Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (32 page)

“Who’s that?” my aunt asked.

Uncle glanced at her disdainfully. “You know who he is.”

“No, I don’t.” She lifted an asparagus to her lips and bit off its tip.

“You should.”

There was a silence.

Aunt took another bite, chewed it thoughtfully, sipped from her gold-rimmed water glass. I thought she had dropped the subject when she asked, “So. Who is he?”

“God damn it,” Uncle said softly.

“He’s the head of the program at Columbia I’ve been going to,” I said. That was so many words, spoken so normally, they both looked surprised.

“Thank you,” she said. Aunt usually ignored me, but she was never mean when I did come into her vision. “Funny name for a professor. What does he teach?”

“You really don’t remember,” my uncle said. It wasn’t a question. “My God, it was in the
New York Times
!” he said, as if that were something greater than reality itself.

“Oh, yes,” Aunt smiled. “The genius program. You’re not going anymore?” she asked me, pleased by this news, although I didn’t feel her smugness was directed at me.

“Halston doesn’t want him to go.” That happened to be true, but as far as Uncle knew, he was lying—he had been told it was my choice. “His schedule is too tight.”

“Rafael works hard,” Aunt agreed.

“Can I still visit Cousin Julie?” I asked. Uncle frowned. “She’s expecting me this weekend anyway.”

“You’ve been staying with Julie?” Aunt asked.

“This is ridiculous!” Uncle turned from Aunt and pushed his plate from him, although he had eaten little. “What is the point of this game? You think hurting him,” Uncle pointed to me with a sweeping gesture, the way a scantily clad model shows off a prize on a TV quiz show, “is a way to hurt me?”

“Well, isn’t it?” Aunt asked. “I thought you loved Rafael. If I love someone, then when they’re hurt, so am I.”

What a day for revelations. Aunt wants to hurt me; and apparently she’s been trying to do it all along. How did I miss that?

Uncle still had his arm extended toward me. He left it there and stared at his wife. “You admit it? You have the nerve to admit it.” He got up now. His round face was ominous, his voice husky.

My aunt didn’t seem frightened, although I was, for her. “Admit what? I’m not trying to hurt Rafael. That’s something you made up. I was just saying that if someone hurts a person I love, then they’re hurting me. You didn’t seem to understand that basic fact of life.”

As Dr. Halston might comment, it didn’t take a genius to know she was talking about their disinherited son.

Bernie turned his back on the table, as if something had called to him. His face cleared of the threatening anger. He squinted into the darkened living room. I followed his eyes. The wall of leaded glass windows shimmered with dozens of small reddish circles, imitating their parent, the setting sun. He was looking for something else to do: prey to kill, a kingdom to conquer. I imagined that this was what sent him into the world to make millions; not the rigid logic of the materialism my parents believed ruled him, but his inability to win with the women in his life—my mother, his wife, perhaps even his mother, whom I never met. Women—they were the answer. Without their love, “chaos has come again.”

“Rafe,” he said softly. “Come with me.”

I looked at my aunt. She was dressed in a black turtleneck, covering the wrinkles there that had been smoothed off her face by a surgeon. Her dyed blonde hair was combed up and back, stiffly puffed off her scalp by more than six inches, a passive and slightly bizarre leonine appearance, although it was presumably fashionable. I felt sorry for her. Her pretense of indifference to her husband’s anger was unconvincing and pathetic.

Uncle patted the side of my shoulder, urging his reluctant thoroughbred to his feet. “We don’t have a home here,” he said with the smooth, resonant music of his cello.

Aunt raised her napkin to her lips and dabbed them. She ignored Bernie and looked boldly into my eyes. “God help you,” she said softly.

“Come on,” Uncle tugged at me. I got up. He said to her, “You’re the one who needs to see a psychiatrist.”

Embarrassed, I averted my eyes. Uncle turned me away and we walked out together. I heard Aunt laugh. A bitter sarcastic laugh, but full of real amusement nevertheless, not forced. “That’s beautiful,” she said to our backs, although not especially to us. She laughed again. Its mockery followed us through the house. I fancied I could still hear it long after we were shut up in Uncle’s study.

He pointed for me to sit in one of his red leather chairs. He settled behind his desk and phoned someone. “Fred? Yeah it’s me. I can’t take it anymore,” he said. “I want to do it now, no matter what it costs. Rafe is the only complication. I don’t want to move him out of this school until the term ends. But he can’t stay here in this—” he gathered energy to put his anger into it,
“freezer
with a witch. Yes,” he glanced at me, “I think she has done harm. I don’t see how it couldn’t—” he looked away, “be very discouraging. It’s as though he’s invisible. God, what a bitch.” He listened patiently to the man on the phone make a speech. I could hear the imploring tone of the voice on the other end but not the specific words. “I can’t,” Bernie finally answered. “I don’t care if it costs me. Anyway, we’ll see. We’ll see if she really wants to roll in the mud. I can’t wait to see how she feels being stripped in public. See how she likes having her heart cut open.” He laughed crudely at something the other man said. “Yeah, right. If we can find it. Well, then her liver.” He hung up eventually. I stopped listening; Uncle’s talk was too ugly. He made other calls. I dozed off repeatedly, my head lolling forward and jerking me awake each time, only to go back to sleep and dream of Grandma Jacinta’s
natillas,
her
plátanos maduros,
the hot sand of nearby Clearwater Beach and the endless Florida sky I watched while floating on my back in the Gulf’s bathtub-warm water—blue burning into white at the horizon, majestic and empty.

I hadn’t heard from the Tampa Nerudas since the catastrophic journey to Spain. After my testimony against my father, I made no attempt to communicate with them, nor, so far as I knew, had they. It might be that Uncle intercepted their attempts. It hurt that there were no more Christmas and birthday packages. But I couldn’t blame them, considering what I had done to their son. I rubbed my face to wake up. Uncle finished yet another conversation. This last talk was with a female voice. He told her he was leaving his wife that night. This meant the will would change totally to my favor. Someday the power of his money would be mine and I could afford to heal everybody’s wounds. Even his son Aaron’s, I told myself to assuage the guilt I felt at the wreck I had made of Bernie’s home life. After compensating my father and helping the poor, I could return what was left to Aaron, restoring his birthright. I felt better about the whole situation until I remembered that if it weren’t for me, healing Aaron wouldn’t be necessary.

We spent the night at a motel in adjoining rooms. Bernie said he would rent a house in Great Neck until the end of the term and then we would move to the city and I would go to a private school next year. Before falling asleep, I asked again if I could spend Friday night at Julie’s and he frowned again. He considered for a moment and decided to agree with an engaging smile. “Okay. But watch yourself. The women in our family are not to be trusted.” He laughed as if this were a pleasant joke.

Over the next month, my life changed dramatically. Uncle rented a furnished three-bedroom apartment and hired an English couple, a butler and cook, to make sure someone was there on the many nights he never came home. A car took me to school, then to Halston’s, and back to the temporary home with Richard and Kate, who served me as if I were an exiled and disaffected young lord, someone deserving of respect and pity. I visited Julie on Friday nights and Saturday mornings, joining Uncle and a woman friend for Saturday nights in Manhattan. The “friend” was Tracy, my uncle’s mistress of many years, although they pretended to me to be recent platonic acquaintances. I told Halston many secrets; none were the big one. We reviewed what I remembered of the attack on my parents in Tampa. Halston didn’t dig for too many details; I assumed that was because he had heard my mother’s account when she was his patient. He also took me through my mother’s abandonment of me during the Bay of Pigs invasion. Again, my recollections, at that point, were blocked, but Halston didn’t have much interest in the details, anyway.

[I am trying to keep this free of later retrospective evaluations of Dr. Halston’s technique because they would muddy a clear picture of the therapy as I experienced it then. At the time, the transference was excellent. Obviously, I had no distance on Dr. Halston’s methods; therefore, to insert them into accounts of our sessions would distort reality. I am concerned, however, that professionals will need to know at this point that I wasn’t blocked about the facts of what had happened in the past, not really, except for a few lurid details. I was blocked about what I felt and what the facts meant to the wider world. To use my favorite depiction of distorted thinking: I knew 2 plus 2 was the equation, I just didn’t know that they would add up to 4—in my calculations, there was a different sum every day—and I had no conscious awareness that the answer of 4 was a taboo number.]

Halston focused on what I felt during the two days and nights my mother left me alone, especially my reaction to Uncle taking me to live with him after she was arrested. In general, contrary to what one might expect of a Freudian-based therapist, he concentrated on my contemporary relationship with Bernie. Indeed, it provided one of the rare occasions he seemed to argue with my perceptions.

“Uncle didn’t rescue me,” I said.

“No? You used the word rescue.”

“Yes. But I asked him to. It wasn’t his idea.”

“He came and got you and took you in.”

“Yes.”

“Wasn’t that rescuing you?”

“Yes, but …”

“But?”

“It wasn’t his idea.”

“I see. So it wasn’t a rescue because you told him to.”

“No, I don’t mean that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I told him what he wanted to hear, so he would rescue me.”

“What did he want to hear?”

“That he—” I paused. This was dangerously close to a final surrender.

“That he … ?”

“That I loved him.”

“And you don’t love him?”

“No.”

“Is that the big secret?”

“No,” I said.

“But it’s a secret?”

“Yes.”

I enjoyed the talks, just as I enjoyed my silence at school, the falling away of my old friendships, and the new interest of the hipsters, as they noticed my hair growing longer and my withdrawal from participation in athletics. I shocked one of the school hippies when I approached him in the bathroom to ask if I could buy a nickel bag of grass. He watched, impressed, as I took a hit from a sample joint, released the smoke from my mouth and rebreathed it through my nostrils, à la Sandy. My credentials established, I was allowed to make the purchase. Thus supplied, I discovered a new joy, getting high alone at night and pleasuring myself in a luxuriant orgy, intensified by the heightened sensation and vivid fantasy the drug made possible.

Meanwhile, on Fridays and Saturdays I pursued my new goal, the shedding of my cumbersome, embarrassing, and—I was convinced—unhealthy virginity. The immediate obstacle, I believed, was a man, a member of Columbia’s SDS steering committee with whom Julie was in love. At least that’s how I interpreted their late-sixties style of dating: they slept together; he discussed everything with her; she adopted his ideas, sometimes with more passion than he felt; and they went together to most events, whether they were political meetings or the movies. They would have denied they were a couple, since they believed monogamous relationships were “bougie” (their slang for bourgeois), possession of a person being an extension of capitalist ideas; besides, Julie believed exclusive relationships were especially wrong for women, inevitably male chauvinist in practice, since inherent in the idea of ownership was the assumption of male control. This self-deception was accepted by their friends, thanks to their general political agenda. I need hardly explain why, despite my age and sexual inexperience, I was so much wiser about the depth and power of even a radical’s need to love, be loved, and to possess his beloved with a monopolistic grip that would have impressed Andrew Carnegie.

In one way, Julie’s lover encouraged my own hopes. Gus was a tall, skinny half-Jewish, half-Irish New Yorker raised by parents who had been members of the American Communist Party. Other than his reddish hair and freckled skin, he wasn’t that different in physical appearance from me; and his social background was as close to mine as one could reasonably expect. I met him on the second Saturday I stayed with the women after my panic attack. Biting his nails, his legs bouncing restlessly, Gus questioned me about my politics, the kids at Great Neck High, and my reason for quitting the “genius program.”

“Sandy,” I said. She looked up from the picket sign she was creating with a black Magic Marker. A demonstration against the building of the gym was planned for later that day. “She radicalized me about it,” I said, talking in their jargon. “I realized we were being exploited in an elitist way.”

Sandy smiled. Her skin was too dark for a blush to be noticeable, but pleasure at my flattery was in her eyes.

Gus’s mouth, which tended to hang open a little, like a friendly, overheated hungry dog, drooped a bit lower and he nodded thoughtfully. “Right on, Sandy,” he said and then resumed biting his nails. “You want to start a chapter of SDS at your school?” he asked as he chewed.

“I’m not a leader,” I said.

“You shouldn’t be,” he said. He spat out a fragment of nail. “Leadership is dinosaur thinking. You should be in the vanguard of creating a way for the other kids to educate themselves and create their own organization. That’s why we don’t believe in going into schools and setting up chapters ourselves. That’s age chauvinism.”