Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind (17 page)

Her friend said, I'm happy for you, and seemed to mean it. I'll get the name of a good nanny for you from my nanny.

Ronit asked her friend, No more trouble? No, said her friend, the bad time passed. We survived.

I thought you would, said Ronit.

And then, because of the nature of her work, the chemicals that might be floating through the vents, she took a leave. She took long walks in the park. She went to movies in the afternoon. She took pregnancy gym classes and made two new friends, one also carrying twins.

Dr. Z. did not think the few poems the poet produced on the subject of his wife's pregnancy were among his best. He found them coy.

There was an emergency one night. Ronit called, she had a terrible pain under her navel. The obstetrician, someone she had trained with, told her to go to the emergency room. Dr. Z. and his wife dressed quickly and met her there. The poet was trembling. Don't tremble, Dr. Z. wanted to say but didn't. Ronit was swept away from them. The poet was with her. It was too soon. Dr. Z.'s wife held his hand. I'm sure it's nothing, she said with her usual disposition to ignore the beast with long teeth running right at her. I hate God, said Dr. Z. You don't believe in God, said his wife. Nevertheless, said Dr. Z., I hate Him. But no more than a half hour had passed when Ronit and the poet emerged and they were smiling. A small hernia had caused the pain. It would go away or they might operate after she delivered. It was nothing. It did not threaten the babies who were doing whatever they did in the dark of the womb, float, touch, dream. Do fetuses dream and if so do they have nightmares?

When Dr. Z. had his own children he had been very engaged in learning his trade. He went four times a week to his own analyst. He watched his son and then his daughter, checking the milestones, muscle flexibility, and eye contact. He was assured and assured his wife, they were normal children. Actually he thought they were better than normal but he knew that was vanity and pride and ego and not necessarily objective truth. He nevertheless found them extraordinary. He forgave himself that delusion: it was so common.

He was supervised twice a week by another analyst who watched his work like the tax man auditing the local mobster. He was fascinated by himself at that time. He was fascinated by his patients, but his children as they arrived in his life seemed natural, like his degrees, expected, appreciated, but hardly astonishing. He knew the medicine, had done the obstetrics rotation, had delivered four babies on his own. It was heady. He remembered a nurse wiping away tears from his eyes that were staining his mask. But after all it was only one of the amazing moments of his life.

Now, this with Ronit, this was everything. Was this about his own genes? Was his attention on these not yet breathing babies just an expression of ego, of the human desire to live on and on? Dr. Z. conceded that possibility. But maybe not. Ronit wanted these babies. She wanted to be their mother, not knowing yet how they might hurt her, how she would grow fearful for their very lives, and how her own life would never again be hers to lose or to live. His ignorant daughter wanted these babies and he wanted her, no, more than wanted, needed her, to have what she wanted. He would not be able to bear her grief if anything should happen. He had no bargaining chips to offer fate. He had no recourse if he were denied. He could only wait, a father who loved his daughter, too much maybe, but maybe when it came to love there was no such thing as too much or at least there shouldn't be.

Emotions cannot be measured like chemicals in vials. That was one thing that attracted him to psychiatry in the first place. The proper amounts were always in flux and attempts to measure the mind always failed. He liked that: that he considered real poetry.

Then as the due date approached and the heartbeats remained steady and the sonograms showed two little boys, floating about in the shadows, he found himself afraid of death: not his own, but theirs. He tried to analyze his fear, he considered his father's sudden heart attack, his mother's slow fade as arteries narrowed. He thought of Yorick and Hamlet and the alas of it all. He thought of graves and wars and outer space with its vast emptiness and none of it relieved his anxiety about Ronit and the twins who would come in their own good time, just after Ronit's fortieth birthday. The poet was composing a poem to welcome his sons. The grandfather-to-be was having stomach troubles, was it anxiety or ulcers? He would have it checked later.

And then, as he and his wife were walking down the aisle at the Metropolitan Opera House, moving slowly toward their season seats, their favorite opera,
La Traviata
, only ten minutes from curtain time, his cell phone rang. He answered it furtively. It was the poet, they were on their way to the hospital. There had been some loss of amniotic fluid. There had been some intermittent contractions. Their doctor wanted them in the hospital, a cesarean might be needed.

Dr. Z. and his wife missed that performance at the Met. It was unfortunate that they had decided to purchase the better seats for that year's subscription, seats that were now conspicuously empty in the center of the sixth row.

Dr. Z. wanted to go to the hospital. The poet had suggested they go home and he would call with word and then they could come. Dr. Z. felt he should be by his daughter's side but then remembered that he shouldn't.

He stood by the window in his living room looking at the Hudson River, black and still. He saw the lights of the looming apartment buildings on the Jersey shore, the steep cliffs beneath them, the George Washington Bridge delicately uniting the shores. He saw a small tugboat anchored halfway across, its dark shape reminding him of the Egyptian canoes that carried the dead into the underworld, stacked with the necessities of life, the memories of their breathing days. Why was he thinking about death now? The answer was obvious. The birth of the twins was the signal for his own death to approach. It marked the moment when the torch of life was passed on. It was sweet but bittersweet.

And then a freighter went slowly by. There was a light on its prow and several in the cabin. What was the long black boat, shaped like a coffin, carrying? He couldn't see. It was an omen. He didn't believe in omens. The freighter had a small red taillight that reflected in the water, ripples of neon curves in the darkness. He spent a half hour trying to decide: an omen of what?

And what of the babies? He had heard no names suggested. He wasn't concerned about their names.

He thought, because he couldn't help it, of the terrible things that might be. The diseases that the amnio couldn't identify. Of the fine wiring of the brain in which the smallest error could result in the most serious of deficits. If a neuron of a synapse drifted perhaps a hundredth of a millimeter off course, then a brain and its body could end up in an alleyway wrapped in a torn blanket on a freezing cold night or it could do harm to its mate or it could be walled into itself and suffer exile from the heat of other bodies. If a neuron strayed, if a synapse clogged and paused at the wrong second, a brain could become evil. Dr. Z. did believe in evil. Santa Claus, Elijah, werewolves, vampires, they were myths, but evil and guilt, they were as real as the bones of his body.

He named the deficits, all the ones he could think of, as if naming them would scare them away, as if naming them, staring them in the face, would spare the children, would guarantee their ordinariness. He repeated the word
autistic
four times, because he knew what that curse would mean, for child and parent. He tried to stop himself. Morbid and ridiculous, he called himself names but he couldn't stop. And then, exhausted, he went on to the less disastrous but still calamitous conditions, situations, problems that shape experience, determine happiness, competency, education, income. He thought of all the attention deficit disorders, he thought of excessive shyness, of paranoia, of uncontrolled aggressions. He thought of polars, bi, and depressions, singular. Standing there at the window he felt as if he could not breathe, as if his lungs had stalled—too much was being asked of them.

He wanted a cigarette. There were none in the house.

And then he thought of sex. He wanted sexual happiness for these little boys, not yet of course, but one day, and he knew that the genes carried those impulses forward. Genetic plans could be altered by the oddest of small matters, a connection between a serious earache and an enema could excite something best left unexcited. A desire to be the other sex could come in the genes, in the biology, or it could come in a parent's preference for a girl or a boy or in a teasing playground incident or in the air when the windows were open, like Peter Pan flying into Wendy's nursery. Sex could be thwarted, misdirected, colored with fantasies of pain inflicted or experienced. The wires in the child's brain were like radio receptors receiving commands from worlds unknown, malevolent or benevolent by whim. Whose whim? No one's whim, at any moment a man could become a cockroach.

Pollutants in the air, pollutants in the black heart of schoolteachers, nannies documented or undocumented, could shift the destiny of a child one way or another. Squalls of misery could come from a broken friendship, a failure to accomplish a task some other child could do easily. What if these children succumbed to the long litany of troubles he heard from his patients, fears, phobias, desires to harm, a sense of failure, realistic or not.

Dr. Z. stopped himself. He had become a psychoanalytic hypochondriac. He seemed to himself less like a grandparent than an analyst in desperate need of an analyst. He thought of calling Dr. H., but then the hour was late and what would he say after all? I'm worried about my grandchildren not yet born and whether or not the vicissitudes of living will destroy them.

He knew what Dr. H. would say. Those vicissitudes of yours, that's just living. Dangerous of course, but perhaps you should focus on starting a college fund for the children or imagine giving them each a microscope, or perhaps a kite with a long red tail on their tenth birthday. Have a pleasant daydream, good night. That is what Dr. H. would say. He didn't need to call him.

Dr. Z. was worrying about whether one twin would dominate the other and the possibility of a fixed unequal relationship developing between the stronger and the weaker one. He thought of Jacob and Esau and how he had always held a particular sympathy for Esau who seemed unloved by his mother. What was wrong with being a hairy man who liked to hunt? He thought too of how he had wished his own brother ill on more than one occasion. He was getting very tired, standing there at the window. The lights in the apartment buildings on the Jersey side had mostly disappeared. Large dark shadows of buildings stood like concrete and iron vultures above the water.

Come to bed, said his wife. No, he said. I don't want to undress and then dress again. And then, as he looked out the window and returned to his melancholy musings, a sharp sound caught his attention: the phone.

Everything is fine, said the poet in a tone that aimed for calm but didn't achieve it. We named them Virgil and Isaac. Virgil is five pounds and Isaac is four and a half. They are lying under a warming lamp right now. And you can come and see them. Floor 5, room 306. Ronit is resting. She said to tell you to hurry and to please bring a hairbrush, she forgot hers.

 

 

thirteen

After a near arrest in LA Betty Gordon, a.k.a. Justine Fast, returned to New York on the red-eye and took a taxi with her rose-colored roll-on luggage to her ex-boyfriend's apartment in SoHo. He wasn't there. Wherever he was he wasn't answering her cell. The doorman wouldn't let her wait in the apartment even though she had kept her key. No girls, he had been told, none at all. She called her mother.

It had come to that.

She had dark circles under her eyes, a result of mascara that had spread like an oil spill and fatigue that had been caused by her inability to sleep without the aids she had a few weeks ago declared off limits. The flickering light within her burned sufficiently to ignite her wish to live and live on, to counter the desire to sleep forever, to want to go home and start again.

Her mother took one look at her daughter, the stale nicotine smell filled her nostrils as she pulled her child, no longer a child, into her arms and led her to her old room, which now had a couch bed, a desk for her mother's computer, and a new carpet. Betty remembered what had happened to the old carpet. The posters were down, the lipstick messages on the mirror were gone. The room had been sanitized as if a victim of an infectious disease had died there. Betty understood. She had tried to erase herself so she couldn't blame her mother for finishing the job.

Betty took a shower and changed her clothes before her father came home from his office. Her hair was cut like a boy's. Blue, pink, crimson, yellow, purple spiked through her head: a fading firecracker, lights sinking in the moonless sky. Her father kept his eyes away from her arms. He didn't want to see what might be there. Dr. Berman might see me, she said. No, said her father. She's not well.

What? said Betty.

She's not young, said her mother.

I know, said Betty. I want to see her, she said.

You can't, said her father.

I can, said Betty.

No, said her father, you can't. But you can see Dr. H.

Dr. H. opened the door to his new patient. He showed her the coat closet. He thought about Dr. Berman. She would not have appreciated the tattoo he saw on his patient's neck when she bent down to pick up the red leather bag that she then held close to her chest while inspecting him carefully. He sat still and let her absorb his size, his blue shirt, the glasses that slipped a little to the left, the receding hairline, the jagged scar on his left hand where he had cut himself while carving the Thanksgiving turkey.

You're ordinary, she said.

Is ordinary so bad? he asked.

Yes, she said.

Tell me why, he said.

He looked at her and smiled. It was a shy smile but it cast a glow into the consulting room. He saw the pieces of her flying around in her head. He saw the little girl waking from a night terror and screaming for her mother. He saw the fragile glass of her soul, tipping back and forth, ready to fall, and he saw the colors of her hair, brave sparks. She was still there.

I want to be special, she said.

You are special, he said. Everyone is.

She sighed.

Blah, blah, blah, she said.

What do you hope for? he asked.

And Betty couldn't answer because she hoped for so much at once and she had little hope.

Dr. H. waited.

I want to see Dr. Berman, she said.

Let's try, he said, you and me, and see if we can work together.

I don't need a shrink, she said to her father, knowing the word irritated him. I need a God with many arms.

Try the Asia Society gift shop, said her father.

Betty's agent called her. There's a part for you in the new Coen brothers script. You wanna try for it? They called and asked for you.

No, she said. Not now.

It wasn't that she didn't like it when the cameras were on her face. She liked it. It wasn't that she didn't want people to know her name. She did. It was just that she wanted to stay home now. She didn't want her name in the tabloids. What did she want? How should she know?

What do I want? she asked Dr. H.

You tell me, he said.

She rose from her chair, glared at him. Useless, she said, you are useless.

But two days later she was there at the appointed hour. Dr. H. was not surprised.

Betty met her old high school friend in a wine bar and amid the dark bottles, the cheese plates, the noise, the rising drumbeat of trysts and tales of betrayal, movies liked or not, raises denied or won, romances budding or fading, she spoke of her old boyfriend. Had she really loved him? Had she ever really loved anyone? How do you know if you love someone? she asked her friend. You know, said her friend. Betty sipped at her fake beer. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, she thought. Stop being such a baby. The word
stop
rolled around again and again in her brain. I could stop everything if I wanted to, she said to herself. Do I want to?

Two tables over someone recognized Betty. That's Justine Fast. Heads turned, staring. I'm surprised she's not in prison, a loud voice offered. Betty turned her head to the left. She wanted them to see her best side, the one that photographed perfectly. She felt ashamed and she felt excited. She was someone. Wasn't she someone? It was good to be someone. It was not good to be someone. Betty's friend's cell phone rang. She turned her back to Betty and in order to block the noise from the bar put her other hand over her ear. She slipped down from her high stool and stood against the wall, her back to the room. Betty put her hand in the backpack that had been left on the floor. In an instant she had zipped open the small pocket, fished out a wallet, emptied its contents into her own lap, and replaced the wallet.

Betty's friend had to go. Her sister was waiting uptown.

Alone in the bar, Betty fondled the dollars in her lap. Am I a thief? she wondered. Would she report this act to Dr. H.? Would he be shocked? He was not allowed to be shocked. It would be unprofessional of him to be shocked. It would be a joy to shock him. Would he admire her daring? Maybe.

Dr. H. asked Betty, Were you angry at your friend?

No, I just thought it would be cool to defund her.

Did you think she had something else you wanted? Dr. H. leaned forward in his chair. There was no note of accusation in his tone. On the other hand, no admiration either.

Maybe, said Betty.

What? he asked.

It's exciting to take things, said Betty.

I imagine so, said Dr. H., rising to indicate their time was up.

Paxil, Zoloft, the right amount of which was hard to determine: Dr. H. wrote the Rx, but only for a few at a time. Betty was given by her aunt a not very frequently used gym membership. She endured a long, very boring test to see if attention deficit disorder contributed to her jangled nerves. She told her periodontist that she didn't want to be Justine anymore but wasn't fond of Betty either. If it was attention deficit disorder they would use Ritalin. It wasn't. Sometimes she slept too long into the late morning. Sometimes she couldn't sleep at all. A psychologist administered an IQ test. Betty didn't want to take the test. She gave wild answers or no answers. The results were not useful.

A lost lamb, said her mother.

A not so adorable wolf, said her father.

What did we do wrong? asked her mother for the ten thousandth time.

I'm not talking about this anymore said her father, although he would, in bed, at dinner, after the movies, on a walk in the park.

She was good in front of the camera, said her mother.

So was Lassie, said her father.

The months passed. She mostly made her appointments.

The world is corrupt, she said. Every politician lies. No one cares about you if you're poor and if you try to be someone a crazy person will kill you. Jodie Foster was almost murdered. John Lennon is dead.

Woody Allen lives, said Dr. H.

I'd like to get him in bed, said Betty.

He'd like that, thought Dr. H., but waited for her to continue.

As she sat across from him he smelled her perfume, applied like insect repellent in black fly season. She wasn't kind. She had a guilty conscience, a superego that plagued her, but she knew how to keep her self-criticism from changing her plans. She rejected his interpretations. She wore skirts so short he had to focus his eyes on the seventeenth century print of an Italian landscape he had purchased in Florence years ago that hung just above her head.

However, Dr. H. was a patient man. He and the Paxil would win in the end. It was just a matter of time. Did he have the time before something happened, an overdose, a major theft that landed her in prison, a drunken evening that would end in a car crash, in a drowning in a swimming pool, a fall from a tree she had climbed so she could be above everyone else. If she had plans for ending her life she did not tell him. Sometimes she stayed home and sulked in her bedroom, watching TV until the stations went off the air and then opening her iPod and downloading streaming rap music until dawn. At least that kind of evening would lead to morning, so thought Dr. H.

Was she taking drugs other than the ones he was prescribing for her? Dr. H. thought not. He wanted to think not. Sometimes when she was in his office he felt her presence as if a small bird were flying about the room, its heart beating in terror, its wings frayed, its beak pecking wildly at anything in its way, its small feet clinging to shelf, to book, to clock, to arm of the chair, to the box of crayons he kept for children, to doorknob, a stray feather falling here and there, a cold-eyed canary bird moving and moving so you could not hold it in your hands, so you could not bring it in close to your chest, so you could not let your breath flow onto its back and soothe that flipping, frightened heart.

And once in a while she would come in and sit quietly in the chair and say nothing for a long while and he would wonder if she was sleeping even though her eyes were open. He would wonder if she had taken too many or too few of his prescriptions. He would wonder if she was still there and would come back before the end of the session. When that happened he felt as if she were trying to punish him. But maybe he was judging himself, found himself wanting, was impatient with his own skills, and maybe she knew that and worried about his lack of faith in her, in himself. He really hated the sessions that were filled with this awful quiet no words of his could alter.

Betty, you could go back to school, said her mother.

Call your agent, said her father.

I don't want to act, she said.

But that is all you wanted to do for years, said her mother.

It's what you wanted me to do, said Betty.

It is not. I didn't care, said her mother. You were always dressing up, pretending to be this or that. You loved the music videos. You wanted voice lessons and acting lessons. I wanted you to be a doctor. I wanted you to pass algebra.

You need a face-lift, Betty said to her mother. Your chins are sagging. Her mother left the room.

At her next appointment with Dr. H. she reported the scene to Dr. H. She began to sing,
On top
of Old Smokey I lost my true love
. He asked her if her mother was her true love? Her, never, said Betty. Your father? he offered. That remark was followed by a long silence, a silence that lasted until the end of the session.

One Thursday, she said, I might join the army.

Christ, Dr. H. thought, and bit his inner cheek. Tell me what that might be like, he said.

One Tuesday she came to her session in a low-cut silk dress and pearls around her neck. Was it a double strand? She seemed to have come to life from the cover of a fashion magazine, the one Dr. H. kept on a side table in his waiting room, except for the fact that all the colors of the rainbow still ran through her hair as if she were a child's toy in the window of a cut-rate drugstore. The effect was to combine Andy Warhol with Princess Diana.

Do you like my pearls? she asked as she sat down.

Did you pay for them? he asked.

Guess? she said to him.

Did you pay for them? he asked again.

She wasn't going to answer him, which was its own answer.

He knew the diagnosis. This
borderline
word that brought to mind smugglers and desperate immigrants, but actually referred to the wall between reason and unreason: boiling thoughts that had lost their manners. This line served as the barrier to unseemly excitement, terrible rage, calamitous shards of the soul crossing the border, invading the daylight, denting the ego, leaving graffiti to bleed across the superego, screaming through the halls of the self.

But the diagnosis, the cold words in the manual, they could not begin to describe the thing in Betty, the things in Betty, that tormented her. It was as if a thousand roaches invaded the kitchen night after night, and no poison spray would stop them, no rank odor prevent their arrival, no stepping on them or sweeping them up in the best of Dyson vacuums. They came, these roaches of the mind, through the cracks, through the tiles on the floor, out of the cabinets, everywhere roaches sneak and hide. And when he saw Betty that way Dr. H. felt anger, not at Betty, but at the illness he intended to vanquish. He knew the mighty strength of his enemy, and he saw clearly the fragile hold on life held by his patient, the one with the smile he found himself increasingly eager to evoke, anxious to encourage. Careful, he said to himself, very careful.

Betty hung up on her agent when he called again to press her to audition for a new TV series. Betty went to the park and sat on a bench in the playground. She watched the up and down and in and out of the climbing rails. She saw the children hanging by their hands from bars, slipping down the slide, crossing small bridges, swinging on a tire held by a chain to the entire contraption. She watched carefully the faces of the children. She was checking for fear. Sometimes she saw it. Just before the push-off, the reach of a hand to a bar, just before the foot leans into a higher step, fear flushes across the child's face. Betty felt sad sitting there. Do I want children one day? she asked herself. Yes, every hormone, every cell, nucleus, acid, protein, said to her. No, she said to herself, any child of mine would just be like me.