Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind (3 page)

She went to a meeting of psychoanalysts, an editorial meeting of a major journal, and she said nothing at all. As the meeting broke up three other analysts, colleagues, asked her to join them in a taxi. They dropped her off at her corner and then watched as she walked in the wrong direction away from her door. One of the doctors jumped out of the cab and grabbed her elbow. This way, Dr. Berman, he said, and walked her through the lobby and right to the elevator that would take her to her apartment. There was talk. She didn't hear it.

In the middle of the night Dr. Berman woke up in her bed, felt about for Howard's arms and legs and his back that was wide and warm with a large mole between the shoulder blades, and remembered that he was gone, and turned on the light. The thought that came to her was not pleasant. She wanted a daughter, a beautiful daughter, whom she would have loved and brought to adulthood. There would be no excess of self-love in her child because she would have been loved enough.

Maybe, maybe not. Dr. Berman knew that like her Chicago colleague, she might have failed. Careful, she warned herself, do not love Justine as if she were yours. Love her only as your patient, which means warily, conditionally, alertly. Wounded birds have a way of dying and sometimes they spread disease.

Lily the cat jumped on the bed, lightly as if a feather had blown onto the blanket.

Justine came late to appointments. The doormen had recognized her and whispered to each other and called down to the superintendent when she came so he could wait in the lobby and catch a glimpse of her long legs when she left. Justine brought her new puppy to her session. It was a small black pug. A gift from an admirer. The pug sat calmly on Justine's lap. Lily jumped down from the windowsill and arched her back and showed her claws and let out a sound between a scream and a choke. The pug opened its sleepy eyes and jumped down and immediately wet the carpet. Was that the point, to stain something that belonged to her doctor? Dr. Berman picked up Lily and tossed her into the hall. She would have liked to do the same to Justine. But she said instead, Tell me about the abortion, and Justine with more drama than necessary described it all. There was no surprise there for Dr. Berman.

Justine didn't show up for her next appointment or the one after that.

Dr. Berman walked in the park and considered what mistake she might have made. How could she hold this movie star who always got what she wanted and never got what she wanted? What would have happened if she had let Lily scratch the eyes out of that pug?

She called Justine, just to remind her of her next appointment. I'd like to see you, she said, even if that was not as professional as it ought to have been.

Justine returned. The boyfriend left for Italy for a vacation with his new love. Justine did not want a new love. She wanted to sleep all day and watch television until the stations turned dark.

One of her security staff took the puppy for his children who lived in Long Beach in a small house not far from the ocean.

Justine did not need or want antidepressants. She had her own medicine cabinet and her ways of restocking it whenever necessary.

Dr. Berman answered her phone when it rang loudly at two in the morning. It was Justine wanting to tell her some childhood memory, a sexual play with a neighbor boy. Justine wanted to have all of Dr. Berman, all her waking hours and her sleeping ones as well. Dr. Berman told Justine that she would see her at her appointment later in the week. Her voice was neutral, her tone warm enough, but the truth was Dr. Berman did not like being called in the middle of the night. If she had she might have been an obstetrician.

Justine told Dr. Berman about her mother's boyfriend who was supposedly painting her mother's portrait but then it appeared as if he had more in mind than a nude descending a staircase. Justine had been brought to his studio one afternoon and the painter had put his fingers in her vagina when her mother was fixing tea in the kitchen down the hall.

Justine's mother did not believe her. Justine's mother often said things to her father in a language that Justine couldn't understand. Neither of course could her father but that didn't appease Justine. Also, this mother insisted on sending Justine to a kibbutz where she had to clean out cow dung. Three summers lost, said Justine.

I hate her, Justine said.

We'll see, said Dr. Berman.

No, said Justine, I really hate her.

Yes, said Dr. Berman.

Do you think I'm beautiful? asked Justine one day.

Do you think you're beautiful? Dr. Berman returned the question.

Everyone thinks I'm beautiful, said Justine.

And you? asked Dr. Berman.

Justine didn't like the question and she didn't answer it.

Some months later Justine said something that pleased Dr. Berman, enough for a real smile.

She said, I think you should call me Betty. I'd like that.

Dr. Berman said, Betty is a good name.

Justine had already tried to drown Justine in a river of vodka.

Then one Thursday morning when the penguins in the zoo were diving into their pool, behind the glass wall that separated them from the visitors who admired the penguins because they endured their imprisonment in the stage set that had become their home without visible signs of misery, Justine, who walked through the park on her way to Dr. Berman's office, followed by her security people, was jostled by a stranger who put his hands on her chest, before the guys could grab him and shove him and chase him away.

I hate this city, she said to Dr. Berman.

And she decided to go back to LA She had heard from her former boyfriend who was now over the stripper, who was actually an up-and-coming actress who was on location in India, and he had asked Justine to return to him. If she didn't come right away, he might kill himself.

Really? asked Dr. Berman.

Maybe, said Justine.

At their last session, Justine brought a present for Dr. Berman. I might be back, she said.

After she left Dr. Berman opened the gift. She found a necklace, emerald and diamonds and a large black pearl at the center in a Duane Reade tissue box. In the box was a note in tiny handwriting.
This came from Cartier's. You can't return it. Don't mention my name if anyone asks where it came from. Thanks and love from Betty.

Daughters grow up and leave, thought Dr. Berman. Even real daughters do that. Patients interrupt their treatment before they are ready to be on their own and psychoanalysts lose their patients before they are ready to let them go. It happens all the time. Dr. Berman could tell you about others, other times. But that night she opened a good bottle of Merlot that Howard had been saving for her birthday, the one he missed by dying, was it five years ago or more? She stood at her window and watched the people in their warm winter coats walking dogs, rushing along to the theater, to dinner at the restaurant a few blocks away, to a wedding perhaps, or a celebration of a promotion or a victory of some kind over someone else of course. She saw the lights in the apartments across the park, small flickers in the distance, where people were gathered, families were building up resentments in the way that families do, envy and fear served with the evening's microwaved lamb chops.

Standing at the window like one of those figureheads at the prow of a sailing ship, a figure carved in wood, painted reds and blues and yellows to show the sea that the ship was protected by a large and looming female. She felt wooden, as if her limbs would not bend on command. She felt cold and useless.

If she had a real daughter she might call her now. But she did not.

A few nights later she was listening to a paper at a seminar meeting titled “Passive-Aggressive Behavior and Personality Disorders.” They were in a meeting room at the institute seated at a round table, small bottles of sparkling water had been placed in front of all the participants, a recording machine on a small trolley glowed red to signal its working state. The presenter was speaking in a low voice. Dr. Berman leaned forward in her seat. She could hardly make out the words. The young woman appeared to be whispering into the microphone. Dr. Berman closed her eyes and fell asleep. All the participants at the seminar including the speaker pretended not to notice. The speaker, who had been a student of Dr. Berman's in her third year at the institute, wondered if she was boring everyone there. A few of the other younger participants thought that the paper was less well done than they had originally thought. But the older analysts understood: the day is long, the effort of listening takes its toll, sometimes even the best of the analyzed are awake in the small hours of the morning and sleepless they flounder through their day.

Sometimes the mind has had enough of other people's words and wants to be alone with itself.

Dr. Z. said to Dr. H., Did you see the necklace Estelle was wearing tonight?

Dr. H. hadn't noticed the necklace because he had a cataract in his left eye and had no interest in women's wear, a fact his wife had complained about often.

Why? he asked Dr. Z.

Dr. Z. said, It looked like diamonds and emeralds and quite extraordinary.

Dr. H. said, Real?

Dr. Z. said, I don't know.

Dr. H. said, Probably not. Who would wear such a thing to a discussion of “Femininity and Fantasy in the Silent Film.”

Dr. Z. said, Boring talk.

Dr. H. said, Very.

Dr. Z. said, I'm a Sherlock Holmes fan.

Dr. H. said, Me, I prefer Star Wars.

Dr. Z. said, The boy in you.

Dr. H. said, The boy in me.

Dr. Z. said, I had a patient who told me his favorite moments of every W. C. Fields movie ever made. Also all Marx Brothers and Abbott and Costello plots.

Dr. H. said, How long did that go on?

Dr. Z., Too long.

Dr. H., What was he doing?

Dr. Z., Stalling.

Dr. H., And then?

Dr. Z., He was killed in a car crash.

Dr. H., Not funny.

Dr. Z., No.

 

 

two

Anna Fishbein was home. She had arrived several weeks after the start of the second semester. She had brought with her two suitcases, a duffel bag of laundry, her bear that had shared her childhood bed, a book of Sylvia Plath poems that she always carried in her backpack, and a glazed look in her eyes. Her mother was afraid it was drugs. Her father was afraid it was alcohol. Anna glared at her parents. They had no faith in her. She was not using drugs and she was not drinking, no more than her dorm mates at least. She had come home, she said, to stay. That was all she would say.

Anna's mother, Beth, was on the faculty at St. John's University. She had published two well-regarded books on Virginia Woolf. Her father, Fritz, was a biographer. His interest was American history, the Civil War in particular. His own father had escaped from Vienna and his mother had spent her early childhood in a small town in Cuba, where in an unlikely migration many Yiddish speakers had washed ashore. But it was the Civil War that held his attention. When asked by interviewers, TV anchors, or such why he had chosen this subject, he said, “If history were an MRI, the Civil War would be revealed as the site of the tumor, the place where the shadows extended outward promising a painful future.” He had said this often.

History did not interest Anna. It was hard enough to understand the present, the moment that was disappearing even as you began to see its shape.

You need to do something, said Beth to her daughter. Yes, said Anna. Do you want to do some research for me? asked Fritz. I'll pay you, he added. Anna did not respond. Anna took to sleeping almost until noon. She took the dog for long walks. She washed her hair again and again. This is not all right, said Beth. Fritz said, This is not normal. This is not just a stage. Anna's brother Meyer was studying for his PSATs. He complained that Anna stole money from him. Beth left a few hundred dollars on Anna's bureau.

Beth and Fritz went out to their favorite Chinese restaurant and all they could talk about was Anna. What? What? How? they asked each other. They liked each other less because of Anna. On the other hand they could barely be apart, because no one else understood their shorthand, their anxious return to the same words again and again. What, what? How?

Which is how Anna, referred by a college friend of Beth's who was a psychoanalyst, came to Dr. Berman's office, on a Thursday morning, on a cold February day, bored, indifferent, with a high wall surrounding her and a very strong conviction that her life would be short and uneventful.

She was wearing a sweatshirt, jeans, and her long hair curled freely down her back, an invitation not echoed in her eyes.

Tell me, Anna, said Dr. Berman in a voice that promised not to judge, only to listen. Tell me what makes you happy. I'm not happy, said Anna. Of course, said Dr. Berman, but even so something makes you happy. Anna said nothing. She looked out the window and saw the bare trees in the park and said nothing. Dr. Berman waited. Anna waited. Anna said I'm happy enough. Good, said Dr. Berman, then let's talk about what makes you unhappy. Nothing, said Anna, but a few tears appeared at the edges of her eyes and her nose turned red. We can talk about that nothing, said Dr. Berman. Maybe, said Anna, and she looked down into her lap so that the doctor would not see the flicker of hope that like a sparrow in flight had passed over her face and disappeared as quickly as it came.

We can consider some medication, said Dr. Berman. That might make you feel better. Drugs, said Anna, are you pushing narcotics? Dr. Berman smiled. This was a sign of life. If you need them, we can consider it, she said. No, said Anna, I don't do drugs. How about medicine? said Dr. Berman. Do you use antibiotics? Anna said nothing. We'll see, said Dr. Berman. Anna said nothing. Dr. Berman's use of the
we
pleased Anna in a small way.

Dr. Berman had gone through a checklist in her mind, drugs, maybe, anorexia, no. The girl seemed about ten pounds overweight. Depression, of course, but in what particular way? Separation issues, yes, but what else? Fury, maybe, but fury was like a shadow, everyone has it in the right light. Was she bright enough? Hard to tell. Was there something in there waiting to reveal itself, a talent, a capacity, a sweetness unexpected by those who knew her best, maybe? On the other hand she might be just another girl struggling with some sexual urge, unacceptable to her, uninteresting to Dr. Berman. Dr. Berman believed that it was a miracle that the impulses that beset the human mind did not break out and cause havoc more often, holy murder, in the bedrooms, boardrooms, streets.

Anna did agree to see Dr. Berman three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 11:15. She had nothing else to do.

Anna texted her best friend from high school. Home, she said. Deciding what to do next. That night Anna listened to her music on her iPod, watched a vampire movie on late night TV, washed her hair, told her brother no girl would ever be interested in him. Just as sleep seemed to be possible, her body shook with some inner alarm and she was wide awake again, and she went into the bathroom and from her makeup kit removed a razor. She opened the razor and carefully between thumb and forefinger took out the blade. She sat on the edge of the bathtub and gently, tentatively, ran the blade over her arm below the elbow. And then to the side of the vein, careful to avoid the vein, she pressed the blade down into her skin and she felt the sharp bite. She watched as a spill of blood oozed over her flesh. It fell in a splotch on the tub rim and then slid crimson and beautiful down the white porcelain.

And then she went back to bed and fell asleep. Her bear had fallen to the floor.

She shouldn't sleep all day, said her father as he drank his morning coffee in the kitchen. I know, said her mother. I'll wake her, said her father. I don't know, said her mother, maybe she was up late last night.

Beth wanted a cigarette. Her last cigarette was eight years ago. Once in a while the need came on her, like a hunger pang. It could be ignored. She ignored it. Fritz looked pale. His left eye blinked too rapidly. He was a tall man but now when he stood up there was something of the scarecrow about him, a kind of inner collapse. The cells of his body were losing their shape, their self-respect. You should wake her, he said to his wife. She didn't rise from her chair. You wake her, said Beth in her fake voice, the one she used for salespeople and doormen. Fritz flinched. He noticed a pale wart that had sprung up on her neck.

The seven-room apartment on West End Avenue that the Fishbein family had bought with the funds received when Fritz's father had died was in need of painting, the Persian carpet in the study had lost its deep purple hues and the couch had a rip in the leather that Beth had patched with tape and now gave the room the appearance of a drunk who had been in a fight the night before, with someone unremembered over something not so urgent in the light of day. The disrepair was not caused by financial concerns. It was hard enough to find time to read the periodicals, the political journals, the manuscripts and theses proposals that piled up in abandoned chairs, on coffee tables, stacked in the corners of the bedroom, on dresser tops. No time at all for the superficial, the surface of style. Or was the leather rip a style of its own, a vote for mind over matter? There was a TV in the living room. It was flat as the world in a fourteenth-century map. It came to life for the Sunday talk shows, for CNN, for Yankees games and Sunday football and HBO series. Meyer downloaded science fiction movies on his computer and Anna wouldn't tell her parents what she watched. Probably
Oprah
, said her mother. Porn, said Fritz. Oh God, said her mother, whose paperback copy of
The Story of O
was on a top shelf, high up but within reach and never out of memory.

Only the fearful and the pretentious avoided TV, Fritz said, a real swimmer dives into all waters, deep, shallow, salt, fresh, narrow, wide.

Was there an unhappy love affair? Fritz asked his wife. Daughters might tell their mothers something like that, something ordinary that would pass over, leaving them all unharmed, the way they had been once upon a time. I don't know, said Beth, she hardly speaks to me. It wasn't always that way. The way it had been, was that an illusion? Once upon a time she would come home from her last class and her daughter would rush to her side. Once she felt free with her child, free of all the effort and the discriminations and the distinctions she made each moment of her working life. She felt only the word
home
, the word
child
, the safety of her armchair, her rose quilt, her daughter's hair that she brushed in the mornings and sometimes braided.

Had they let something slip, something fall down, something they were supposed to do but didn't? Had they harmed, not meaning to, but harmed the person they had created between them, thigh to thigh, heat rising, and with good intentions perfectly aided by the moonlight flooding the cedar planks in the floor of the cabin they had rented by the lake for two weeks in August? Do you remember that summer we went to Maine? asked Fritz. Yes, said Beth, who then opened her black bag and took out a memoir she was preparing for her Thursday seminar, a story of survival in a women's prison. The narrator wrote in brave sentences that bristled, holding the reader the way any car crash would, with fire, crumpled metal, broken glass, a body on the tarmac.

Fritz had an office twenty blocks away. He walked there as he did most weekdays. All the way uptown, he kept the image in his head of his daughter's face, a kind of blankness, making it seem more like a mask than a face. It frightened him, this face of the child he had created, valued, overvalued? Even a confident man, with five significant books listed in the congressional library's catalogue, has days when his faith in himself is shaken.

Dr. Berman looked at Anna sitting across from her in the large patient's chair. Her cat Lily sat on the window ledge asleep. Felines could not break patient confidentiality. Dr. Berman suppressed a sigh. It was going to be a long forty-five minutes. Anna did not seem pleased to be there. She did not seem comfortable in her chair. She played with the ends of her hair. She looked out the window intently as if she were immensely curious about something happening in the park across the street. Dr. Berman was not going to rush matters but wasn't going to sit in silence either. Did you have a roommate? she asked. Yes, said Anna. Did you have any particular difficulty with her? asked Dr. Berman. No, said Anna. She was all right. Did you find the work hard? asked Dr. Berman. No, said Anna. Dull? asked Dr. Berman. Yes, said Anna. Tell me about your classes, said Dr. Berman. Anna said nothing. Dr. Berman tried another direction. Did you have a boyfriend? No, said Anna. Did you want one? said Dr. Berman. Anna said nothing. Did you want a woman? For what? said Anna. Were you perhaps sexually attracted to women? Dr. Berman's voice was neutral. She might have been asking if Anna preferred Gouda or Brie. Anna said nothing. Have you had intercourse, sex with anyone? she asked. Anna said nothing. Dr. Berman said, Anna, you came home suddenly. You left college, you say you will not return. You cannot hide whatever grieves you here. I need your help in order to help you. I don't need your help, said Anna, but there was a tremble in her voice. Dr. Berman heard it. Yes you do, she said. Her voice was like a whisper, soft but insistent. I have to leave, said Anna. No, said Dr. Berman, it's not time. You seem sad, she said. What is making you sad? Nothing, said Anna, but her eyes filled with tears. I don't know, said Anna. We'll find out, said Dr. Berman. Anna said, I don't care. You care, said Dr. Berman, and then she added, perhaps unwisely, Talk to me. And Anna thought but didn't say, Never. Dr. Berman heard the
never
which might mean
maybe
even though it was silent, the way we know there is an
e
at the end of words like
done
or
whole
, or
mine
or
have
: maybe especially the word
mine
.

The next session she asked Anna what she had thought she would do with her life when she was in high school. Anna said, I wanted to be a war correspondent. I wanted to write about the bodies of the soldiers who were hurt or killed. If you could, asked Dr. Berman, would you do that now? Yes, said Anna. I would. But it might be dangerous, said Dr. Berman. That wouldn't bother me, said Anna. I'm not afraid. But you are afraid to tell me what brought you home, said Dr. Berman. Anna said nothing. At the end of the session when Anna stood up and turned to the door, she said to Dr. Berman, I am not afraid. Good, said Dr. Berman.

Dr. Berman wondered about incest. Anna and that writer father, it was possible. Incest was an interest of hers. She had written three papers on the subject published in the international psychoanalytic journal and she had delivered one of the papers at the meeting in Mexico City the previous July. She had worn her red summer suit with a gold pin in the shape of the sun on the lapel. Nothing human was alien to her, but some things were more compelling than others. She had no doubt that attractions to shoes or nail clippings or animal fur were just signals from the dark, products of the want and disappointment that ran through the mind, everyone's mind. Untamed thoughts, formed in the crucible of rage and need, corrupted by civilization's niceties were common enough. Dr. Berman considered herself a kind of exterminator. She was after the lice of the mind. The putrid stuff within took no holiday, spared no one, lasted to the final breath and only then disappeared. Dr. Berman did not believe in the afterlife or the salvation of the soul. She did like being the chairwoman of psychoanalytic committees that determined matters of importance and affected the lives of others. At the last meeting when the talk turned to narcissistic personality disorders she had mentioned that she knew Justine Fast and while she wasn't explicit about their relationship she did imply some knowledge of Justine's absence from the public eye. She did manage to hint at the difficulty of treatment in such instances but express her confidence that all was well in hand. She shouldn't have done that. She did it. If you treat a famous person and you don't tell anyone you would be a candidate for sainthood and Dr. Berman was not interested in being canonized: simple awe and envy would do.