Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind (18 page)

She told Dr. H. about her visit to the playground. She told him that she had sat on the edge of the sandbox and taken off her pearls and buried them a few inches down in the sand that was not like beach sand but like the crumble of gravestones. And what did you hope would happen to the pearls? asked Dr. H.

A little girl would find them and her mother would let her take them home and use them for dress-up.

Anything else about the little girl? asked Dr. H.

No, said Betty.

What might happen? asked Dr. H.

The little girl dies of leukemia and her divorced mother buries her with the pearls she used to wear when she played at being a princess.

Not such a happy story, said Dr. H.

No, agreed Betty.

Which is how the subject of death entered the consulting room.

Some months later, as Dr. H. was gently reminding his patient that most young women her age were preparing for a profession, to do something in the real world, and she was reminding him that she had already earned enough money to live for years and years and she wasn't interested in money anyway. He said, Let's pretend you needed to do something, what would it be?

She knew. She knew exactly. I would write books for children. I would write good books for children.

He said, I wouldn't stop you.

Something is stopping me, she said, and began to cry. Makeup ran, blotches came, she caught tears on her tongue. She began to have trouble breathing. The session was over. At the door she turned around and said, I feel dizzy. Dr. H. knew she was an actress and could faint whenever she wanted. He would rather she didn't: not in his office. He would really rather she didn't.

And so of course there was a new boyfriend. Gregg was a cameraman with one of the national news shows. They met in a club. They screamed out their names to one another as the lights circled around. They danced a war dance or was it a love dance for several hours before they exchanged names. He knew who she was or had been. He was impressed but not cowed. She liked his face. He was political. She was pre-political. She intended to have more opinions one day. He lived in Washington Heights in an apartment with a view of the river and the rocky cliffs on the Jersey side. He had grown up in Maine and he had a stern, weathered look, a young man who couldn't be melted down or blown apart and he had no drug history. He drank only moderately and he, best of all, had no girlfriend, the last one having left him for her boss, receiving a far better job as a reward. He had no weird sexual habits and if his fantasies were dark he didn't share them with her. Betty gained a few pounds and was trying to quit smoking. He didn't like the trace of smoke that stuck to her body, remained in her ears, in her armpits, in the folds of her clothes.

I'll move in with him, she said to her mother. You just met him, her mother said. Wait at least a few months. Why? said Betty. She left the room as her mother was listing the reasons, the wisdom, the necessity of caution. I'll move in with him, she said to Dr. H., who said, How will you feel if it doesn't work out? Like hell, she said. But she'd been there before and wasn't afraid.

He liked classic movies,
Casablanca
,
The Third Man
,
The Orient Express
, Hitchcock, the Marx Brothers. They watched them late at night in his bed. Sometimes he called her Justine. She let him although she preferred Betty. During the day when he was at work Betty went to the gym and she went to see Dr. H. and she went shopping with her mother and she told her agent that she was dropping him in favor of a real life. Good luck, sweetie, he had said, and don't call if you change your mind. But then Gregg was sent out of town with a show. He would be gone for a few months. She could fly out and visit him, he said. He would be in Cambodia for a look at the death camps there. I don't think so, she said. It wasn't the airplane that frightened her. It wasn't the death camps, which he explained to her were no longer operating. It was something else.

What? asked Dr. H.

I don't know, said Betty.

And now in the week before he was to leave she turned her face away from him. She was supposed to meet him for dinner at their favorite Indian restaurant near his studio at six o'clock and she never showed up.

She had gone home again. Her mother rushed to bring her an ashtray as she curled up on the couch in her old room. Her face was not clean and her black fishnet stockings were ripped in a revealing place. Is there any rice pudding in the house? she asked her mother. Her mother went into the kitchen to make some. Gregg called. Betty wouldn't answer the phone or respond to the texts. Damn, said her father, Damn, Damn, Damn.

Dr. H. tried. Did you like
Charlotte's Web
? he asked.

Everyone likes
Charlotte's Web
, she said. Did you like
Curious George
, the mischievous monkey? he asked. Not particularly, she said. What then? he asked.
Where the Wild Things Are
, she said. You wanted to be Max? He was headed somewhere sexual. She saw him coming. No, she said. I wanted to be a wild thing. He waited. I am a wild thing, she said. In the end, he said, Max goes home. I am home, she said. I want to leave home, she added. Good, said Dr. H., who felt like stomping around his office and waving his arms and growling his growl.

Betty bought a blank notebook. She bought some watercolors. She brought them home and stored them on the top shelf of her closet under her press photos. Those she had buried under her sneakers, old sneakers she had meant to throw out but hadn't. Everything in her closet that wasn't on a hanger was on the floor. Everything was crumpled and wrinkled and she waited for her mother to straighten it out. Her mother was waiting for her to grow up. It was an impasse. It forced Betty to buy new clothes that were never right, never exactly right.

Tell me about acting, asked Dr. H.

What? she said.

Do you miss it? he asked.

No, she said.

It made me nervous, she said.

How so? he asked.

She told him.

She received a long letter from Gregg. He wished she were with him. He didn't want anything to happen to her. He had bought her a present in Phnom Penh. He asked her to be careful. He told her that he didn't want her to steal. He didn't want her to see her face in the tabloids. He was making good money on this job. He would buy her what she wanted. He thought he could spend his life taking care of her.

I don't need taking care of, she said to Dr. H.

Of course not, thought Dr. H.

What was wrong with Gregg? wondered Dr. H. Gregg wasn't his concern.

There was a bad night. It started at a club. The thug at the door hadn't recognized her. The friends she was with had to vouch for her. She had worn a lace top and it ripped as she was dancing and then she had a few drinks. She was vague on the number. Then this tall woman in black leather boots pushed her when she was already off balance with a glass in her hand and she fell to the floor and the glass broke and she went for the woman and bit her on the neck. Yes, there was a small trickle of blood, but she hadn't killed her or anything. And then she was thrown out of the club and her friends didn't come with her and so she was alone on a street that seemed empty and so she screamed some obscenity and then she went looking for a cab and she couldn't find one and so she walked and she saw what she thought was a monster coming toward her, only it was just a trash can that had been tipped by the wind.

She slept through her next appointment with Dr. H. She slept through her yoga class. Her mother heard her in the bathroom and the sounds were not pleasant.

I need a higher dose, she said to him.

I don't think so, he said.

You can manage, he added.

I can? she asked.

You can, he said.

As she left he noticed a streak of purple dye and another one of pink running down the back of her neck and disappearing under her T-shirt. For a second he thought it was blood, blood from the brain. Oozing, she's oozing out of herself, he thought, and then wrote a far more technical, professional sentence in his notebook.

Some months later, after a short vacation in which he went to Belize with his family, he heard a message on his answering machine.

Hi, it's Betty, I'm going to Cambodia, back in a few weeks, will call.

Good news or bad news, he wasn't sure.

Gregg met her in the airport. He was tan and seemed taller than she had remembered. He was shy as he grasped her arm. He lost his shyness later in his hotel room. I caught you, he said, I caught you. What did he mean? Was she some kind of lizard scurrying along the tile floor that he had trapped in an upside-down wastebasket? Did she like being caught or didn't she?

The shoot was over the next week. She went with Gregg on a riverboat ride. It would have been romantic but she didn't like the rocking motion of the boat and closed her eyes and lay down on a cushion and moaned for the whole four hours. It occurred to her that she had a gift for missing the moment.

She did not steal anything in Cambodia. Not quite true. She took a towel from the hotel. Everyone takes towels from hotels. She took a set of ten postcards from the gift shop only because the girl behind the counter was rude. She took a blue bracelet from a vendor's cart because the vendor had fallen asleep on a nearby bench and she didn't want to wake him. But she took nothing that needed to be declared on return. She was pleased.

She seems calmer since she came back from Cambodia, said her mother to her father as they waited for the water to boil for their pasta.

Remember, said her father, she can tack pretty well in a storm. This was a metaphor. She had never gone sailing with him although he had asked her several times.

Her mother said, I should have divorced you years ago. And then a minute later she added, I don't mean that.

I know you don't, he said.

I just wish—, he added.

Me too, she said.

The seasons changed and changed again. Hardly anyone recognized Betty as Justine anymore. It was all right with her. Justine Fast had died a grizzly death tied to a cactus in an imaginary desert, ants had eaten out her eyes and crawled across her skin. Minutes before the end of a session she had described this in full detail to Dr. H., who intended to return to the subject as soon as possible.

Gregg wanted to buy Betty a ring but he knew she could steal a better one and that made it hard for him to actually choose one. He finally did. Betty began a children's story, Once upon a time there was a little girl named Justine. She lived in a castle under the sea. Justine was a girl octopus and she was going to lead the battle of the octopi against the sharks that swam in the nearby reef, consuming baby octopi by the dozens. She was going to do the illustrations. It would be an epic battle. Her name would be on the cover, Betty Gordon.

Dr. Z. and Dr. H. had been to a meeting of the institute's education committee. One of their faculty had been boring his students so badly that half of them neglected to show up for class. His evaluations by the students were filled with vague phrases of neutral disinterest. They were cautious students even in anonymous evaluations. You never know whom you might need in your professional life. These students were not the sort to demonstrate on the steps of the capital or burn flags of any nation in a public place. Their chemistry experiments never exploded. Their college essays revealed only what they wanted revealed. Nevertheless they were clearly intolerably bored, which in a class on Sexual Fantasy and Its Role in the Doctor-Patient Relationship seemed unnecessary.

He has to go, said Dr. Z.

Dr. H. sighed. He didn't want to be the one to do it.

We could give him another semester, he suggested.

We could not, Dr. Z. said. What is happening with your movie star?

Her hair is all one color, said Dr. H.

That's good, said Dr. Z.

Yes, said Dr. H., and it's green.

Green? said Dr. Z.

Yes, said Dr. H., the color of spring.

 

 

 

fourteen

The wealthy patron beamed at the doctors at his table. It was a front table right near the podium. He had sponsored the $40,000 Dr. Estelle Berman Prize for original work. This year it was going to the author of the paper titled “On Countertransference in the Vulnerable Analyst.” He was ready to push back his chair and rise to his feet, walk up the few steps to the stage and present the prize to the winner, a very young analyst.

Later that night, as the young analyst puts on his glasses so he can undo the clasp on his wife's necklace, he whispers into her ear, hurry up, and she disappears into the bathroom. As he waits he thinks of all the urges, dark and ordinary, the moods, bleak and blissful, innocent and guilty, unspoken thoughts: anxious, brave, terrified, that were even at that moment rising in the air, uniting all the apartments, crossing the park, moving uptown and downtown, punishing or rewarding minds of all economic and social varieties, moving like a mist over the high towers, the steel bridges, their cables shifting in the wind, fog covering the Empire State, the Chrysler Building, the new Freedom Tower above its mourning pool. He thinks of all the minor resentments, the failures to love or be loved that like so many allergens in the spring float through the cross streets, the tunnels, Chinatown and Washington Heights, causing many to stay indoors. He thinks of the great battles of conscience and desire that leave scars on minds as they pause at street corners, or stand in an elevator, or are on their way to the dentist or the mammogram, or the waiting analyst.

His wife calls out from the bathroom: We're out of toilet paper.

In Central Park, across the street from where Dr. Berman had lived, the almost nineteenth-century lamps send long shadows along the paths by the deserted benches. Along the avenue an occasional bus lumbers by. In front of the Museum of Natural History the stone bodies of the stately lions are unmoved by the passing hours, the coming of the next day. All through the night dreams drift away, carrying images of fright and love, of a gentle touch or a ferocious bite, a harmless wish, a slamming and crashing and bumbling about of old angers and new ones, mingled together, forgotten by morning.