Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind, page 19
She seems calmer since she came back from Cambodia, said her mother to her father as they waited for the water to boil for their pasta.
Remember, said her father, she can tack pretty well in a storm. This was a metaphor. She had never gone sailing with him although he had asked her several times.
Her mother said, I should have divorced you years ago. And then a minute later she added, I don’t mean that.
I know you don’t, he said.
I just wish—, he added.
Me too, she said.
The seasons changed and changed again. Hardly anyone recognized Betty as Justine anymore. It was all right with her. Justine Fast had died a grizzly death tied to a cactus in an imaginary desert, ants had eaten out her eyes and crawled across her skin. Minutes before the end of a session she had described this in full detail to Dr. H., who intended to return to the subject as soon as possible.
Gregg wanted to buy Betty a ring but he knew she could steal a better one and that made it hard for him to actually choose one. He finally did. Betty began a children’s story, Once upon a time there was a little girl named Justine. She lived in a castle under the sea. Justine was a girl octopus and she was going to lead the battle of the octopi against the sharks that swam in the nearby reef, consuming baby octopi by the dozens. She was going to do the illustrations. It would be an epic battle. Her name would be on the cover, Betty Gordon.
Dr. Z. and Dr. H. had been to a meeting of the institute’s education committee. One of their faculty had been boring his students so badly that half of them neglected to show up for class. His evaluations by the students were filled with vague phrases of neutral disinterest. They were cautious students even in anonymous evaluations. You never know whom you might need in your professional life. These students were not the sort to demonstrate on the steps of the capital or burn flags of any nation in a public place. Their chemistry experiments never exploded. Their college essays revealed only what they wanted revealed. Nevertheless they were clearly intolerably bored, which in a class on Sexual Fantasy and Its Role in the Doctor-Patient Relationship seemed unnecessary.
He has to go, said Dr. Z.
Dr. H. sighed. He didn’t want to be the one to do it.
We could give him another semester, he suggested.
We could not, Dr. Z. said. What is happening with your movie star?
Her hair is all one color, said Dr. H.
That’s good, said Dr. Z.
Yes, said Dr. H., and it’s green.
Green? said Dr. Z.
Yes, said Dr. H., the color of spring.
fourteen
The wealthy patron beamed at the doctors at his table. It was a front table right near the podium. He had sponsored the $40,000 Dr. Estelle Berman Prize for original work. This year it was going to the author of the paper titled “On Countertransference in the Vulnerable Analyst.” He was ready to push back his chair and rise to his feet, walk up the few steps to the stage and present the prize to the winner, a very young analyst.
Later that night, as the young analyst puts on his glasses so he can undo the clasp on his wife’s necklace, he whispers into her ear, hurry up, and she disappears into the bathroom. As he waits he thinks of all the urges, dark and ordinary, the moods, bleak and blissful, innocent and guilty, unspoken thoughts: anxious, brave, terrified, that were even at that moment rising in the air, uniting all the apartments, crossing the park, moving uptown and downtown, punishing or rewarding minds of all economic and social varieties, moving like a mist over the high towers, the steel bridges, their cables shifting in the wind, fog covering the Empire State, the Chrysler Building, the new Freedom Tower above its mourning pool. He thinks of all the minor resentments, the failures to love or be loved that like so many allergens in the spring float through the cross streets, the tunnels, Chinatown and Washington Heights, causing many to stay indoors. He thinks of the great battles of conscience and desire that leave scars on minds as they pause at street corners, or stand in an elevator, or are on their way to the dentist or the mammogram, or the waiting analyst.
His wife calls out from the bathroom: We’re out of toilet paper.
In Central Park, across the street from where Dr. Berman had lived, the almost nineteenth-century lamps send long shadows along the paths by the deserted benches. Along the avenue an occasional bus lumbers by. In front of the Museum of Natural History the stone bodies of the stately lions are unmoved by the passing hours, the coming of the next day. All through the night dreams drift away, carrying images of fright and love, of a gentle touch or a ferocious bite, a harmless wish, a slamming and crashing and bumbling about of old angers and new ones, mingled together, forgotten by morning.
about the author
Writer, essayist, and journalist ANNE ROIPHE is known and revered for such novels as Up the Sandbox and Lovingkindness, and for her memoirs: 1185 Park Avenue, Epilogue, and Art and Madness. In addition to her eighteen fiction and nonfiction books, she has written articles for The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, and Elle, among others, and for many years she wrote columns for The New York Observer and for The Jerusalem Report. Her book, Fruitful, was a finalist for the National Book Award.
about seven stories press
Seven Stories Press is an independent book publisher based in New York City. We publish works of the imagination by such writers as Nelson Algren, Russell Banks, Octavia E. Butler, Ani DiFranco, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Coco Fusco, Barry Gifford, Martha Long, Luis Negrón, Hwang Sok-yong, Lee Stringer, and Kurt Vonnegut, to name a few, together with political titles by voices of conscience, including Subhankar Banerjee, the Boston Women’s Health Collective, Noam Chomsky, Angela Y. Davis, Human Rights Watch, Derrick Jensen, Ralph Nader, Loretta Napoleoni, Gary Null, Greg Palast, Project Censored, Barbara Seaman, Alice Walker, Gary Webb, and Howard Zinn, among many others. Seven Stories Press believes publishers have a special responsibility to defend free speech and human rights, and to celebrate the gifts of the human imagination, wherever we can. In 2012 we launched Triangle Square books for young readers with strong social justice and narrative components, telling personal stories of courage and commitment. For additional information, visit www.sevenstories.com.
Anne Roiphe, Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind
