Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (43 page)

“What? The noise’ll keep me awake.”

“I’ll work quietly,” Don said and, in Gene’s memory, bowed his head to whisper penitently, “I’m really sorry.”

“I’m not paying for the extra time,” the gallery owner said.

“Of course not. It’s my fuck-up,” Don said. “Look, my kid is sick. I had to take care of him. I got distracted.”

The gallery owner turned to look at pale, meek, ill Gene. “If he’s sick why is he here?”

Gene immediately threw up on the book of Bosch paintings. That image was keenly alive in his mind, vivid and horrible, of an alien orange substance erupting out of him. He recognized chunks of the slice of pizza. It soaked into the book’s binding, oozing between the threads. His father yelled while the gallery owner shrieked that the book was ruined, the shelves were useless, his weekend a disaster. He bullied Don into carefully cleaning the Bosch book while insisting that Gene sit in the bathroom, alone, in case he had another accident. The gallery owner eventually threw Don and Gene out, refusing to allow Don to return and also refusing to pay him for the work.

That extended the horror of this incident. Carol wanted Don to demand payment, but he was too ashamed and furious. He wanted to forget it. Gene, it turned out, was seriously ill with scarlet fever. He ran a high temperature for two days. He lay in bed, listening in a delirium to bitter quarrels between Don and Carol. Why didn’t Don demand justice from the mean gallery owner? Carol demanded. They had it out late Sunday night while they thought Gene was asleep. The argument ended with Don slapping Carol. She walked out and didn’t return until the following evening. Gene, although he was very uncomfortable, was afraid to ask Don for any nursing while she was away and also afraid that his mother would never return. He suffered terribly and in isolation.

Getting to these facts and feelings took many sessions. How Gene perceived each character’s motivation and demeanor was veiled and massively defended. Only through specific questioning could I get Gene to see that the image of his father’s behavior he carried with him—uncaring and violent—didn’t match what seemed to be his father’s rather passive approach to his problems. Nor did the image he carried of his mother—caring and victimized—jibe with her passive and neglectful behavior. Odd though this may seem to a lay reader, we spent months—not exclusively, a little bit each session—reviewing each of his father’s and mother’s choices. Why, I asked, did Carol, who presumably had a somewhat flexible schedule, not leave work an hour or so early and help out Don? (She had on other occasions.) This was a question Gene had never asked himself. He didn’t want to now, either. Why didn’t his father get a sitter and take Gene home, rather than drag him to the job? Why did he use Gene as his alibi for his own mistake? And so on. I was a pest, crawling over every inch of the story, asking such things as, why did Don feed him pizza? (An odd food for a sick child, I commented.) I found fault with everything they did and was very critical of
both
his parents.

Gene was irritated—understandably—by this apparently absurd microscopic examination of their care. He believed I was wrong to attack his parents as parents: the incident proved gallery owners were wicked, that his father lost his strength when he tried to please people in the art world (this was not articulated, but clearly felt), that illness in general wasn’t tolerated by his father, and that the slap proved Don had a violent temper which Carol and Gene had to avoid provoking at all costs.

Throughout, the common theme we discovered for the whole family was passivity and fear of anger. Gene, it turned out, had felt feverish before going to school and worse during the day, but hadn’t told his parents or his teacher, afraid of annoying his teacher and interfering with his father’s or mother’s work. It was obvious to me Gene had been taught years earlier that he wasn’t free to interrupt adult plans. Certainly he had been sold on the notion that there was nothing wrong with his mother and father placing his needs second to the authority figures in their lives, blaming each other or Gene, rather than confronting the true obstacle: their own fear and resentment of authority. Gene’s cover-up of this neglect was greatest when it came to his mother. He was shocked when I commented that her walking out and not returning for twenty-four hours while Gene lay feverish wasn’t caring.

“She was scared of Dad,” he said. “He hit her.”

For the one hundredth time, it seemed to me, I had to ask, “Did he punch her?”

“No, I mean—”

“What did he do, exactly?”

“I told you. He slapped her across the face.”

“Was she hurt badly?”

“No—”

“Was she bleeding—?”

“I know what you’re saying. Okay. But she was scared. She didn’t know if he would stop. She told me she thought he was going to kill her.”

“Okay. Your mother thought he was ready to kill her. And so she leaves a sick seven-year-old boy alone with this monster?”

I wasn’t trying to impose any particular point of view on Gene. My example here may seem to be partisan, but in other conversations, I took his mother’s side. What I was really trying to do was to get Gene to stop blindly accepting his parents’ version of these events and discover what he felt. In some cases, perhaps I
was
trying to lead him to feelings he ought to have had—that’s a difficult charge to defend against. I was not interested in the objective truth. Many people who are upset by psychotherapy assume its sole concern is to make mothers and fathers into villains. If Gene had been a different sort of neurotic, one who was in love with an image of himself as victim, I might have defended his parents’ actions. The moralistic way of seeing life that pervades all religions and cultures makes some people ill, especially children. In the end, it doesn’t matter whether Don or Carol or Gene is right or wrong about each of these actions (although how a seven-year-old with a fever could be wrong about anything is beyond me), what matters is that Gene was deeply affected by incidents such as the one described and yet he was a stranger to his feelings. He was as cut off from what each moment meant to him while it was happening as if he had never been present.

He had entombed himself in his mother’s and father’s experience of these events. He hid himself within his mother’s opinion that Don was merely trying to be a good father and husband by taking Gene along on this important job rather than what Gene actually felt, that his father was passive and his mother neglectful. He convinced himself of Carol’s opinion that his father had been a poor workman for the shelf error and a bad businessman by offering to repair it, when, at the time, Gene actually felt his father was dishonest and weak. We discovered, in the therapy, that Gene had silently counted the tall and deep shelves while the gallery owner raged about them, and found that his father had built the right number. He couldn’t accept that his father agreed with a false criticism, so he covered up this unpleasant fact with his mother’s distortion that Don
had
made a mistake, but should have demanded payment anyway.

To shore up all these facades, the teenage Gene was also convinced of Don’s version, that his father was accurate in using Gene as an alibi; that Don made an error because he had to take care of a sick child. In fact, the seven-year-old Gene knew the job was done properly and felt that he had been a good little boy, trying hard not to bother his father. It may confuse or annoy some readers that Gene’s judgments and feelings contradict and differ from how they might have felt or acted. (By the way, Rafael Neruda saw these actions and behaviors differently than seven-year-old Gene.) But that’s the difference between reacting to someone in life and as a therapist. Even if one believes Gene could be wrong in his feelings (for example, that it was understandable for his illness to be treated so casually in relation to his parents’ work), even so, before the mature Gene could come to that conclusion, he had to know what he felt as a seven-year-old. How can someone change their opinion if they don’t know what it is? It’s up to Gene to decide—if he needs to—whether his mother or his father was the better parent or whether their actions were good or bad. That comes later. My job was to present the evidence for the only participant who had no lawyer. My seven-year-old client’s guilt or innocence, in the eyes of Catholicism or Communism or feminism or capitalism or est or the op-ed page of the
Times,
was irrelevant to me. My job was to bring that seven-year-old back to life, to introduce Gene to himself, and let him be his own juror.

Over the next year, we returned again and again to this story. It had many doors to the interior of Gene’s heart. The vomiting, for example, was an entrance to the basement where Gene hid his anger. It was a fierce struggle getting down there. Gene denied the vomiting had any significance for a long time, insisting it was a coincidence, although it was immediately preceded by Don blaming Gene’s illness for the shelf error.

Remember, we discovered that, in fact, there hadn’t been a mistake. Gene confirmed this for both of us by checking his memory with Don the same day he informed his father that he was in therapy. Much to Gene’s surprise (not to mine) Don didn’t object to his seeing me, although he was dismissive of its being useful. Once over that, Gene told his father that he remembered counting the tall and deep shelves and found them to be correct. Don, Gene reported, was delighted. “You remember that?” he said with a smile and they had a rare relaxed afternoon together. Don even showed Gene some recent photos he had taken. Being reminded of the shelf fiasco—given his current success as a photographer—was pleasant for Don. The bullying gallery owner was now fawning toward the newly successful photographer. Indeed, Don confided to Gene, a friend recently told Don that the gallery owner bragged to him that his shelves had been built and designed by the “brilliant Don Kenny.” Later that night, Don joked to Carol, with Gene present, that he should send the gallery owner a bill now. The adults laughed. This is, of course, the difference between adult and childhood experience. For them, it was a parody of their conflicts and neurosis; for Gene, it was the tragic original.

I knew Gene’s therapy was almost done the day he finally relived what
he
felt, not what his parents had told him to feel, at the moment he threw up on Bosch’s vision of hell. He had long since understood that he was desperate to believe his father’s lie. Given a choice between Don as a disingenuous opportunist, willing to blame his child rather than confront the gallery owner, or as a decent man who couldn’t juggle the dual responsibility of fatherhood and work, Gene much preferred the latter. Don’s cover-up was that Gene was ill, so Gene performed on cue. What had remained hidden from Gene was the deeper feeling, what in jargon we would call the introjection of Gene’s rage at the betrayal, the deep betrayal not only of himself by his father, but the much more terrible betrayal by Don of Gene’s cherished image of his father. It is fair to say, in psychological terms, that Gene would rather die than see his father as he really was, a man who would neglect his child, abandon his dignity, and lie, in order to get his work exhibited. And so the real Gene did die. But the rage at the murder was there and it erupted out of him, pieces of himself spilling on the art. Erupted, but in the safe way—with the marvelous self-defeating logic of neurosis—in a way that could punish his father, the gallery owner, and the alibiing Gene. From then on Gene was to despise himself, the child who was a willing accomplice to the death of Don the self-assured carpenter and his beloved apprentice son.

Gene wept the day he relived the incident as himself. In great silent drops, he mourned. First he said, “I knew he didn’t love me,” in a dreadful tone of conviction and the tears rolled. “I knew that he didn’t really care about anything but his pictures.”

“And you threw up on a picture,” I said, pedantically and with wrong-headed coolness, I’m sorry to report.

“Yeah …” There was a painful silence. “He didn’t care about himself. He didn’t even care about me.”

Of course, this was not a moment of common sense or realism. I know it is the melodramatic emotions therapy evokes from apparently simple events that makes it so easy to dismiss. In life, some would slap Gene and tell him to grow up. Others would hug him and say, “Of course, your father loves you. He was just confused and scared. We all make mistakes …” and so on. Unfortunately, that isn’t the way children experience life. It isn’t really the way we feel inside, either, in the softest and most hidden part of ourselves. People often confuse not having visited that interior with its not existing.

It took another year, our third, before Gene was able to accept both what it had meant to him as a child and what it meant in the real world. He was, at last, able to see his father as a whole man, not as a pair of extreme choices. And he was also able to see that a quarrel between his parents wasn’t somehow a by-product of his scarlet fever.

The last gain was useful. His parents split up during the third year of his therapy. It turned out that Don had been having an affair with one of the women painters in the Garage group for years. He broke it off and simultaneously left his wife. After several successful shows Don felt confident his career was launched successfully and he abruptly became unwilling to stay in a fractured marriage or continue a fractured love affair. Clearly, he was so driven by the outside world’s view of him that once Don was an acknowledged success he felt entitled to seek romantic happiness as well.

Gene understood the divorce’s cause and effect better than his parents. In fact, he had experienced their problems, covering up for them, years before they confronted them. (Actually, they never did confront the truth of their lives. Carol told herself the marriage was happy until Don became “swell-headed.” Don told himself that Carol had convinced him he was a worthless and unlovable man; thanks to his success he discovered that he was fine, and concluded she was the sick one.) It was this aspect of Gene’s neurosis, his willingness to be the fall guy for his parents’ conflicts, that I came to like. I never liked the Gene who pulled with his mother against his father’s ambitions, the Gene who vomited his rage on his father’s art. He was too much like the young Rafe I still did not approve of. But this Gene, the child who understood his parents’ need to pretend that their long dead marriage was still alive, that Gene I could feel sorry for. And I was proud of how patient and mature he was in dealing with the grandiose Don and his grief-stricken mother after the separation.