Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind (2 page)

She had learned to live alone, alone with her son and the help in the house. If she did not stumble into a memory, or fall upon an empty moment, she managed well. She moved quickly, briskly, keeping the door to old longings closed as tightly as it could close. She had her private regrets. She was not immune to pain.

What had the patient who had just left talked about? What was that patient's name? It was a woman, she was sure of that. The couch was smooth as always. The small towel on the pillow unwrinkled. The patient must have been sitting in the chair, not lying on the couch.

What had the patient who had just left brought to the session? What had she said to the patient? If she were quiet and still it would come back to her. If she didn't let her mind race forward, but thought of serene moments, of waiting for Howard to finish his dessert, of listening to her favorite aria from
La Traviata
with Howard in the next room watching the ball game, then it would come to her suddenly like the smell of her own body on a hot summer day. She waited. It doesn't matter, she said to herself. She picked up Lily and held her in her lap, stroking the gray and white fur, tapping the place between the ears that made the cat purr with contentment. The cat jumped off her lap and left long hairs on her black skirt. She brushed the hairs away and waited, hoping Lily would soon return.

She said aloud the names of places visited, beaches and hotels: was that where the international conference was held where she gave her first paper or was it the auditorium of her son's school, was it a graduation or was it a memorial service, a memorial for whom?

Dr. Berman had not slept well. At four in the morning an ambulance siren had wailed its demented warning as it raced past her block. She had walked to the window and stared out at the eastern sky. The sun beneath the horizon was pushing its way toward her slowly, too slowly. And all through the night she had dreamed: wallpaper from old rooms she once knew well, lamps that had sat on desks in whose drawers she had once hidden a lover's letter as well as the tax forms from the years before, a dress ripped, a glove without its mate, and always the sound of a ringing alarm clock, in the almost darkness of the city where the glow of the blue, green, red Empire State Building, its needle pointed into God's eye, never disappeared entirely. Again she thought about her mother. Her mother had been dead some fifty years and no longer had any skin on her bones, which Dr. Berman knew well enough.

Five hardback copies of her book,
The Nightmare and Its Vicissitudes
, marched along on the shelf behind her chair. Their electric blue covers demanded attention. Her name on the book's spine was clear as a trumpet call. She unpinned her hair and it slipped down over the collar of her suit jacket. Her hair, white at the mostly hidden roots, was a shade of red, auburn, maybe too orange, too even, too perfect, but commanding as she wished it to be.

Her colleagues liked the word
vicissitude
. Freud had used it. It had always sounded to her like the hiss of a snake. She too liked its dangerous echo. Now she was writing a book on memory or she would write a book on memory. Or maybe she could no longer write a book. Actually for her last book, the one titled
Lust and Longing
, she had hired a ghostwriter. She didn't have the time or the energy to write each word herself. It had become hard to form the sentences, to hold them in her head as she was reaching for the next thought. The ghostwriter was a secret. No one would ever know. She would never tell.

Some nights she dreamt in numbers that floated across her brain as if it were a chalkboard. She saw formulas and equations and measurements and theories. She had been the only girl in some classes. But in those classes she had known joy. When she woke from those dreams she felt confident and refreshed, as if somewhere it had rained on dry ground and new seeds might grow.

Things she remembered:

Her mother, what her mother had died of, but she wouldn't say, not now.

A poem she had memorized in the third grade.

She wouldn't say it now. No need.

The medical school auditorium and the boy who took her back to his room after the liver function lecture and what happened there. She could remember that and the stuffed monkey with the pink cotton tongue perched on his bookshelf, a remnant from his childhood home, a sign of immaturity she should have taken seriously.

The corpse, the body, her body, and her partner's, to slice and name. It was female and the pubic hair was black, and the clitoris had withered so it was impossible to find.

The Waterford china plates she had bought in the roadside antique store in Vermont one autumn when they had gone to a wedding. She remembered whose wedding it was: almost. She remembered the inn where they spent the night, the strawberry jam they had for breakfast and Howard running his fingers over her mouth to remove the crumbs that had gathered in the corners.

And then she remembered the red and orange leaves on the trees. They stopped at a road stand to buy a basket of apples, too many apples, most of them soft and bruised.

The black appointment book, there it was under the paper “Object Loss and the Fetish in Early Childhood” that had been sent to her by a Norwegian analyst she had met in Geneva several summers ago.

She had a son. His name was Gerald. She believed in the good enough mother, and all that entailed. But she also believed in spine, upright spine and discipline and order, and she believed that the world rewarded effort. She hired a nanny from Jamaica and went back to work, ten days after Gerald's arrival. She did not alter her teaching schedule. She added patients as referrals came from the head of this committee or that. She became a training analyst the year Gerald started nursery school.

She was interested in sexual obsessions and wrote and delivered papers at meetings across the country and abroad on transsexual identifications and sadistic or masochistic fantasies. She knew why she was interested in sexual obsessions.

Those subjects have many vicissitudes.

If Gerald was not always in her mind it didn't mean that he wasn't present on occasion.

Gerald became a handsome child. She kept his hair long, with bangs hanging almost into his pale blue eyes, and his oblong face, while not like her father's which had been sharp, intense, alert to danger, seemed kind and peaceable. The nursery school report said he was a good sharer and liked to build towers and would try hard to do puzzles if asked. He was pleased when it was his time to water the plants or feed the hamster.

Howard took the boy to the zoo on Sunday mornings when they were in the city and sometimes took him to the office, letting him crayon on printing paper at his assistant's desk. The boy was partial to his father: male identification, a defense against Oedipal feelings. She understood: a normal affliction of early childhood that causes havoc in the brain, until death erases its last trace.

She had read all of Margaret Mahler on separation anxiety and the development of the self in the second year of life. She had read all of Anna Freud's descriptions of the stages of childhood. She knew that sexual thoughts were as natural to the child under seven as the sky above and the soil below. She knew that toilet training involved a separation from what the child misconstrued as a body part, and so became frightened by the flush and disappearance of his own product. She knew that when Gerald woke at night with a dream of fiery dragons about to eat him, or screamed that a building collapse was about to suck him underground, he was only struggling with his desire for her, an illicit desire he would have to abandon.

She read the words of Melanie Klein who was convinced that children wanted to chop up, devour, eat, trample the inner organs of their parents, because of the frustration of their baby genital desires. Maybe or maybe not. She did agree with some of what she had read: underneath the sweetness of the blue pajamas with the little rabbit hopping repeatedly over the sleeves, her son was also in a trap that would not spring. Iron bands of want and need, fastened by fear of retaliation, oiled by guilt, enforced by a desire to murder, accompanied his quite banal childhood. He warmed his little arteries beside a bonfire of ardor for the very persons he might destroy if he weren't so small and so cute in his bunny pajamas.

Sometimes Dr. Estelle Berman looked at Gerald and saw a demon and sometimes she saw a sleepy child whose thumb was often in his mouth, bending his teeth outward, consoling him for the condition of childhood, which would not be altered by any special pleading in any particular instance.

She had a nine-year analysis of her own. Was it successful? Of course it was successful. She had found the root of her ambition and she had recognized that she was flawed. She knew why she was flawed. She forgave herself, or tried to, for the meanness that swelled up within her when she saw a woman more beautiful, more seductive than she. She understood that rivalry was a normal human condition, as common as heartburn and the occasional bad cold. And there was more, much more, she lost her fear of strangers stalking her. She stopped gaining and losing weight with each shift of her mood. She learned to feel almost comfortable in other people's homes, even if they were more expensive and glorious than her own. She learned to listen to other people's boasts and see underneath the bravado, observe the anxiety that settled on the coffee cups after desert. She knew she was a tough lady, and she didn't expect to become a delicate princess.

She had married well in the Victorian novel sense of the word and this gave her insurance against the vicissitudes of life. She had gold pins and thick bracelets set with rare stones. She had necklaces with pearls and real coral. She had gold earrings she caressed with her fingers when she was deep in thought. Her jewelry was not timid or discreet. It admitted to its expense and required respect.

After her own analysis she no longer believed she was a bad person. Or rather she believed that all persons were bad and she, no worse than her neighbor or her friend or her colleague.

Her patients, on the couch or in the chair, accepted her words, gratefully, most of the time. She knew when to speak and when to wait. It was a skill that was perfected with time. She heard the skipped heartbeats, the gasps, the tiny sounds of pain that patients uttered, one and all, as they repeated the tales of their lives, the crucial facts, the losses, avoidable and unavoidable. She responded to the patient or she did not according to some instinct that told her to wait, more is coming, or speak now or the moment will pass and never return. Each session was a dance, a
danse macabre
, not a ball. She was responsible. She was sometimes loved and sometimes hated by her patients. She was almost never bored. Patients lied to themselves, they hid their bitter sharp thoughts, or they spilled them out before her like so many pennies in the blind man's cup, or they wept when they remembered lost love and denied lust. They wept when they saw that their pride was false or their hope futile.

Was she kind? You did not need to be kind to do the work. Was she always right in the way she saw the patient, the story before her, the dream that had been brought to her office? Of course not. She was sometimes right and sometimes kind and frequently she could follow the dream down the royal road of the unconscious and find the buried message that waited there.

Between patients she often changed clothes. She had suits and jackets and shoes for all occasions. She went to professional meetings at her institute. The first Tuesday of every month, she had a committee meeting to discuss the teaching program, the admissions of new students, the appointing of new training analysts. She swam in the waters with others who also knew whom to court, whom to deny, whom to woo. She enjoyed the encounters around the table, in the halls, just as the capos in the back rooms enjoyed their colleagues, their poker games, the urgency of their encounters. She was also an editor of a prominent international psychoanalytic journal which required her to attend meetings in Portugal, in Brazil, in the Loire Valley and other places where psychoanalysts gathered in the summer months, their spouses in tow, their passports in the hotel safe, their afternoons spent in museums and gardens and churches across the globe.

Her father was shot in a bar in Las Vegas over an unpaid gambling debt.

No, that wasn't true, although she often told the story.

He died in a hospital in Charlottesville of cirrhosis of the liver, which was no surprise to anyone, least of all his daughter.

Most of the time, her patients accepted her words gratefully.

Suddenly on a spring day when the dogwood trees in Central Park were just opening their blossoms, a soft white haze on their limbs, Howard Berman felt a deep pain in his chest and within seconds his lips had turned blue and he was gone. He left his wife enough funds to take care of herself and her near-grown son. At the funeral many prominent psychoanalysts wrote their names in the guest book. Some patients of Dr. Berman also appeared and sat in the back of the room. Was her heart breaking? It was hard to tell as she greeted mourners in her living room. She was composed as she had always been. She knew that death was never a surprise, only relatively sudden. It was always there, ignored or not, it was there. She had her ways of keeping together, allowing fear and grief just so much of its due and no more. She was strong, her friends said. Three days after the funeral she resumed her regular schedule and if she was in some kind of pain, makeup hid the traces.

Nevertheless she was mourning. She paced the apartment. She ached in her bones. She came down with a strep infection and when the fever abated she tripped on a rug in her office and fell, spraining an ankle. She was angry too, bristling at the household help, scowling at the doorman, and cutting her friends off in mid-sentence. At night she curled herself into a fetal position and rocked back and forth in her bed. She knew the worst would pass but that was of no comfort as waves of anxiety, how could she continue, washed over her again and again.