Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind (15 page)

Ryan considered. After a long pause he said, It's Saturday.

The candlelight reflected in the window, the orange flame reproduced in a line leading out over the park, a flickering line.

The aide in the kitchen finished her steak and string beans and sweet potato and scraped her plate and was rinsing it in the sink.

Gerald was talking about a good place to buy sound equipment for a stereo system. There was gossip about another student who had been taken to the hospital the week before. He could feel his legs trembling under the table, but his face was calm and he was careful to drink slowly, to stay alert. He wanted to be liked. He wanted to be included in their plans.

Ryan looked up at the table. He stood on his toes. He saw a roll, a dinner roll on a china plate. I'm hungry, he said. And Dr. Berman saw that he wanted her roll. She saw him staring at it. She didn't see a child. She saw the jaws and the teeth of the enemies she had always known would one day come to tear apart her flesh, rip open her chest, take her heart. It wasn't a shape anymore. It was a tornado coming closer, ready to take from her what was hers, her life, her self, her hopes. It wasn't her id, it wasn't her superego or her ego or her narcissistic object relations or her masochistic failures or sadistic fantasies. It wasn't obsession, repression, negative or positive transference. It was them, the them that had always been out there waiting, and now they had come: crawled out of the abyss, ready to destroy her. There they were. They were owls with sharp little beaks.

She pushed back her chair and took the burning candle out of its silver holder. She took a second to watch the flame. It was a strong flame, steady as her breath. She saw her red chipped nails against the candle's long stem.

She reached down and on the shirtsleeve, where a Tyrannosaurus rex was cut in half by the repeating pattern, she set the candle to the fabric and then before the child could run or cry she lit the front of his shirt and his hair. The child looked at his grandmother and pressed himself against her skirt. The child screamed. He looked like a burning bush: a bush without the voice of God. His grandmother waved the candle in the air. The aide in the kitchen was talking to her cousin in Jamaica on her cell phone. There were small fires springing up the seams of the curtains by the time she came into the room. Black smoke drove her back. The firemen came up the back stairs. They were too late.

Lily was found seared but alive under a bed. She did not last through the night.

The aide was afraid she would be blamed. No one blamed her.

Six months later the apartment, ransomed by the building's owner for a significant sum, was listed in the Sunday
New York Times
at full market price and was sold to an airline executive and his young third wife and her two daughters from a previous marriage who took the bus across town to go to school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, the school that Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis herself had attended once upon a time.

Dr. Z. said, The institute should establish a memorial lecture in her name.

Dr. H. said, I don't think so.

Dr. Z. said, We should do something in her honor.

Dr. H. said, Let's make sure every classroom is equipped with a fire extinguisher.

 

 

ten

The very young analyst found himself thinking about his colleague, Dr. Leah Brewster. She was in his class at the institute. She did not wear a wedding ring. She was in her thirties and had gone to medical school in the Midwest near her home in Ohio. Some magnetic impulse had brought her to New York, to psychoanalysis, to his class. She was taller than he was. She was forever biting at her thumb when she was concentrating. She had eyes that seemed to both hide and reveal her at once. She was sexual like a cat, a little plump, and her full breasts appeared, demurely appeared, at the open edges of her blouses. She wore a locket around her neck like a little girl, but she clearly wasn't a little girl. And the very young analyst, who certainly loved his wife and children, couldn't help it, week after week, sitting next to her around a table, discussing with total dispassion the questions of inversions and perversions, the role of the masochistic fantasy. He had fallen in love.

He told his analyst. He hadn't approached her. He hadn't let her know, but he felt that she knew. How was it possible that his thermostat could be up so high and she not feel his longing? And where had his desire for his wife gone? He was always too tired, it was too late, one of the children was still awake. He was distracted. His lovely wife, his good wife, bored him. Oh God, she bored him.

And so the tale took on a familiar literary plot. John Cheever had written it over and over again. Tolstoy, Updike, Bellow. There was a time when every week
The New Yorker
published another story about infidelity, desire wandering through the cocktail party, and the subtle, hinted-at, common human unhappiness that made its home in the marriage bed. It was so trite, his love, or was it lust, for Dr. Leah Brewster. He suddenly hated the sameness, the sameness of everything. No, not everything, just his wife, the way she ate a health bar for breakfast every morning. The way she still wore her college sweatshirt to bed on cold nights. The way she wanted to visit her parents whenever they had a few days they might go someplace interesting. The way she smelled of formaldehyde from her lab sometimes: not often he had to admit. Sometimes when they went out to dinner with friends she wore too much makeup. He could see it caked underneath her eyes.

If his wife were killed crossing the street, a truck delivering electronics veering fast around the corner, catching her as she stepped from the curb, then he would reach out to his colleague and what would be more natural, two analysts, working side by side. They could take an office together with a shared waiting room, their winter jackets pressing against each other in the coat closet. It's just a fantasy, he said to his analyst, who said, There is no “just” when it comes to fantasies.

His wife was a research scientist at Sloan Kettering. Her admired her skill, her mind. He came home early to put the children to bed when she went off to give a paper at this conference or that. She was always cleaning surfaces. She saw bacteria where he saw crumbs but he had become used to her habits. Now he complained about them. She is too neat, he complained to his analyst. It borders on obsessive behavior, he added. She hates dogs, he said. I think it would be good for the children to have a dog.

Do you think Leah would keep the dishes in the sink for days on end and you would be happier? asked his analyst.

He sighed. Sometimes it was so hard to make Dr. H. understand. Was the man dense, the wrong analyst for him, incapable of human empathy? He told his analyst these thoughts.

Uh-huh, said the analyst.

And the winter went on. The oldest child was learning to read. The youngest child was almost out of diapers. The holidays came and were spent with his wife's parents in Massachusetts. His own patients suffered because of the happiness of others and complained about their New Year's parties or lack of them, their parents, their friends, their own aches that he had not been able to banish.

At last the evergreen wreaths on the doors of buildings turned brown. The streets were littered with trees with aluminum icicles blowing in the breezes and dead needles falling to the gutter, waiting for the sanitation trucks to pick up the debris of celebrations that the young analyst, like a robot, moved through untouched.

She's brilliant, Dr. Leah Brewster, he said to his analyst.

That explains it, came the answer from the chair behind his head.

Last night, he said, as we were getting undressed, the mother of my children started to talk about a colleague of hers who was trying to get pregnant, had lost a few early pregnancies, was going to try fertility treatments, and she gave me all the stats and the odds and the dangers of adoption. I stopped listening. Do I care about her colleague's womb? I hear enough during the day. I don't need this just as we are getting into bed. I know, he said to his analyst, I sound like a beast. His analyst was silent.

He was too young for a midlife crisis. He was however not too young or too old for the old wounds of his childhood to appear again. His analyst expected that the storm would soon arrive in full force.

Maybe I should ask her to go for coffee with me, he said to his analyst, and waited for some reaction.

And then, said his analyst, what happens then?

And he didn't go near her after that week's class, but planned to very soon. He went over the scene in his head a million times
. Leah, would you like to have coffee with me before we head home?
He would say it casually. She would tell him about swimming in the lake as a child and being bitten by a giant turtle (did turtles bite? he wasn't sure). She would tell him about the man who broke her heart, a fellow medical school student who broke up with her the summer after they went to Europe together and stayed in hostels and got drunk and had sex on the sap-covered pine needles on the forest floor in Germany.

And then he and she would end up in a hotel on Lexington Avenue. He had picked it out on Google. And he would explain that he wasn't a monster. She would understand . . . Perhaps she felt the same pull toward him? Perhaps she didn't. Would he tell his wife? Sooner or later he would tell her. It would be unbearable, this secret, the fact of the other woman. She would sense it. She would know. She was already breaking out in hives for no reason at all. She said it was pressure at work, but it wasn't. It was his betrayal, which so far was just an imaginary betrayal but it hurt him, it hurt him for her, because he did not want to hurt her, although his analyst was not so sure about that. He woke often at three in the morning and lay in bed, wanting, but not wanting the woman beside him, wanting sleep.

In the sixties everyone believed in sexual freedom. Loyalty, sacrifice was very out of fashion. He was born in the early eighties when the time for orgies was over, and he believed in loyalty and sacrifice and making his children strong and happy, although he understood perfectly well that might well be impossible, human nature being so prone to calamity.

Divorce marked children, some never recovered. He didn't want to harm his children. On the other hand staying in a marriage where the spark had died, where the joy was no longer there, when you felt your home was a trap instead of a refuge, that too would harm the children.

I see you are concerned about your children, said Dr. H. Was his tone ironic?

Was it a dream he had brought to a session or had the analyst introduced the subject in some way that he hadn't noticed? But they were talking about his own father who had left the family before the young analyst was ten and had gone to another part of the country and sometimes sent birthday cards and sometimes didn't. I wonder, said Dr. H., what your father's absence has to do with your love for your wife now?

Was he reproducing in his children the pain he had felt? Was he mastering the loss by creating it himself? Was he making a mess of his marriage to send a message to his own childhood? I am master now.

What was going on?

The young analyst talked and talked and said some things he had never said before. The more he talked the less he felt compelled toward Dr. Leah Brewster, who for the long months of his passion had been unaware of her role in his fantasy life and was herself, after some hesitation, starting a relationship with a suitable man, already divorced, whom she had met on Match.com.

One April evening the young analyst came home from his office and played a game of Clue with his oldest child and read the younger one a story, turned out the light in the children's room. His wife and he sat down to dinner, a Thai dinner they had ordered.

Are you all right? she said to him because he was looking at her peculiarly.

I'm fine, he said.

Are you tired? she asked him.

No, not tired, he said, and he stood up and took her hand and led her into the bedroom, leaving the pad thai and the beef satay in their carton boxes.

Dance with me, he said.

And she did.

Later she said, I think Ronit is pregnant.

Who? he said.

You know, she said, the fertility treatment one.

That's good, he said, and closed his eyes and went to sleep.

 

 

eleven

After a year at New York University, a transfer student, majoring in classical studies, which primarily meant learning Greek and Latin and reading Ovid and Virgil and Homer, Anna Fishbein had become convinced that humanity was not always pitiful and that language was often a comfort. She now saw herself as part of a long story, still unfolding. However she still had bad days when she lost her way and a deep loneliness drove her to hide in her dorm room. This loneliness seemed unshakable. She could no longer see Dr. Berman. Something had happened to Dr. Berman. She had felt deserted, betrayed, and had spent a week or so feeling unlucky, permanently unlucky, but then her mother had arranged for her to see Dr. Z.

She liked him. He listened to her and his voice echoed in her head as she dressed in the morning, as she rode the subway to class, as she sat in the library and paused in her note-taking. She really liked him. She knew it was transference. She knew her relationship with him was pretend, pretend for a purpose, the purpose to heal her. She was willing to be healed. It was hard, sometimes it was very hard. She did not like the things she was learning about herself. Sometimes she liked them so little she forgot them entirely, erased her memory of the last session, so everything had to be said again and again.

And so it was when she met Mary Rose O'Brian who was pre-med and friends with a faculty member in the Classics Department who invited everyone to an annual Christmas party at her home. Mary Rose was tall and broad. She had large feet like Cinderella's evil stepsister. She was not shy like Anna. She had a loud voice and a very deep laugh. She had wide shoulders and when she walked she stepped firmly, she moved like an ice cutter through the Antarctic. There was no one who was going to mess with Mary Rose. She wore an army jacket and sometimes she wore a blue striped tie. She was what she was and a lock of her hair kept falling into her eyes and she kept brushing it away and when she looked at Anna a strange new electric pulse ran through Anna's body. It was not an unpleasant feeling.

Which is how the two women found themselves eating Mexican food in a small restaurant near Anna's dorm. It was how they talked to each other about their families, about their favorite movies, about the admiration Mary Rose felt for the beauty of nature. They talked about swimming in cold lakes and both of them disliked Florida where Mary Rose's parents had moved and Anna had received a nasty sunburn one vacation when she was nine.

At the end of the evening when they parted outside of Anna's dorm they did not touch but the possibility hung in the air. It made Anna anxious but not unhappy.

It took Anna several weeks before she told Dr. Z. about Mary Rose. She expected he would have some stuffy damning Freudian response, but instead he asked, What do you feel when you are with her? Anna told him. That's good, he said. That is all good. Anna could practically hear him purr.

Maybe that was just the radiator.

Have I made a bad choice? Anna asked him.

What do you think? he asked her.

She blushed.

I'm okay, she said.

Good, he said.

I'm really okay, she said.

That is really good, he said.

And so it went through the semester and the one after that. In the summer Mary Rose and Anna both had jobs as a counselors at a nearby day camp. The two shared a small apartment above a garage and Mary Rose and Anna together went to work every morning and to bed at night. They watched summer reruns on an old television and listened to music on their iPods and went swimming on the weekends at the local public beach. Under the water they held hands and when they surfaced they pulled at each other's bathing suits and tossed seaweed in each other's faces. At such times it would be hard to tell how old they were. Were they sisters? The tall one was older or maybe not.

Anna's parents spent August on the Cape. Come with your friend, they said. The family crisis had come and gone. Anna was independent, making up for lost time. Yes, there were a few white scars on her arms. Yes, her mother listened to her voice carefully, always hoping not to hear what she might hear. Meyer was at Stanford, something about zebra fish and brain tissue.

I know what my life will be like, Anna told Dr. Z. Mary Rose and I have plans. After I graduate we are going to get married. We're going to move to a village in Vermont and I'm going to open a bakery and Mary Rose will go on to study forestry, and then when she has her degree we're going to have two or maybe three children. I'm going to carry them and Mary Rose will donate the egg so the children will be both of ours. In the winter the children will ski to school, said Anna. Sounds like a fairy-tale life, said Dr. Z.

And then one night in a bar called Barney's after a famous woman who dressed in men's clothes and in the 1920s lived in Paris and was a daring beauty before such beauty could show itself all over town, Mary Rose saw a young woman wearing high black boots and a shirt that had a drawing of a racing car over the left pocket. Anna knew nothing about car racing. Mary Rose did. Anna put her hand on Mary Rose's arm. Mary Rose didn't even turn around, she shook off Anna's hand and leaned toward the racing car as if gravity were pulling her hand and there was nothing she could do to stop its forward motion.

Outside the bar the last of the smokers were puffing into the night. Anna waited for Mary Rose but she didn't appear. Anna went back to their apartment. She left the car for Mary Rose. She walked past the 7-Eleven and the gas station with its cold white lights and the Dairy Queen shuttered against the dark. Her limbs were tired. She hated Mary Rose but not as much as she loved her. She realized she was stomping around after midnight. She did not take a razor to her arm but she remembered how that felt and the memory accompanied her all through the night and the next day when Mary Rose appeared she took one look at Anna's face and said, Darling, nothing lasts forever. A little longer, said Anna. We'll always be friends, said Mary Rose. No we won't, said Anna. Mary Rose was sorry, but not sorry enough.

I'll never love anyone again, Anna said to Dr. Z. For better or worse, said Dr. Z., you will.

No, said Anna.

Yes, said Dr. Z. He had the last word because the session was over.

Do you know, said Dr. Z. to Dr. H. at the annual fund-raising party for the institute where they shared a table with their wives and a wealthy patron and his aged mother, why all the young mothers are reading that Sendak book,
Where the Wild Things Are
, to their toddlers?

Yes, said Dr. H. They want their children to know where to go if a crisis arrives.

You mean to an island? asked Dr. Z.

No, came the reply, inside of books. In the pages of books, that's where you go when trouble comes.

Dr. Z. laughed. He sloshed his wine on his pants, which was all right because it was white wine. Good drawings of the id, said Dr. Z.

An imaginary animal, said Dr. H.

Are you presenting that theory at the May meeting? asked Dr. Z.

I have no desire to be famous, said Dr. H. I'd have to chair too many committees.