Hokey Pokey, page 17
“You didn’t ask her about me.” Nora pulled back the curtain.
“No.”
“Why am I here?”
“Lie on the couch.”
“I—”
“Lie on the couch.” The agitation she had seen before the session had gone. He was purposeful. “Lie there as she did.”
Nora took Berenice’s place as instructed, relaxing into the leather that Berenice had touched minutes before. She stared at the ceiling. She did not hear Leo return to his chair, or even stir from that spot by her feet.
She began: “What’s the matter with your neighbours…”
Leo said nothing as she went on. She imagined the responses in between her own, replayed words. Berenice’s phrases tasted good to her. When she reached the point of convulsing, she felt Leo’s hand upon the front buttons of her dress. He unfastened them smoothly, pushed up the satin of her slip, and she felt the air on her skin. She didn’t break in her replication of Berenice, though she heard the rearrangement of Leo’s own clothing and his breathing quicken. Her words I dreamt of a bottle shattering brought on the crisis. He placed a hand over her face. She felt him wipe a cloth across her stomach. When he let her go she continued to speak as Berenice had done right until Berenice’s words ran out. Only then, in her own voice, did she ask:
“Did you mean it at all, when you said I would be singing with her?”
“At first. I think.”
She remembered the kiss outside the apartment, after her mimicry of Berenice singing. It was not Nora he’d meant to kiss.
“I love her,” he said, looking at the damp folded cloth in his hands.
“Don’t be silly. It’s countertransference.”
“Oh, what’s the difference!”
“Leo—”
“You’re angry with me.”
Her fingernails were deep in her palms. Heat swept from her neck up: yes, she was angry, and it was mingled with desire for being Berenice.
She stood up from the couch, feeling sullied and in need of a wash. Being herself again was uncomfortable. The beauty was gone and her buttons were still undone. With shaking hands she fastened them. She retrieved her coat from behind the curtain. When she left, as she walked the streets home, she thought Berenice must be a witch, to ensnare the obsession of Leo and Nora both. But everything would be all right if Nora saw enough of her to replicate her completely. That would satiate her; there would be no need for the real Berenice at all once Nora knew enough to mimic her all the time. Alone in her room she sang the aria again and again to feel less herself. She sang until her throat was raw.
4
Of course Nora returned the following week. She heard more word associations, and dreams, and witnessed further convulsions and accounts of multiple affairs. When Berenice left and Nora was replaying everything she had said and done, Leo rolled her over face down on the couch, tore her skirt in the act of shoving it to her waist, then was inside her. Over a year this became the normal sequence of events each Monday afternoon. All the time Nora was accumulating Berenice’s words and gestures. Replicating her so thoroughly meant she came to know the Icon’s internal drives and fears as well as she knew her tics of speech.
The pattern broke the week that Leo suggested testing Berenice with inkblots. Nora had used them before and was familiar with the range of interpretations. Every one of them resembled a bone, as far as Nora was concerned; a pelvis, a finger, a spine. Put them all together and you were half way to a skeleton.
For the session, as was usual, Nora watched the reflection of Berenice’s pretty head upon the couch. She listened as Leo gave Berenice instructions: he explained he would pass her the image, and she must say what she saw within it. She would be free to rotate it as she wished.
“Here’s the first,” he announced. Nora couldn’t see what he passed Berenice, but she knew which image came when on the cards – the order was always the same – and she could visualise the first easily.
“That’s a headless woman,” Berenice said immediately. “She’s pinned down at either side by men in thick coats and hats. And she doesn’t have any feet either.”
Nora noticed, for the purposes of imitation, that Berenice was smiling as if the image gave her pleasure.
“Who is the woman?” Leo asked.
Berenice’s head lifted from the couch with laughter. “I don’t know, Doctor; she doesn’t have a head, does she?”
“The men, then?”
She stopped laughing. “Cheka. Soldiers.”
After a silence, Leo said: “Let’s look at the next one.”
“Girls playing pattycake,” Berenice said.
“Pattycake?” Leo must not recognise the English word.
Berenice shrugged. “The Russian name is Ladushki. I don’t know what you call it. It’s a clapping game, little children clap their hands and sing.”
“Ah. Jeux de mains.” Leo had a smile in his voice.
“They must be sisters,” Berenice said slowly. “Because they look the same.”
“Do you have any particular sisters in mind, Berenice?”
Nora noted his use of her first name.
“My sister was too old to play clapping games with me.”
“Remind me – you were the youngest?”
“Yes, of eight, the others were boys. My mother died in childbirth.”
“And they called you – do I have this right? – they called you Nika?”
“My father called me that.”
There was a pause as Leo held up the next one.
“Two women with cocks,” Berenice said, which was a fairly common answer for the third image, but Nora thought it merited more probing in Berenice’s case. Leo didn’t say anything. Nora could hear the scratch of his pen in his notebook, before he introduced the next image.
“A bearskin rug?” Berenice sounded unsure. “A man seen from below… as if I’m a child. Or lying on the floor.”
“A moth, or my sister’s hair clip,” she said.
“Tut tut, Doctor,” Berenice said. She gave a sly little glance at Leo.
Leo waited for her to continue.
“Showing me pictures of pussies now.” Berenice put her thumbnail between her teeth, dropping her head so that she was gazing at Leo through her fringe. “You can’t shock me in the least. I’ve seen plenty.”
“I think it is you who enjoys the idea of shocking people.”
“If they know I want to shock them, it shows I don’t care about exposure – so they can’t threaten me.”
“Has that ever happened?”
“Oh yes, when I was much younger, and stood to lose more.”
“Who threatened you?”
“My sister. Sisters are meant to be equals but she was my father’s ally. Especially with my mother gone. He was probably fucking her.” A strange agitation was engulfing Berenice. Her shoulders and arms vibrated. Her face smiled, her teeth on show. “When I was thirteen she interfered in some of my friendships. Put a stop to them. Said if I disobeyed her she would involve my father.”
Leo produced the next image.
“A bootprint in the snow.” Berenice paused. “It’s familiar to me, I have that image in my head already. I don’t know if it’s a memory or a vision.”
“Is it normally hard to tell?”
“No,” Berenice said gaily. “My visions are more vivid, almost like I’m living them, but also the details change more than in a memory.”
“What was your first vision?”
“I knew my sister was going to be murdered.”
“Tell me more about that.”
“What’s to tell? I saw her in my head, being killed – the details kept changing, every time the vision came – and then the details were different again when it happened. But one important thing never changed. I saw her dying painfully, and she did.”
Nora wanted to ask: Did you warn her?
But Leo couldn’t hear Nora’s thoughts. He moved on.
“It’s the imperial tricolour,” Berenice said. “Or – a crown?”
“It’s the auditorium of the opera house, with the aisle running down the centre.” Berenice was vibrating again. “I don’t like this one.”
She momentarily passed from Nora’s view, as she handed the image back to Leo and took the next.
“This is a mess,” Berenice said, letting the image rest on her chest. “It isn’t a picture of anything.”
“Look longer.”
She re-examined it.
“It’s the woman from the first image,” Berenice said. “But she’s fallen to bits. All those fragments are pieces of her dress.”
“Our time is up for today,” Leo replied.
*
As Nora adjusted her skirt later to leave Leo’s apartment, she raised the topic of Berenice’s lost voice to him.
“When will you tell her what’s wrong?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
He didn’t listen to a word Berenice said, either the first time or in Nora’s repetition, except as beautiful sound – like Orfeo ed Euridice was to Nora because she didn’t know the language. She would have to explicate as herself, the doctor who’d trained in the workings of the mind.
“Berenice hated her sister, and wanted her dead. Those visions were fantasies of what she wanted to happen. When she saw that soldier killing her sister, she was glad, and guilty about being glad. That’s why she keeps dreaming of breaking the ink bottle and someone else getting the blame. The ink she’s walking through is her sister’s blood. If you ask Berenice if that man she saw in the theatre was the soldier, or a man who looked very like him, I think she will realise it was. And if you ask her the method of killing her sister, I think you will find it’s something involving the neck – that’s why it triggered her inability to sing. It won’t be strangulation, because of the blood in the dream. I’d expect her to say her sister’s throat was cut.”
Leo took a seat at his desk, and made a note.
“All right. I’ll ask her those two questions.” He rubbed his hands then, vitalised by the prospect. “It’s a typical Electra complex, no? The sister standing in for the mother figure of course – but allied with the father – and Berenice wishing her dead to take that role herself. It makes sense of the vengeful gynaecophilia. And her transference in session too – she asked me, once, to call her Niko, do you remember? Her father’s name for her, as she revealed today.”
Nika, Nora corrected silently. She disliked his interpretation. It seemed clear, from Berenice’s responses, that her anger arose from her sister’s blackmail. It seemed equally clear that Leo wanted to see an Electra complex in which Berenice was transferring her desire for her father to him. But she did not argue with him, for an end to this strange triangle was in sight. The possibility of Berenice being cured was unspoken between them. If she ended her analysis, Berenice would be gone and Nora could indefinitely replicate what she had witnessed. She would keep being Berenice, as long as Leo played his part; Nora’s believing audience.
“I’ll see you at the hospital,” Nora said.
*
But she didn’t, that week. It was fate that decided things against her. She developed a fever and cough, necessitating three days in bed. In her semi-hallucinatory state she took comfort that the illness made her an even better likeness for Berenice. For now, she couldn’t sing.
As she recovered she hoped that Leo – if he hadn’t cancelled the appointment with Berenice outright – would have delayed the critical questions, to allow Nora to watch how Berenice answered them. She went to his apartment on Wednesday evening, while she was still overwarm, to check what had occurred. There was no response when she rang and rang the bell. She looked at his apartment window, trying to discern if he were truly – and uncharacteristically – out for the evening. The blind was half down. All beyond was darkness.
The old man with the trident – Nora was chagrined to see he did, in fact, carry such a thing – was just climbing the front steps. He looked Nora up from her shoes to her hat, disconcerting her.
“Everyone’s been here on the wrong day,” he informed her, and let himself in.
“Wait – what do you mean?” Nora called before the door closed.
The old man looked back through. She saw the hand that held the trident had close-cut fingernails, surrounded at all edges by swelling flesh. He shrugged. “You weren’t here on Monday; his other one was, but left after twenty minutes. Then she was back again yesterday, for the whole evening.”
“Has that happened before?” Nora checked. “Her coming on a Tuesday?”
The old man shook his head. “She usually arrives just after you do.”
“You’re sure?”
“Oh yes. She’s much louder than you on the stairs.”
She gave up on the bell. The following morning she returned to work, and shared a ward round with Leo, though in the business of attending to patients there was no opportunity for a private conversation. At the round’s completion, just as she was about to ask what had happened with Berenice to require a change in schedule, Leo said: “Best not come next Monday.”
His words were casual, and he was about to start a conversation with one of the nurses. Nora forgot to appear polite. She pulled him back by the arm.
“Why is it best I don’t come?” she whispered.
“You shouldn’t be distracting me. Not when she’s at a critical point of analysis. She’s reckoning with a feeling she has repressed for years. I couldn’t forgive myself for a catastrophic deterioration.”
Deterioration was one outcome. Another was improvement. Once the shameful secret was finally voiced and recognised, patients were often restored with astonishing rapidity. How odd that Leo should remember, now, he was Berenice’s psychoanalyst, rather than the orchestrator of an odd sexual game. Nora realised she had done something irretrievably stupid. She should never have told Leo why Berenice couldn’t sing. He was not content for them to be alone, each week, without the Icon. If the sessions should end he would seek to maintain his connection to her in some other way. It was very common for male psychoanalysts to keep former patients as mistresses. Or less commonly, to take patients as a wife. This had surely entered Leo’s head many times in the past, even if Berenice’s interest were more recent. Nora should have realised that effecting a change in their weekly routine might not work in her favour.
“I must continue to observe,” she insisted. “I gathered the cause of her guilt, after I listened to her more closely in months than you did. You relied on me for that discovery, Leo.”
“You shouldn’t be distracting me,” he repeated. Her hand was still on his arm. He let it fall away, then walked back to the nurse.
*
For hours she went through her duties mechanically. Another opportunity to speak didn’t arise until the afternoon. She found him in the kitchen garden, talking about carrots with a patient. He was carefully ignoring her presence on the side path. When the patient resumed digging, Leo finally approached her.
The breeze made her teeth chatter and she hoped this would not be read as nervousness. Nora did not mention the conversation with Leo’s neighbour, to preserve her dignity. There was something humiliating in the thought of her waiting on the step, when she had a suspicion he had left the apartment to see Berenice.
She confined her comments to: “If I’m not to come again, you should at least tell me whether my theory was correct.”
He looked at the earth dusting the path, his downward gaze sheepish.
“It was,” he owned. “And she took it valiantly. Not initially. She fled, actually, when I broached her memory of her sister’s death. I thought I’d made an irreversible mistake. Then she returned – quite unannounced – the following day. She was much more prepared to confront who the man in the audience is. She disclosed that the premonition of her sister’s death was fantasy. In fact she confessed, Nora, that her visions are a pretence, something she might have grown out of if they hadn’t been rewarded with such attention.”
Of course they were.
Leo spoke again, his tone absurdly bashful. “At the end of the session – she was able to sing.”
“So fast?” Nora said.
“Yes. Not at her usual level, of course. But she demonstrated for me she could produce a note, without her ears being covered, or the masking of a gramophone.”
“I see.”
“It was quite joyful to watch her emerge.” He was looking into the mid-distance, as if he were talking to himself as he pictured Berenice, and Nora’s presence was irrelevant. “I feel a connection between us has been made.”
Nora worried what he meant by connection. Without her as a safe duplication he might have made some overture towards the Icon; the Icon may have accepted it. All things were possible. He was handsome. Which was of secondary benefit to Nora – he could have worshipped her mimicry as an ugly man – but would have eased his path with Berenice. Worse, Berenice had sung again; Leo’s ability to cure her – Nora’s ability to cure her – would surely enhance him in Berenice’s eyes.
“Leo,” she cautioned, “the connection isn’t an ordinary connection. You’re describing transference, and counter-transference.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t think I am.”
“You’ve heard her talk about everyone she sleeps with. Don’t forget what a slut she is. If she’s flirting with you, that’s because she flirts with everyone. She’s just brought that into analysis with her.”
“You’re hardly a virgin,” Leo said mildly.
“My point is she isn’t true – she can barely keep them all straight in the telling of it.”
“She’s still capable of love. She’s human.”
