Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

by Rafael Yglesias

  He pointed for me to sit in one of his red leather chairs. He settled behind his desk and phoned someone. “Fred? Yeah it’s me. I can’t take it anymore,” he said. “I want to do it now, no matter what it costs. Rafe is the only complication. I don’t want to move him out of this school until the term ends. But he can’t stay here in this—” he gathered energy to put his anger into it, “freezer with a witch. Yes,” he glanced at me, “I think she has done harm. I don’t see how it couldn’t—” he looked away, “be very discouraging. It’s as though he’s invisible. God, what a bitch.” He listened patiently to the man on the phone make a speech. I could hear the imploring tone of the voice on the other end but not the specific words. “I can’t,” Bernie finally answered. “I don’t care if it costs me. Anyway, we’ll see. We’ll see if she really wants to roll in the mud. I can’t wait to see how she feels being stripped in public. See how she likes having her heart cut open.” He laughed crudely at something the other man said. “Yeah, right. If we can find it. Well, then her liver.” He hung up eventually. I stopped listening; Uncle’s talk was too ugly. He made other calls. I dozed off repeatedly, my head lolling forward and jerking me awake each time, only to go back to sleep and dream of Grandma Jacinta’s natillas, her plátanos maduros, the hot sand of nearby Clearwater Beach and the endless Florida sky I watched while floating on my back in the Gulf’s bathtub-warm water—blue burning into white at the horizon, majestic and empty.

  I hadn’t heard from the Tampa Nerudas since the catastrophic journey to Spain. After my testimony against my father, I made no attempt to communicate with them, nor, so far as I knew, had they. It might be that Uncle intercepted their attempts. It hurt that there were no more Christmas and birthday packages. But I couldn’t blame them, considering what I had done to their son. I rubbed my face to wake up. Uncle finished yet another conversation. This last talk was with a female voice. He told her he was leaving his wife that night. This meant the will would change totally to my favor. Someday the power of his money would be mine and I could afford to heal everybody’s wounds. Even his son Aaron’s, I told myself to assuage the guilt I felt at the wreck I had made of Bernie’s home life. After compensating my father and helping the poor, I could return what was left to Aaron, restoring his birthright. I felt better about the whole situation until I remembered that if it weren’t for me, healing Aaron wouldn’t be necessary.

  We spent the night at a motel in adjoining rooms. Bernie said he would rent a house in Great Neck until the end of the term and then we would move to the city and I would go to a private school next year. Before falling asleep, I asked again if I could spend Friday night at Julie’s and he frowned again. He considered for a moment and decided to agree with an engaging smile. “Okay. But watch yourself. The women in our family are not to be trusted.” He laughed as if this were a pleasant joke.

  Over the next month, my life changed dramatically. Uncle rented a furnished three-bedroom apartment and hired an English couple, a butler and cook, to make sure someone was there on the many nights he never came home. A car took me to school, then to Halston’s, and back to the temporary home with Richard and Kate, who served me as if I were an exiled and disaffected young lord, someone deserving of respect and pity. I visited Julie on Friday nights and Saturday mornings, joining Uncle and a woman friend for Saturday nights in Manhattan. The “friend” was Tracy, my uncle’s mistress of many years, although they pretended to me to be recent platonic acquaintances. I told Halston many secrets; none were the big one. We reviewed what I remembered of the attack on my parents in Tampa. Halston didn’t dig for too many details; I assumed that was because he had heard my mother’s account when she was his patient. He also took me through my mother’s abandonment of me during the Bay of Pigs invasion. Again, my recollections, at that point, were blocked, but Halston didn’t have much interest in the details, anyway.

  [I am trying to keep this free of later retrospective evaluations of Dr. Halston’s technique because they would muddy a clear picture of the therapy as I experienced it then. At the time, the transference was excellent. Obviously, I had no distance on Dr. Halston’s methods; therefore, to insert them into accounts of our sessions would distort reality. I am concerned, however, that professionals will need to know at this point that I wasn’t blocked about the facts of what had happened in the past, not really, except for a few lurid details. I was blocked about what I felt and what the facts meant to the wider world. To use my favorite depiction of distorted thinking: I knew 2 plus 2 was the equation, I just didn’t know that they would add up to 4—in my calculations, there was a different sum every day—and I had no conscious awareness that the answer of 4 was a taboo number.]

  Halston focused on what I felt during the two days and nights my mother left me alone, especially my reaction to Uncle taking me to live with him after she was arrested. In general, contrary to what one might expect of a Freudian-based therapist, he concentrated on my contemporary relationship with Bernie. Indeed, it provided one of the rare occasions he seemed to argue with my perceptions.

  “Uncle didn’t rescue me,” I said.

  “No? You used the word rescue.”

  “Yes. But I asked him to. It wasn’t his idea.”

  “He came and got you and took you in.”

  “Yes.”

  “Wasn’t that rescuing you?”

  “Yes, but …”

  “But?”

  “It wasn’t his idea.”

  “I see. So it wasn’t a rescue because you told him to.”

  “No, I don’t mean that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I told him what he wanted to hear, so he would rescue me.”

  “What did he want to hear?”

  “That he—” I paused. This was dangerously close to a final surrender.

  “That he … ?”

  “That I loved him.”

  “And you don’t love him?”

  “No.”

  “Is that the big secret?”

  “No,” I said.

  “But it’s a secret?”

  “Yes.”

  I enjoyed the talks, just as I enjoyed my silence at school, the falling away of my old friendships, and the new interest of the hipsters, as they noticed my hair growing longer and my withdrawal from participation in athletics. I shocked one of the school hippies when I approached him in the bathroom to ask if I could buy a nickel bag of grass. He watched, impressed, as I took a hit from a sample joint, released the smoke from my mouth and rebreathed it through my nostrils, à la Sandy. My credentials established, I was allowed to make the purchase. Thus supplied, I discovered a new joy, getting high alone at night and pleasuring myself in a luxuriant orgy, intensified by the heightened sensation and vivid fantasy the drug made possible.

  Meanwhile, on Fridays and Saturdays I pursued my new goal, the shedding of my cumbersome, embarrassing, and—I was convinced—unhealthy virginity. The immediate obstacle, I believed, was a man, a member of Columbia’s SDS steering committee with whom Julie was in love. At least that’s how I interpreted their late-sixties style of dating: they slept together; he discussed everything with her; she adopted his ideas, sometimes with more passion than he felt; and they went together to most events, whether they were political meetings or the movies. They would have denied they were a couple, since they believed monogamous relationships were “bougie” (their slang for bourgeois), possession of a person being an extension of capitalist ideas; besides, Julie believed exclusive relationships were especially wrong for women, inevitably male chauvinist in practice, since inherent in the idea of ownership was the assumption of male control. This self-deception was accepted by their friends, thanks to their general political agenda. I need hardly explain why, despite my age and sexual inexperience, I was so much wiser about the depth and power of even a radical’s need to love, be loved, and to possess his beloved with a monopolistic grip that would have impressed Andrew Carnegie.

  In one way, Julie�
��s lover encouraged my own hopes. Gus was a tall, skinny half-Jewish, half-Irish New Yorker raised by parents who had been members of the American Communist Party. Other than his reddish hair and freckled skin, he wasn’t that different in physical appearance from me; and his social background was as close to mine as one could reasonably expect. I met him on the second Saturday I stayed with the women after my panic attack. Biting his nails, his legs bouncing restlessly, Gus questioned me about my politics, the kids at Great Neck High, and my reason for quitting the “genius program.”

  “Sandy,” I said. She looked up from the picket sign she was creating with a black Magic Marker. A demonstration against the building of the gym was planned for later that day. “She radicalized me about it,” I said, talking in their jargon. “I realized we were being exploited in an elitist way.”

  Sandy smiled. Her skin was too dark for a blush to be noticeable, but pleasure at my flattery was in her eyes.

  Gus’s mouth, which tended to hang open a little, like a friendly, overheated hungry dog, drooped a bit lower and he nodded thoughtfully. “Right on, Sandy,” he said and then resumed biting his nails. “You want to start a chapter of SDS at your school?” he asked as he chewed.

  “I’m not a leader,” I said.

  “You shouldn’t be,” he said. He spat out a fragment of nail. “Leadership is dinosaur thinking. You should be in the vanguard of creating a way for the other kids to educate themselves and create their own organization. That’s why we don’t believe in going into schools and setting up chapters ourselves. That’s age chauvinism.”

  “Rafe would be a good choice,” Julie said. She was in a black leotard and faded jeans. She looked extraordinary: at the peak of youth’s bloom, her skin as luminous as porcelain, her black hair glinting, her big brown eyes full of passion and yet as innocent as a fawn’s. To look at her for more than a few seconds was painful, although it was also a sublime pleasure. “He’s political and a real teacher. And he wouldn’t try to dominate them.”

  Gus nodded. “How can we help you do it?”

  I said nothing. More secrets were piling up. The need to impress Julie and her friends, including her lover, was insistent, but I couldn’t risk my uncle’s wrath by openly embracing left-wing politics. And Halston? Dare I tell the doctor about my new secret life—or was it too close to my mother’s madness? Halston might believe Ruth’s ideology caused her lunacy.

  “You know what?” Gus said. “Rafe should come to the demo today and to some meetings next week.”

  I marched beside Sandy that day. Julie and Gus walked ahead of us. I was apprehensive, expecting violence and then discovery by my uncle. But my first experience of political protest was like a stroll in the country: getting high before we started, chanting together as we marched cheerfully in the sunny spring day, linking arms at the gym site to listen to a few speeches. Gus’s was the best. His relaxed manner made him convincing. He talked to the crowd in the same tone and language he used in conversation—although it’s true that his conversation was rather like someone giving a speech. Afterwards, we ate at the college hangout, the West End Bar. Whether it was the grass or the fresh air or my exaggerated feeling of having been brave, I was famished. I ate two hamburgers while around me there were more arguments between the tables as members of rival student groups took issue with Gus and the other SDS leaders, not about whether Columbia was wrong, but what exactly should be done about it.

  It got to be time for me to head for my uncle’s Manhattan apartment. I announced I had to return to the girls’ place for my overnight bag.

  “Overnight bag,” someone repeated. “Far out,” he added and laughed.

  “I’ll go with you,” Sandy said.

  “I’ll take him—” Julie said.

  “He can take my key and leave it there,” Kathy said.

  Sandy drained her coffee cup, stood up and said with a frown, “No, I gotta go, anyway. Come on.” She left the bar quickly without me, as if I were an afterthought.

  “Bye, honey,” Julie said. She took my hand, pulled me to her and kissed me on the cheek. She had never called me honey before and the kiss, although chaste, was impressed firmly, with an affection that also seemed new.

  Walking with Sandy, still thrilled by the lingering sensation of Julie’s lips, I thought about why my cousin had become physical with me. It was because I marched in the demonstration, I decided, disappointed by that conclusion.

  My gloomy turn of mind must have been obvious. “You okay?” Sandy asked while we were in the elevator going up.

  The familiar construct of my relationship with Julie and her friends was depressing. I experienced this dismay (its cause so obvious from this distance) as an enervating achiness, like the onset of a flu, rather than as a realization that I had created yet another hall of distorting mirrors in which I would never find a true reflection or escape from my emotional maze.

  [The dazzlingly rapid re-creation of self-defeating patterns in a neurotic is exactly what makes therapy so often frustrating for both doctor and patient. I have come, in a perverse way, to admire the resilience of mental illness. It is helpful for a therapist to bear in mind that neurotic behavior is actually a survival mechanism, however misguided. Its longevity is a sign of the patient’s passion to live and in that paradox there is hope for a cure.]

  Sandy put her hand on my arm and repeated, “You okay?”

  The terror lived again. My skull was fragile, my skin vibrating: leaks were about to spring. Say what you’re feeling, I urged myself, desperate to fend off madness. “I’m sad,” I said.

  Sandy nodded. She didn’t ask why, to my surprise. She rubbed my arm and smiled encouragingly, but never said a word. The elevator doors opened. She marched out in her waddle walk, saying, “Come on.” She opened the apartment door, tossed the keys into a bowl and kicked off her sandals. The soles of her feet were black. She extended her left hand, fingers asking for mine.

  I looked at her, not understanding.

  She wiggled her fingers again, eyes mischievous, and the request was clear.

  She was strong and confident and I knew that she, unlike me, was real. I gave her my hand.

  She towed me through the hall into her room. Her platform bed was unmade, the yellow cotton blanket twisted at the foot, a pillow squashed against the wall. She kicked the door shut, pulled me to the bed and we sat, side by side on its edge. With a light touch, she stroked my left cheek once, ran her fingers through my hair, traveling to the back until she held my now very solid skull in her palm. She moved close to my lips and whispered, “You okay with this?”

  My need was so heavy that I could hardly manage to do more than nod.

  She kissed me. She pushed my lips apart with her tongue and explored my mouth restlessly; her hands were also restless—rubbing my back, kneading my neck, as if she wanted to mold me to her shape. I woke from passivity and pushed back into her mouth, for a moment tasting the eggs she had for brunch mix with my hamburgers, and then we were only a single human flavor. I touched her thin hair and dropped my hands to her back. It was soft, much softer than I expected from her vigorous body.

  She broke from the kiss to unbutton my shirt. She undid each one with deliberate care, reverently. I kissed the top of her head once or twice as she descended and thought to myself: “Thank God. Thank God.” When she reached my waist, she paused at the sight of the bulge in my jeans. She put a hand on it, raised her eyes and looked earnest. “Are you a virgin?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  This information seemed to galvanize her. She yanked my belt once, said, “Take ’em off,” and stood up. She pulled her T-shirt over her head and into the air in a single motion. Without a pause, she had her jeans open. They dropped to the floor. She pushed them off the rest of the way with her feet. Fingers slid under her red panties and shoved. She stepped out of them and looked at me. I hadn’t moved. The sight of her frank nakedness was mesmerizing. Her breasts were small, nipples dark and turned a little outwards,
like poorly coordinated eyes.

  “You’re beautiful,” I said.

  She laughed. “Your turn,” she said.

  I didn’t trust my trembling legs to stand. I tried to get my jeans and underpants off simultaneously while still on the bed. They got stuck on my thighs. I had never seen my penis in so ridiculous and desperate shape: levitating off me, flagging the world for attention. Sandy laughed again and pulled at the tangled mass of clothes. I flopped my legs up and down, like a baby being changed, as she negotiated them past my knees and ankles. She pushed my clothes onto the floor, then moved to lie beside me. We turned our bodies to each other. She kissed me briefly and looked at my erection. I followed her eyes. She lightly ran three fingertips up from its base to the head. It might as well have been an electric shock. My thighs and torso came off the mattress and I groaned.

  “That feels good,” she said, not a question.

  I laughed.

  She found my right hand and put it at the top of her bushy mound. She guided my finger to the moist split of her sex. “This is where it feels good to me,” she said, holding my middle finger on the bump of her clitoris. “But not too hard,” she said, moving it. “Like this—”

  Without thinking, I flicked her hand away and straightened my fingers so they formed a smooth surface. Automatically, I gently rolled down and up, then side to side, massaging all of her sex with a subtle emphasis at the spot she thought so crucial; She looked surprised. I shut my eyes and remembered effortlessly: the gentle uneven pattern, down, up, around, side to side … The whole region loosened and opened as her warm body arched against me. Only this time, I was alive too, so thrilled by her belly’s warm hug of my penis that I had to concentrate hard to replicate the complicated rhythm my mother had enjoyed.