upright man across from him. He had predatory teeth and long, steepled, smoke-stained fingers; the psychiatrist watched him with a faint hint of distaste.

“What are you here for?”

“I was sent.”

There was a quick, neat movement of the yellow pencil in the psychiatrist’s hand.

“By whom?”

There was a puff on a cigarette that wasn’t there; the man chuckled. The sound was faintly Satanic.

“The Devil.”

The psychiatrist had an upright and pious horror of Satan; his gaze was now faintly reproachful.

“Be serious, please.”

“I’m never otherwise, Doctor.”

Blasphemy, of course; sincerity is not in this man’s makeup.

He strolls, smoking, laughing at life.

The Doctor sighed, a sigh of impatience at the inhibition of Progress.

“Let’s begin, then.”



I could never think of any other way to end it; to me, the niceties would logically terminate here, and Kelly would begin his analyzing. Gina (who I’ll introduce in a moment) always laughed at my writings, particularly the imagined scenes between Kelly and Bilkins. With her graceful carelessness, she christened them my ‘Endeavors’.

I confess I liked them—but then, as quick, offhand Gina would often point out, every writer likes their own work.

After all, she would say, with a curve of her neat pink mouth, somebody has to.



In that June, when Kelly dealt with Bilkins, I was still in a marvelously undefined relationship with Gina.

Actually, I don’t believe her name was Gina; it was something pompous and ill-fitting for her clean-cut prettiness, something I don’t recall. The point is, I didn’t like it, so I changed it, if only for those few hours we were in bed.

So Gina became Gina, and she took it in stride. Gina was one of those women who took everything in stride, whether it was a frog in the house or a changed time for a meeting. I liked that about her; if there was something I disliked in a woman, it was fuss.

Gina, for all her cool sarcasm and blunt, masculine efficiency, had no fuss.

Ever after what I now call the Bilkins Happening, I have toyed with the possibility of her possessing some sort of second sight, or at least great powers of logical clarity.

Out of the lot of us, she was the only one who saw it coming.



CHAPTER 2



Gina, it seems, had known him before. Bilkins, that is. She told me, shortly after I casually mentioned seeing the name thrown about somewhere in the office.

“Bilkins?” she said, sitting herself up, leaning her soft cream body on her splayed hands. It was four in the morning and we were being, as Kelly might say, ‘companionable’. Sex was over—long over—and we were in bed, eating dry cereal. Hardly romantic, but it was something we’d come to do together over time.

A relationship—even one as clear and sex-based as ours—cannot subsist on intimacy alone; there’s got to be some kind of chatter.

But I’m wandering.

“Bilkins?” said Gina, raising a soft yellow-white brow. “AVERY Bilkins?”

“Think so. Why?” as something which wasn’t jealousy gnawed at the edges of my head. Gina wasn’t mine, of course, but if she was in bed with Bilkins too it certainly took the zest out of things.

I was never much for bathing in used water.

She shrugged. She had a marvelous shrug, did Gina: cool, careless, graceful. A shrug with airy dignity.

“I used to know him. He taught at the same school where I taught. Crazy bastard.”

“That’d be why he’s going to Kelly.”

At this, she let out a shiver of wry laughter.

“He’s going to Kelly? Oh, God.”

There was something derisive about her tone, and I bristled; Kelly, for all his annoying, unromantic dryness, for all his dream-crushing tendencies, was a little bit sacred to me. He was the only great man in my mediocre circle of friends; I looked at him as men look at their one vintage gun and women look at their best dress.

He was certainly too great to be pah’d by such as Gina.

“What’s wrong with that?”

She looked at me as if wondering that I didn’t know. She had a habit of doing that, particularly when we spoke of Kelly.

“Henry, Bilkins is—not for people like Kelly. They shouldn’t interact.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” fixing me with matter-of-fact brown eyes, “Kelly has no fucking imagination.”



I wondered on that afterward, when she’d left the bed and gone off to work.

Kelly’s lack of imagination seemed, to me, immaterial; it hardly mattered how much imagination a psychiatrist had. I’d always seen the job, in my humble estimations of it, as more of a formulaic gig; you observed the symptoms and thus divined the cause. There was no invention, no imagination there.

But then, I reflected, Gina had always been a woman of ambiguous statements; I supposed that she regarded them as part and parcel of what my mother always called her Feminine Wiles.

So most probably it was not worth my time to wonder.

Gina had, however, divested some statements of interest concerning Bilkins.

“He was—odd,” she said, staring philosophically at the bumpy white ceiling. I refrained from an exhale of pure impatience. With those like Gina, it wouldn’t do any good.

“In what way?”

“He was just—odd. He kind of reminded me of a Halloween costume—I just got the sense that there was something about him that couldn’t be real.”

“You think he’s a liar?”

“No.” Her eyes turned to me. “That’s not what I said.”

“Well, what the hell did you say?”

“I said there was something…contrived about him. He’s not what he appears. And Kelly’s too much of a fool to be able to see it. Bilkins will have Kelly on a platter.”

I sucked hard on a cigarette, exhaling with the majesty of a man convinced he’s right.

“Please. Kelly’s dealt with people like Bilkins before. HE’S the psychiatrist after all. He knows how to handle them.”

Gina shrugged—that single, graceful movement which immediately won her the argument.

“Whatever you say.”



It was sometime soon after that I had dinner at the Kelly household.

Kelly, as I have already said, is married—and married to quite an attractive woman, in my humble estimation. Her name is Sandra, but I always took the liberty of calling her Sandy—mentally, at least. We weren’t close enough to do so out loud.

I’m not much at describing women, so I’ll just say that Sandra Kelly gave off an impression of softness: soft blonde hair, soft bluish green eyes, soft pale skin. She was slender but not athletic. A good-looking woman, and one of an entirely different brand than the sharp-tongued Gina.

Somehow, the fates decided to give them a kid—a little boy. He was about nine at the time, and his name was (is) Abraxus. Sandra named him; she always had a streak of poetry in her, I think.

It was always my way of thinking that Abraxus Kelly had to be the most unfortunate kid on God’s greenish earth.

We sat and talked for a moment—Kelly and I, that is. Abraxus just sat and looked at his father; Sandy smiled to herself. Her thoughts appeared elsewhere.

“So, Kell,” I said, leaning back, “how’s the old job?”

Kelly frowned slightly; he had a hatred of nicknames. No doubt he thought Kell an abhorrent abridgement of his identity or some crap.

“It’s well enough,” he said, with that clear-cut reticence which always bordered on primness.

I pressed him.

“How’s Avery Bilkins, the new one? Pretty crazy, I guess?”

But of course he wasn’t about to answer me; the straight arrow mouth tightened as he said, with the cool tired air of a man who’s weary of repeating himself:

“You know I can’t divulge that, Henry.”

“He must be rather awful,” murmured Sandra from her parenthetical place on the side, “you looked perhaps…rather tired when you came in, darling.”

Two things about Sandra: one, she spoke with an effect of constantly cushioning her words, softening them between interminable rathers and perhapses. I guess it was to counterbalance the sharp rigidity of Kelly. Two, she called him darling. Kelly, that is. Darling. Every time I heard her say it, I felt sick and wanted to laugh at the same time.

It was just such a stupid thing to call him.

Kelly, meanwhile, looked at her almost reprovingly.

“Sandra.”

Kelly was not a man of any subtlety; there was a very clear don’t say another word about it in his voice, and poor Sandy knew it. She didn’t blush, but her eyes dropped, the long gold lashes making soft shadows on her cheek. Abraxus stared at his father like he had the sun on his shoulders or something. Kelly hardly seemed to notice.

It was awkward after that, of course; it was always awkward when the glassy surface of the Kellys’ relationship revealed a crack. But though I ate meekly enough, a few more glances told me Sandy was right; Kelly did look a little…worn, maybe. Tired. In any case, he lacked the imperturbable glow of righteousness which usually suffused him after a day of Order and Method.

Briefly, I wondered if Bilkins had anything to do with it.

But then Sandra offered a quiet remark about the state of the weather, and I confess I was so busy talking and thinking how well she looked in that pale pink dress of hers that I forgot the matter altogether.



Gina was waiting for me that night when I got home. She wasn’t wearing anything except a towel. She was reading, however, and she batted my hand away when I tried to make an advance.

Woman, I find, is a duplicitous creature that way. Or perhaps it was just Gina.

“Geen, c’mon, what the hell are you doing in just a towel if you don’t want a go-round?”

Her very eyebrows grew contemptuous. Gina was not one to humor a man.

“I just bathed.”

“Well, why don’t you dress yourself then?”

Gina shrugged, one of her pretty, scornful, I didn’t feel like it shrugs. She said nothing, and she didn’t have to; the slight movement of her shoulders was eloquence on its own.

Gina’ shrugs were a kind of language, and if the masses were to learn them no other communication would be needed.

Disgusted, I gave the whole thing up as hopeless and conversation between Geen and I didn’t continue until she slipped into bed.

“How was the dinner?”

I, in an attempt at Gina’s effortless elegance, bobbed a shoulder up and down; somehow, it didn’t have the same effect.

“It sufficed.”

Gina’s eyebrow went up, and she smiled—a glimmering, barely-there, faintly ironic smile.

“It sufficed, did it? So what did Kelly Boy talk about?”

I stiffened, feeling as I imagine a devout Christian would hearing some rollicking atheist talking about “Jesus Boy” or “Mary, old gal”.

Not that I would really know. I don’t adhere to any particular creed.

But the point is that Gina’s flippancy seemed damn near heresy, and I for one wasn’t amused.

“Kelly talked about the usual—recent scientific breakthroughs, etc. It was—interesting.”

And I tried and failed to look like a man interested; the whispering irony in Gina’s smirk increased in volume.

“I’m sure. And of course Sandy did the dishes and cleaned up?”

Her tone was both disapproving and dryly amused; I felt that again Gina was taking liberties, encroaching with her neat, sharp humor on the boundaries of Kelly’s perfection.

“The Kellys are just…traditionalists,” I said. I was lying; Kelly was not a man for traditions. Traditions are sentiment. He was a man for whatever was logically best.

Gina snorted.

“Right. I think she’s unhappy.”

“What?”

“I think Sandy’s unhappy.”

“What the hell makes you think that?”

She just looked at me and radiated rightness.

“Wouldn’t you be?”

She had me there; Kelly was a brilliant man, a man of infinite and exciting possibilities—but the fact remained that living him would be hell, that after a time life would take on the quality of a carefully set up experiment of the devil.

I took refuge in the obvious; when with Gina, it was all I could do.

“I’m not Sandy.”

At this point Gina appeared to give up on me; in any case, she sighed, and her shoulders swooped in one of those fantastical shrugs—this one said You’re a moron. Burying herself beneath the sheets (Gina slept with only her sarcastic nose and deceptively light, lovely hair poking out of the blankets), she said, after a few moments:

“You’re human, aren’t you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

The long lump beneath the blankets didn’t move; I could almost hear, however, the brown eyes rolling and the eyebrows ascending with slow, majestic incredulity.

“You know what it means. We’re all human. And Kelly would be too if he didn’t fight it all the damn time.”

And she said nothing else, knowing that she had made her point quite neatly. Gina was always a being of marvelous efficiency.

I, however, stayed up, pondering—remembering what she had said about Bilkins and Kelly and wondering if Kelly’s inability to be human—according to the Gospel of Gina—had anything to do with the fact that Gina—a known skeptic when it came to Kelly, but a bright one nonetheless—thought Bilkins would “have Kelly on a platter”.