Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (66 page)

On March 15th, 1990, I began our last session by offering Gene the taped record of our work together. At first, he seemed embarrassed. He grinned, touched the hard shell of his moussed hair, and said, “What am I gonna do with them?”

“Whatever you like. I told you I needed them for our work but that’s over and—”

He raised his hand from feeling his smooth hair, like a student asking for the teacher’s attention and interrupted, “What happens if I need to come back?”

“I’ll keep them if you want. They’ll be safe. I just thought it was right to offer them.”

“No, you keep them. It’s too final if I take them.”

He talked about the situation with Halley. She was traveling a lot, trying to sell the company’s products, not the relatively popular Black Dragon, but their less successful line of personal computers. Her frequent absences relieved his feeling of urgency about his marriage and the affair. Besides, Halley had kept her word: she continued to see him when in town without pressuring him to leave Cathy. Of course, this had a perverse effect on Gene, worrying him that perhaps Halley didn’t love him as much as she claimed. I must admit I was skeptical about the authenticity of her feelings. Why had she taken a job with the company her father was running, especially since she didn’t seem to have any background or interest in computers? Why, if she was as beautiful and intelligent as Gene described her, was she involved with a married man who, to be blunt, didn’t seem sufficiently dynamic to inspire an illicit love? I guess I assumed from the slight facts that she was a female version of the old Gene—that she got herself into situations and relationships which were guaranteed to thwart her desires, probably because she didn’t want to face other, deeper needs. And she obviously had some version of an Electra complex, working for her Daddy, involved with his number one man. Probably, given Gene’s status as a kind of adopted son of Copley’s, there was an element of making love to a stand-in for her dead brother. And, perhaps unfairly, I assumed she was much less fascinating a woman than Gene believed her to be. Her true motivations were beside the point, however. What seemed utterly clear—and a little unpleasant—was that, for the first time in his life, Gene was in control of the people around him. Stick was under pressure at the company, in danger of being fired by the board for dipping sales, indebted to Gene for their only successful product and dependent on his management to bring in a new line for next year. Now that her husband needed her less desperately, Cathy had become a loving wife. Gene commented on this irony: “It’s weird, you know? It’s kind of sick. Now that I’m getting laid a lot, she wants sex. And it’s getting better. Not as good as with Halley, but better. I love her less,” he said, “and she seems to love me more.” He noticed Freudian oddities, observing that the names of the two women in his life were strangely similar: Cathy and Halley. “Sometimes I have to think twice before I say them, it’s so easy to make a mistake,” he told me and cackled, not truly mean-spirited, more a childish delight at his surfeit of pleasures. He was like the youngest sibling after the older ones have moved out—amazed and thrilled that he no longer has to worry about his big brothers and sisters gobbling up all the dessert before he gets his share. He looked at the choice in his life—to stay married or go off with Halley—nervously, of course; but also with excitement; that at last he was the playwright of his own drama. Whatever misgivings I may have felt about my help in freeing Gene’s id were calmed by my knowledge that in the end I was confident he was a caring man who would do his best for all of them.

“I’m probably gonna call you tomorrow,” Gene said. “I’m probably gonna be back here in a week.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“But just in case I pull this off, I want to thank you for—” he interrupted himself to say, “You know I spoke to Dad the other day.”

“How is he?”

“Complaining, as always. His career’s not going well. But, anyway, he asked me how I was doing and I told him, I really told him. Everything. You know.”

“Halley also?”

“Yep. And he actually lectured me about how important it was to try to keep my family together. Can you believe it?”

“Yes,” I said. “I remember how long he tried to.”

“I guess that’s right. Anyway, he said, even though he had a hard time living with Mom, that the years we were together, you know, when I was a kid, that, in the end, it was the happiest time of his life.” Gene swallowed, moved. When he could speak easily, he added, “He told me when he has another show, he’s going to put a picture of me and Mom in it, a picture he took when I was a child.” Tears appeared in Gene’s solemn eyes, the same worried and yet trusting eyes that had looked at me furtively thirteen years before, pleading for rescue. “He said I was a good son and that he was proud of me. He said he knew I would do the right thing.”

“I agree with him,” I said.

Gene sighed. “Anyway, I didn’t mean to say that to compliment myself.”

“You’re sure about that?” I asked with a smile.

“Really,” he smiled back. “I meant to say that I would never been able to talk to him about all this if it weren’t for you. I would never have been able to get through Black Dragon, or have had the nerve to come on to Halley. Even if that was wrong, it made me happy. It’s thanks to you.”

“Well, you’re welcome. But you—”

He interrupted. “I know. I did it. Still. Thanks.”

He stood up, dressed that day in fashionable black shoes, faded blue-jeans, a black polo shirt, and a light gray sport jacket, his hair slicked back, his eyes, at our parting, at last direct and unafraid. He put out his hand and said, “I hope this is goodbye, Dr. Neruda.”

As I shook it, I have to admit a surge of vanity: I was proud of what I had wrought.

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN
Closure

J
OSEPH
S
TEIN DIED A YEAR AFTER MY LAST SESSION WITH
G
ENE.
HE survived less than two years since testing positive, a mere fourteen months following the first symptoms of full-blown AIDS. To the horror of his colleagues and friends, he made no attempt to stave off the disease, refusing not only standard therapies but those in the experimental stage that, in his privileged position, he could have had access to. He dropped out of sight after the onset, severing contact with everyone, including his lover, Harlan. No one knew that he took a long tour of Asia and Europe. Later we found out that during his travels he twice fell ill with pneumonia and tried to avoid hospitalization. The second time, the delay in getting treatment killed him: the infection was too far gone and complications led to heart failure. He died, of all places, in Poland. His behavior was pointed, clearly suicidal. He knew better than anyone that with proper preventative care he might have lived for many years. I learned of his death from his mother. She nursed him for the final three days of his life. At last her nightmare came true: she returned to the scene of the Holocaust, to the sick bed of a son who was vulnerable to every germ.

Surely Joseph meant something by these actions. Whether they were a rebuke or a homage to his parents, I don’t know. Whether his purposeful trip to Poland while dying—he collapsed at the Warsaw airport—was part of a delusion or merely curiosity about the scene of his parents’ drama, again I don’t know. Mrs. Stein didn’t volunteer if she knew and I felt asking whether he explained himself to her was inappropriate. Besides, she might be ignorant of his reasons. Until he called to say he was dying in a hospital in Warsaw, she hadn’t heard from him in a year. She told me when she arrived the next day at his bedside, he was incoherent most of the time. She reported that in one of his lucid moments he said there was something in his will for me, and I had better do what he asked or he would never let me win at chess. “What does that mean?” she asked.

“He always beat meHe always beat me,” I said. “He was always smarter than me and he liked to remind me of it.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. Her calmness, now widowed and without her child, intimidated me. She was tiny. Her pale skin hardly obscured the veins and bones of her hands. Her chin quivered all the time and her eyes were as lifeless as a doll’s. Yet speaking of her son, her voice was strong, apparently untroubled. “He was crazy. Didn’t know what he was saying. He was very fond of you. He probably thought it was a funny joke. He liked making people laugh,” she said, a quality of Joseph’s that I must have missed.

I understood when the will was read. Other than a trust fund for Mrs. Stein, he left his money to Harlan. Joseph’s cold behavior to his lover, breaking off their relationship and making contact impossible, only intensified Harlan’s grief. He said, “Fuck you,” when we heard the clause leaving the money to him, but he broke down on his way out, sagging into the arms of a mutual friend to sob. Mrs. Stein watched them comfort each other impassively. She seemed all the more isolated because she hadn’t met most of Joseph’s intimates until his memorial service. I felt useless to her and angry at Joseph. I was angry at him for many things, in particular his legacy to me. His message referred to the fact that he left me his papers, all his research on the brain, in the hope, he wrote, that I would use my skill to explain his theories to the general public. Was that nastiness? Egomania?

To my surprise, Diane took his side. “I think you’re wrong,” she said to my speculation. We were walking home from the lawyer’s office in Midtown to our apartment on the West Side. It was an early spring day. Although cool, the sun was out. Central Park was crowded with people wearing as few clothes as they could bear. “He left things to only three people—his mother, Harlan and you. The three people he loved most.”

“Or resented the most.”

“Come on, Rafe. And he left you his work, the thing he valued most. He’s trusted you with it, even though he knows you don’t agree with him. That’s quite a compliment.”

“I don’t know. Maybe it just amuses him to think of me saddled with the job of disseminating ideas I don’t agree with.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think that highly of Joseph. I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but he was too much of an egomaniac to risk throwing away his life’s work just to tease you. He trusted you. He knew you’ll do him justice.”

“Fuck you, Joseph,” I said. But I began reading and making notes on his papers the following weekend.

Two weeks later I took on a collaborator for the job, Amy Glickstein, a brilliant young neurobiologist who shares Joseph’s faith in biochemical determinism. I asked for her help after an incident of great significance in my personal life that changed my attitude as to whether I was fit for the job of exclusively representing a point of view other than my own. My father returned to the United States. I learned this in a straightforward way, but it was still a shock. On a Thursday afternoon, I picked up the phone at the clinic and a reedy male voice asked in Spanish if I was Rafael Neruda. When I said yes, the caller continued in rapid Spanish that I couldn’t follow. I interrupted, asking if he could speak English.

“Not good English. I am Francisco Neruda,” he announced.

I stared into space for what felt like a long time, but was probably only a moment. I said without thinking, “No, you’re not.”

“Yes. That’s my name. But they call me Cuco. I am your half-brother?”

Then I understood. Embarrassed, I said, “Of course, of course.” And I added, foolishly, “Nice to meet you.” I continued to fumble. “I mean, talk to you. We never met, so …” At last, I stopped the silliness.
“Perdóname.
I didn’t know your name. In fact, I don’t really know anything about you. I’m sorry, but no one told me. Are you Carmelita’s son? Born in, let’s see—?”

He interrupted. “That is correct. I’m twenty-eight years. No one informed you of anything?”

“Informed me about you?”

“No. Excuse me. I’m not clear. My father—excuse me—our father, he thought … He asked me to call.”

“Is he here? Are you here? Are you calling from the States?”

He told me they were in Tampa. Grandpa Pepín was having trouble with his mind, he said, and they had come to take care of him. I spoke to Pepín every other month and he seemed to be in excellent physical health, except for arthritis in his knees that especially annoyed him because he could no longer garden. He was ninety-two years old, living alone in the same house whose porch and lawn were the scene of my World Series injury. He didn’t like to travel and, for reasons the reader well understands, I didn’t care to visit Tampa. I hadn’t seen him in six years. Listening to my half-brother’s brief explanation, I felt so many different pangs of guilt that I almost laughed. No matter how many psychological textbooks I might consult, here was one situation where I was the bad guy, pure and simple. Three male relatives were down there whom I had neglected or betrayed or pretended didn’t exist. Once I accepted the fact that I was hopelessly and forever in the wrong, I relaxed. Selfjustification may do wonders for the ego, but it’s exhausting and probably bad for the hairline as well. “How can I help?” I asked. “Do you need the names of doctors?”

“No, thank you.
Abuelo
has a doctor. Dr. Garcia.”

“Yes, I know,” I said, a little peeved. After all, when Pepín outlived two generations’ worth of Latin doctors, I had helped find younger men such as Garcia, each time warning the new doctor to conceal the fact that his parents were anti-Castro refugees from Cuba. Grandpa didn’t trust non-Hispanics or anti-Communists to treat him—the truth is, he wasn’t that happy about putting his health in the care of people a third his age no matter what their ethnicity or politics. Although I had seen Pepín only five times since I was a child, I liked to think I had done my best to stay in touch and help. But who was I kidding? I wasn’t close to him. Pepín had never told me about my half-brother or my father’s whereabouts, claiming he didn’t know, when obviously he did. “Tell me, what’s wrong exactly? You said he’s having trouble with his mind?”