Mind Tryst

by Robyn Carr

  “Wharton,” he said with a laugh, nodding. “How’d that come up?”

  “Accidentally. She was asking who I’d met so far in Coleman, and when I mentioned your name she remarked on how good-looking and shy you are. I said I thought you were about the friendliest person I’d met so far. Then, who do I have to compare you to? Roberta? Anyway, she decided maybe you were quiet around that group of men because Wharton makes it no secret he doesn’t get along with you. She said you and Wharton have been fighting since you moved in.”

  He chuckled, shook his head, sipped his wine. “Wharton,” he said again. “Hell, he made up his mind about me before I moved onto that lot. I bought the land he wanted, for starters. He’s damn near the crankiest old coot I’ve met; I hear he’s kindhearted underneath. You couldn’t prove it by me. He hated me on sight.”

  “Well,” I said, going back to the kitchen, beginning to move baked potatoes and salad and broccoli to my small dining room table while the beef brisket was under the broiler. “Have you tried to make up with him?”

  “Aw, I tried doing everything his way and that didn’t work; he keeps coming up with more problems he’s convinced are my fault. His cattle got out once and he said I must’ve opened the gate. His fence got knocked down; he said it had to be me ran it down since I was the only one up that road, and he demanded I fix it. I was going to do it, too. Then he pissed me off. You ought to see him, Jackie. Sometimes when I drive by that fork that goes to Sixteen, he’s standing there staring at me with a shovel or something in his hand. Standing there, looking mean.” He laughed again. “I can’t fix him, that’s for damn sure.”

  “Keep talking,” I said. “I can hear you and I’ll get this dinner rolling.”

  “I understand Wharton has had a hard time of it the last few years. His wife died, his boys moved away when he was counting on at least one of them to take over his ranch. I guess this business about property gets to be a big deal to some of these people. Guessing from what little bit I’ve heard, I get the notion that Wharton’s ranch is fairly pissant and his boys — men, actually — don’t have any interest in taking it on. They moved away and I don’t know that they’ve been back or that Wharton’s gone to visit. Seems like he’d ask me or someone else nearby to feed for him if he went on a visit, and I never heard that anyone has.

  “I figure Wharton is disappointed and working too hard for a man his age; protective of his land and animals and cranky because things aren’t going his way. So, he’s an ornery old man, working to keep it all going for no good reason except so he can have a place to die.

  “Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I think I could be Jesus himself and Wharton wouldn’t like me. I think he doesn’t like many people and he’s carrying around a big load of resentments. He sure is a pain in the ass.”

  “Well... what does he do? Call you and complain? Drive over to your place?”

  “Oh, hell no, that would be dealing with the problem. He either waits for me at the fork and in less than ten words demands something — like that I use less well water. Or he says something snotty to me at the cafe. One day when I was getting a cup of coffee to go and said hello to the morning group, Wharton says, ‘You mowed down that fence last night; you can put her up.’ And I say, ‘What are you talking about? Mowed down what fence?’ And he says, ‘The one after the fork to Sixteen.’ And I say I didn’t do that; I would have noticed something like that. And he justifies it by saying he didn’t do it and no one else comes down that road. My truck is fine, I know I didn’t mow down his fence, and he gives that stony look and announces that ‘You and me both know you mowed down that fence. You gonna fix it?’

  “Pretty soon all the other men get a little antsy and wiggle around and clear their throats and get up. Even the rest of them get tired of it. Not a one of them says, ‘Now, Wharton, how do you know for certain it was Tom?’ They just kind of let him go.”

  “And you said no?”

  “I said, ‘You prove I ruined your fence, I’ll fix it. Otherwise, I want you to stay off my case.’ That’s the only way to handle someone like Wharton.”

  “Must be aggravating,” I put in.

  “That’s all. Aggravating. He isn’t bothering anyone but me, and if I let him get to me, it’s my problem. He’s a hurtin’ old man underneath all that hostility.”

  “It’s got to be hard to live next door to someone like that,” I said when we were having dinner.

  “Jackie, you’ve been to my place,” he said, smiling. “I’d be a damn fool to ever complain. It’s beautiful and comfortable, and when I’m at my house on top of that hill and watch the sun go up and down, I’m at peace. After Los Angeles, I’m grateful.”

  “I heard the bad stuff already,” I said. “Tell me the other stuff about your life. Your family, your work, your education, all that.”

  “It’s boring.”

  “No, I’d love it.”

  “The only thing about my life that isn’t boring is awful.”

  “I’d still like to hear the boring stuff.”

  8

  Tom Lawler had had an ordinary childhood. “The only thing that wasn’t strictly average was that I got good grades from the very first and scored high on achievement tests. You remember way back then; there weren’t a lot of ‘gifted’ programs for slightly above-average kids. I got a partial scholarship to the University of Illinois. Studied sociology. Got drafted.”

  “You were in the Army?”

  “Well, it was 1970; no more deferments. I was lucky; ended up I didn’t go to Vietnam, so I did two years of busywork in North Carolina and started applying to universities for my advanced degree. Columbia took me without a quibble.”

  Tom was the youngest of three boys, but he was the only natural son. His older brothers had been adopted. His parents didn’t think they were going to have children and adopted two baby boys two years apart. Seven years after the second one, along came Tom.

  To grease the gears, I talked about my own childhood, about making doll-people out of toothpicks and hollyhocks with my mom, going to the college library with my dad, learning to sew from my mom, disastrous prom dates, and the time I wet my pants in first grade and was humiliated for life.

  He told me about his mother being like Edith Bunker, in the way she bustled around the house and had this high-pitched and naive whine, fretting constantly about her husband and the boys. His dad was an untalkative mechanic; didn’t have much to say but worked on cars with his sons like a surgeon. Tom talked about Little League, high-school baseball, and the problems of having older parents, to which I could relate.

  “You keep in touch with your family?” I asked.

  “Sure, though not as much as I could. To start with, we’re not a real close family. My dad died a couple of years ago and my mom lives with my oldest brother, John. I call, I send a Mother’s Day card, visit every couple of years. We were never that tight, and after I was in trouble everyone got nervous. They love me, I guess. My mom believes in me; she never thought I could do anything that bad. But...”

  I felt that pain inside; that ache of feeling not good enough. Being blamed when you’re innocent. Injustice could wring barrels of sympathy from me.

  So what Tom told me he did was marry the girl back home before going in the Army; he took her with him to Columbia, where he was first noticed when he did a paper on domestic violence and became an expert. He was offered a good position by the state of California as a Ph.D. in the Department of Social Services. His primary job was evaluating inmates, criminals, and defendants. Testing was his specialty. Interviews and counseling evaluations were also part of the process.

  “So you usually worked with people who were on the wrong side of the law?”

  “Bearing in mind that not all of them belonged on the wrong side. I found a number of people who appeared to have been convicted on shabby evidence — had had inferior defense representation — and shouldn’t have been locked up at all; some who should have been remanded to medical care
; and some criminals. I continued to treat a few with counseling if the court would remand them to counseling. Testing was my gift. I was hot. Like I told you, that’s when I started to get in trouble without getting caught.”

  I didn’t want to hear any more about his trouble. I wanted to hear his other stuff.

  “Do you miss anything about counseling, testing?”

  “It’s interesting, challenging, that’s what I miss. I still have my credentials even if I did get canned. I’ve written a couple of articles for the hell of it.”

  “No kidding? For what?”

  “For money.”

  “No.” I laughed. “For magazines?”

  “Yeah. I did four or five pieces on psychological evaluation and testing, and for a woman’s magazine I did a commercial piece on getting a family member a psychological evaluation. You know, like if you think your husband is acting strange and don’t know what to do to find out if he is strange. I listed behavior checkpoints and services.”

  “What was your most interesting case?” I asked. “I mean besides the bad one or the guy who liked to sit in people’s cars.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, seeming to shrug it off while he chewed down on brisket. I gave him more wine. “I did have a nymphomaniac once and that was kind of fun.”

  I laughed. “Fun? Or tempting?”

  “Not tempting in the usual sense, believe me. I know I admitted already that I was kind of promiscuous back then myself, but I never was attracted to sex addicts. Imagine two sex addicts together, killing themselves slowly? Jeez. The impact of it was hard on me, pardon the pun. What was fun was this: I knew she was a sex addict right away, and after about four sessions I figured out that in counseling she had another place to experience her sexual exploits. She liked to talk about it. I had to make her stop telling me about sex.”

  “Aw. Was there anything left to talk about?”

  “She was kind of neat. She was married, had a couple of kids, worked in real estate in L.A., and had no shortage of men or opportunities to screw. She would go out on calls to show homes, condos, and office space and show her panties.” He laughed. He had me laughing in no time. “Her exploits were fun to listen to; she had all these outrageous near-misses. Like she was showing a house to a man while the owners waited on their patio, and she screwed the prospective buyer in the laundry room on top of the washer and dryer.

  “Another time she did it in a fitting room in a department store, another time in a movie theater — not a drive-in, a theater. Now, try to imagine, I was about twenty-six, full of energy, charged up most of the time on those unmentionable illegal medications, and this woman was not only giving me graphic details of every little sexual adventure she’d ever had, she was blatant in her come-on to me. So, picture this, if you can: I’m not attracted and professionally I’m supposed to be objective, and I still have this little problem that my body doesn’t remember I’m not aroused. I listened to these X-rated stories and I had to stay behind the desk or die of embarrassment. And I started to look forward to her appointments.

  “I still had some ethics then; I gave her to a female colleague. Poor thing; she quit counseling. I often wonder what’s become of her. Wonder if she’s died of AIDS yet.”

  “I don’t suppose you keep in touch with anyone from those days?”

  “Sure, I have a couple of friends I keep in touch with. Remember, people were stunned by what happened. Then I dropped out of sight for a while.”

  He still had not mentioned names of friends or colleagues. No teachers, mentors, or bosses. He had only mentioned one brother’s name. It was always “There was this guy” or “There was this woman.” Nameless, faceless, rootless people. “So you went to Oregon. No one in Oregon was affected by your trouble in L.A. You must keep in touch with friends from Oregon.”

  “To Oregon to work for a private facility as a counselor. I drew the old twenty-two thousand a year as a first-year counselor who talked to codependent housewives, overstressed businessmen, alcoholics, people with eating disorders, and that kind of stuff. For a couple of years.”

  “Ordinary clientele?”

  “Nothing is ordinary. Everyone has something to work out — doesn’t always have to be in counseling. Some of these pop-psych books are good; twelve-step programs are changing people’s lives. I think about some of the people I had as clients.

  “There was a guy I used to see who, until the age of forty, had a charmed life. He managed to get himself to a position of importance in a big corporation, made lots of money, was under extreme pressure, had traveled widely; he had every social and economic advantage. All of a sudden he became disoriented — developed phobias and paranoias. Aside from lots of fears, he was feelingless. He didn’t care about anything. He’d cry in my office and not know why. Here was a smart, good-looking man, suddenly chronically depressed.

  “Well,” Tom went on, “we had to get our M.D. to prescribe some antidepressants to get him going in therapy. Right away, on intake information, I found that there were large segments of his childhood that he couldn’t remember.

  “We had to move into family therapy for a while. Jackie, this guy was absolutely crushed over something. When I saw him with his family — wife and teenaged kids — he could barely hold it together. When I saw him alone, he came apart. I wanted to put him in the hospital immediately.

  “We finally learned that he had had a younger brother who was severely handicapped, mentally and physically. He took up all his parents’ time and energy, wore them out. This guy got nothing from his family; his folks were worn to nubs by the time their younger son died. My client somehow went into adolescence believing he had killed his brother to get his parents back. He spent his youth telling himself that it was his fault, that he had killed the boy, and then spent his early adult years trying to block what he had accepted as truth.”

  “How sad,” I said. “And you’re sure he didn’t?”

  “His brother died in an infirmary and there are records. My client’s parents suffered a combination of grief and exhaustion and didn’t help their surviving son in any way. The parents acted as though an ornery house guest had left; my client had all this grief and affection to deal with. My client had been neglected and was not exhausted; although his younger brother was in terrible condition, my client had spent time with him, loved him, visited him, and had developed a relationship with him.

  “See what the mind can create and suppress? He developed a scenario in which he killed his brother, then suppressed the imaginary crime and became a success... and then finally his mind would not cooperate. He had what laymen would call a nervous breakdown.”

  “How did you treat him?”

  “Hospitalization and antidepressants and intensive therapy. Added to that was family counseling including his mother, and finally outpatient therapy. The minute the pieces were put in the puzzle, he stopped being paranoid. Neglect and abuse are dangerous disease makers.”

  “Do you think about any other patients?” I asked him, pouring him more wine. “Want coffee?”

  “Yes, to the coffee. You can’t find this interesting.”

  “Of course I do. You find it interesting; why shouldn’t I?”

  I made coffee and went back to the dining room. I pushed him to tell me a couple more. A woman who had beaten her children and was attempting to gather up the family threads and make amends; a minister who was a religious fanatic and couldn’t seem to hold a ministry together because sane parishioners rejected him; a man who suffered childhood abuse and was sociopathic and frighteningly brilliant.

  “I can’t even remember how this guy got into counseling — maybe a condition of employment, court order, something. I don’t know if he was telling me the truth; he sure had a story. He went to school up to about the fourth grade, when his father arbitrarily decided to take him out. His father had a big piece of farmland and grew wheat. He had no brothers or sisters, he said... that he knew of, he said. His parents worked him, this little
kid. And beat and abused him. His mother was terrorized by his father; his father sexually molested him. His mother cooperated in the sexual abuse. He had fantasies about killing them both, which I thought was reasonable, and I didn’t get the feeling he was planning to carry them out.

  “He was in his twenties when I saw him. I gave him IQ tests prepared for the learning-disabled first, then regular tests. He had a photographic memory, advanced cognitive thinking; he could unravel complex story ideas. He had superhuman math skills after being taught some basic math concepts. Brilliant. And sociopathic.”

  “Sociopathic. Explain.”

  “No conscience. He couldn’t make and keep friendships; he couldn’t form positive relationships. He had a horrible temper and was always right; always. He wrote letters to editors that were filled with five-syllable words and beautiful prose — too hot and crazy to print. He’d misspell... until being corrected once, and after that he’d get the words right every time. I suggested a GED and he told me it would be pretty impossible to go back and make up from third grade on, and, that he didn’t need any fucking piece of paper to know how smart he was. He told me anything I wanted to know, with zero emotion. He told me about the temper; I never saw it. He was cool and controlled...

  “I wonder about him,” Tom ended.

  “What kind of childhood abuse makes a sociopath?” I asked.

  “There are a lot of theories. You can take one kid who suffered neglect and abuse and he becomes a criminal, and take another one, similar circumstances, and he becomes a neurosurgeon. You tell me.”

  “You don’t think it’s environmental?”

  “Well, could be. This guy had a mean old son-of-a-bitch father who raped him and worked him; that’s not a role model for a conscience. And a mother who couldn’t protect him. Then figure in his superior intelligence. Where does that come from?”

  “Intelligence isn’t connected to moral behavior,” I said. “Hitler taught us that one.”