Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind (9 page)

With determination, Dr. Berman took her date book and on one of the back pages she began to catalogue the baubles, the valuable baubles laid out before her. She wanted to write this down so she would be able to tell if someone stole from her. She wanted to write this down the way the mayor of Amsterdam might want to add another brick to the dike. It tired her. But she persisted. When the cleaning lady knocked on the door wanting to do her job, Dr. Berman screamed out, Go away. And then she scooped up all the jewelry and placed it back in the large heavy box and carried the box into her bathroom, her beautiful beige marble bathroom, and she locked the door and sat on the floor, unwilling to come out, until late in the evening. What were they these jewels? She could throw them all away and nothing in her life would change.

She canceled her supervision appointment with the young analyst, the third week in a row that she had canceled.

Lyla's analyst was going away to a conference on “Object Relations in Early Childhood.” He didn't tell her that he told her he would be out of his office for the week of the fifteenth to twenty-second. Object relations is the technical term for the fact that human beings need someone to care for them and someone to care for and if they don't have an object relation they die, literally sometimes, if they are babies, almost always, in spirit. Object relations is a phrase invented to convince analysts that they were talking about something you could put under a microscope, like dividing amoebas or RNA loops or enzyme production in the female frog. It also served to dignify the real story: who loved me, who loves me, who loved me not, who loves me not. The old daisy petal pull of childhood which is after all the main and maybe only drama, unless you are a Yankees fan or a collector of rare stamps, both of which serve as ways to evade the real question: who loves me, who loves me not.

The young analyst's brother had said to him, What's the matter with you analysts? You make the Politburo look like a town meeting in Akron, Ohio.

Conflict can be a sign of vitality, the young analyst had answered. Agreement is the sign of a fascist organization.

And this penis envy stuff, said his brother. For God's sake, you can't believe that.

The young analyst shrugged. He'd read all the articles. He knew all about Freud and Anna O. and the unfortunate judgments made along the way.

My brother is not my friend, he said to Dr. H. just before his session ended.

Very unusual, said his analyst.

There had been major wars inside psychoanalytic institutes. The young analyst knew all about them. There was Freud and Jung who parted company over questions of a religious sort. If you looked at their quarrel from a great enough distance you would see two giant behemoths with tusks at the ready pawing at the ground, ready to fight for dominance of the wild lands that reached north and southwest and east as far as the eye could see. There was Ferenczi, the Hungarian who wanted to put his patients on his lap when Freud wanted them untouched on the couch. Then there was Melanie Klein and Anna and the question of just how murderous was the infant mind. While sleeping peacefully in its basinet was the baby in fact chopping up parts of parents and sending death signals to invisible predators? Did children wish to devour their mothers and if so should you reveal that fact to them or not? That disagreement almost undid the London institute and made the New York ones tremble.

No one threw anything at Donald Winnicott when he came to America expressing a Kleinian idea or two but they did make him miserable with their derision and the night after his lecture he died of a heart attack. These New York psychoanalysts played for real. They didn't have disagreements on the nature of the human mind, they had territories to defend, borders that could not be crossed without proper passports. They played for keeps. And keeps was a trench in which many bodies were buried. Psychoanalysis was a science indulging in mayhem. Like priests fornicating in the parish house, this was to be expected. Freud believed he was a scientist. He had no interest in becoming a rabbi leading his followers into paradise with enchanting song and dance. And he was not a peaceful man, serene in his convictions. He thrived on the rivalry and the combat among his followers. He had favorites and non-favorites and the intrigues were political, tinged with sexual flirtations, and always mattered. After all the stakes were high. Was there a dangerous core of the human mind that expressed itself in dreams and went about disguised as politics or art or business the rest of the time, or wasn't there?

The young analyst had many questions about this or that part of the theory or that but he did believe unconditionally that the underground rivers of the unconscious existed in real time and crocodiles lined their banks.

The conference was in New Hampshire but the young analyst did not tell Lyla where he was going or why. Perhaps her guesses would open a path, would let him see her connection to him. Maybe she won't really care, he said to his own analyst.

Why would you think that? Dr. H. asked him.

The conference was only a four-day matter but the young analyst took an extra two days to visit his old roommate in Boston and to attend a Red Sox–Yankees game, which was lost by New York in the final inning, leaving a disgruntled young analyst with an urge for pot, a memory of a smell that filled his dorm room, carrying with it both defiance and peace.

And during this vacation, this brief suspension of her treatment, Lyla wilted. Like a plant without water she seemed to contract. She had bad dreams that woke her at night. She called her mother even more often and she thought more seriously about going home, although it wasn't actually her old home. I may visit, she said to her mother, who said, Yes, come, come as soon as you can. Lyla went online to look for airfares and direct flights. But she made no reservations.

When the following Monday her sessions resumed she arrived at the office looking unkempt, a kind of unemployed look, a rejected wife look, a who-cares-if-my-skirt-is-on-backwards look. Her analyst wondered if she had showered in all the time he had been away.

She had nothing to say to him. She stared at the ceiling as if a message from God had appeared in the faded yellow paint. Are you upset at our missed sessions? said the analyst after a very long time. No, said Lyla. I don't need you. I don't even like you. I avoid men with weak chins like yours. I am not going to keep on seeing you. I'm through.

Because I went away for a week? he asked. You're angry, he observed.

And Lyla did not weep. She said, I hate you. She said it coldly. She said it like a knife was placed between her teeth. She said it for eternity, for all of time. Her analyst waited.

What are you thinking? he finally said.

Nothing, she said, but in her rose a new unexpected feeling. As if she weren't a young woman whose husband had just left her for—for a man—but as if she were a terrible beast of the darkest forest, with a bloodlust for all living creatures, a desire to gnaw and smash and violate and trample and tear apart and spill to the ground the tissue and the muscle of other creatures, as if nothing but her great roar of rage existed and she would devour everything in front of her, wearing only her Nike sneakers, her red sweater, and the Banana Republic skirt she had on backwards.

She became very pale. She thought she might faint. I guess I'm not made of sugar and spice, she said.

I admit to a few puppy dog tails myself, said her analyst.

That night the analyst said to his wife, Do I have a weak chin?

I think you're perfect, she said to him, although of course she didn't.

Then in the real world something happened.

There was a black mole on Lyla's inner thigh. She ignored it. Two months later she had a dream about a mountain that kept sliding toward her. She mentioned to the young analyst that this mole on her thigh looked like a tiny mountain. He suggested she go to the dermatologist. There was a wait in a small room. There was a quick cut. She put Neosporin on the little wound. There was Lyla's belief that all would be well. She was young. Everything lay ahead of her. Everyone has moles, thought Lyla. I will be all right, thought Lyla.

But the doctor called and she wasn't all right. Melanoma, said the doctor. Are you sure? said Lyla. He was sure.

How does that make you feel? asked her analyst.

That is a really stupid question, she said.

It was, he agreed, clumsy and stupid. Why had he asked it?

Because he was nervous. Because he was scared for her but didn't want to say so. Because he always believed that the sky could fall down on your head at any moment. Because despite being a doctor, he was afraid of the void, the pain that could come before the void, and sickness of cells, nerves, sinews, brain stems, that kind of sickness, he was afraid of that too.

Chemo? asked Dr. Berman in a very girlish voice. She too was afraid of death. You can live a long time these days, she added.

I know, said her supervisee.

Patients get sick and die. You need to get used to it. You're not Saint Teresa and you have no weapons to rescue the physical body. She said that coldly. As if he were a delinquent child.

The polish on her fingernails was fire engine red and chipped. Her hands repulsed him slightly. The young analyst repeated the conversation in his own session the next day.

Later that evening Dr. H. wondered if Dr. Berman was sick herself. How old was she exactly?

Lyla Shulman called her ex-husband. Do you want to meet me for a drink? he asked. No, she said.

She said to her analyst that she had dreamt about her mother. In the dream she saw her as a shark swimming in a turquoise pool, circling and circling waiting for the menstrual blood of her daughter to draw her close for the final kill. This seemed something of an exaggeration. All her mother had actually done was ask her daughter to come home, so she could provide refuge for her child at a difficult moment in her life. To paint so dark a view of her mother was surprising, at least to Lyla.

The analyst said: It's your dream.

Lyla said, You probably made me dream it. The young analyst considered what a wonderful thing it would be if he could only put dreams into his patient's heads. It would speed things up. It would give him power, and he was not one to shun a little power. Lyla said, If you met my mother, you might like her.

Why? asked the analyst. And Lyla could not find one single reason. They had nothing in common. The analyst however heard in her remark the thunderous footsteps of old rivalries accompanying the insulted, the wounded, and the powerless into old age. Lyla Shulman knew, even if she did not admit it to her analyst, that there was in that description of the shark in the swimming pool, truth. The young analyst sneezed. He may have been allergic to the discontents of civilization.

She won't die, said the young analyst. Probably not, said Dr. Berman. But I suggest you inform the institute that you will need another patient to meet the supervision requirement anyway. A backup? asked the young analyst. Yes, said Dr. Berman. This one is going home to her mother.

One beautiful spring night when the dogs were out in the park with their owners and there was a concert on the Great Meadow so crowds of people with blankets and picnics carried in bags and baskets were moving along the paths, Dr. Z. said to Dr. H. as they pushed their way toward the East Side where their meeting was about to begin, In my dream last night I had a pack of cigarettes in my pocket and I slowly took one out and lit it and I inhaled.

Dr. H. said, And then?

Dr. Z. said, I woke up.

Dr. H. said, I remember cigarettes.

 

 

f
ive

How much did the child know and when did she know it? Her mother would worry about that and even discussed it with her therapist, more than once. You think, Dr. Berman had said, you behaved selfishly, a remark that was intended to open a new road of inquiry but instead resulted in two missed sessions. The mother's sister was a patient of Dr. Z.'s, and so when certain nervous symptoms appeared in Portia's mother that had no physiological basis, Dr. Z. had recommended that she see Dr. Berman.

The child, Portia, had an imaginary family named Smullian. The name was chosen because it sounded like
million
and
billion
and
smudge
. A smudge was a black mark across a page, a smudge was dirt on your dress, a smudge made something perfect imperfect and Smullian was the right name for this family—a mother and a father and a boy child and a dog. The imaginary dog was always hungry and the others never remembered to fill his bowl. The father was a lumberjack in the forests way up north and they lived in a cabin in the woods. The mother was in the kitchen baking bread day after day. Sometimes she went for walks with the boy and the dog and they picked yellow flowers and filled vases with golden petals that floated into the child's hair. The father's ax was always within arm's reach even when he was watching television and he took it into the shower with him. He said that an ax was a dangerous tool and should never be left unguarded.

Yes, Portia was a daydreamer. It was not bad to be a daydreamer. Her mother had said you could grow up to be a screenwriter or a test pilot. Her father was a rising financial officer of a prominent real estate firm. Her mother was the CEO of an organization that raised money for medical supplies for distant African nations. Portia could find those nations on a map; recite their names in alphabetical order. Portia knew that many children were not able to get the vaccinations her doctor had given her. She understood how fortunate she was in the accidental geography of her birth.

The Smullians lived in a cottage in the woods. Portia and her parents lived in an apartment on West Seventy-second that had once been half of the parlor floor of a robber baron's winter home.

Portia had outgrown her princess dresses. They lay crumpled in a box in the back of her closet, the tulle, the rhinestones, the petticoats, the lace straps, ignored. She was allowed one half hour of video games a day and another half hour of Nickelodeon. She sometimes watched
The Wizard of Oz
or an old Lassie movie with her babysitter who picked her up at school, who stayed when her parents went out in the evening, who belonged to a Hindu temple in Queens where some weekends she would take Portia to be blessed by the large person who sat on a cushion in bright robes and touched Portia's head with his brown hand.

She had piano lessons on Thursday afternoons and an art class at the Museum of Modern Art on Saturday mornings and she had gymnastics on Wednesday after school and on Tuesday evenings the tutor came to prepare her for the tests for a different school, tests that she would soon be taking. Also she never had diarrhea, except once after dinner at a Thai restaurant near her father's office. She was the only one of her classmates who knew that diarrhea could kill you. Her life was full, rich with events, free from fear of kidnapping, bombing, earthquake, flood, avalanche, or volcanic eruption.

The Smullians however were not so lucky. There were wild beasts in their forest. The little boy had been bitten by a snake and would have died had his mother not sucked the snake's venom from his foot. A vicious wolf had leapt at his father's face and a thick red scar ran from the corner of his left eye down to his jaw.

The Smullian mother had bad dreams. Sometimes she woke at night and her hands were shaking. Portia would tell her it was just a dream, don't be worried, but the Smullian mother could not be comforted and she would sit by the window of their cabin and wait for dawn. She was afraid that if she fell back asleep she would have another dream, perhaps worse than the first.

The Smullian boy wet his bed which made his father very angry and once he slapped him in the face so hard that the child hid from his father and would not let himself be kissed, not ever again, not by that father.

Portia overheard her babysitter telling her friend Lola's babysitter that Portia's mother was so beautiful she might have been a movie star. Not that one, she had added, tipping her head toward where Portia stood a distance away, not far enough away.

The Smullian mother developed a rash, ugly red hives appeared on her face and neck. The boy brought his mother a plant he had found under an oak tree. She rubbed the leaves on her face in hopes of a cure but the leaves only irritated the sores and more appeared.

Portia's mother went on a trip to Uganda with some benefactors on her board. She was gone three weeks.

During those three weeks Portia's mother experienced the vertigo of those who travel extensively around the globe. When she looked down from her airplane height she saw that her husband was small and insignificant and that the turning planet would soon toss them all into oblivion and this made her sad, especially sad for Portia who would also age and disappear. On the fifth day of the trip she accepted the key pressed into her hand by a member of her board who supported jazz concerts as well as a small experimental theater and had paid for an entire new gymnasium for his old and not financially struggling prep school in Massachusetts.

Was it love or curiosity? It was love she believed. Maybe it was just sexual pleasure. Her body responded to these new limbs as if doors had flung open, trumpets had played, and all through the following long days, discussions of budgets, meetings with project managers, approving or disapproving of fund-raising mailings, she could conjure up sensations that made her workday pass quickly and her dinners at home with her husband and Portia seem like long cruises with unpromising strangers. All this she told Dr. Berman.

Dr. Berman believed in Eros, in the goodness of libido. She considered her patient's new affair a sign of awakening, a start down a potentially dangerous path, but overall a sign of life, a stretching upwards. She had no disapproving words. She wasn't a priest. This was itself a kind of permission. Her patient's nervous stomach behaved better.

Portia was born red all over with a crust of something in her eyes. She was perfect and both parents felt instant love and gratitude so vast it could never be repaid.

Which is why you might have thought that Portia's mother would not have accepted that key. It was a dangerous act. She was risking all and that itself may have explained the way she tightly held the key in the palm of her hand and carefully put it in the inner pocket of her bag next to her passport home.

The Smullian mother was carried off to the nearest hospital hours away on a rough road in the back of the family truck. The Smullian father kept telling the Smullian boy not to worry, the doctors would save his mother. The Smullian boy could not imagine the death of his mother. He was brave and said nothing but he prayed nevertheless to the gods, to the stars, to the spirits of the earth and the sky. He promised he would never harm any creature on earth if his mother was saved. And in the hospital he waited in the emergency room and told no one he was hungry or thirsty and at last fell asleep on a couch. And he did not dream. His head was empty.

Portia noticed that the Smullian cabin had a water stain on the wall behind the parents' bed. There must be a leak she thought, when wild storms pass the rainwater must pound against the wall and seep into the cracks. It rained in the forest every night for hours and Portia could hear the sound of water running down a drain. She could see the dirt darkening around the tree stump at the corner of the yard and she heard the beating of pine needles dashing against each other, against the branches swaying with currents. The Smullian father told the boy not to worry. They were safe in the cabin. Portia worried anyway. She saw jagged flashes of lightning as the crashing thunder came closer and closer and then receded over the mountains.

The Smullian mother returned from the hospital. Her rash was much better. It had left her face and there were only a few marks on her forearms. She threw her arms around the boy and she pressed her body into her husband's and she said she would make chocolate cupcakes. Portia watched as the boy licked the bowl. But in the forest a jackal let out a scream, a hunger scream, and his prey tried to hide behind a rock, but the jackal was fast, his nails clicked on the stone as he jumped.

Portia's mother had a good trip. It had been long but worthwhile. She brought Portia a doll from a market near the AIDS clinic she was visiting. The doll had glass beads around her neck and a red dress. On her feet she wore tiny stitched sandals. Portia was not very interested in dolls but she was glad her mother had come back. It was expected that she would return but Portia had not entirely expected it.

What a beautiful doll, said her nanny. I'll give it to you, said Portia. Oh no, said the nanny, your mother brought her for you. Portia said nothing. Nobody can make you love something you don't love. Even a child knows that.

August, Portia and her mother and father went for a vacation on Cape Cod. Portia and her parents rented a cottage furnished with wicker chairs and Hopper reproductions and little lighthouses rested on bookshelves. Portia's mother spent many hours of the day on her cell phone talking with her office. Portia's father took picnic baskets to the lake and Portia went into the water. She would not put her head under the water. She would not lift her feet from the stony bottom. Somewhere there was a snapping turtle in the lake and Portia watched for him, prepared for retreat to the shore if he approached.

One day the incoming fog slowly crossed the lake. There was no exact moment when the temperature dropped but in slow motion the gray seeped up the blue and the white clouds disappeared and deeper, wider dark ones spread over the nearby moored sailboats, over the weathered docks, over the children building a fortress, but then it was there, a drop in temperature, a quick folding of umbrellas, a packing away of the just unpacked sandwiches, the beach ball fetched quickly from the bushes.

Portia was there with her father and her father's colleague whose family had rented a nearby cottage and the two men had been talking about a third who had broken a promise. And then Portia's father said, I find vacations boring. His friend said, The weather's changed, let's go back to the cottage and watch the Yankees game. Portia said, I want to stay here. No, said her father. No one stays on the beach in the rain. I like rain, said Portia. I don't, said her father.

There were rules of course that should be obeyed. There were promises that ought to be kept. Portia's mother was aware of her obligations to her husband, to her daughter, to her own honor. She had never been a religious sort of person. But the Ten Commandments had long ago settled into her neurons and her blazing synapses and could not be easily erased. She was a decent person, considerate of those who worked for her, smiled at the doormen in her apartment building, caring about her friends, and above all proud of her family. Now there was this new man and this excitement in her body that would not go away, that made her nights sleepless, that filled her with dread just as it delivered shivers of joy, joy that she had almost forgotten was possible. However, as it was the world over, since
Homo sapiens
had straightened their shoulders and shortened their jaws and lived in groups that gathered and hunted and increased the tribe, some order had to be maintained.

Portia's mother did not believe in sin but she did believe in respect, in nursing the flame of love for one's mate even when that flame was flickering and threatening to leave her in the dark. But she simply couldn't stop, stop the meetings in hotel rooms at the end of afternoons, at lunches in out-of-the-way Italian restaurants that were no longer fashionable if they had ever been.

Portia's mother stayed later and later at the office. Portia's father spent more time at the gym and Portia herself spent more time with the Smullians. The boy Smullian hid his father's ax in the forest behind a large mossy rock. The father Smullian said that the forest was becoming home to thieves and he wanted to move them all into town. The mother Smullian went looking for the ax and she found it. After that the ax was kept on a high shelf in the closet.

Portia's father taught her how to play chess. In the evenings sometimes he would sit with her and explain the moves, white and black. Portia would watch his hands, fingers drumming on the arm of his chair with his eyes focused on the board and at those times she wanted for nothing. Then he would turn on the evening news and sink into the couch. Portia saw that his eyes often closed as he watched. Sleep was suddenly elusive. He tried pills. They made him groggy. They stopped working after one or two nights. He tried hot milk and late night movies.

Portia's mother had not meant for this to happen. There is no question that she was as shocked as anyone else that a stranger had slipped into the small space that she had allowed between her and her husband. It's just a passing phase, her best friend told her. Ignore the signals your hormones are sending. They will go away in time. I don't want them to go away, said Portia's mother, who then was certain she would lose her lover if she didn't admit, acknowledge to the entire world what was the new truth of her life. She was not cruel. There was no pleasure in this. She wept for her husband and the way he turned his head to the wall and refused to look at her when she explained it to him, an accident, a matter of fate, of true love. Like a surgeon who cuts to heal, she told him the truth.

And he moved out and took Portia and her nanny with him. The Smullians came too.

Two nights a week Portia returned to her mother's apartment and her old bed and her old room. Her mother read to her at night. The man who was not her father told her how lovely she looked and he bought her a two-wheeled bicycle and promised to teach her how to ride it, and he played board games with her before bedtime. She called him Mark, but she never said his name out loud when she was at her father's house.