A Tightly Raveled Mind

by Diane Lawson

  “Who’s there?” I said, my pulse pounding. The fingers of my right hand slid to the edge of the armrest, closer to my makeshift weapon.

  “Missin’.”

  “Missin’ who?”

  “Missin’ Sergeant Lance Powers. Missin’ accomplished. Get it? Just about finished this psy-cho-analysis.”

  His psy-cho sent gooseflesh up my arms. “I’d say we just started.” I tried to sound clueless, to inject some light into the darkness closing in around us, just like I’d do with my father—Daddy, why don’t you stay home tonight? We could play Scrabble.

  “Don’t think you get to say,” Lance said. “Orders from higher up.”

  “Who gets to say?”

  “Ask that guy with the red hair,” he said, backing out the door.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Of course, I called Mike after Lance left. But the essential thing is that I hesitated, as if not telling Mike would keep it from being true. Lance was falling apart, and that meant danger. Even though I felt the need to arm myself, I didn’t want to accept the cause. Naturally, I felt the responsibility of a physician: If my patient comes undone, it must be my fault. And all that caretaker-guilt would have played some part in undermining my psychic stability. But to tell you the truth, I think it was more about some inkling of a real possibility for danger. Real danger over which I had no control. And my mind couldn’t manage the awareness.

  Theoretically, one would say that my primary defense mechanism was starting to fail me, my default psychic circuit-breaker shorting out. One minute I’d be disavowing like crazy: Yes, he’s dangerous. But no, I’m not scared. Not me. No worries, I’m just keeping my scissors handy. Credit is due my mother for her honing of this powerful protective maneuver in me: Your daddy won’t hurt you, Nora. Not you. Disavowal—the psychic mechanism that insists the world must be a stage, because what’s happening is just too damned awful to be true. And so, I did what we all do. I called on a back-up maneuver. It was ever so much easier to get agitated about what Mike thought—about controlling what Mike thought, about putting my fear into Mike—than to deal with my own messy subjectivity.

  “He’s talking crazy about a red-haired guy,” I said.

  It was the truth, of course, but I could have said any number of things to illustrate my concern. I could have said that Lance wore his sunglasses. That he told me he was living his nightmare. That he spoke in riddles. Have you ever noticed how, with just the right approach, you can recruit someone else to feel your unwanted feeling for you?

  “And what does our good Doctor Perv look like?”

  “A lot of people have red hair,” I said.

  “Yeah. San Antonio’s crawling with Scots and Irishmen. I need to go.”

  “Mike…” My throat closed off in reaction to a solution taking shape in my mind. “Wait.”

  “What?”

  “I need to ask you something. I just don’t want you to take it wrong.”

  “If you’re hoping to analyze our little session yesterday, this isn’t the time.”

  “That’s not it,” I said.

  And it wasn’t what I’d wanted to ask about. Nevertheless, the mention of what I’d done with him started that unstable shame-arousal mix swirling around inside me.

  “Of course, that’s it,” he said, attempting a Viennese accent. “You’re ver-ried about being a slut. You ve-men are all alike.”

  His words caused something in me to shift. Of course, that was my worry, but also notice how he made me part of the human race: You women are all alike. And then the accent. A perfect touch, simultaneously echoing the authority of Freud while diluting judgment with humor. Masterful. His intervention was exactly what an analyst aspires to in an interpretation—saying the right thing in the right way at the right time.

  “Slut isn’t the exact word,” I said.

  “How about whore? Does that work for a sex-starved Kansas girl?”

  “Only as in filthy whore! My dad insisted on the modifier.”

  “Ever hit you?’

  “Only when he was manic.”

  “Where the hell was your mom?”

  The question struck me as odd. I looked around my remembered room. Where the hell was she? Looked up with eyes throbbing from his blows. Heard a snicker. Over there, from the shadowy figure in the doorway. Most people assume memories are static. You have them or you don’t. You recover them or fail to. The fact is that memories evolve. Life narratives undergo continual revision. And for the first time in this scene, I noticed my mother.

  “She was watching.” I said.

  “Watching? That’s sick.”

  “She was scared.”

  “Ariantha didn’t stand for that kind of shit from my old man.”

  “Your father beat you?’

  “Don’t start on me.” A keyboard started tapping in the background. “I got things to do.”

  “Will you get me a gun?”

  “You’re sounding like your son,” he said. “And you’re getting the same answer.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I.”

  “Other people have guns.”

  “Other people aren’t psychoanalysts. You of all people should be curious about your wish to possess a lethal weapon.”

  “I know why,” I said.

  I just didn’t want to have to say it out loud. He won’t hurt you, Nora. But my father had hurt me in more ways than one. And Richard had hurt me, and Lance could hurt me.

  Freud stared down from his perch.

  “Just for my peace of mind,” I said. “I’m alone up here in this office all day. Anyone could come in.”

  “Sniperman scared you today. Admit it.”

  “It’s not just him,” I said. “It’s the whole situation.”

  “You’re finally scared. That’s good. Really. That’s good.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I was far too nervous to sit down to lunch, even though Ofelia had outdone herself that day—a fruit plate with fat red strawberries, slimy-sweet mango slices, orange sections arranged in a pinwheel with cottage cheese in the middle, some raw almonds and shiny green grapes scattered around for contrast. I paced and ate, grabbing a morsel each time I passed the plate on the counter.

  I have no idea how long she’d been standing there in the doorway between the kitchen and the laundry room.

  “Doctora?” she said.

  “Ofelia,” I said. “Sorry. You…surprised me. Is everything okay?”

  She looked suddenly older to me, silver hair in a tight bun, churning hands clasped just below an ornate crucifix. Under her apron, she wore a dress I’d given her, a sleeveless cotton sheath with big pearly buttons all the way down the front. The pale blue fabric looked especially handsome against her caramel-colored skin. I’d always liked the dress, but I’d despaired of ever squeezing myself into it again. It actually hung a bit loose on her, and I felt a twinge of resentment, as if she’d taken something from me.

  “Don’t marry heem, Doctora.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “You can be with heem, but no marry.” She shook her head back and forth in time with her wagging index finger.

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “Este Miguel. The childrens tell me.” Her mouth took on a prissy shape. For a moment, I had the irrational fear that somehow she’d seen me do my little job on Mike.

  “You mean Mike Ruiz,” I said, deliberately using the Anglo version of his name, as if that choice provided cover for my fantasies. “The detective. He’s just doing some work for me.”

  “Before marry, los mens…they take shower every time. They bring beautiful flores. Despues, nada mas que beben cerveza. Mucho beer, Doctora. Y miran el television. No baths. Steenk all day. No marry.” She gave a little nod of her head and slipped up the stairs.

  I stood there, my face feeling as red as the strawberry I held between my fingers. “No te preocupes,” I shouted after her. “Don’t worry,” I added, just in case my
verb tense was wrong.

  To my surprise, Yvette called in at ten minutes after her start time for a phone session. There was a noticeable level of French rowdiness in the background.

  “Dr. Goodman, I can’t talk much. The cell phone costs hoards of money. My parents wanted me to call from the hotel room. So I could use the phone card, they said. So they could listen in would be more like it. What could you possibly say to your analyst that it wouldn’t be all right for your parents to hear? We’re analysts too. Can you believe them? I swear to god.”

  “Tell me about you,” I said. “I haven’t seen you in over a week.”

  I felt disconnected from her and devalued by how little our contact seemed to matter.

  “You won’t believe it,” she said. “I met this guy here.”

  I believed it. Yvette met a guy everywhere she went. She’d be crazy over him until her parents started to like him, then he’d be history. Yvette yearned for her parents’ approval every bit as much as she yearned to shove it in their faces that they had no control over her. The only way to deal with a person like Yvette is to have no agenda at all. That mental state is hard for even an analyst to generate.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “His name is Jean-Pierre. Just like in my French textbook.” She added in a whisper, “He’s really hot.” Switching back to a normal tone of voice, she said, “Say hello to my psychoanalyst, Jean-Pierre.”

  I heard a distant Bon Jour, Madame.

  “Doesn’t he have an awesome accent? Anyway, I’ll tell you all about it when I see you. But I might not be coming back with my parents. I’m trying to talk them into letting me stay here and work on my French. Semester abroad. Once-in-a-lifetime chance, don’t you think? Got to go. Au revoir and all.”

  “Did you see it?” Renee asked when I opened the door for her session that day.

  “See what?” I said, although I knew damned well what she was talking about.

  “Just take a peek out the window. You can’t miss it. Only E550 out there.”

  “You got your car.” I heard the sour note in my voice. I didn’t covet the Mercedes. The Japanese do much more reliable luxury. What I coveted was the happiness Renee seemed to get out of something so concrete, so attainable.

  “Lucky for me I found an analyst who takes as much pleasure in my good fortune as my envying bitch of a mother. How am I supposed to understand trans-fer-ence if you are just like her?”

  “We need to understand what this car represents to you.”

  “It means that I can hold my head up when I pull into the Phyllis Browning Realty parking lot. It means that I don’t have to tell wealthy clients that my other car is in the shop. How many times do they fall for that? They see that old Volvo and think they can run my hiney all over town showing houses. That Mercedes says, Don’t think you can waste my time.”

  “So how did it go with King?”

  “Did I say anything about King?”

  “You must have seen him when you got the car.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Saw parts of him I hadn’t seen in quite a while. Do you really want to know about those dirty dealings? Thought you only liked hearing about the polite stuff.”

  “Dirty dealings?”

  “You didn’t think he’d just hand over the keys, did you? You want to know how the real world operates, Dr. Good-man? Write this down on your analytic tablet. The bastard has me come over to his office. Makes me wait outside for twenty minutes with his secretary snickering into her keyboard. I finally get let in to find him sprawled in his fat leather chair, smiling his shit-eating smile, waving the car title in his hand. The keys were nestled right over his fly.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Say? I did what had to be done. I blew the bastard.”

  “You allowed him to degrade you.”

  Freud’s eyebrows seemed to elevate. It’s an uncanny fact of the analytic trade that whatever goes on in the analyst’s life gets mirrored in the life of one or another of her patients. Don’t ask me to explain. It just happens. Selective attention? Coincidence? Maybe there’s more to it in some instances. Some weird resonance that gets going. Some unconscious identification—patient to analyst, analyst to patient. In this case though, my first impulse was to distinguish the blowjob I’d administered from the one Renee was describing. Mine was about love, not greed, I told myself. But weren’t both motivated by want? At least Renee knew what she wanted from King. Or thought she did. What did I want from Mike? That question was still begging to be addressed, but I wasn’t really looking for an answer back then. If it occurred to me at all, I couldn’t focus on it, couldn’t give it substance. I just wanted.

  Besides, conscious explanations of our behavior are always suspect. A neuro-psychologist might say that my pursuit of Mike was merely my emotional brain charging ahead, not giving a fig for input from my rational brain. Consider the long ago experiments done on patients unfortunate enough to have had the two hemispheres of their brains disconnected via lobotomy or some freak accident, meaning each side can get different information. Then show the emotional right-brain a dirty picture and the rational left-brain a blank screen. The patient will giggle and blush, reacting emotionally from the right side. What did you see? Nothing at all, the left-brain, the only brain with language, will answer. And if I believe this, how do I justify being an analyst? Isn’t the story I weave with a patient just a very costly and time-consuming justification? That’s what Richard believed. The way I see it, analysis educates the rational brain to what the emotional brain might be up to, puts the rational brain on to the rules the emotional brain plays by—attachment, emotional survival, pattern-matching.

  So then what did my rational brain see in Mike? Nothing. No money. No education to speak of. No prestige. Balding. Swearing. Cigarette-smoking and lying about it. The real question is, What did my emotional brain see? Sexual intensity. Conflicted, of course. A psychic wound deep enough to match mine. Rage. Grief. But maybe some emotional honesty. A reflection of myself that resonated, that for once in my life felt like it had something to do with me.

  Renee, however, wasn’t ready to be troubled by any such neuro-philosophical concerns.

  “Degrade me?” she said. “Ha. When the SOB came in my mouth, I grabbed the keys and title in one hand, spit his sour cum into the other and smeared it all over his Hermes tie.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The knocking started at four minutes to three that afternoon. Urgent knocks, like a woodpecker hot on the tail of a grub. This is really too much, I thought. One thing to stand nose pressed to the door, quite another to be pounding away minutes before session time. Of course, you’re wondering why I didn’t think it might be an emergency. Maybe Morrie had diarrhea or a bloody nose. Well, you would have to know Morrie Viner. No, you would have to be engaged in Morrie’s Asperger-y version of a sado-masochistic dance to really know. I just didn’t think any of those normal, compassionate, human thoughts. I just didn’t. Okay? It had been a long day.

  “Your dog tried to bite me,” he shouted when I opened the door.

  “Which dog?”

  “The big brown one. The one you have sitting on the stairs.”

  That goddamn stray. “That dog isn’t mine. Why don’t you lie down and we can talk about it.”

  “How can I lie down? I almost lost my leg.”

  I sat in my chair, feigning analytic calm. My thoughts were spinning like pinwheels. Will Animal Control even be open by the time I finish with Morrie? Will they try to give me some bullshit about coming out tomorrow? Will the dog even be here when they come? Such a mess. Richard would know somebody that knew somebody. If he called, that truck with the cages on the back would be out here within the hour, and that dog would be on its way to the gas chamber. The thought of what Richard could do with his connections made me even angrier.

  “That may not be your dog,” Morrie said, “but it is on your stairs. And when it bites your patient, it is your fault. Only your fault. I can get an
attorney. I see the billboard on my way here every day. 1-800-GET-EVEN.”

  “The dog didn’t bite you,” I said, but my words were lost in his rampage.

  “If you had your office in a building like a normal psychoanalyst, like Dr. Richard F. Kleinberg does at 7940 Floyd Curl Drive, Suite 700, San Antonio, Texas 78229 in the heart of the Medical Center, there would not be a problem with biting dogs. Dogs are absolutely prohibited. Except seeing-eye dogs, and seeing-eye dogs are specifically trained not to bite.”

  “What does the image of a biting dog bring to your mind?”

  I wasn’t really trying to analyze Morrie’s reaction. I was just trying to get him to calm down. Free association amounted to a soothing, obsessive exercise for him.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll try to analyze it. But I’m very nervous.”

  He got on the couch and talked a while about dogs he’d encountered in his life. His grandfather’s collie Winston. The two yapping Boston Terriers that chased him up the street on his way to school, scaring him until he wet his pants. Teddy, the little dog he’d been allowed to have until his parents put it down in hopes of easing the baby brother’s asthma. I suggested that he might have felt that his dog killed his brother. Or that his anger at having to give up his dog made him want his brother to die and that he’d assumed his bad thoughts killed his brother.