Albert, making a display of intellectual worship, excitedly received whatever came from her lips as if she perpetually revealed the hidden truths others had spent entire careers seeking but never finding. When, for example, Rita spoke of her tendency to blame others for her own failures, while seeing others’ failures as no one’s fault but their own, Albert remarked that she had just deduced one of the basic principles of social cognition, which had taken experimental psychologists years to describe. When Rita told Albert of her own inconsistencies, of her inability to see herself as she saw others, in any singular way, he told her of the exciting new theories of identity construction, and how her unique perspective could spur major theoretical advances, if she chose to apply herself in that field. Albert turned her abstract, ambivalent notions into his certainties: a great comfort to Rita, who at twenty-two had felt ambivalent about nearly everything.
Ambivalence: Rita felt forces at all times pulling her in their contrapuntal directions, had always experienced argument and counterargument in simultaneity, had seemed always to want everything: to be pure and base, to make love to boys and to resist all boys; to join up with the communists, the anarchists, and also to deliver tirades on the absurdity of children of comfort and privilege dabbling in communism and anarchy. She wanted to impress her practical parents with a practical application of her degree and become a lawyer; she wanted to shrug off all the expectations of her parents and move to Morocco to write poetry.
She wanted to marry young, raise a family, prosper in the common ways; she craved absolute solitude, life nearest the bone, to sort things out for herself.
Often, she wondered how some of her classmates could speak of their futures with such certainty. She wondered if anyone actually experienced such certainty or if all lives were merely the midpoints between opposing impulses, carried forward.
And then there was Albert. Not only certain, but certain about all the things she was not. Certain, in fact, about her uncertainty.
This uncertainty you always tell me about
, he said, half-lover, half-therapist,
this fear of being no one. What you can’t see, what is abundantly clear to me, is that this is simply the burden of a receptive and thoughtful intelligence. It is precisely this ability to see all the angles that will make you one of our most brilliant therapists
.
Our most brilliant therapists
, Albert had said, as if he were on the ruling council of some exalted society.
But now two years have passed, and for all the grand visions Albert has presented her, Rita knows his limitations as plainly as she knows the coarseness of his hands, the hairs that sprout from his shoulders. For example, despite his dumbly persistent claims to the contrary, Rita knows Albert will never leave his wife, will never make his love for Rita public. Not for lack of love for Rita, or for any moralistic belief in the inviolable bonds of marriage. And certainly not out of any great sense of devotion to his wife. Simply, Albert would never make public this or any secret that might jeopardize his position, embarrass him, or—worst of all—thwart his ambitions.
Over time, Rita’s tenderness for Albert has become rather the inverse of when they first began two years ago. When Albert speaks to her now, with all his familiar ambitions and certainty, it strikes Rita as not unlike a little boy dreaming of becoming a
professional athlete or a superhero: in its optimism, its grandiosity, holding a kind of tender purity. But it isn’t enough, this tenderness, for her to continue her affair, for her to continue in the strange position she has never felt fit her.
No, the truth is she is fascinated by something else, what psychiatry seeks to eliminate. Why could some people endure wars, famines, holocausts, while others lost their sanity in a comfortable world in which people spoke things that were not always true? Why, for some, does plain silence provoke such horror that profound, intricate hallucinations are required to compensate? And why, too, are poets so often mad?
Poetry
, Rita wrote in her journal last week,
is Promethean. Madness is the fire poetry brings back to earth
.
Rita feels close to something essential about madness and about herself, about madness and something that madness conceals.
An intimacy with chaos: not just in her position, but in her affair as well. Something compulsive in her closeness to catastrophe is why she has allowed herself to continue with this man, who occasionally, as now, repels her.
Repels her. When Frederick came into the office and found the two of them, Rita could not quite read Frederick’s face, silhouetted against the hallway light, but she projected into that dark oval her own repulsion, received the shame of the scene through his imagined eyes. And, in the days that have followed, that shame has only deepened. Canon had not come to find her after she ran from his office, had not told her himself of her transfer to the women’s ward. He had let the orders come through Higgins, as if she were any other employee. The coward.
And, though Rita does not know the extent of it, does not
know that Canon ordered not one but three sessions of ECT for Frederick, this far more dastardly act does not provoke fury, as does her transfer. Simply, she is ashamed, for her part in what has happened to Frederick, for her relationship with a man capable of such actions. Her shame of Canon’s cowardice conflating with the shame of her affair; many times she has wanted to go to Frederick, in Ingersoll, and plead with him to forgive her. But what would she say? It isn’t a rational thing, an entirely explainable thing, this affair, her need to remain here. Her need, most shameful of all, for Canon. Repulsion, but also—no denying it—need: two years (my
god!
) of her ambivalence, incarnate.
But there are more important considerations now. In the two days Canon has been gone, something has ruptured within Mayflower. It began with the first true horror she has known here. That night, one of the most fascinating, most tormented, and kindest of the Ingersoll men had found a lighter and done to himself something impossible to consider.
(Was it only a coincidence it had happened just after she had been transferred off Ingersoll? Might Canon be right, at least in this regard, that the slightest disruption in care and authority can be devastating to patients?)
And though Marvin was taken, as per protocol, to Mass General, though the staff, as per protocol, have denied and obfuscated, she has witnessed the chaos pushing at the seams Canon so diligently tried to sew together with the sutures of his protocols. And now this, another suicide attempt, if halfhearted. Herself, the affair, Frederick, and her shame aside, Mayflower needs its psychiatrist in chief.
Rita knows, so well, Canon’s weaknesses. She knows, for example, that in Canon’s shame over Frederick’s discovery, in the
dark outcomes of his childish overreactions, he is simply waiting there, at home, for his mistress to come and convince him of how absolutely necessary he is.
Do you think there’s anything you could have done differently?
What are you implying, exactly?
Nothing, I just wondered if you felt you should have done anything differently
.
Of course not. Of course not! What could I have done? Differently? Differently? How differently?
Albert
, Lara Canon said, already weary of the conversation. She is always so weary, his wife. Always so uncaring. Sometimes, though he’d never say it aloud and certainly never act upon it, Canon shames himself with a sudden impulse to shake her by the shoulders, strike her until she cares.
I was merely trying to suggest
, Lara said, with the mock-formality she dons at any of Canon’s emotional outbursts, as if all this might be recorded for later referral in a court of law—this, he has thought, can’t be too far from her mind—
I was merely trying to suggest that if you could not have done anything differently, then you have no cause for regret
.
Regret? It’s not regret. I saw something horrific the other night, Lara. Something incomprehensibly bad. I am disturbed, dear. Regret!
Poor dear
, she said, as if her husband were complaining about any other rough day at the office: an insubordinate orderly, difficulty
finding enough financing for the new parking lot. Why couldn’t she understand? He had gone to the hospital and seen one of his patients with his face tattered, the flesh dangling and seared, still smelling of its own cooking.
Poor dear!
The next morning, after dressing for tennis and making the boys pancakes, Lara came upstairs to discover her husband, awake but shiftless, still in bed.
Aren’t you going to work?
she asked.
How can I?
Canon said.
His face. Christ, Lara, his face!
But haven’t you seen terrible things before?
Lara countered.
In the war?
Canon sometimes forgets this, the embellishments he has made to his war stories. Yes, he had been sent to Europe as he has claimed, but he never left England, never left the small room in which he evaluated soldiers. In that room, Canon had been responsible for ensuring midlevel officers were ready for combat, had been responsible for little more than administering a set of standardized tests of psychological well-being. He had, in truth, been little more than a nurse, making his routine evaluations just as the other nurses probed, measured, and inoculated the new recruits before combat. He had not, as he has since claimed, worked with the soldiers just back from the front, traumatized with stories that
made all our normal frustrations seem irrelevant
. In the story he had told his wife in their early courtship—he had wanted only to impress her in the moment; he had not then considered he’d have to live with these fabrications forever—he had been an angelic figure, striding ruined battlefields, leading men lost in their tenebrous terror back up to daylight.
Well
, Lara said.
If you aren’t going to work anymore, you’ll have to start helping out around here
. Then Canon’s wife looked to the apron she held in her fist, tossed it to the traumatized doctor, and
informed him that today she was going to teach him how to knead meat loaf.
To his own surprise, Canon accepted her orders, like a child receiving his mother’s punishments. Later that afternoon, suffering what he had told Lara
could well be a trauma-induced minor psychotic episode
, he was made to pick the boys up from soccer practice, circumnavigating his asylum, perched over Belmont. When he returned home, he insisted no one answer the phone that periodically rang, explaining he was simply not ready to return, not yet. And then dinner passed; even the kids did not ask any questions, even when he mustered a tear.
Canon will only consider much later that likely he accepted all of these indignities as penance for shame. He was, after all, a man who had been discovered in an affair, if only by a patient.
At the end of the dinner, citing the results of a recent physical examination, Canon’s wife did not allow him to have dessert.
And so there he is now, the great reformer of the Mayflower Home, brooding as he sits on the floor with his kids, while the new inductees to the Mickey Mouse Club name themselves on the television.
Poor Canon. Perhaps it is true that he exaggerates his trauma only as a compensation for his shame. But still, there had been Marvin’s face, slick with ash and blood, confronting Canon. And then there had been the call from Clarence Winthrop, chair of Mayflower’s board of directors, panicked at the prospect of the home’s most famous case study coming to a fiery end so soon after the board had installed Canon to Mayflower’s highest office.
Winthrop and his board. Canon knows well, from a long career of ascendancy in academe, what is at stake for these men. Given the prominence of the family names under Mayflower’s
care, poor stewardship from the board could yield disastrous outcomes for the academic and political futures of its members. Marvin Foulds had not died, but the closeness of it was enough to require Canon to spend a perspiring hour talking Winthrop down from an emergency meeting of the board. It is as simple as that, Canon thinks. One more dropped lighter, one more purloined blade, and the board members could ruin Canon’s career in a flailing attempt to rescue their own.
The doorbell rings. Canon calls to his wife that he will answer it.
And there she is. At first he panics to find his mistress on his doorstep, assuming she has come for a reckoning, now that they have been witnessed. Sometimes, he thrills and terrifies himself by imagining her words to his wife.
I was a student of his, Mrs. Canon, and at first I craved only his mind. But at some point the craving turned into something else, bigger, and I believe he took advantage of it. I know this is terrible for you and your family, but I thought you should know, Mrs. Canon, that I love him, that I—Where have you been?
Rita says.
I needed some time away. That’s all. You didn’t see it, Rita. It was the most terrible thing I’ve ever—
Canon prides himself on the assiduousness of his considerations of all possible reactions, interpretations, and passions. But now, facing his mistress in front of his house, the possibility of a
motive far truer than the one he has claimed to his wife and now to Rita strikes Canon with a magnitude typically reserved for divine revelation. Simply, Canon has been afraid, is afraid now, of what Rita will say to him next.
Something has happened
, she tells him.
It was always a shameful thing, all that secrecy, all that dissembling, but now that this shame has been acknowledged by another, if only a patient, it will become unbearable. She will leave. For what is there to hold her to him? These last months, he knows they both have discerned a fading. The act itself, never unsatisfying, has just recently begun to feel borderline perfunctory.
Perhaps it’s for the best
, he has tried to tell himself. After all, how many times has he resolved to end it? Better to live, as he instructs his patients, at the surface: exposed, all needs spoken of directly and publicly. Better to end it, of course, and to live honestly. And yet, to contemplate a future without Rita—the thought sparks love’s opposite, kindles dread.