“I have to be more phallic. Time to grow up. So I want to ask your opinion. That’s my version of maturity.”
She laughed. “Boy, are you in trouble.”
“Boy is right. I’ve got patients till nine.”
“You can see the second act.”
I don’t remember the play. The second female lead came offstage screaming at the male lead after curtain, but Julie and the playwright seemed pleased with the performance. After they had a brief conference, I got Julie to myself for a late dinner in a Japanese restaurant next door to the theater.
I told her about Gene and my dilemma. “I’m convinced the mother never informed his father.”
“You mean …” Julie had cut her shimmering black hair short, but she still reached for the missing mass from time to time, and ended up teasing the bristles at her temples. She did this for a moment before finishing, “You mean she forged his signature?”
“I guess. The important thing is that she’s told Gene to keep it a secret from me.”
“Wait a minute. I can’t get over this. This woman is so scared of her husband, she forged his name—”
“That’s not important—”
“What’s she scared of? Does he hit her?”
“No. Much worse. He ignores her.”
Julie frowned. I noticed for the first time—it was too dark in the theater—that her eyeliner was iridescent blue. She was dressed in a black silk man’s shirt and tight black jeans. She had a man’s haircut, lipstick very red—her appearance was eccentric. Was it some sort of dress code for theater people? Julie had worked as the artistic director of a regional theater in the Midwest while I did my residency. When she came to New York for this new job a year ago, she dressed like a hippie—worn jeans, work-shirts, hair long, usually no makeup. I wondered (and noticed that I wondered) whether this new style was a lesbian costume. In the Village I had seen this look on lesbian couples; for that matter, her former hippie appearance also fit their dress code. The playwright was a lesbian. That was the subject of her play and she told me it was autobiographical. There had been a lot of physical affection between the artistic director and the author. I’m a sick person, I thought and fell further into despair.
“Hitting her would really be better?” Julie asked while I spiraled down.
“That’s not my problem. Gene can’t keep that secret from me. It’s a terrible burden.”
“So confront her.”
“She shouldn’t exist!” I cried out.
Julie laughed. “What does that mean?”
“She’s not there. In therapy, the patient and me, that’s the only reality. I can’t go outside, step into his real life, without weakening the transference. If I call the mother, whether she denies it or not, I’m diminishing Gene, making him a child, a bystander, when I want to shore up his ego. Build it really. He doesn’t have one. He’s a creature of his parents.”
Julie peeled off a pink sliver of ginger and chewed it thoughtfully. “Gotta tell you the truth, Rafe.”
“No you don’t.”
“I don’t understand a word you’re saying. You’re making me feel stupid. Why can’t you just call the father to chat about the therapy? If he knows, the conversation will seem innocent. If he doesn’t, you’ve exposed the situation without—”
“I’m the parent now,” I interrupted.
Julie winced. “Don’t be angry at me.”
“I’m not. I’m angry at myself.”
“What for? You haven’t done anything.”
“Look. I’m the parent now. Gene needs to deal with these things with me, reenact these dynamics with me so he can learn to master them. If Gene had decided to lie to his father, that wouldn’t be a problem even if he were lying to me about it. That would become part of the process. But this is being done by an outsider. I know it, and—” I stopped. The answer was simple. It violated my book training, but Susan would approve. I resisted the temptation to phone her immediately to ask permission. No, I would just do it. Next session with Gene, first thing. If I was wrong, so be it.
Julie sipped green tea. She nodded at me over her cup to continue.
“I’ve got it,” I said. “Thanks.”
“What is it? What’s the answer?”
“I’m going to ask you something. I don’t want you to be angry at me. Just remember I’m upset.”
“Ask me something? What is it?”
“Are you a lesbian?”
Julie put down her cup. She made a sound. Her big eyes opened. “Rafe,” she said, as if calling for help.
I reached for the hand that had held the tea mug. It was warm and smooth. Her fingers grabbed me tight. “I’m in love with you,” I told her.
“I love you too,” she said.
“No,” I said. “I mean I want to possess you.”
She blanched. Her pupils dilated as she looked directly into my eyes. “But…”
“But?”
“We’re …” She shrugged.
“Cousins.”
“Isn’t that … ?” she looked down.
“A taboo,” I said. “Yes, maybe that’s the reason I want you so much.” Julie frowned at this unpleasant thought and I was encouraged. I pulled on her hand and she looked up, confused and excited. I was full of hope. “Or maybe,” I said, taking the chance at last, “or maybe you’re the only woman on earth for me.”
CHAPTER THREE
Breakthrough
TWO DAYS LATER, WHEN GENE NEXT APPEARED IN MY OFFICE, I HAD reason to be thankful to him. Julie and I had become lovers and I was happy, happier than I had ever been. My life seemed complete or as complete as I had any right to expect. I was doing work I enjoyed and I was in love. Happiness, Freud said, is a childhood wish fulfilled: I had wished to be a healer and for Julie to love me. Perhaps both were mine.
I resisted the temptation to tell Susan of my dilemma with Gene and my intended solution. (I didn’t immediately tell her about Julie, either.) I knew my frank declaration to Julie and my going it alone on Gene’s therapy were related events and so I felt, in a magical way, that my success with Gene on this issue would affect my love life. I was quite nervous while Gene untied his Keds and lay back on the couch.
“Gene, before we start, there’s something I want to talk about. We’ve never talked much about therapy, I mean its ground rules. This is your time. This is your place. And it’s a safe place for you. I may push you to talk about things you’d rather not. It may seem, at times, as though I’m making you feel things you’d rather not. And I’m not perfect. I make mistakes, but no matter what is said here, it stays here. This is a safe place for you. I won’t repeat things you say to anyone, especially not to your mother or your father. Because you’re a minor your mother had to bring you here and I met with her, but with adults that doesn’t happen. Some adults see therapists for years and their friends and relatives don’t even know they’re in psychotherapy. Some therapists tell their patients not to discuss what goes on in sessions with anyone. I don’t. That’s your decision. I don’t believe I should make that decision for you. Now I have a problem. It’s a simple problem in one way. In another, it’s not. My problem is, I don’t believe your mother did what I asked her to that time we all met. I don’t believe she told your father you were coming here. I don’t believe she showed him the consent form or got him to sign.” Gene’s legs were up, of course, and his thick eyebrows were down. “Now that doesn’t matter. I don’t care. I’m satisfied that your father wouldn’t object to your seeing me. I don’t feel his consent is necessary and whether she lied or not won’t change anything about your coming here. But—and it’s a big but—I don’t like that your mother has put you in the position of lying to me. If you want to lie to me about something, that’s okay.”
Gene laughed, skeptically.
“I mean it. I don’t think there’s any reason for you to lie to me about anything. If you want to lie to me, that’s between you and me and we can work it out. But keeping a secret for som
eone else is not okay. It’s unfair to you.”
“She doesn’t mean to do anything bad,” Gene said plaintively. “She was scared if Dad found out, I …” He trailed off. His legs slid down and he turned a little in my direction. His voice was soft and childish. “She was just trying to help me.”
So my intuition was right. I was thrilled. I felt, irrationally, that I had a right to my work and my love, had been granted the title and deed to my own happiness. I suppressed my elation, of course. I was in mid-session, very much at the heart of Gene’s problem. “What is she scared of, Gene?”
“That he’d get angry at me.”
“Angry at you for seeing a therapist?”
“No. Yes. No. I mean, angry that I’m sick.”
Thanks to this new confidence in me, we made rapid progress that week. Gene brought up memories of his father’s intolerance of illness when he was a boy. The stories were typical of a neurotic’s: the meaning for Gene was out of proportion to the facts.
Within a few sessions we arrived at the key memory: one afternoon Gene had a sore throat after school. He thought he was in kindergarten or first grade, his age roughly six or seven. His father had a big job on the Upper West Side, building shelves for a gallery owner—thus this carpentry job was more than a way of earning a living, it was a backdoor contact he hoped would help get him a show. Gene wanted to go home. Don wouldn’t postpone returning with Gene to the job; he had promised the gallery owner to be finished by the weekend and it was Friday. He phoned Carol, but she insisted she couldn’t get off early. Don coaxed Gene uptown, buying him a toy, dosing him with Bufferin, interrupting his work to buy him pizza and an orange soda. (I had to dig for these details from Gene; what he wanted to remember was his father’s impatience and neglect.)
The most poignant aspect of the anecdote was its climax. By six o’clock, when the gallery owner came home, Gene felt feverish and nauseous. Afraid to interrupt his father, Gene had been suffering silently in a corner, choking on the sawdust, forlornly staring at an art book of Bosch’s visions of hell. He watched his father greet the owner and nervously show off the nearly completed shelves. The man wasn’t satisfied. There weren’t enough tall deep shelves for the art books. Don tried to explain that he could easily remedy this insufficiency, but the gallery owner complained that the two extra days it would take meant he couldn’t have a brunch on Sunday he had planned for a brilliant new painter visiting from Brazil. Don, in Gene’s memory, was seen for the first time as weak: apologizing, fawning, insecure, no longer the masterful artisan, but a fearful sycophant. Don promised he would work all night to repair his error.
“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 tr
uth. 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.
Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil Page 33