Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (97 page)

Someone called to us. “In a minute,” Julie said. “When did I what? Decide? Always.”

“Always? You said you were over it.”

“You knew I was full of shit when I told you I didn’t love you. You see my kids? Don’t I have great kids?” I nodded. “I have everything but you. And I’m greedy. Rafe, I’m forty-five. I’ve already had my face done. My marriage was …” She reached for me, shyly, fingers lighting on the sleeve of my blue summer suit. “Anyway, why? I heard you don’t—I mean … Are you with someone?”

“You’re upset,” I said.

“Of course I’m upset. My mother’s dead. But I’ve been thinking about it for a … Since I knew my marriage was …” She tugged at my sleeve and looked down.

“When did you break up?”

“In reality a long time ago. You know me. It took four years to get up the nerve to tell him. I did it last January. I was chicken. Hurting the kids, and all that garbage. It’s not garbage, but you know what I mean. It was an okay marriage … But I don’t want okay.” She watched me for a reaction and answered what she thought she saw in my face. “I didn’t just think of this!” Julie looked away at someone whose approach I hadn’t heard. She said, “Sit with them in the car. Rafe and I need a moment.” She turned to me and rubbed at the short cropped hairs above her temple. “What do you think this is? ‘Oh gee whiz, I’ll be in New York, so I’ll come on to Rafe?’”

“You have to give me some time, Julie. I’m in the middle of something important … Important work—”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with your work. I’m sorry. I’ve gotten rude in my old age. You can do your work. I don’t care. I’ll move to New York or wherever you want. I can fail to get my movies made in Indiana just as well as in Hollywood.”

I felt ashamed and nervous. Had I lost control with Halley? The thought of never seeing her smooth white breasts again, of never hearing her naughty girl’s voice asking, “Do you love me?” seemed impossible. And to join Julie in middle age, growing old with a woman whose prime I had missed, seemed grotesque.

“Is it them?” Julie gestured contemptuously to the graves. “They don’t care anymore.” She leaned forward, mouth set angrily, and whispered, “They’re dead.”

“Not to me,” I said and thought it was a lie.

Julie nodded to herself and insisted, “They really got to you.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I’m sorry!” she said louder, topping me. To
get
away, she walked over Bernie’s grave.

I stayed for only a short time at my uncle’s old house, merely a polite appearance of sitting shiva, instead of the all-night visit I had intended. I expected Julie to be hurt or angry. If so, she didn’t show it. She squeezed me tight, kissed me on both cheeks, on my lips, and finally on the tip of my nose. She said, “Call me.”

I turned to leave. She resumed a conversation with Jerry about the Rabinowitz plot becoming crowded. I reached the double-height foyer, with its long sweeping staircase, and paused on the spot where Julie had tried to defend me from my angry mother the night I found the
Afikomen.
I heard Julie say loudly, “What we all need is an exorcist.” The room laughed.

My early departure meant I was back at the sublet in time to go to Halley’s for our regular session. I had told her I wouldn’t be able to. Perhaps a surprise appearance would make it all the more effective and I would at last hear grief when I deserted her.

Was effectiveness what I sought? Or consummation?

Probably the reader will be amused that this was when I realized my new method might be impractical. Unless psychiatrists were willing to give up their personal lives how could they imitate it? The obvious to an outsider became clear to me: I was as much on a personal mission as I was engaged in a scientific quest.

At nine-thirty, an hour before I usually appeared to announce myself to Halley’s doorman, I tried to make notes, read, watch television. I microwaved and then rapidly ate a whole bag of Paul Newman’s popcorn, hoping the deafening crunch in my head would silence my nagging desire. I had the night off. I could be myself. So—who was I?

Nothing could distract me. I couldn’t divert my mind from the new questions I planned to ask as I slipped a hand under her pale pink sheets. Who was more addicted, Halley or me? Was her cure fatal to me?

Ten-thirty. Time for me to go, if I was going.

Accept the worst hypothesis, I decided. That was Joseph’s technique, I had learned from Amy Glickstein’s chapters. Presume that I could cure Halley only by infecting myself. With luck I might escape—but accept the worst as inevitable. Was neutralizing her worth it?

That August night was clear. As I walked, a bright new moon peeked out from behind the tall buildings. Between the squat brownstones it seemed to be a friendly lamppost.

“Goodnight, moon,” I said aloud as I turned the corner to Halley’s building. “Goodnight air,” I mumbled to the amber streetlights. And to a wailing ambulance, as the doorman opened the way for me, I whispered, “Goodnight noises, everywhere.”

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE
The Second Danger

B
Y
L
ABOR
D
AY
I
WAS SO DEEPLY INVOLVED WITH
H
ALLEY THAT
I
DARED
not test how important she was to me. I had her complete trust—she confided everything, no matter how ugly or trivial. That was as thrilling as the convulsions of her narcissistic ecstasies. Every day, I learned more about her self-murder and the temptress she had created to live.

And I had cornered Stick. The once separated and distrustful units of Hyperion were communicating without clearing everything through him; their feeling of independence grew unhindered while he was busy probing for a way to hurt me. I was fully committed to my enterprise, prepared either to cure them or lose myself in their whirlpool of illness. I faced this truth on August 30th, thanks to the banal need to find another place to stay in New York. Susan helped me there. An old friend in the Village, a writer, got a teaching job in the Midwest. I agreed to a six-month sublet at eight hundred a month and moved my few possessions down to a studio apartment on 33 East Ninth Street. More than two weeks later, on September 17th, I left for Vermont the night before Stick and the others to prepare for the retreat. My intention, because of the intense level of the countertransference, was to provoke a crisis, in the hope we could achieve a breakthrough.

The Green Mountain resort had no mountain in view. Instead, the five-story stone hotel overlooked a golf course. Behind it were six tennis courts, a heated swimming pool, and, about a quarter mile away, a large cabin for the “encounter sessions.” The cabin was set on the western border of a man-made pond. The pond and its immediate environs existed solely for use by retreaters. Rowboats were available. They could cross to the sandy beach on its northern shore where a swimming area was marked off by a string of red and white striped buoys. In its center floated a wood platform and an eight-foot diving board. The pond was stocked. The east shore was set aside for fishing with the understanding that every catch must be thrown back. Also, there was a camping area, with two discreet outhouses, in a meadow ringed by pines and cedars hidden away off the east shore, if retreaters decided that a night under the stars would be helpful.

Ten rooms in the stone building were booked for me, Stick, Halley, Andy Chen, Jack Truman, Tim Gallent, Jonathan Stivik, the operating system programmer, two regional sales managers—Carl Hanson and Joe Gould—and the only other woman besides Halley, Martha Klein. Martha worked under Halley as the market researcher for Centaur and the rest of the new PC line.

I shooed away Green Mountain’s retreat leaders, declined their offers of foam bats (to strike people with as a “playful acting out of aggression”), their New Age music tapes for meditating nude (“Body awareness can strip away hierarchical stereotypes and build self-esteem,” I was told), and also their “cooperative tasks,” basically scavenger hunts designed to require team effort for success. However, I did accept exclusive use of the cabin, the pond and its amenities.

At eleven o’clock Friday morning, I lingered over room service breakfast. The others were due in the late afternoon. The room was pleasantly furnished, as if it were a rustic inn, with a four-poster bed and plain pine furniture. I mulled over how to make use of the encounter meetings since I had rejected their gimmicks. I had the television tuned to ESPN, listening with one ear to their college football forecast show for Saturday’s games. After a long silence, Albert had gotten a message to me and we had talked by phone for over an hour. He was excited. His college coach had been tough on him, he said, especially about his fitness. (The coach didn’t really mean fitness, he meant his bulk. He wanted Albert—at seventeen, already six foot three and two hundred and fifty pounds of muscle—to get even bigger.) Nevertheless, Albert would be starting tomorrow at middle linebacker, a great honor for a freshman. “It’s happening for me, Rafe. It’s happening,” Albert said, the thrill in his voice obviously exciting me too, since I was now watching a mind-numbing hour-long sports show on the off-chance I would hear Albert’s name mentioned. I was disappointed that I wouldn’t be able to attend the game, or see it for that matter, since I would be busy with the group all day Saturday.

There was a knock at the door. I assumed the maid wanted to clean. I shut off the television and answered it. Halley walked into my arms, on tiptoe, mouth puckered, reaching for my lips.

Gently, but firmly, I pulled on her long shimmering hair to keep her off. Since July 4th, I had, of course, not permitted embraces or kisses. A chubby teenage chambermaid, pushing a service cart out of the room across the hall, looked at us. I smiled at her, put my cheek against Halley’s and whispered, “Stop this right now or I’ll throw you out.”

Halley let go and walked around me into the room. I shut the door. She was in jeans, a pink polo shirt, feet bare in black penny loafers. She flopped onto the four-poster bed and said, “I guess I’ll have to fuck Jack.”

“You told me that was over.” Weeks ago, she confessed they had had many more than the one encounter she originally claimed.

“He’ll want to. Every trip I’ve taken with Jack he gets horny. He leaves home promising himself he’ll be good, but I talk him out of it. You know what he likes? He likes to order room service while I’m giving him a blowjob.”

“Are you enjoying talking dirty to me?”

She lay down, hands behind her head. She kicked off her shoes. One dribbled onto a throw rug. The other tipped on its side, the cream-colored interior looking at me. “You said I had to be honest or you wouldn’t be nice to me.”

“I said as long as you were honest I would love you.”

She ignored that. “I’ve been in meetings all week preparing the pitch for our 800 operators. I’m ready to scream. All I could think about driving here was your lovely hands, your big brown eyes, and that I’ll probably get to see your buns in a teeny-tiny bathing suit. You really believe in this retreat?” she asked without a transition.

“I doubt much can be accomplished in two days. Less than that, really. Just two mornings.”

“So what are you going to do to us?” She sat up and pulled her legs under her. “Finger painting? Oh, I know. We’ll close our eyes, fall backwards and see if we catch each other.”

“No. The nearest hospital is fifteen miles.”

She smiled. “My room is next door. We have three nights.”

“No,” I said.

“You know what the Great White Father wants?” That was the nickname for Stick she used with her lovers. I understood the contempt expressed didn’t mean she was disloyal to him in action or thought—Gene and others, unfortunately for them, did not. Her use of it inspired a thought for the sessions and I considered asking her to leave.

“No,” I said. “What does Stick want?”

She kicked at the shoe on the bed. It tumbled down, bumped into its twin and rolled off the rug onto the pine floor. “He thinks I should get to know Edgar.”

That stopped me from sending her away. “He puts it to you that bluntly?” I asked.

“What?” She looked up. “What do you mean? Oh … No, that’s not what he says, you pig. He says I should move in his quote, circle, unquote. He says Edgar would be happy to include me in his glamorous New York social life.” She set her jaw to copy Stick’s stern face and barely moved her lips to imitate his ominous style of talking, “‘You’d make lots of good contacts, Hal.’”

“What he really wants is for you to have an affair with Edgar.”

“That’s ridiculous. Edgar can buy any piece he wants. And he already has a trophy wife.”

“Your father has a higher opinion of you than that.”

Halley winked at me. “Do you?”

“Do I think Edgar would have an affair with you?”

“No!” She frowned. “Do you have a higher opinion of me than that?”

“Than what?”

“Than …” Halley shook her head. “You’re confusing me.”

“Do I have a higher opinion of you than that you’re more than a trophy wife or a piece of ass?”

“That’s it.”

“Is that what you think of yourself?”

“That’s what men think of me.”

I shook my head and commented quietly, “You hate yourself.”

She watched me. Her black eyes seemed to cross a little. She dropped a hand down to her right foot and squeezed her big toe. “Let’s get married,” she said in her deep, absolutely earnest voice.

I stood up, offering my hand. “Okay. We can do it right now. Burlington’s only a half hour away. We’ll go to their city hall and see if they’ll waive the waiting period.”

“I mean it,” she said.

“So do I. We can pack up and fly to Vegas.” I beckoned with my hand. “Come on.”

“You would really marry me?”

“Of course.”

Halley kicked her legs over the edge of the bed, hands on its edge, staring at the small throw rug. She thought for a moment. “Where would we live?”

“We would live where you want. We would do everything exactly the way you want it.”