Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind (13 page)

Ah, thought Dr. Berman, now I have you.

She waited for Edith to offer her the poems, to ask her to read them, but Edith hesitated. No one had seen her undressed since she was a child. It was true Dr. Berman was a doctor but nevertheless the poems were too personal, too secret, something she would never expose. She could not give them to Dr. Berman.

Dr. Z. said, as the two men sat in Starbucks before a lecture at their institute by a French analyst known for speaking very fast and lisping, I think I may need an audio aid for this one.

Dr. Z. said, Why did we come? I'd rather be home watching the Giants game.

Dr. H. said, I'd rather be fishing.

Dr. Z. said, At night?

Dr. H. said, That was a metaphor.

Dr. Z. said, We're like poets. We write for each other.

And posterity, said Dr. H.

And the tooth fairy, said Dr. Z.

And then she would give them to Dr. Berman. If Homer could be blind, then she could be fat. Edith thought it through. If she never let anyone see her poems no one would ever know how it was in her country: the land of those whose bodies had betrayed them, or was it better to say those who had betrayed their bodies. Also if no one ever read her poems and no one knew she even wrote them, then she would remain hidden and if she were hidden she would be alone forever and if she were alone, this lonely, days without end, she would extinguish herself the way you put out a candle with a quick rubbing of your thumb and forefinger, or a swift breath serving as the wind of God terminating the light, preventing morning from coming up over the horizon.

Rimbaud was bipolar.

Ezra Pound was manic.

Simone Weil was anorexic and masochistic.

Emily, well Emily was an isolate with interpersonal terrors and talked to God too often for her own good.

Dylan Thomas was alcoholic and depressed.

Robert Lowell was lucky they found lithium. It kept him out of the hospital.

John Berryman jumped off a bridge when depression put its arm around his neck.

Allen Ginsberg wrote to keep his mother's schizophrenia at bay but he needed drugs to do it, as well as religious hypnosis, hocus-pocus, lotus positions, and chants.

Robert Frost was mean as a snake.

Ted Hughes was twice the husband of defeated wives.

Sylvia Plath put her head in the oven, while two little children slept in the next room.

Anne Sexton didn't make it. Her analyst failed her.

Edith was a fat poet: a very fat poet who was at the moment alive.

And then there was something else. Dr. Berman had sat opposite Edith quietly for many months. She had leaned forward to hear her when her voice had been almost inaudible. She had listened to her talk of diets and her shame at the gluttony she only partially disclosed. She had given Edith her full attention and as a result the predictable had happened. A small space had opened in Edith's mind where she sometimes thought of things to tell Dr. Berman. And in that small space something new was growing, was it a small bud, a small new tender shoot of affection: was the word for it
love
and what did that love contain? Edith didn't know but it brought her hope, this feeling, and it belonged to her and was the gift she wished to give to Dr. Berman and this new feeling made her bring her poems, in their three full small purple notebooks to her session, each time for two months, that was twenty sessions before she actually opened her bag and produced the notebooks, just seconds before her hour was up.

Dr. Berman was about as fond of poetry as the next person. She had taken a course on the Romantics in college, a change of pace from pre-med chemistry that had been welcome. She admired poets, and the idea of poetry, but she didn't have the patience to let the words wash across her brain and sink in here and there. She was basically attracted to facts. They were mysterious enough. But she understood that Edith was opening a door, a door Dr. Berman had every intention of walking through. She put the poems on her desk, on top of a paper, “The Defensive Position in Melanie Klein,” that had been submitted to the
Psychoanalytic Quarterly
and was awaiting a positive or negative reaction. Dr. Berman had been selected by the editorial board as a reader whose opinion would be given great weight.

Edith's three notebooks were slim, as slim as Edith was not.

Over the weekend Dr. Berman went to dinner with a friend. She forgot the name of her friend's daughter. She forgot how old the child was and if she was married or not. It was possible to carry on a conversation about that daughter, picking up clues as she went along. The effort however tired her and she did not go to the movies with her friend as planned but instead went back to her apartment and directly to bed.

She admitted to herself that her mind was a blackboard on which the questions for the exam, an important exam, had been written but a hand with an eraser had appeared and wiped away the questions and all possibility of answering them before she had a chance to open the blue book in front of her.

Edith spent the weekend as she spent every weekend, watering her plants, ordering food online, boxes of food that would arrive in clear plastic wrap. She would also go to the grocery store, early in the morning before most people were about, and there she would purchase only healthy food, apples and whole grain cereals and skim milk and packages of low-calorie diet bars.

Later if the sun was drifting across Central Park and the day was warm enough Edith would sit on a bench in the park and watch the young mothers pushing their strollers. She would watch the tiny silver scooters, the bikes with training wheels, she would stare at the pockets in the back of the stroller, stuffed with sweaters, diapers, a book, a baby bottle, a bag of cookies. What kind of cookies? She would guess.

Sometimes while she watched she would see a flash of anger cross a mother's face. She would see the tired eyes, the limp hair, the signs of sorrow or exhaustion in the midst of joy. Edith appreciated those sightings. And sometimes a line of a poem would float into her mind. And she would repeat the line over and over again, shutting out all sounds around her, all sights. She believed that these inward journeys saved her life and were her life.

Sometimes sitting on a park bench noticing that passersby saw her size and looked away as if embarrassed she would get angry. It is not your park, she would think. Cancer cells are in your breasts, she would think, you will die, she would think, and I will live. And she thought worse things than that, things that included pulling of nails and shaving of heads and blinding of eyes. These were not nice thoughts but if she had told Dr. Berman about them, Dr. Berman would have said they were just thoughts.

And then she would get up and go back to her apartment and write down the line that had come to her in the park and maybe add another.

Dr. Z. said to his friend as they were waiting for an education committee meeting at their institute to begin, I should have been a GP in rural Nebraska.

Dr. H. said, I should have been a Scientologist.

You're in a bad mood, said Dr. Z.

Dr. H. said, I don't think Scientologists have as many evening meetings as we do.

Dr. Z. said, You could practice voodoo and you wouldn't have any meetings at all.

Dr. H. said, Scientologists get to climb to higher spheres.

Dr. Z. said, Psychoanalysts get to tumble into the abyss.

The doors to the meeting room opened, the chair of the committee walked in.

Tuesday morning: Edith had her usual 2 p.m. appointment to look forward to later in the day. She put on her best smock over her jeans, jeans she had bought online where no one would see her, or ask her size.

Tuesday morning: Before the sun rose, pink and hopeful, over the East Side, on the other side of the reservoir, before the joggers and the walkers had begun their exercise, Dr. Berman woke up and for a moment wasn't sure if she was traveling. Had she come to another city, was she in a hotel? Soon it came back to her, the way a room settles down after a dizzy spell. She went into her office and saw the clutter on her desk. The paper she should be reading and the three notebooks that contained Edith's poems. She had not read them.

Lily walked over the desk gingerly, looked for a place to curl up and finding none went over to the couch and sat on the patient's pillow, yellow eyes staring and blinking at nothing in particular.

Dr. Berman had her coffee cup in her hand. She wanted to put it down. There were too many papers on her desk. She was upset. It was too much to have to clean her own desk. She had hired people to keep order in her house and they were not doing their job. She had to do everything herself. Bitterness came over her, the loss of her husband ate at her marrow. The terrible thing she knew about herself, but never thought of, never said in words to herself or anyone, hung at the edge of her thoughts, coming closer than it had ever dared before.

She picked up everything she saw on her desk and carried it, three trips in all to complete the act, into the kitchen. She opened the back door and threw it all into the cans that waited in the hallway. She threw her coffee cup into the sink, breaking the porcelain and startling the housekeeper who knew better than to say anything at all.

Now her desktop was clear. There was a framed photo of her husband on one corner that faced her. There was a laptop computer opened before her although she only checked her email communications from her institute or the publisher of her two books who was waiting and would wait for her third. Her appointment book was placed on one side. There was the large vase with dried flowers in it on the far end of the desk and other than that the space was clear, geometric. The golden wood on the desk was polished to a smooth honey color, glistening in the sunlight from the park. Dr. Berman felt settled, clearer. She would focus on her patient, whoever it was, who would ring the bell momentarily.

And in the early afternoon it was Edith. Edith with a pale rose lipstick and her size twelve oxford shoes. It was Edith with her hair washed and makeup covering the acne that had made a permanent home on her chin. It was Edith with hope in her heart. Dr. Berman would have read her poems over the weekend, a weekend which had seemed longer than usual to Edith, a weekend in which no matter how often she looked at her kitchen clock, the hours were moving at a geologic pace, eon after eon, layer upon layer, until Edith thought she might be a fossil, frozen in limestone.

As she approached Dr. Berman's apartment house, she had been grabbed by a familiar need, a desperate famine came upon her, not exactly a call for food by an empty stomach, not exactly a cry for nourishment by the cells and veins and muscles of her body, but more as if a creature within were howling in desperation, in need of rescue, as if it had been pinned down on the bottom of a well and the rainwater was beginning to pour in. It was a trapped feeling, as if there were no way out of the well. Her need was so great she could only pacify it with calorie after calorie, icing and bread, candy and potatoes. Edith had not been able to describe this panic to Dr. Berman yet, because she was ashamed. But it was in the poems and now Dr. Berman would know, would understand.

But when Edith sat down in the chair she saw immediately that her poems were not on the desk. She waited for Dr. Berman to mention them. She told Dr. Berman it had been a long weekend and she told her that her mother had asked her to go to a movie with her, a French film, but she had decided to stay home. She did not like going to the movies. She could feel the judging eyes of others on her as she walked to her seat and attempted to fit herself into its confines. She waited. Dr. Berman said nothing.

Of course, thought Edith, she wants me to ask her. And so she did. Did you read my poems? asked Edith. Dr. Berman was puzzled. She was silent. Edith said, I was wondering what you thought of my poems.

Dr. Berman wondered if Edith had a poem published in the paper or in a weekly magazine. She said nothing.

Edith said, You said you would read my poems. Edith thought this must be a test of her ability to assert herself, to own her work.

Dr. Berman said, I will read them when you give them to me.

Edith was silent. She looked all around the office for her three notebooks. They were not on the table behind the couch. They were not on the windowsill.

I gave you my poems, she said in her smallest voice.

I have no poems of yours, said Dr. Berman, quite certain.

 

 

nine

Gerald had a girlfriend.

The two of them smoked in the park after school. You know what they smoked. Often.

But who were they? What would they do when the action started? Could this boy take the heat and emerge a warrior? His grades were mediocre. He needed tutoring in math. He liked baseball. He played poker but without swagger. He was the kid at the table who would fold if you just smiled to yourself as if you were pretending to hide your smile, when you were in fact flashing it right at him. He wished he had been born black. He spoke sometimes in street kid slang, clearly a bluff. He was not black. He was not down with a gang. He went away to a college in Vermont where the admissions director said he wasn't interested in SATs but was looking for applicants with a love of nature and a commitment to a better world. Gerald was not so fond of nature, he did hope for a better world but after the Christmas vacation of his freshman year he dropped out.

How far a drop is that? Time would tell.

His mother, Dr. Estelle Berman, was upset, deeply upset. She wanted him to rise in a world she knew was hard on sweet souls, and would chew him up if he didn't have the necessary armor. He was not a dog to send into a dogfight. She sent him into therapy with a trusted colleague. Perhaps his aggression was inhibited. Perhaps he could find a path of his own with some help. His father thought he might like to travel awhile. Gerald was happy to lie in bed in his childhood room and watch late night TV. He was especially fond of horror movies, although he also appreciated alien figures with many heads and multiple tongues.

Dr. Berman thought his interest in these movies was his way of repressing hostility toward her.

What Gerald wanted for his life? He had no idea.

What his mother wanted for his life: She wanted to take him away to a far-off island where he could go surfing every day. He loved surfing.

His girlfriend had a rich father. This Dr. Berman considered in Adrienne's favor. There are worse ways to become rich than marrying money. Society is always shifting people up a floor or down ten through marriage. Dr. Berman understood that marriages don't always last but that they most often left the poorer partner richer. She approved of this romance that had begun in high school but lasted past the prom.

Dr. Berman was wealthy enough by herself to support their only son in a comfortable manner for the rest of his life. But Dr. Berman worried about reverses. Stock markets tumble downwards. Businesses are only as solid as last year's net. Airplanes that have flown a thousand times across the Atlantic sea burst into flames with total disregard for their passengers and their ids, egos, and superegos: defense systems, projections, phobias, libidos, memories, fame and fortune, ignominy, murderous thoughts all gone in a flash.

Gerald lifted weights and enjoyed a long night of substance use, if not abuse. He deserved a good and easy life. The children of Dr. Barman's friends and colleagues who were at Yale or Harvard Law School were pressed to join hedge funds and consulting firms but Gerald who was a dreamer needed a well-funded uncomplaining, unambitious, but attractive partner to cushion his moods, to fulfill his desires: maybe Adrienne.

Gerald was twenty-three and Adrienne was twenty-four when they were married. The wedding took place in a great room with windows overlooking the city from all 360 degrees. With a champagne glass in one hand and a canapé of egg and sturgeon you could circle about. You could see the Hudson River darkly sliding toward the sea and you could watch the East River, sluggishly moving barge after barge, through the channels that separated the auto repair shops of Long Island City from the high-rises that clung to the promenades on the Manhattan side and you could see the Pepsi-Cola sign and the Citicorp building at the gateway to the expressway that led to the Hamptons where Ralph Lauren had a store on main street and Tiffany's sold Gerald the engagement ring he had given to Adrienne.

Gerald stamped on the glass wrapped in a napkin with all his might. It would be mortifying if the crack of the glass did not resound loudly for all to hear. The rabbi explained that this broken glass was splintered by the force of the groom's foot to remind the guests that Jerusalem was lost to the Romans and its people were in exile. The psychoanalysts in the room, Gerald's mother for example, thought that the broken glass was a reminder of the seal of purity that a young girl kept sacred for her wedding night. That was the old way.

The new way happened when Adrienne was on a teen tour of Provence after her sophomore year.

The musicians stamped and screamed and the beat was louder than the trumpets that brought down Jericho and it was impossible to hear or speak over the drums. At the psychoanalysts' table the guests sat in pain, Bach lovers, operagoers, fans of Ella Fitzgerald, they stared down at their plates, like children in detention. Throughout the meal one of them, an amateur flute player, had put his hands over his ears despite his wife's reproachful look. Others sat politely until the salad course and then, like a flock of startled geese, rose and left, before the toasts.

Gerald's marriage allowed him to avoid the nagging question of self, worthy or not, guilty or not. Ready or not, here comes the world. Adrienne let her blonde straight hair grow as long as it would. Gerald sometimes felt he could climb to safety on her hair, he could pull himself up to a tower and rescue her from a witch who had imprisoned her there. His daydreams and his wet dreams were fused with the smell of her Body Shop shampoo, which came from a famine-prone African country. It was made of flowers found in the deepest bush.

On weekends they liked to walk along Madison Avenue and stare in the windows at dresses and leather bags, shoes with spike heels, furs and chinaware. Adrienne knew the names and prices of all the items they surveyed. Fendi, Wang, Manolo Blahnik, Searle. If Madison Avenue stores were each a nation with a flag she would have many stamps on her passport. Adrienne stopped to buy a pair of purple leather gloves in a little shop and Gerald wandered into a gallery nearby. He saw a metal welded shape. He stared at it. He liked it. He wanted it. It was too much money. As he was walking out of the gallery into his mind came another shape. I could make that, he thought, but he didn't know how, which is why he enrolled in the Art Students League and discovered that he liked large canvases and small brushes that would let his hand follow his mind's eye. His mother was pleased. Adrienne was pleased. She liked hanging out in the places they now hung out. Gerald didn't expect great success. He was content to be in his class with the others, to weld in the afternoon and to paint in the morning. Therefore many of his classmates admired him. He woke up eager and he went to bed tired and his dreams went unremembered and were probably uneventful. He could be silent for hours and no one cared, no one said, What are you thinking?

Gerald walked through the East Village and held Adrienne's hand and he was happy.

Adrienne's mother moved to Barcelona with her decorator. Her father took a mistress close to Adrienne's age and Dr. Berman spoke of male jealousy of the suckling infant and in addition considered that actual incest might have been inflicted on Adrienne. It is true that this happens far more often than most people want to believe, but in this case the father would never, had never, and his generosity to his daughter, his willingness to house her in the most fashionable neighborhood in town, was not an expression of guilt as Dr. Berman suspected but merely an extension of the gargantuan largesse he had always expressed toward his own.

Gerald liked going home to Adrienne and tumbling her into their bed and turning the music up as high as it would go and doing things that people do when time seems to be on their side and fortune, good fortune, theirs for the taking. Adrienne had a drawer full of intimate apparel. If Gerald had believed in giving thanks, he would have given thanks for that drawer, or perhaps to that drawer.

Adrienne would often meet a friend for a long lunch. Pedicures and hair colorings, catalogs and daydreams filled her long days. She didn't cook although the wedding presents had included all she might need to open a five-star restaurant. At night they ordered in from the local Indian restaurant or they went out downtown.

Then Adrienne wanted a baby. Her friends were having babies. It was time. Dr. Berman referred Adrienne to the best OBGYN doctor at her hospital. It started right then. Dr. Estelle Berman kept forgetting the name of the OBYGN. She thought the name was repressed because she was jealous that her own time for procreation was long gone. She thought it was a sign of how difficult it was to accept the aging body and the narrowing of the road. But rapidly it became more than that and the list of forgotten places, dates, names, directions, affiliations, faces became longer and longer. In the privacy of her bedroom, she knew what was happening, but as soon as she knew she ignored what she knew. It must not, it could not, and it should not be. In her kitchen in the Hamptons, the housekeeper tipped over the sugar bowl on the counter and Dr. Berman entered to see a swarm of ants in the sugar, black spots on pure white, and she knew what was happening in her brain, but she would tell no one.

The child was growing in Adrienne's womb and Adrienne spent long hours naked in front of the mirror.

Gerald said, My mother is losing her mind. Adrienne said, She has too much mind, she can afford to lose a little. Gerald liked the smell of his pregnant wife. He liked the way her nipples rose to greet him. He was getting better at perspective, line, and shadow. He wasn't so shy anymore. He talked about the Giants and the Yanks and during March he talked about March madness and he talked to the women in his class about Adrienne and the drawer in which she kept the baby clothes she had received in a shower.

A boy was born in the early morning hours. Adrienne slept as her shocked body prepared itself to deliver milk to the infant who lay under a heating lamp in the nursery. The infant's thoughts, like a watercolor painting, wordless but constant, were not sharply separated from the dreams that came and went amid the air that went in and out of his small but perfect lungs. Dr. Berman was pleased the child was male. Life would be easier for him. His name was Ryan, an Irish name Adrienne had picked from a baby-naming book.

Gerald held the baby in his arms for a photograph and felt strong and sure of himself as he had never before.

Adrienne had sufficient funds. Gerald needed space and so he went to his studio and sometimes stayed there late into the night. The nursemaid took the baby to the park. Adrienne had lunch downtown with her friends. It was in a restaurant on Spring Street that she met the director of a theater group in need of backing in order to continue producing the cutting-edge, the most important, truly relevant work. The words he used were not familiar to Adrienne, but they were hypnotic along with his intense eyes and shaved head.

The sex was also sweaty and almost violent, pure and followed by monologues, Lear, King Richard, Hamlet, recited from memory. This was how Adrienne came to know that Gerald knew nothing about the theater and would never be anyone important.

By the time Adrienne moved out with three-year-old Ryan and his nanny and Gerald was forced to move into his studio, Dr. Berman was not reading her psychoanalytic journals. Nothing new, she said, as she tossed them into a pile behind her desk, but she could no longer follow, sentence by sentence, paragraph into paragraph, as if the algae in a pond had grown so thick that the bottom was obscured and the noxious gas was rising to the surface.

And then there were fewer patients. Then there were no more referrals. Then there were no more patients. She had explained to each of the remaining ones, she wasn't well, would send them to someone else, someone trusted, esteemed by her institute, someone respected by the great names that had gone before. She would not abandon her patients but finally they had gone.

And then the housekeeper left and was replaced by a woman from an agency whose name may have been Dora or maybe not. And then another woman came in the afternoon who wanted her to go out for a walk in the park although she did not want to go out at all. She had her reasons. Her son called. Yes, yes, she said to her son, I'm going to dinner tonight at Marybeth's. She wasn't going to dinner but perhaps she was or would have liked to, or might consider it one day. She had always believed in deception. It was a survival skill. Honesty was for children who didn't believe in it either.

Dr. Berman even forgot that the day Ryan was born gray fog had drifted up the two rivers that held the city in their arms.

Gerald went home, but not right away. He took a small studio in an abandoned bakery in Long Island City. The ceilings were tin and the moldings were delicate vines and the river was only a few blocks away. Lying in his bed he could see legs, women's legs, men's legs, large and small dogs, passing by. He put up shades and an iron grate on the windows. Gerald felt safe there. He also could afford the rent. He had a small income from his father and his mother was always able to give him whatever he needed. He needed just a little.

Most Saturday nights Adrienne called Gerald and asked him to take Ryan and keep him until Sunday afternoon. Gerald bought a little bed. He spent hours looking at his son, holding him. He played “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” again and again for the boy. Other than Ryan he was alone. Once or twice a month he went to the Central Park West apartment to see his mother. She seemed pleased to see him but often conversation stalled and he went into the den and watched a ball game.

The doormen still knew him. The caretaker from the visiting nurse service and the maid greeted him with smiles. But at the center of the apartment, in her large living room, on her red velvet couch, his mother sat, nodding at him, restless, a leg bouncing up and down impatiently, not wanting to say the wrong thing but unsure of the purpose of the visit. Still he came.

His mother was a vanishing mother. Blessed by a hopeful nature, he bet on the scores of football games, basketball games. Hope was his wild card. He held it close to his chest.