Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind, page 7
His wife worked for a nonprofit, raising funds for tutoring programs in the inner city. She volunteered at an organization that arranged for the children of incarcerated drug dealers to go to the circus or spend a few weeks at a summer camp. On the beach in Belize she forgot the forlorn and the downtrodden and danced at night in her husband’s arms, and helped her children collect shells and allowed her daughter to place a live crab on her thigh, and wore a bikini that made her husband grab her from behind and hold on so long that his son complained, Let go Dad, which made his wife laugh, which made him happy.
In bed at night she said to him, Maybe we should move here.
Maybe we shouldn’t, he said.
There must be a great need on this island for psychoanalysts, she said.
Sure, he said.
I’m thinking, she said, you could go back to real medicine, you could be a GP and take care of the natives and the tourists: stomachaches and sunburn.
Tempting, he said.
I’m sure they could use you, she said. She wasn’t serious.
I wish, he said, I could have been Dr. Salk. I wish I had been the one to discover the polio vaccine but since I was born too late I think I’ll just continue to see my patients.
Are you bored? she asked. Are you ever bored?
No, he said, and then the Tequila Sunrise hit him and he closed his eyes and fell instantly asleep.
At breakfast she said to him, You’re my hero.
Sure, he said.
You don’t have doubts? She pinched his arm.
About what? he asked.
Oh you know, she said.
His youngest child took a running leap into the pool. Look at me, said the child.
I’m looking, he said, turning back to his wife. If a small splash of human happiness is added to the atmosphere, then I have been of use. If I remove a pain, an unnecessary fear, unblock the repression, undo the guilt, pull someone out of the cave they are hiding in, then I am doing as well as can be expected.
All right, she said, and put her third croissant with strawberry jam into her mouth.
Maybe we should invite my mother for dinner when we get back, she said.
Do you want to go water-skiing this afternoon? he said.
And two days later, his face somewhat pink despite the sunblock his wife had smoothed across his nose again and again, his arms beginning to tan, his tenth attempt to read Remembrance of Things Past not yet abandoned, he was on the dock where the boat waited as the sky blushed with morning sun and the white sliver of a dying moon was about to fall into the distant turquoise sea. The captain of their fishing boat shook his hand, patted the boy on his shoulder, and asked them to sit down as they motored out to the flats. On the shore the palm trees bent and cast their shadows on the sand and his wife opened her eyes, happy not to be fishing, happy he was fishing, happy to feel the warm air on her arms, and wondered if she was too old to have another child. Maybe not.
The captain had an assistant, a native boy who put bait on the hooks, who showed them how to cast far out into the waters, who took the bonefish that the boy caught and placed it on a bench and banged its head in with a hammer and tossed it into a bucket. The captain said his name was Harry and he was an American who had come to Belize because he wanted to live on the water, and he owned this boat and two others. The sky was cloudless. The morning was perfect.
Dr. H. had a tarpon on his line. It circled the boat again and again in an attempt to break the line. Clever tarpon, its desire to live churning up the aqua sea, fierce and unyielding, until one hour and twelve minutes later, exhausted, it rose against the boat’s side. Good work, said Captain Harry, who had given instructions the entire time and probably deserved the credit for the capture. The tarpon was released back into the water. You don’t have to eat or kill everything in the sea, said Captain Harry, and there was something in the way he spoke, the rhythm of the words, that caught Dr. H.’s attention. And then he looked carefully at the fisherman and he saw that his face was familiar, not exactly like the one he knew, but similar. Was it the curve of the mouth? Was it the nose which was longer than many but not unusual? Was it something in the smile? Had his patient mentioned overlapping front teeth? Captain Harry’s eyes were hidden behind dark sunglasses. Were those glasses hiding a tic? Of course that was ridiculous, the odds of such a thing were impossible.
Where did you grow up? Dr. H. asked as the boat seemed to glide across the shallow waters. Not here, said Captain Harry. Where? said Dr. H. North, said Captain Harry, where it snowed. I hated the snow. Captain Harry turned to his ropes and his reels that rested in holders clipped to the gunnels of the boat. Of course it was ridiculous. He was imagining, he was losing distance between himself and his patient. He would have to examine his overidentification with his patient. It was absurd but he couldn’t get it out of his mind.
The boat moved close to the shore of an island, covered in thick green ferns, palms, birdsong overhead, birds fighting, a spitting sound above. There were rocks beneath, and schools of small colored fish darted behind waving underwater plants. In the branches of a palm tree on the nearby shore his son saw a red and golden parrot. Hey look at that, Dad, he said, and pointed.
And Dr. H., without thinking, without calculation, said loudly to the captain who had his back turned, Ivan, what kind of parrot is that? And the captain turned around, frightened, amazed, a tension in his shoulders. Harry, he said, my name is Harry.
Six days later, early on the morning that they were scheduled to leave for the airport and the return trip to New York, Dr. H., having carefully weighed the pros and the cons of what he was about to do, walked to the dock and saw the boat waiting at the end and Captain Harry drinking coffee from his thermos and his assistant piling soft drinks into the cooler for the customers who would soon arrive, a lawyer and his girlfriend who was somebody else’s wife, but who cared in the forgiving warmth of the new daylight.
Dr. H. walked down to the edge of the dock. He took a bulky letter he had written on hotel stationery out of his pocket and handed it to the captain who had turned his back when he saw him approaching but his way was blocked. Captain Harry took the letter and later, after he had brought the lawyer and his girlfriend back to the dock, after he had washed the smell of terrified tarpon off his calloused hands, he opened the envelope.
Ivan, it said, call your father. He needs you. And inside the letter was a cell phone, which if anyone traced would come back to Dr. H. sitting in his office in New York City, who would claim he had lost his cell phone on a vacation in Belize. Inside the small perfect phone was a listing of only one patient, all the other numbers had been erased. Mr. Mike Wilson’s address and number were there for Ivan.
Of course he shouldn’t have done that, Dr. H. scolded himself as soon as he had fastened his seat belt and pulled Remembrance of Things Past out of his carry-on bag. Analysts do not interfere in their patients’ real lives. It spoils the work. It changes everything. It isn’t professional. And perhaps he was wrong, in which case the countertransference, the over-involvement, would not matter very much and be washed out to sea like a leftover plastic glass holding the remains of a Tequila Sunrise with its little paper parasol covered in wet sand.
How was your vacation? asked Dr. Z.
And Dr. H. told him, No real names used.
Wishful thinking, said Dr. Z.
No, said Dr. H.
Magical thinking, said Dr. Z.
No, said Dr. H.
four
It wouldn’t be polite to ask Dr. Berman if she was listening. He was sitting opposite her in the patient’s chair but he was not a patient. He was a young analyst and he had his own analyst, the newly appointed head of the education committee at his institute, Dr. H., whom he had just seen several hours before. Dr. Berman was the young analyst’s supervisor. She was supposed to listen to his reports of an analytic patient he was working with and to offer advice and comment on his technique, to deepen his thoughts, to help him, help the patient. It was a good system. The older analyst could see around the corners that the younger analyst could not. Also the older analyst could provide protection and support for the younger in the institute and so create opportunities for him to become a training analyst himself, the head of various faculty committees, to join the international organization, to hold prominent positions in the American Psychoanalytic Association. Ultimately, if he did creative work he himself could be the one who gave opening speeches at meetings, who was respected or feared by his colleagues. Dr. Berman could be, if all went well, his psychoanalytic mother. Or she could not. He knew he had a few long years of work ahead of him before he would be certified to work on his own.
Analysis is not a romance novel. She lived happily ever after with the love of her life in his castle by the sea and developed a vaccine that prevented river blindness was a result to be devoutly pursued but most improbable. The end was more modest, more attainable than that. The end of the analysis would approach when the patient could manage to travel through the debris of his or her past and nod in its direction as it attempted to interrupt the pursuit, the daily boring pursuit of happiness that is all of our right to seek. The young analyst knew that but like a person learning a new language he had to repeat it to himself several times a day.
The young analyst understood that the rest of the world did not think so well of analysts. His own brother who was a physics professor at a university in Minnesota was convinced, and repeated his conviction at every family occasion, that the entire Freudian idea and all its offshoots and its incessant babble was without scientific basis and as dated as their grandfather’s pocket watch. The young analyst was not swayed. This is what he wanted to do. This is what interested him. It might be alchemy. The gold it produced might be mere copper, but it had caught him and held him tight. His brother teased him. You could have gone to India and walked about bald, barefoot in an orange robe with a begging cup. At least you would have been earning an honest living. The young analyst went right on. If he was in a cult, so be it. If his work became totally irrelevant because pharmacology replaced him with a cheap cure that came in a bottle, it would have been worth it, worth it for him and he believed, despite his brother, for his patients.
But today, Dr. Berman had a gray pallor and her lipstick did not appear to be applied carefully. She had turned her head to look out at the park. Had he been boring? Had he said something so wrong that she had simply blocked out the rest of his words? He waited for her to turn toward him. She did not. Dr. Berman, he finally said, shall I go on? There was no answer. He leaned forward in his seat. Are you all right, Dr. Berman? he said loudly.
She startled. She turned toward him. Whatever you just said, say it again, she snapped. She was back with him, he hoped.
She talks about her ex-husband’s love of Renaissance painting. She talks about his hands, how they make shapes in the air when he speaks. She does not talk about his wanderings at night, although she told me he often left the bed after midnight and didn’t return until dawn. I asked her what she thought he was doing. She said she had no idea. She talks about her more beautiful sister, who remains more beautiful, but when I ask her about her dreams she says she has none. When I ask her to tell me about her childhood, she tells me how good she was at archery, and that she had the lead in her high school production of The Sound of Music. I ask if she thinks about me between sessions. She says not at all.
And then I ask her why her husband left. And she weeps and she weeps and she says she has no idea. None? I ask. She weeps. He is living, she tells me, with a roommate in Boston. I ask her what attracted her to him when they first met. Did you desire him? I asked. She wept. I don’t know if that was a yes weeping or a no weeping.
Dr. Berman says, Don’t use words like desire. Say what you mean. Did she want to have sex with him when they met? You use language that makes it possible for the patient to speak without the cover of social pretensions. Oh, said the young analyst. He sighed.
Dr. Berman responded to his sigh. Don’t worry. You weren’t born an analyst.
It often starts this way. She will tell you what you need to know in time. Just keep listening.
It’s like listening to white noise, says the young analyst.
No, says Dr. Berman, it’s like listening to the tide come in. Be patient, said Dr. Berman, something will wash up on the shore.
Go back to sex, says Dr. Berman. Perhaps she will tell you some moment, a boy’s hand on hers, a sight of a couple kissing, something that began in the outside world and moved into her body, and she knew, at least for a moment, that sex was more than a word in a manual.
I think, said the young analyst, her longing is for a better wardrobe.
Dr. Berman did not smile. She said, Every woman wants a better wardrobe.
The young analyst was suddenly shy. What was he supposed to say?
You don’t like this patient? Dr. Berman said to him.
I don’t know her very well, he said.
You will, said Dr. Berman.
And what if then I don’t like her? said the young analyst.
Then we will talk about you. If that happens the problem is yours to understand. We will look at your countertransference. It sounded to the young analyst like a threat but of course he knew countertransference was normal, a flow of his own emotional responses back into his consulting room, hanging over his patient, seeping into his every comment.
Dr. Berman put on her glasses and glanced at the clock on her desk and the young analyst gathered himself together and left.
Dr. Berman liked the young man. She wondered about his own sexual history. Where was the crucible that drew him to his chosen profession? What had seared his brain? It would be good to know that, she thought.
As he walked down Central Park West back to his own office, the young analyst considered his patient. She had come to him because she couldn’t sleep, because she was afraid of the dark and had kept all the lights on in her apartment since her husband had left. She had been an art history graduate student but had dropped out of the program after her marriage ended. Her parents were supporting her and wanted her to move to the Napa Valley where they had retired. She loved her parents, she said. She had a good childhood, she said. She seemed stunned, like a cartoon person hit on the head with a frying pan. He thought of her like Sleeping Beauty, a kiss would revive her. He was the prince, she was the comatose princess. This was one of those thoughts he would not tell his wife. He would tell Dr. H., but he wished that image had not drifted up into his consciousness. It should have stayed in the deep mud of his unconscious where it belonged.
The patient had a name, Lyla Shulman. She had a social security number and a driver’s license: which should have been sufficient proof that she was not a character in someone else’s story. One moment she had been an ordinary person. She picked out her wedding gifts at Bloomingdale’s. Her mother had tears in her eyes when she tried on her bridal dress in the store. One moment she had been considering a thesis on Otto Dix and his use of bold dark, thick strokes, carrying, as her professor had pointed out, the hints of the Weimar Republic’s infernal destination. The moment before that she had been fighting off Bobby Schwartz in the back of a taxicab on their way to a party in SoHo.
Her analyst seemed to be listening. She could almost feel him leaning forward in his chair, concentrating on her words. Of course that might not be true. He might be thinking of his own wife or their vacation plans or his child’s crossed eyes. He might not have children. He wore a ring. She had noticed that when she came to consult him, recommended by the clinic at the institute that had itself been suggested to her by her cousin in New Rochelle who had promised her good results at less than the full rate. Her mother appreciated the discount.
When she walked through the park to his office she thought of herself as a figure in a Seurat painting. A shape formed by tiny specks of color that might separate off and go their own ways if the wind blew strongly or the painter decided she didn’t belong on the canvas and preferred to put a tree in her place.
Now that her husband had left, at night she sometimes fixed herself a frozen dinner and then went out for a walk. She would look up at the sky, or what she could see of it between the buildings on Lexington Avenue, and consider the billions of people on the planet and the miles to the moon and beyond and she would feel soothed by the very immensity of the universe. If she walked in front of a car, if she fell off a cliff in Montauk where they had been on their honeymoon, if she took all the pills in her medicine cabinet, no matter what, it would not matter. She was replaceable.
Sometimes this thought calmed her. Other times it made her tremble and go home and call her mother who would repeat her hope that her daughter would come to California. There was a room waiting for her. Her mother knew from experience that this invitation would be rejected and often rudely. Her mother suggested she adopt a cat or a dog from the rescue program. Lyla thought people who lavished love on dumb beasts were pathetic. Anyone can win an animal’s affection by serving up kibble day after day. Lyla wanted more. Lyla wanted her analyst to love her even though she knew that was out of the question, outside the rules, the worst possible outcome of a therapy. On the other hand it might be the best possible outcome.
The young analyst wanted to help Lyla Shulman rejoin her life and grow into a vibrant woman. The young analyst did believe that loving someone was essential to mental health. Or at least holding on to the hope that one might love and be loved was essential. In addition he wanted to impress Dr. Berman with his skill. He also wanted his own analyst, the often inscrutable Dr. H., to be pleased, pleased and admiring.
