Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind (8 page)

And so he considered Lyla Shulman. She was not hallucinating. She did not hear voices telling her that she was worthless, lazy, or criminal, like his first hospitalized patient whose eyes fixed on his face with a look of wild hope he couldn't bear, couldn't bear because he couldn't cure, couldn't change, couldn't write a different end to her story. He had made soothing noises—adjusted medications—felt broken himself, as if she had a contagious disease. Lyla was not like that. But all the same she might have needed a more experienced analyst. He knew that the more experienced analysts once were inexperienced.

Lyla was stalled. Lyla was dull. She had left the subject of sex behind but she would come back to it. Dr. Berman did not doubt that. Lyla was depressed but not in the way that called for an ambulance. He thought of his family cat Mookie stalking a bird in the garden, silently, slowly, one paw raised, stillness in all the muscles. He would be Mookie in the garden of his office.

He thought of a firecracker he and his brother had set off one July 4th on the Jersey Shore. It had made a whooshing sound, it had soared upwards, it had set off a few glowing lights in a pinwheel shape and then suddenly it had faded in the darkness a few feet above the dunes. His brother had said it was his fault but it wasn't his fault. Every firecracker does not succeed in lighting up the sky.

Words, words, if only his patient would use words and dry her tears and give him some material to work with. When he said that to Dr. Berman the following week, she said, Let her be sad, let her feel what she needs to feel. Dr. Berman spoke in a low, tired voice. She was disappointed in him, or she was tired. He wasn't sure.

Lyla considered Bruegel. She considered the painting of Icarus falling from the sky, his wax wings melted by the sun, while the peasants continued undisturbed to cut the hay, feed their horses, carry their vegetables in baskets to the market. Flowers bent their heads in the breeze while Icarus, unnoticed, fell and fell and died in the waters off the shore and if not for the artist, not for the poet, would have been forgotten, wiped away. She felt she was falling. She felt her wings had melted. She felt the water below, deep and lethal. She did decide to tell her analyst and see what he thought about Bruegel, about falling, about the great inattention of the world to the screaming boy headed downwards.

The young analyst had not seen the painting. He was pre-med after all. She described it well enough. He got the point. Do you think I don't see you? he asked.

Do you? she asked him. He waited.

Nothing.

Everyone is dying, she said.

But while they are dying they are living, he said. Was that a pompous thing to say? Maybe? The red button on his answering machine was flickering.

One afternoon as the light was fading in his office and the shadows were spreading across his oriental rug, the one he and his wife had bought on sale at a rug warehouse in New Jersey, Lyla said, My ex-husband likes men.

The young analyst considered asking her if she had hints of this before they got married. Instead he was silent, but sitting up very straight in his chair, leaning forward, willing her to speak.

Everyone is bisexual, Lyla said. I read that in
New York Magazine
.

Are you bisexual? the young analyst asked.

I told you already, she said. I am normal. Aren't you listening to me? she added in a tone that would have hurt his feelings if he didn't know that his feelings were part of the tool kit he would use to help his patient and were therefore welcome even when they were not welcome. Lyla Shulman told him her husband had always closed his eyes when she appeared nude before him. He told her, in the last days they had been living together, that he had discovered his true self, a self that could not be attracted to her. It wasn't personal. It was her gender. It's not my fault, she said. It is nobody's fault, said her analyst.

The young analyst heard his own heartbeat. The session was over at last. Her big secret, at least one of them, was his at last.

Lyla left his office spilling no tears. She left his office with a new thought. Maybe, she thought, I can, I will.

Dr. Berman was not pleased with his report. Sex, she said, you think that is all that this about.

No, he said, not at all. She interrupted him.

This young woman has locked herself up. Find her, release her, sex is just part of the story. For God's sake, she said, stop thinking about sex all the time. The young analyst blushed.

But sex was the subject of his next session with Lyla and the one after that and after that.

It had begun at a party at her best friend's house at a brownstone uptown. There was a small garden terrace with candle lights on little tables and chairs and she had gone outside to get away from the air conditioning which was too cold and there at one table her future husband was leaning back in his chair and his face seemed so perfect, like a Greek marble statue. It turned out that ancient Athens was just the right town for him. She should have paid more attention to the clue. Her analyst said that she did just that: pay attention.

One afternoon before her session, Lyla Shulman went to the museum. Perhaps she might pick up a man in the museum. She saw one just ahead of her in line to purchase a ticket. He was talking about something intently to someone just ahead of him. Lyla saw his face when he briefly turned around to glance at the revolving door. He was tall and his hair almost reached his shirt collar. Maybe he was a painter? Lyla thought about what she might say to him, to start the conversation. She considered tripping in front of him and apologizing. Then as he was leaving the counter he put his arm around the man he had spoken to, who was now waiting for him, and she saw that they were together. Had she known all along that her husband was just pretending an interest in her? Was this her choice? When her mother asked her, How is it going with the doctor? she answered, Fine thank you. When I next come to town, her mother said, I would like to meet with your doctor. Never, thought Lyla. Maybe, she said.

Good work, said Dr. Berman to the young analyst. But then she dismissed him twenty minutes early. He thought it would be rude to mention the time. He thought she might think he was greedy. He felt cheated. He was going to tell Dr. H. but he forgot about the twenty minutes she stole from him before his next appointment.

Dr. Berman left the hair salon with a red flush at the nape of her neck where the back of the sink had pressured her and the hair blower had been too hot. She stood on the street, the familiar street. She turned left toward Central Park. She stopped. Should she have turned right? She looked at the street signs but found no clue. She continued up the side street. It was a long block. It was a familiar block but should she have gone the other way? A fear came on her. It was the wrong way. She turned and retraced her steps. But when she got back to the corner she still wasn't sure. How was this possible? It was a passing confusion. Anyone could get turned around in a city where sirens wailed and buses wheezed and crowds pushed into markets and stores, and strollers, everywhere strollers crossing and recrossing streets. Dr. Berman stepped into the curb and hailed a taxi and gave the driver her address. It was only a ride of a few blocks but she was safe and as she stepped out of the cab and saw her own doorman on the steps of the building, she gave him a warm smile. He deserved the large gift she had placed in his envelope at Christmas time.

Lyla sat beside the window looking out at the building across the street. She saw a child running with something in his hand. In the next window she could see a woman who now bent down to the child. She could see neither of them anymore. She turned away from the window. She called a friend from school, now living in Boston, expecting her first child in a few months. They spoke of another friend who had gone to Egypt with her boyfriend. No one had heard anything for months. People just disappear, said Lyla. Come and visit me, said her friend. I can't, said Lyla, I'm too busy just now. Masterpiece Theatre began, a rerun of Inspector Lewis, who never failed to find the murderer despite his lack of a university education. Lyla called her mother.

Through the cloud, into the atmosphere, riddled with electronic fragments, invisible to the naked eye, one coast to another, speech was carried, instantly. Or was that not right? Perhaps the spoken words were transported without bodies, or form, but like people in
Star Trek
, beamed across the mountains, re-formed in the ears of the people they were meant for, as words, or in her case as a call for a bedtime story, another glass of water, a holding on to the daylight as long as possible.

Nothing is happening, said the young analyst to Dr. Berman.

Nothing you know about is happening, said Dr. Berman.

What should I say? asked the young analyst.

About what? asked Dr. Berman.

And then one morning Lyla Shulman said to her analyst, My mother thinks my sister is smarter than I am. And Lyla didn't weep. She said, She isn't. And then she said, She's nothing, nothing at all. The voice she used for this sentence startled her analyst. It was like an ice pick, sharp, made of unbreakable steel, a weapon to pierce and draw blood. Lyla had not mentioned her sister since their first meeting. Was she older or younger? He had forgotten. He could look at his original notes later or he could ask her right now. He made a decision. Tell me more about your sister, he said. And Lyla told him. She was older. She once pushed her in a closet and wouldn't open the door. That closet was a metaphor, the analyst knew. Soon enough he could say that to Lyla, but not yet. First he had to listen, as still as a small toad under a fern leaf, as the storm from the sea approached and the sky above the pines darkened and the cracks of lightning came closer.

And this worthless sister was a lawyer, a graduate of a top-ranked law school, who worked for a public interest firm that protected the interests of the homeless, the unfairly fired, those denied medical care, the illegals awaiting deportation. She had a husband who was a professor of archaeology and the author of a book whose title Lyla didn't remember. This professor had said to his mother-in-law that Lyla needed to grow up. That Lyla did remember. This sister, who had prevented Lyla from sitting on her mother's lap, from combing her mother's hair, from singing songs into her mother's ear, also had two little girls, one named Lyla. This sister, Lyla told her analyst, had very small breasts, the left smaller than the right.

This remark made the young analyst think about Lyla's breasts, which did not seem uneven or small.

And there it was, a thread to Lyla's soul. This thread would lead through the most ordinary of matters, tennis lessons, a school play, a fight with a girlfriend who had a crush on their teacher, and it would come to a hard hating place where jealousy and rage and the other demons of the soul would stamp and roar, not harmlessly, but with real fangs and claws that could cripple and destroy. And the young analyst wanted, wanted now with a ferocity he didn't know belonged to him, to bring Lyla to life, real life, with a life-sized sister and a way forward. This was everything; this was it, what his training was for, to add just one finite amount of good life to a person who might otherwise have missed their moment. It wasn't much, he knew. It wouldn't stop starvation or disease on the African continent. It wouldn't lift up the poor or save a single river from drying to dust, but it was his work, this little moment of freedom from the past, that he might be able to bring to Lyla Shulman, if he didn't make some clumsy mistake and she had the courage and the persistence to go on, and her mother kept paying for the treatment.

Lyla Shulman's mother was worried about Lyla. She had a whine in her voice. Lyla Shulman's mother recognized that whine. She thought her daughter had left it behind but there it was again, an aggrieved nostril wheeze. After the light was turned out and the dog had settled at the edge of the bed where he wasn't supposed to sleep but always did, Lyla Shulman's mother felt as if she were vanishing, despite being a size fourteen, and struggling not to go to sixteen. She thought of Lyla's birth, the pain she did not remember, although she had done it the Lamaze way, no medicine, no spinal tap, just nature moving her second and last baby down a canal, with some difficulty. The exhilaration, the pure unequaled exhilaration of the life created, the newness, the softness, the tiny hands, the red chapped lips, the sucking noises, and she was glad it was another girl. And now she felt defeated, defeated by enemies she could not see or hear. She did not know what to do about Lyla. There was in fact nothing to do about Lyla. And if Lyla was not content, then her mother—together with the billion small choices she had made over the years—was implicated in the fact of Lyla, less than happy, Lyla alone, Lyla divorced, Lyla adrift. Had she preferred Lyla's sister? Of course not. She sat up in bed and reached for the heavy novel on the night table. Her book club was reading
War and Peace
. Her husband was sound asleep.

Lyla would have to do it, whatever it was, herself: with the help of her young and very eager, maybe too eager, analyst.

Lyla Shulman told her analyst something very private. Something she would not say to a friend or a date or even her mother. She wanted to be famous. She didn't know for what or how to start. How jealous that would make her sister. There is nothing special in me, she said. It's safer to think that, said her analyst. I'd fail if I tried, she said. Try what? asked her analyst. She didn't know. Her analyst let five minutes pass with the weight of silence pressing down on his chest and on Lyla's too. And then the session was over. Dr. Frankenstein at least had wires that connected to his monster.

Dr. Berman sat on her bed and spilled the entire contents of her jewelry box out on the spread. She placed the pieces in order. There was a line of bracelets, three Tiffany's silver bangles and the gold one with a small diamond and a small ruby linked one to the other by a row of emerald stars, from her husband on their twentieth anniversary. It was engraved with their names on the inside. Sometimes she thought when she placed it on her wrist before one formal dinner or another she thought it looked more like a handcuff than a piece of valuable metal. There was the necklace Betty had given her: the one that Justine had surely stolen. She should return it but how could she without violating patient confidentiality. On the left side she placed necklaces of various kinds of precious stones and pearls that had been formed in the depths of coral reefs across the datelines and as far from Central Park West as the imagination can go. On the right there were earrings, not so small and delicate, not so discreet in their value. Above, set in the tufts of the velvet was a ring with a ruby stone the size of her thumbnail and a gold star with a chain that she had never worn. Why was it there? Once they had gone to a meeting in Israel. Was the chain a worthless souvenir, a giveaway from some pharmaceutical company, or had she wanted it, purchased it from some shop in the lobby of the King David Hotel? The real diamond necklace her husband had given her when they married was in a safe in a bank vault. The name of the bank was emblazoned on the cover of her checkbook so it would never be forgotten. The diamonds themselves, having been taken from a mine in Africa, carrying with them the memory of geologic ages and human bondage, saw no more light then they had back in the mine.