Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (50 page)

“Every night?”

It turned out that Pete came into their bedroom perhaps twice a week. Gene said he lived in dread of Peter discovering them making love. Dread was his word.

“Doesn’t your door lock?” I asked.

“Yeah …” Gene didn’t seem to think that made much difference. “But he would hear,” Gene finally said when I pressed him on this point.

“Do you think Pete knows that you and Cathy have sex?” I asked.

The question flabbergasted him. His mouth opened. He gestured to my shelves as if someone were standing behind me, also amazed. “I … I…” He made some sort of noise. “I don’t think so. It never occurred to me—I mean, not while I was a child.”

“What never occurred to you?”

“That my parents … You know, that they …” He seemed to blush. Or, at least, to be embarrassed.

“You
walked in on your parents making love, Gene. Or at least, you walked in on your father kissing your mother’s breasts.”

“I did?” he said, astounded. His voice was full of wonder. His eyes trailed up to my ceiling, mouth open. “I did,” he confirmed it. He looked at me suddenly, intent. “How did you know?”

“You told me.” I waved a hand. “It’s no trick, Gene. I reviewed my notes on our sessions. You told me years ago that in the old loft—remember there was no lock on your parents’ door … ?”

“Yeah, it was a sliding door.”

“Right. You had a bad dream, about a spider, and you went into your parents’ room. It was very dark, but there was a shaft of light from the street lamps that fell across your parents’ bed.”

“Right,” he was nodding, eyes unfocused, looking into the past. “Right. And I thought Dad was biting Mom.”

“Do you remember what happened?”

“She saw me.”

“That’s what you told me.

“She saw me and I left.”

“Is that all you remember?”

“Dad yelled at me?” he guessed.

I said nothing.

“That’s wrong?” Gene asked plaintively.

[Of course there is no right or wrong. His current memory didn’t jibe with what he told me before, but that didn’t mean he was now wrong in the psychological sense. The memory is just as important in
how
it is wrongly remembered. For us, facts are not the truth—that’s why we often find the law to be frustrating and unjust.]

“Gene, I’ve already run ten minutes past the hour and this is complicated, so—”

Gene got to his feet quickly, mumbling while I explained, “Oh, okay, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” I said sharply.

He froze and stared at me. His thick eyebrows lifted, quizzical.

“I’m
sorry,” I said. “I’m frustrated I don’t have more time. Gene, that’s going to be a problem if you want to keep seeing me. My schedule is loaded and inflexible. In fact I only have my lunch hours free and I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to skip lunch that often. I really can’t see you more than two times a week. I hope that’s not too little.”

“Yeah, I understand. It’s the kids who really need help. You can’t waste time listening to me whine.”

“Gene, to be accurate, you haven’t whined until now.”

“Oh, I was just kidding.”

“It sounded to me like a disguised complaint. It isn’t that I think the children need me more, or that I value you less, it’s just that I’ve promised my time to them already and I’m not a superman. I can’t go without eating or without a break more than twice a week.”

[The above is a violation of barriers. I was asking Gene to see me as an ordinary human being, which—according to the transference theory—is impossible and, more to the point, undesirable. I did it deliberately. I hadn’t lost my temper. I had decided if I was going to work with him, a new approach was called for. I believed Gene was stuck, or rather, in love with being a boy, staying safe in his timidity and lack of demands. To once again accept a role as his substitute parent would be counterproductive, I believed, no matter how theoretically correct.]

“I’m sorry,” Gene said.

“No, you’re not,” I said mildly. That took him aback. “How about Friday, same time?” Gene nodded slowly, still in shock at my blunt tone. “Do you know your way out?” He rose, groaning, as if his muscles were sore. By now the van from the South Bronx with my group of five foster care teenagers should have arrived. The courts had removed these adolescents from their homes into an almost equally bad system. They had horrendous problems: they were severely abused by their families and surrogates, their schools were inadequate and they lived in dangerous neighborhoods, surrounded by crack addicts. Their economic and emotional prospects were virtually terminal. Gene was right. I did disdain his middle-class complaints to some extent. And yet I understood that emotions don’t exist in a relative universe: Gene’s pain from the splinters in his toes might as well be shafts of steel in his heart. Pain is all-encompassing to us. No one can be proven to be better off than others; they can only feel better off. Pointing out to Gene that his life was comparatively easy would merely add guilt to his woes—that is religion’s failure. And yet indulging his childishness would keep him forever seeing only the imagined monsters in the shadows and not the joyful daylight everywhere else—that is traditional therapy’s failure.

Gene left. The receptionist buzzed me to say my group of teenagers were waiting in the Group A room. I opened my desk drawer and turned off the hidden tape recorder, ejecting an audio record of the session. I wrote Gene Kenny on the strip of paper attached to the cassette’s spine with the date and the number “one,” then put it into my briefcase for reviewing later during my late afternoon session on the health club’s treadmill.

“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” I said to myself before going to my real work.

C
HAPTER
S
IX
Mighty Opposites

T
HREE MONTHS LATER
I
WAS ARGUING WITH MY OLD CHILDHOOD FRIEND
Joseph Stein about dreams. We were double-dating. I brought Diane. Our relationship became so deep and satisfying since our summer trip that, as winter approached, we found ourselves wondering why we shouldn’t marry or at least move in together. Joseph brought his steady boyfriend, a young jazz musician named Harlan Daze, a stage alias. After we saw a movie in the Village, had pizza nearby at John’s, we walked the ten blocks to Joseph’s garden apartment for coffee.

In 1982, Joseph and I had renewed our friendship thanks to television. (We were chosen by a talk show host to represent opposing sides of an argument raised in my book,
The Soft-Headed Animal.
I had criticized the use of Ritalin and neuroleptic drugs on children; Joseph was there to explain their effects and disagree with me. To the host’s dismay, he agreed that, in practice, they were overprescribed.) As a neurobiologist engaged in basic research into the human brain—this is old news to anyone with a superficial interest in science—Joseph, in addition to his chair at Columbia, was consultant to a major pharmaceutical firm on the development of neuroleptic drugs. His theoretical breakthroughs led to practical experimentation and yielded tangible results. Prozac, a very specific serotonin enhancer reputed to have milder side effects than drugs then in use, had debuted earlier in the year. It rapidly became the most widely prescribed antidepressant in the United States. Joseph was far from being the only person responsible for Prozac’s development but he was acknowledged as a necessary component of its creation.

“Dreams are nonsense,” Joseph said, not for the first time that evening or in the second incarnation of our friendship for that matter. We disagreed so completely on the causes of human behavior that we had a pact to avoid the subject as much as possible. Unfortunately, it was a treaty that Joseph was frequently guilty of violating.

Harlan lifted a cup of espresso off an elegant Chinese lacquer tray and handed it to me. Harlan would not have seemed gay to someone with a stereotyped notion of homosexuals—specifically, Joseph’s mother. She was widowed now and still lived in Washington Heights, one of the many reasons Joseph, although his lab and teaching duties were at Columbia, lived way downtown, putting a distance of one hundred and seventy blocks between them. Joseph told me he lived in terror of accidentally running into his mother while with a boyfriend. Harlan, ten years Joseph’s junior, hardly seemed, with long blond hair tied in a pony-tail, black jeans torn at the knees and a white T-shirt, like a colleague or a graduate student. Still, Joseph’s mother would never have suspected him of being gay. His tall lean frame was always hunched; he moved like a prowling panther. A cigarette (that Joseph complained loudly of) seemed to hang perpetually from his lips, and his voice was as deep and rarely used as a cowboy’s. I liked him for at least two reasons. First, he made Joseph happy. And second, I enjoyed that Harlan often pricked my old friend’s arrogance and pomposity, both of which were rapidly inflating that year thanks to his success. “Maybe
your
dreams are nonsense,” Harlan said in a mumble and smiled at Diane.

She had been uncomfortable so far that evening, silent before the movie and all through dinner afterwards. I assumed this was because the previous three times she had met Joseph, she didn’t like him. She said she felt she didn’t exist for him. “I don’t mean sexually,” she added. “I mean he acts like I’m not there at all.” I understood. To Joseph, all women were his suffocating, perpetually cleaning and cooking mother, especially a strong-willed Jewish woman like Diane. He was as sexist as Pat Buchanan, quite different from the cliché of the homosexual who is especially sympathetic and understanding of the plight of women. I wondered how he treated his women graduate students and associates; or how many he took on, for that matter. And I also contemplated the irony of a mother whose grip was so tight on a famous scientist’s life that he chose lovers who would be invisible to her.

“You’ve read Allan Hobson’s paper?” Joseph said to me, ignoring Harlan.

I nodded. “It’s sophistry.”

“Did you study the data?” Joseph emptied his cup of espresso in a single gulp. He dismissed me with a wave of his hand. “I bet you skipped the numbers, right? Psychiatrists,” Joseph added, addressing this comment to Diane, much to my and her surprise. “They’re pseudoscientists. I bet he didn’t even understand Hobson’s argument.” Diane stared at him blankly. “Hello?” Joseph said to her.

“I’m a psychiatrist and I—” she began. Diane is a short, thin energetic woman, her black curly hair as fiercely complicated and indomitable as her personality. She has a pert nose, pale skin covered with freckles and bright brown eyes that are unfortunately dulled somewhat by eyeglasses. (She refuses to wear contacts.) Her alert, friendly manner and smallness lend her an uncanny youthfulness—at thirty-four she was still carded by bartenders—and also a benign quality to her anger. Her tone was furious and irritated, but I could see Joseph was unaware of danger. I knew she was about to fire off an angry and much deserved reproach that I also knew Joseph was ill equipped to handle without firing back, so I interrupted. In a war between Diane and Joseph surely I would be the casualty.

“All Hobson’s data shows is
how
dreams are created by the brain,” I said over Diane.

“Oh you missed the point! I knew it!” Joseph leaned forward and dropped his cup and saucer before they were level with his oak coffee table. The cup clattered and slid off, tipping over.

“Jesus,” Harlan mumbled. He righted the cup and waved a scolding finger at Joseph. “And this is the good china.”

“No I didn’t,” I answered and heard anger in my voice. “Because science can identify how we mechanically produce dreams doesn’t speak to whether they are meaningful or generated by emotional conflict. It’s a false argument.”

“Oh, I see.” Joseph appeared quite amused. “So you’re telling me that Prozac’s success doesn’t prove we’ve identified what causes depression.”

This was his real point in fussing over the meaning of dreams. Prozac had received final approval from the FDA only four months before, and Joseph was very proud of the remarkable hoopla with which it had been covered by the general press. I had said nothing to him about it, except for routine congratulations. Apparently he felt he had decisively proved me wrong in our long-standing argument over whether drugs or talking therapy were more effective and wanted to hear me cry uncle.

I considered letting his breach of our treaty pass, but I couldn’t. “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m telling you. No amount of successful drug manipulation of mood proves that depression or dreams or anything else isn’t generated by conflict and feeling. Masking symptoms isn’t the same as a cure.”

“I don’t believe this.” Joseph slapped both hands on his thighs and twisted away from me. Again he addressed Diane. “He actually said it. I can’t believe it.”

Diane crossed her legs, adopting an atypical supercilious attitude that, frankly, she couldn’t quite pull off. “What can’t you believe? Please tell us. I’m dying to know,” she said and smirked at him.

Joseph ignored her sarcasm. He stood up. “Let’s drop it,” he said and then immediately continued, “You won’t admit that we’ve done it. We’ve cured depression, we’ve cured anxiety, fuck—we’ve cured neurosis! We’ve proven that it has nothing to do with whether Mama wiped your ass for you or made you do it yourself. It’s just a goddamn chemical imbalance. How can you, a trained scientist, argue that depression is caused by anything but a bad brain recipe if we can wipe it out with a pill?”

“I can argue it very easily,” I said calmly. My momentary anger had passed.

“How!” Joseph shrieked at me, not very differently from when we were ten years old.

“Let’s drop it, Joseph.”

“Oh, you want to drop it. Because you’re losing.”

“Cool it,” Harlan said and lit a cigarette.

“Stop smoking,” Joseph snapped.

“You wanted to drop it a moment ago,” I said.

“I don’t want to drop it.” Joseph pleaded to the others. “Everybody take note. I don’t want to drop it.”