Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (33 page)

“Rafe would be a good choice,” Julie said. She was in a black leotard and faded jeans. She looked extraordinary: at the peak of youth’s bloom, her skin as luminous as porcelain, her black hair glinting, her big brown eyes full of passion and yet as innocent as a fawn’s. To look at her for more than a few seconds was painful, although it was also a sublime pleasure. “He’s political and a real teacher. And he wouldn’t try to dominate them.”

Gus nodded. “How can we help you do it?”

I said nothing. More secrets were piling up. The need to impress Julie and her friends, including her lover, was insistent, but I couldn’t risk my uncle’s wrath by openly embracing left-wing politics. And Halston? Dare I tell the doctor about my new secret life—or was it too close to my mother’s madness? Halston might believe Ruth’s ideology caused her lunacy.

“You know what?” Gus said. “Rafe should come to the demo today and to some meetings next week.”

I marched beside Sandy that day. Julie and Gus walked ahead of us. I was apprehensive, expecting violence and then discovery by my uncle. But my first experience of political protest was like a stroll in the country: getting high before we started, chanting together as we marched cheerfully in the sunny spring day, linking arms at the gym site to listen to a few speeches. Gus’s was the best. His relaxed manner made him convincing. He talked to the crowd in the same tone and language he used in conversation—although it’s true that his conversation was rather like someone giving a speech. Afterwards, we ate at the college hangout, the West End Bar. Whether it was the grass or the fresh air or my exaggerated feeling of having been brave, I was famished. I ate two hamburgers while around me there were more arguments between the tables as members of rival student groups took issue with Gus and the other SDS leaders, not about whether Columbia was wrong, but what exactly should be done about it.

It got to be time for me to head for my uncle’s Manhattan apartment. I announced I had to return to the girls’ place for my overnight bag.

“Overnight bag,” someone repeated. “Far out,” he added and laughed.

“I’ll go with you,” Sandy said.

“I’ll take him—” Julie said.

“He can take my key and leave it there,” Kathy said.

Sandy drained her coffee cup, stood up and said with a frown, “No, I gotta go, anyway. Come on.” She left the bar quickly without me, as if I were an afterthought.

“Bye, honey,” Julie said. She took my hand, pulled me to her and kissed me on the cheek. She had never called me honey before and the kiss, although chaste, was impressed firmly, with an affection that also seemed new.

Walking with Sandy, still thrilled by the lingering sensation of Julie’s lips, I thought about why my cousin had become physical with me. It was because I marched in the demonstration, I decided, disappointed by that conclusion.

My gloomy turn of mind must have been obvious. “You okay?” Sandy asked while we were in the elevator going up.

The familiar construct of my relationship with Julie and her friends was depressing. I experienced this dismay (its cause so obvious from this distance) as an enervating achiness, like the onset of a flu, rather than as a realization that I had created yet another hall of distorting mirrors in which I would never find a true reflection or escape from my emotional maze.

[The dazzlingly rapid re-creation of self-defeating patterns in a neurotic is exactly what makes therapy so often frustrating for both doctor and patient. I have come, in a perverse way, to admire the resilience of mental illness. It is helpful for a therapist to bear in mind that neurotic behavior is actually a survival mechanism, however misguided. Its longevity is a sign of the patient’s passion to live and in that paradox there is hope for a cure.]

Sandy put her hand on my arm and repeated, “You okay?”

The terror lived again. My skull was fragile, my skin vibrating: leaks were about to spring. Say what you’re feeling, I urged myself, desperate to fend off madness. “I’m sad,” I said.

Sandy nodded. She didn’t ask why, to my surprise. She rubbed my arm and smiled encouragingly, but never said a word. The elevator doors opened. She marched out in her waddle walk, saying, “Come on.” She opened the apartment door, tossed the keys into a bowl and kicked off her sandals. The soles of her feet were black. She extended her left hand, fingers asking for mine.

I looked at her, not understanding.

She wiggled her fingers again, eyes mischievous, and the request was clear.

She was strong and confident and I knew that she, unlike me, was real. I gave her my hand.

She towed me through the hall into her room. Her platform bed was unmade, the yellow cotton blanket twisted at the foot, a pillow squashed against the wall. She kicked the door shut, pulled me to the bed and we sat, side by side on its edge. With a light touch, she stroked my left cheek once, ran her fingers through my hair, traveling to the back until she held my now very solid skull in her palm. She moved close to my lips and whispered, “You okay with this?”

My need was so heavy that I could hardly manage to do more than nod.

She kissed me. She pushed my lips apart with her tongue and explored my mouth restlessly; her hands were also restless—rubbing my back, kneading my neck, as if she wanted to mold me to her shape. I woke from passivity and pushed back into her mouth, for a moment tasting the
eggs
she had for brunch mix with my hamburgers, and then we were only a single human flavor. I touched her thin hair and dropped my hands to her back. It was soft, much softer than I expected from her vigorous body.

She broke from the kiss to unbutton my shirt. She undid each one with deliberate care, reverently. I kissed the top of her head once or twice as she descended and thought to myself: “Thank God. Thank God.” When she reached my waist, she paused at the sight of the bulge in my jeans. She put a hand on it, raised her eyes and looked earnest. “Are you a virgin?” she asked.

I nodded.

This information seemed to galvanize her. She yanked my belt once, said, “Take ’em off,” and stood up. She pulled her T-shirt over her head and into the air in a single motion. Without a pause, she had her jeans open. They dropped to the floor. She pushed them off the rest of the way with her feet. Fingers slid under her red panties and shoved. She stepped out of them and looked at me. I hadn’t moved. The sight of her frank nakedness was mesmerizing. Her breasts were small, nipples dark and turned a little outwards, like poorly coordinated eyes.

“You’re beautiful,” I said.

She laughed. “Your turn,” she said.

I didn’t trust my trembling legs to stand. I tried to get my jeans and underpants off simultaneously while still on the bed. They got stuck on my thighs. I had never seen my penis in so ridiculous and desperate shape: levitating off me, flagging the world for attention. Sandy laughed again and pulled at the tangled mass of clothes. I flopped my legs up and down, like a baby being changed, as she negotiated them past my knees and ankles. She pushed my clothes onto the floor, then moved to lie beside me. We turned our bodies to each other. She kissed me briefly and looked at my erection. I followed her eyes. She lightly ran three fingertips up from its base to the head. It might as well have been an electric shock. My thighs and torso came off the mattress and I groaned.

“That feels good,” she said, not a question.

I laughed.

She found my right hand and put it at the top of her bushy mound. She guided my finger to the moist split of her sex. “This is where it feels good to me,” she said, holding my middle finger on the bump of her clitoris. “But not too hard,” she said, moving it. “Like this—”

Without thinking, I flicked her hand away and straightened my fingers so they formed a smooth surface. Automatically, I gently rolled down and up, then side to side, massaging all of her sex with a subtle emphasis at the spot she thought so crucial; She looked surprised. I shut my eyes and remembered effortlessly: the gentle uneven pattern, down, up, around, side to side … The whole region loosened and opened as her warm body arched against me. Only this time, I was alive too, so thrilled by her belly’s warm hug of my penis that I had to concentrate hard to replicate the complicated rhythm my mother had enjoyed.

I must seem stupid to the lay reader, or at least very confused, when I describe what happened next. Despite the surrender of Sandy’s body, despite my own delicious excitement, a cold fact landed on my neck and froze my brain, severing it from the passion of my body. I understood, finally, with all the knowledge and emotional maturity truly necessary to comprehend the fact:
I had made love to my mother.

By then, Sandy was no longer touching me to give me pleasure. She clutched me to her, grabbing an anchor as she surrendered to excitement. I increased the pace and penetration of my fingers as I remembered—and this was the most terrible, the most awful of revelations—what my mother had wanted me to do. Several times, on those illegal nights, she had squeezed her legs tight on my hand, urging me to press deeper. The demand had seemed angry and I had resisted, confused and, of course, unwilling. But I understood her request at last. I gave the answer she wanted to Sandy and finished my conversation with my mother as though it had been interrupted only yesterday, although she had been dead for six years and my part of our intimacy had been mute.

Sandy gasped, bucked, and moaned.

In a flash, as she climaxed, the mystery of my personality was solved, laid before me as clearly as in a scientific report: silent and manipulated, I had been my mother’s passive lover, learning that I must please others or they wouldn’t love me, and thereafter I re-created this dynamic with everyone else, massaging their pleasure centers so they would hold me close, mute and dishonest though I might be, because that was love to me.

The force of this revelation, one might suppose, ought to have paralyzed my passion and released rage at my maltreatment. I should have become impotent or violent. Instead, I let Sandy maneuver me on top, take hold of my penis and—a little puzzled by something, probably the fear in my eyes—guide me inside her.

And here was magic: horror was overwhelmed by joy. At last my longing had been embraced by someone other than me. My body was gleeful to find a luxurious home for its most deprived part. The psychological report in my head ignited. Its cold language burned off in a flare, forgotten. Insight and science no longer interested me. I became like any other person feeling utter pleasure, like anyone else enraptured by an embrace that, if it’s a lie, is the most convincing ever devised.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN
An Interpretation

B
Y
M
ONDAY
I
WAS DESPERATE.
W
AITING FOR MY SESSION, THE DAY PASSED
slowly. Losing my virginity hadn’t chased away the cosmic terror always at my elbow, ready to suffocate me with panic. I composed a sentence that I repeated to myself when I felt it come too close—I am alone, a stranger on a rock spinning in a meaningless universe. Using those inadequate words to describe the awful sensation helped a little, but only as a stopgap until I could turn in all the secrets to my doctor.

“So,” Halston said. “What’s new?”

“I want to tell you the big one.” There were all sorts of odd reactions throughout my body: ears ringing, stomach flopping, throat so tight the words had to be squeezed out.

Halston raised his brows, a vivid expression thanks to his bald head. “Why?”

“Why?” I was astonished.

“What’s happened that makes you want to tell me?”

“I don’t know.” I was annoyed. “I just want to tell you.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t you
want
me to tell you?”

“This is your time to talk about whatever you want.”

I shut my eyes to dismiss the anger I felt at his game playing. When I opened them, Halston had propped his head on his chin and leaned sideways in his chair, an attitude that seemed to indicate only the mildest curiosity. “So. What’s the big one?”

“I …” The speaking of it was harder than I expected. I mean physically hard. There were all sorts of explosions inside. I could have sworn I heard my heart pop and that my chest filled with blood. “I lied about my father.”

“You lied about your father to whom?”

“To the judge, to the police. I didn’t want to live with him anymore so I told lies.” Now the discomfort left me, perspired away, although there was no sweat. I felt that kind of relief: cooling down to a pleasant exhaustion. “I said he was a Communist, that he treated me badly. Whatever Uncle’s lawyers wanted.”

“And they were all lies?”

“Well … Not the part about the passport.”

“The passport?”

“He used a different kid’s picture to make a passport to
get
me out of the country. It was against the law, but it wasn’t …”

“Wasn’t what?”

“Well, it wasn’t really a crime. He didn’t have time to get one for me and I knew all about it. I didn’t mind.”

“But he did do it?”

“Yes.”

“And it is illegal?”

“Yeah.”

“So, what did you lie about?”

“Well, I said he was a Communist and …”

“He wasn’t a Communist?”

“No, not really. He
had
been, but …”

“He had been. How recently? I mean, from the time you said he was a Communist?”

“I don’t know. A few years.”

“I see.”

Silence. Halston kept his casual pose.

“So you’re saying I didn’t lie?” I asked.

“I wasn’t saying anything. I just asked.”

“Oh come on!”

“Oh come on, what?”

“You’re playing word games. I said those things to hurt him, to get away from him. I didn’t really mean them. I said he was mean to me. He wasn’t mean to me.”

“I see. Then why did you say those things about him?”

“Because I was angry at him.”

“About what?”

“About leaving my mother and me.”