by Casey Dorman
Hearing her describe him as young pleased him, even though he knew that he was probably twenty years older than she. He was sure she was just being polite. He took off his glasses, realizing that he was hoping that not wearing them would make him seem younger. “You mean you thought it was only very old men, probably trained in Europe, who still had practices on the Upper East Side in New York?”
“Or Beverly Hills.”
“Newport Beach is not that different from Beverly Hills,” he reminded her.
She nodded. “That’s true. This is only my second case here and I’m still getting used to the level of wealth in this community. Is that who most of your clients are?”
He’d had his share of film stars over the years and even a professional athlete or two, all of them local residents, but he didn’t want to sound as if he were bragging. “Most of my analytic clients are trainees from either the local Analytic Institute or from the larger one in LA.”
“You said you didn’t get many criminals in your practice, but it sounds as if you don’t get many real patients, that is people suffering from genuine disorders.”
“It’s about 50/50,” he hastened to correct her. “Half of my practice is analysis with trainees, the other half is short term therapy with, as you call them, ‘real patients.’ ”
“Like Lucas Bonaventure.”
He wagged a finger at her. “Ah ah. That’s forbidden territory.”
Their beer had come. She looked with interest at his goblet of dark beer, but, to his disappointment, didn’t ask about it. They both ordered their meals, his a club sandwich and French-fries, hers a salad.
“Why are you interested in psychoanalysis?” he asked.
“I guess I’m more interested in someone who practices it than in analysis itself. I learned all about it in grad school, but I’ve never met an analyst before.”
“You mean it’s like stumbling across a dinosaur in the middle of the modern world?” He was joking, using a phrase that had angered him when his wife had said it.
“I wouldn’t put it that crassly. In fact, from what I learned about psychoanalysis, it’s a very complex theory, one that is probably misunderstood by most people and one that takes years to learn.”
Was she deliberately stroking his ego? She was correct, but it was hard to believe that she meant what she was saying. “I hate to say it because it doesn’t sound scientific, but the power of psychoanalysis to explain behavior is not something you can fully understand until you’ve been analyzed yourself. I know that’s what born-again Christians say about having a relationship with Jesus and what Zen Buddhists say about achieving enlightenment, but I still think it’s true.”
She smiled and nodded. “I’m willing to give you that. Do you feel that you understand your own behavior, why you do what you do, better than most people understand theirs?”
Did he? He wasn’t about to tell her about the blank periods that had once again begun appearing in his life, the times he found himself someplace but didn’t remember how he got there, or the impulsiveness he was constantly trying to subdue with his strict routines. “I think I can understand the reasons for what I do, see the patterns that fit my personality better than most people can.”
“And does being able to understand the reasons for one’s behavior help a person to change?”
“Sometimes. It’s not enough by itself, but it’s a necessary component.”
She nodded slowly, as if thinking deeply about his answer. He was struck by her pensive beauty.
“Most psychopaths have a pretty clear understanding of why they do what they do,” she said. “Unfortunately, very few of them want to change their behavior.”
“Really? You don’t think they’re acting out some unconscious conflict and just rationalizing what they do without really knowing why they do it?” Other than a few classic papers from early in the last century, he had never really studied the psychology of psychopaths.
She shook her head. “In most cases, they just want things and don’t want to postpone getting them and don’t want to pay for them. They take what they want, whether it’s money, property, sex or power. They’re not conflicted about it. They’re just unable to say no to their desires.”
“But sometimes what they want is bizarre or sadistic, isn’t it? What about their understanding of why they have such desires?”
“You mean like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer, the Hannibal Lecter types? Those aren’t your typical psychopaths. I admit that those people are deeply disturbed in some way and probably don’t understand why they have such perverse appetites.”
“And do you understand why they have such appetites?”
She shook her head, slowly. “I’ve studied such people. They all have very unusual childhoods, but do I understand why they are as sadistic as they are? No, I don’t. Do you think psychoanalysis provides a way to understand them?”
“Only in theory. No such person would subject himself to analysis, I’m sure. From what I’ve read in the popular literature, Ted Bundy studied psychology, but apparently gained little self-insight from it.”
She looked thoughtful “Then do you think the fact that Lucas Bonaventure is seeking analytic understanding means he’s not a psychopath?”
“I think labeling his disorder is less important than helping him understand himself. That’s what I’m interested in.” He hoped his confident tone concealed his anxiety.
“You’re very good at not answering questions directly,” Susan said, smiling and holding up her glass as if she were toasting his skill. “I suppose that’s something you’ve learned through years of being a therapist.”
“You’re not a therapist yourself?”
She shook her head. “I only do diagnostic work. I’m afraid I’m a skeptic when it comes to the power of psychotherapy to change people.” She smiled uncertainly, as if she knew she was being critical of his profession.
“Change isn’t always what therapy is about, except to lessen anxiety, perhaps. But there are more direct ways to do that with medication. Therapy primarily provides the client with understanding.”
“Then I must learn more,” she answered, brightly. “Now I’d better eat so I can get back to work on time. It’s been a very interesting conversation, Doctor Farquhar. I’ve really enjoyed it.”
“So have I,” he answered.
Chapter 11
Danny Rosberg sat in his motel room. His stomach ached with hunger, and he was sweating as though he had a fever. His description had been on the TV news again, a reminder that it was still dangerous for him to be seen in public. What a come down, he thought. He’d been staying at the Hyatt in Newport Beach, and now he was in a Motel 6 in Santa Ana, eating his meals at fast food drive-thrus. He still attended his business meetings, but, since they were mostly with the visiting Japanese executives from the company with which his employer was negotiating, he wasn’t afraid that anyone at the meetings would identify him as the man who’d tried to buy the missing woman a drink in the bar in Newport Coast. He doubted any of his Asian business associates, who used a translator for all of their English conversations, watched the local news or read the local newspapers.
The police had put out a call for him to come forward, but there was no way that he was going to turn himself in. As soon as his business was over he was headed back to Boston. Then the nightmare would be over. Unless they found the woman’s body. Then they would mount a national manhunt and he’d have no place to hide.
Guilty or not, his record would convict him—an assault on his girlfriend when he was in high school, two years in the Florida State Prison for assaulting another woman he hardly knew but had picked up as a one-night stand, then beat her when she
tried to take his wallet. He was lucky he hadn’t had to register as a sex offender. That he hadn’t was only because the two other women he’d raped after picking them up in hotel bars were married and were afraid to report the incident to the authorities, lest their husbands find out. At least that was his theory. He’d never seen either woman after the nights when he’d forced himself on them. That’s what he’d planned to do with Regina Bonaventure: a shared drink and then sex back at his hotel, but no rough stuff unless she didn’t cooperate. She should have accepted his offer of a drink. If she had, she’d probably be OK right now. She might have been the recipient of some hard sex, even an unwilling recipient, but not “missing and presumed dead” as she had been described in the newspaper. Too bad for her that she had been such a stuck-up bitch. The more he thought about her, the more he thought that she deserved what she’d gotten, even though he was now in danger.
He was hungry. He’d gotten a hamburger after his meeting, but that was around two in the afternoon. Now it was ten at night and he hadn’t eaten anything since the afternoon, nothing except whiskey, coke, and chips, which he’d bought at a grocery store near the place where his meetings were held. Without even a microwave in his room, there was no point in buying food, except potato chips and peanuts and candy bars, which he’d almost finished. He was only about a half-mile from three different fast food restaurants and a Denny’s. He’d visited the drive-thrus at each of the fast food places several times over the last week and a half. Was it finally safe for him to enter the Denny’s? There’d never been a picture of him in the paper or on TV. The papers had only published the written description of him that the bartender at the Asian restaurant had given to the police. The same description could fit a lot of people.
He finished the plastic cup of whiskey, his fifth since leaving work. The whiskey made him feel more confident. What could it hurt to go to Denny’s? He changed into his most casual clothes. Although it was chilly at night, he decided not to wear a coat, since he’d been described on the news as wearing a sport coat.
When he entered the Denny’s he found that the air conditioning brought the temperature even lower than it had been outside. He could take it. It was worthwhile in order to have a regular meal, maybe a steak and even a beer with his dinner, although he felt a little unsteady from the five cups of whiskey.
The steak was thin and overcooked—he’d ordered it rare—but it was delicious compared to the tacos and burgers he’d been eating. He devoured it eagerly and ordered a second beer. He felt better than he’d felt for the last week and a half, ever since his description had appeared on the news. He decided he’d order some pie. He hadn’t had a piece of restaurant pie in years.
“Good thing you ordered the blueberry pie now,” the waitress told him. “It’s a favorite of both of those cops over there, and we only have one piece left.”
Danny hadn’t noticed the two policemen enter the restaurant. They were sitting in a booth three booths away from him, between him and the door. “Never mind,” he said. “I’m not as hungry as I thought I was.
“I was just kidding,” the waitress said. “We have plenty of pie, you don’t need to worry.”
“That’s OK, I’m really not hungry.”
“You sure? We’ve got plenty of pie for all of our customers.”
He was getting irritated. He just wanted the waitress to bring him his bill so he could leave. “No pie,” he said, raising his voice. “Just bring me the bill.”
“How about some coffee? We have a whole dessert menu. Can I bring it to you?”
Jeez, he thought, what’s wrong with this bitch? “Just bring me the goddammed bill!” he said, his voice nearly a shout.
The two policemen looked up. They stared at him.
Shit! He thought to himself. He lowered his head and put his hand on his forehead so they couldn’t see his whole face. He shouldn’t have shouted, but the beer and the whiskey had made him lose his temper. He kept his head down until the waitress returned. He gave her cash and told her to keep the change, even though he didn’t think the stupid bimbo deserved a tip. He was ready to leave, which meant walking past the two cops.
He got up and walked as fast as he could past the policemen’s booth, keeping his head turned away from them. Only too late, he discovered that he’d walked right past the entrance. Shit! He was drunk, and the cops were staring at him. He kept walking, pretending he had been headed for the restroom, which he entered. He looked at his face in the mirror. His face was red from the alcohol. He felt hot. He ran the cold water and splashed it on his face. He felt cooler. Grabbing a handful of paper towels, he dried his face and left the restroom, looking straight ahead as he passed the two cops, who both gave him a suspicious stare. When he got past the front door and into the night air, he breathed a sigh of relief. He resisted running toward his car. When he finally reached it and got inside, he ventured a look back at the restaurant. The two policemen were coming out the front door. They were looking his way. He started his car and pulled out of his parking space.
It was less than a mile back to the Motel 6. He held his breath. It seemed impossible that the two cops had identified him. He was sure they hadn’t gotten a clear look at his face. They were only interested in him because of that stupid bitch of a waitress. If she’d just brought him his bill he wouldn’t have yelled at her. He drove slowly and carefully, forcing himself to stay within the speed limit. Damn! Now he was going too slow. Behind him, blue and red lights began flashing.
He floored the gas pedal. He couldn’t let the police pull him over. They’d pull him in for driving while intoxicated, and once they had him in custody, they’d figure out that he was the man who’d been at the bar with the missing woman. The police hit their siren. He kept his foot on the gas pedal. He was already up to seventy and it was a city street. He kept accelerating. On the right, he spotted a freeway entrance. He barely slowed as he spun the wheel to take the turn into the entrance. Only at the last second did he realize that it was an exit, not an entrance—just before he hit the truck coming off the freeway, his own car going sixty-five miles an hour, the two vehicles meeting head-on.
Chapter 12
“Last night I had a dream. It was the second time I’ve had the same dream, or at least a similar one. You’re supposed to be able to tell me what it means, right?” There was a note of dread in Lucas Bonaventure’s voice as he lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, his head on the leather pillow.
“You sound worried,” George said, mildly surprised that Lucas was already telling him a dream without any prompting.
“Both times it woke me up. The dream did. My heart was racing. I thought I might have a heart attack. Is that normal?”
“Dreams can often cause the same emotions we feel in our waking lives.”
“There was nothing frightening going on in the dream, nothing that would have frightened me in real life.”
“Tell me about it.”
“I remembered it vividly when I woke up, but it’s kind of vague now.”
Lucas was retreating from the dream already, an indication to George of the level of anxiety the dream had provoked. George knew he had to push his client. “Tell me what you think you dreamt.”
Bonaventure sighed and shifted his weight. He had turned away from the doctor, and lay on his side, facing the wall, as if to signal that he was complying against his will. “I was in a forest, it was dark. I was on a narrow pathway among tall trees, following a young woman, but for some reason, I thought it was my mother. Every time I tried to catch up with her, I moved more slowly, as if my legs were half-paralyzed. I couldn’t get close to her.” He rolled onto his back and his eyes searched the room, as if he were looking for an escape.
“Your legs felt paralyzed, or half-paralyzed, you s
aid.” George hoped his words would bring his client back to the rest of the dream. Whatever came next provoked enough fear to cause Lucas to try to avoid continuing.
“I know what being paralyzed is like,” Lucas said, his voice quieting, so it was hard for George to hear. “Six years ago I lost function in my right leg. It lasted more than six months. They never found a cause.”
George wasn’t sure he had heard his client correctly. “So the feeling in your legs in the dream reminded you of a time six years ago when your right leg was paralyzed?” Hysterical paralyses were rare. It took a massive effort of repression to cause such a symptom. In Freud’s Victorian culture such symptoms had been common, but they were unusual in modern times.
“Yes,” Lucas answered. “But in my dream, it was both of my legs and they were only partially paralyzed. I was able to move, but it was difficult.”
“So you kept following the woman?”
“She went away at some point. After that, I came into a clearing in the forest. There was a man in the middle of the clearing. He looked like a workman. He was sawing something on a sawhorse. I couldn’t tell what it was, but it terrified me. That was when I woke up.”
Bonaventure’s dream was a textbook Oedipal castration dream. George had recognized it immediately: the pursuit of the mother figure, the old man—a clear father figure—wielding a sharp instrument, one that could cut off a child’s penis, the paralyzed legs, which represented the feeling of vulnerability of the male’s sex organ. This was the kind of case George had dreamt of having, the symbolism of the symptoms so clear that he would have no difficulty writing it up for a clinical journal. His immediate task was to determine how deeply the psychological sources of the dream were buried in his client’s unconscious. The closer they were to consciousness, the more anxiety Bonaventure would be feeling.
“And just now, did remembering the dream make you nervous?”