by Diane Lawson
Halftitle page
Title Page
Copyright Page
A Tightly Raveled Mind. Copyright © 2014 by Diane Lawson. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written consent from the publisher, except for brief quotations for reviews. For further information, write Cinco Puntos Press, 701 Texas, El Paso, TX 79901; or call 1-915-838-1625.
FIRST EDITION
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lawson, Diane.
A tightly raveled mind / Diane Lawson.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-935955-92-4 (paperback) : ISBN 978-1-935955-93-1 (eBook)
1. Women psychoanalysts—Fiction. 2. Marital conflict—Fiction. 3. Ex-police officers—Fiction. 4. Murder—Fiction. 5. San Antonio (Tex.)—Fiction. 6. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3612.A952T54 2014
813'.6—dc23
2014007656
Book and cover design by Anne M. Giangiulio
Poor girl has to go back to work.
Electronic edition handcrafted at Pajarito Studios.
Dedication
For my children,
Alejandro and Pilar
Epigraph
No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed devils
that inhabit the human breast and seeks to wrestle with them
can expect to come through unscathed.
NSigmund Freudn
Chapter One
Psychoanalysis is not and has never been the fashion in Texas. It’s a pull-yourself-up-by-your-cowboy-bootstraps kind of place where psychiatrists are only for crazy people. Texas psychoanalysts like to say they grow their own analytic patients, meaning people come seeking a quick fix for emotional pain and learn about the enduring value of self-knowledge as a by-product.
In no small part, my own success could be attributed to several advantages provided me by my former husband Richard, as he would have been the first to tell you. There was the money, of course—the plump cushion of his inheritance, on top of the income from his high-end psychiatric consulting—which allowed me the luxury of being selective about patients I took on. My office on the grounds of his childhood home was in a classy part of town, and, although I’d kept my maiden name for professional purposes, enough of the right people connected me to Dr. Richard Kleinberg and his old San Antonio bloodline to ensure my business card would be handed out in the best places. In Texas, as in most of the country, Jews are well enough regarded, as long as they’re doctors, lawyers or accountants.
On the other hand, I’d given up a lot for Richard. My career was just getting going in Chicago when he started lobbying to move back to San Antonio. From what I’ve observed, Texans must get a homing microchip implanted in their brains at birth. I’m not talking about everyday nostalgia for one’s home town. I’m talking about some primordial imperative for return. I’d agreed to relocate if, and only if, I could have my ideal practice. I would not, as too many psychiatrists have come to do, run patients through the office at fifteen-minute intervals with only a prescription to show for the encounter. I would restrict my work to psychoanalysis, the real five-times-a-week kind, not some watered-down version. Richard, under the influence of the migratory urge to reinhabit his birthplace, swore that he wouldn’t dream of pressuring me to make money.
I should have known better. His complaints about me not pulling my weight and my other numerous faults grew like weeds in his native soil. However, after a few years, despite domestic turbulence and brutal summers, I’d settled into a comfortable, if not blissful, routine. I was good at my job—or thought I was. And I liked my work: listening each day to the details of the lives of my seven patients, exploring the intricacies of their minds, trying to help people like Professor Howard Westerman get comfortable in their owns skins. So much for my good intentions. Like Private Investigator Mike Ruiz says, that and ninety-nine cents will get you a breakfast taco at Panchito’s.
The Monday that my patient, Howard Westerman, blew himself to kingdom come started out like any ordinary workday—like the kind of everyday day that feeds our communal delusion that everyone we care about will live forever. I’d felt my standard urgency to be at my station for Howard’s eight o’clock session. Once, early on in my work with him, I’d dawdled over the newspaper, reluctant to plunge into my routine, only to emerge from my back door to find him pacing the balcony of my converted carriage house office. He’d flat refused to use the couch that session, circling the room instead, talking in fragmented sentences, rolling a cat’s eye marble—the “lucky” one he always carried in his pocket—around in his fingers. I got the message about his desperate need for order. From then on, I’d done my best not to disrupt him.
This in mind, I’d pushed through the weekend’s worth of stale air in the waiting area that day to switch on the lamp and straighten the magazines before closing myself into the consulting room. I’d registered my usual irritation at the sight of the glass-paned door, a choice Richard had insisted upon for aesthetic reasons. It was that wavy kind of glass—some fancy Italian something, totally opaque of course—but it always struck me as posing too permeable a barrier for a therapeutic sanctuary.
I’d gone about my morning ritual: making coffee, adjusting the blinds for the morning sun, fluffing the pillow at the head of the couch, and covering it with a fresh tissue. When I finally looked up, the clock read 7:56, which was late for the painfully punctual Howard. I held my breath, anticipating the strike of his heavy black wingtips on the metal staircase. As if to provide a substitute sound, the resident redheaded woodpecker started pounding the tree by the window. The clock rolled to 8:00. I poured some coffee, burned my tongue on the first sip and thumbed through a psychiatric journal full of articles on schizophrenia, PET scanning and the thirty-one flavors of bipolar disorder before tossing it in the trash. There was no possibility of missing Howard coming up the stairs. I’d checked the waiting room anyway. Empty.
In theory, a patient coming late constitutes resistance to treatment. Not necessarily a big deal, just something to talk about once he or she arrives. Part of the process. Grist for the mill. Under ordinary circumstances, the analyst can even afford to experience a patient’s tardiness as a small gift. There are always calls to return, letters and bills to open, private thoughts to savor, fingernails to file. But I knew deep down this event was far too un-Howardly to consider ordinary.
Howard came seeking analysis when his socialite wife Camille put the divorce gun to his head. Their twin boys would be off to college in the fall, and she’d told him she didn’t fancy spending the rest of her life with a human robot. Howard, having grown up in rural West Texas, came by his lack of emotion honestly. He’d survived the bleakest of childhoods—seventh child of twelve, an emotional cipher for a mother, a hellfire Pentecostal minister for a father—by making feelings irrelevant. I‘d immediately understood Camille’s complaints about Howard. The man possessed no vocabulary for feelings, much less a clue as to what might require one. He was maddeningly and irrationally rational. All the same, I’d come to be quite fond of him, certain there was a tender guy inside awaiting rescue. My rescue.
I paced around the office as Howard’s minutes ticked by that morning, doing what an analyst does, letting my mind free associate about what had been going on in his treatment. I recalled that a chink had appeared in his defensive armor in our previous session, his Friday appointment.
“My wife said to tell you that I made her coffee this morning,” he’d said.
“What makes that important?”
“Usually I just make it for myself. I don’t know what got into me.”
/>
“And?”
“She kissed my head.” Trained to know that I want to hear about feelings, not just behaviors, he’d squirmed and added, “It felt okay.”
It made sense that he’d be shut tight in reaction to this lapse, but it wasn’t his style to be late. By 8:15, I was fighting down the urge to give him a call. I knew it would be to quiet my nerves, not for him, so I cleaned out my purse instead. I took my time, throwing out the wadded credit card receipts, paper clips and even one desiccated lipstick I’d bought on impulse but never wore because the color made me look sallow.
I hate patients no-showing. Always have. It makes me feel that I’ve screwed up in some way. In an attempt to soothe myself, I began to circle the consultation room, looking out each window in sequence—the two parking spaces just off the street, the elm with the frenetic woodpecker still hard at work, the view of the back of the house screened by a huge, flaming-pink crape myrtle and the old live oak cradling the children’s tree house in its branches. The beauty of our backyard raised the ugly question of what I’d do for a workspace should Richard and I go through with the divorce. There was no doubt I’d have to relinquish the house, a consideration that only served to ratchet up my agitation.
I remember the accusing gaze of my life-sized bust of Freud, a graduation gift from the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, following me from his spot on the bookshelf. To appease him, I’d asked myself what the good Dr. Sigmund would say about the situation. He’d say, of course, that Howard’s defenses were loosening. That this was a great opportunity for insight! I’d rolled these ideas around in my mind like worry beads. It didn’t help.
In retrospect, I was far too concerned about things that had no importance—like whether I’d made some therapeutic mistake or whether Howard’s absence presaged my losing a hard-earned analytic patient. In retrospect, I wasn’t concerned enough about things that really mattered—like the fragility of the human psyche and life itself. Or the potential for one terrible event to start a catastrophic slide down a slope made slippery by fear and selfishness.
For all the good that retrospect does.
I learned Howard was dead on the nightly news. I was putting dinner together, cooking being one of the few downsides to Richard’s and my separation. The kids had been fighting over which show to watch for their thirty-minute television allotment. As punishment, I made them endure the wrap-up of the day’s traffic jams, city council spats, and detailing of San Antonio’s intractable summer heat. They wrestled around on the rug, keeping the bickering just below the threshold of what would set me off again.
“Mom, look! It’s your patient.” Alex jumped up, knocking his Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper onto the rug, the beige and sage green oriental Richard had haggled into possession on our Turkish honeymoon.
Professor Westerman’s face on the screen—the stunned photo from his Trinity University Chemistry Department ID badge—was unmistakable.
“Hey, Stupid. Mom can’t say who her patients are.” Tamar was smug. “It’s called con-fi-den-ti-al-i-ty.”
“Dwarf-brain, it says he’s dead. If he’s dead, she can say. Privacy Case Law. It was on Dad’s TV show last week.”
“Whoa! He blew himself up.” Tamar’s eyes opened wide. “Maybe it was a suicide bomb.”
“He wasn’t a terrorist. That’s so stupid,” Alex said. “They think it’s an accident, Mom. Can we change the channel now? Pleeeese?”
I thought about the voicemail I’d ended up leaving that morning. Howard’s wife would find it—her husband’s analyst politely but firmly inquiring as to his whereabouts. I imagined her return call: This is Camille Westerman, calling on Howard’s behalf. He regrets not being there for his appointment, but he is in smithereens. Do you charge for sessions missed due to unanticipated death?
I soldiered through the motions of our dinner routine, total numbness alternating with gut-ripping waves of guilt. The word blindsided kept looping around in my mind. As if somehow I could have seen it coming, which maybe I should have. Mike Ruiz says people get blindsided because their eyes are closed. I take offense at that—or pretend to—a private investigator presuming to teach a psychoanalyst something about denial. About repression. About the power of the Unconscious to put our head up our butt and keep it there. But the fact is that I didn’t see Howard Westerman’s death coming. Or the death of my second patient, as Detective George Slaughter, SAPD Homicide, would take great pleasure in pointing out. Or even that of my third patient, which I would witness with my own eyes. Despite years of experience as a psychoanalyst, I failed to anticipate each and every one of those fatal events, not to mention the violence I would prove capable of myself.
Chapter Two
A brief obituary in The San Antonio Express-News announced a memorial service for Professor Westerman to be held on Wednesday at four o’clock in the Trinity University Chapel. Odd timing for such an event in a way. On the other hand, it was late enough to accommodate work and early enough to not constrict plans for the evening. Howard, I thought, would have approved of the efficiency.
I debated attending the service all the way to the chapel door. Did I think it would do Howard good? Did I need to go for myself? Some of my colleagues, the theoretically conservative ones, would later argue that my very presence was a breech of confidentiality, a sign that I was already off my rocker. And maybe I was. Certainly, Howard’s privacy wasn’t a top priority for me. What I told myself was that being human was the important thing. But then we humans will tell ourselves anything to justify what we want to do. That I felt compelled to check out Camille Westerman is probably closer to the truth. Not that I would have known that at the time.
The media presented Howard’s demise as accidental—a little chemistry experiment in his home workshop gone wrong. But Freud didn’t believe in accidents, and neither did I. Deep down no one believes in accidents. We all want meaning. We prefer the illusion of control over what matters in our lives, no matter how irrational the explanation. And so, as I grew tired of irrationally blaming myself for Howard’s death, I began to irrationally target Camille.
Though I hadn’t met Howard’s wife, I had a picture of her in my mind, and I scanned the gathering for that imagined, tight-faced woman in black, the dowdy professor’s wife with red-rimmed eyes. As it turned out, the real Mrs. Westerman did wear black, a St. Johns knit that revealed just enough cleavage under her three strands of pearls to push at respectability. Her studied beauty only served to fuel my budding suspicion. She sat front row, of course, a mirror-image son on either side. As each eulogist descended the lectern, she stood, extended a hand and presented her smooth cheek for a condoling kiss.
Howard and Camille never qualified as a heaven-made match. She comes from old money, from the oil well-drilling, ranch-owning, dove-hunting elite of the self-contained municipality of Alamo Heights that occupies central San Antonio. Alamo Heights—City of Beauty and Charm, it says on the green population signs marking the town border. I’m not kidding. It’s a preciously insular world, populated with folks who affectionately call their town The Bubble. They’re people proud to have never set foot out of Texas, direct descendants of the gang that invented Fiesta—the ten day, faux-Mexican Mardi Gras imitation that celebrates their claim to privilege with parades, coronations and costumes costing tens of thousands of dollars, while simultaneously providing greater San Antonio’s Latino population the redoubtable opportunity to honor the brutal defeat of their ancestors at the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto.
The man Camille had set her sights on marrying during their Alamo Heights high school days, the man who had been starting quarterback to her head cheerleader, who had been smiling Duke for her Fiesta Duchess debut, opted instead to jilt her on the eve of their wedding. In a quick, face-saving move, Camille seduced Howard, her taciturn cowboy of a professor at Trinity University. Although the seduction earned her a passing grade in Chem 101, the pleasure of the revenge was short-lived.
After the service, I found a place
to take in the crowd behind an obscenely large floral arrangement near the doorway of the chapel foyer. I couldn’t resist peeking at the card: “Camille dear,” it said. “Deepest sympathy to you and the boys. Richard Kleinberg and family.” What? Jews don’t send flowers! Jews donate to good causes! And just how inclusive did my husband intend that “family” to be? I slipped the card into my pocket for my Freud action figure to analyze. I’d brought Sigmund’s plastic likeness, a birthday gift from Alex, along as a talisman. It’s a little habit that, I’m embarrassed to admit, has proven helpful on numerous occasions.
I was looking for a private moment with Camille to introduce myself, offer my sympathy and get a close-up read of her person. She wasn’t hard to spot, standing near the exit, holding court with a group of well-heeled types. I’d just found my opening, when a man sidled up to her. He put his forehead to hers and his arm around her waist, his hand settling a little too comfortably on her hip. She looked at him like a first love and kissed him lightly on the lips. Was he the high school sweetheart, none other than Mr. Alamo Heights Quarterback auditioning for a comeback? I thought of Howard and the coffee. I thought of Camille’s kiss on his head. My suspicions were confirmed. I‘d been leading Howard to the slaughter, encouraging him to be vulnerable, to express his tender feelings to a woman incapable of a like response. A sour taste filled the back of my throat.
There was no call for condolence here.
I slipped out the chapel door to be slammed by hundred-degree-plus heat. It was another in the series of unseasonably cruel days of that early summer, the kind of June day that engenders profound dread for what August holds. Steamy waves rose off the parking lot, and the soft asphalt sucked nastily at the tips of my Diego di Lucca spike heels. It was a long walk to my car, and I had a lot to think about.