She was not in the apartment when I awoke the following morning. She arrived later with a removal van with two men whom I recognized as members of her anti-apartheid group. None of us spoke. As she began to collect her things, I left. A few hours later, I returned to the apartment and packed my belongings. Then, as I had always intended to do, I returned to my studio. Carol and I had been married for only twelve weeks.
CHAPTER TEN
Carol sued for divorce on the grounds of incompatibility. I chose not to contest her suit. She made clear through her lawyer how much I disgusted her. He told mine that his client wanted no alimony, no settlement of any kind. She wanted only to have nothing whatsoever to do with me.
I felt now as alone in America as, years before, I had wanted to be. Paul was always out of the country. His reputation as a violinist (he also played the flute) had soared and exploded into bits that fell brilliantly all over the world. He spent more time performing in Europe, Asia, Australia and South America than he spent living in America. The spare bedroom in my apartment was full of his postcards from the places where he performed. Each of the last two years, I had received telephone calls from him, from San Francisco and Miami, where, he said, he had gone for a day in order to meet his legal requirements as a resident alien.
Selwyn hardly telephoned. He had been transferred against his will again. He could no longer hide that he was not the important executive he wanted to be taken for. When I told him of my divorce he said, chuckling, “Use and discard. Use and discard.” He complained about having to live in Louisiana, which was the latest place he had been transferred to. He said, “No international action here, man. It’s like eating breadfruit and saltfish every day. The thing’s good, but you bound to get tired eating it day after day after day. It’s tough.” I thought he sounded less and less American. I was certain he chuckled less than he used to.
Two years passed. Undistracted now, I gave myself up to what I had originally come to America to do. I became, finally, two years later than I should have been, a psychiatrist. I opened a private practice. I published some papers. I claimed they were actual case histories, but those studies of alienation were based on experiences that I concocted and attributed to patients I invented.
My invented patients trusted neither their perceptions nor the perceptions of them by others. They lived in worlds of their own and reserved for themselves the right to do in it anything they pleased. Their behaviour, from the point of view of those for whom I described it, was always outrageous and often inexplicable. One of them was a young bank clerk. Shattered when she finally met the man she had been flirting with for over a year on the telephone, she suddenly became deaf and blind. There was, I wrote, no medical explanation for her condition. The first time I saw her, she was covered with bruises. In my office, she stumbled into couches and walls. She fell over chairs. The loudest, unexpected noise could elicit no response from her. I named her illness Janice Syndrome. I claimed to have discovered it. Janice, I explained, had obviously decided she could no longer trust, nor rely upon, senses that so cruelly had betrayed her. She simply decided that she was better off without them. Her case was extreme. She was, I concluded, incurable. She had been brought too late to see me. But I suggested that if she had come to me sooner, I might have been able to do something for her.
Another of my patients claimed to be invisible. He was arrested repeatedly for nudity in public. His dream was to work, costumed as an entertaining animal, in an amusement park. He wanted, he told me, unseen within his costumes, to deride and make fun of those whom he was ostensibly amusing. But, of course, he refused to put on clothes, even in order to achieve his secret wish, and could never apply for the kind of position he wanted. In court, dressed in prison garb, he maintained that his arrests were harassment and the trial a violation of his civil rights since, but for the insulting prison uniform, no one could see him. I published a spate of such fraudulent case histories over the next few years and began to establish a quixotic, apparently attractive reputation. I was considered an exciting newcomer in American psychiatry.
One day, out of the blue, I received a telephone call from Jonathan. He invited me to lunch. I had not spoken to him in years, any more than I had spoken to Reginald or Porter. But I had followed his career, just as I had followed the careers of my other former colleagues. I had read Jonathan’s papers. I knew of his excellent reputation, just as I knew of Reginald’s pioneering work in the ghetto and of Porter’s free clinics for the underprivileged that he held once a week in the hospital that Reginald had coaxed corporations into building. Over lunch, a week later, Jonathan told me that he felt dissatisfied working as a psychiatrist and wanted to try his hand, seriously, at becoming a novelist. He offered to sell his practice to me.
I was surprised, but only mildly. As my study-group colleague, he had always given me the impression that he trusted me more than he trusted his fellow Americans, Reginald and Porter. It was not only because of our secret conversations, which he initiated, about racism and anti-semitism, or because of his secret novel manuscripts. He treated me as an illiterate.
Though Jonathan, convinced that American art, literature and history were important sources of information for therapists of American patients, was constantly recommending books for me to read, I had single-mindedly refused to read anything that was not to do with psychiatry. He reminded me, often, of Sarah; that, as with her, I was his protégé, his special project.
Despite, perhaps because of, my fraudulent papers, my practice was growing only slowly. My patients were mostly non-European-descended Americans. However, Jonathan began enthusiastically recommending me to his mostly European-descended patients. He showed me the letter he had written about me that he wanted, with my permission, to circulate among them. He told me that they trusted his judgement and assured me that they, or most of them, would follow his recommendations. I accepted his offer.
Now, with the rich Euro-American patients Jonathan had bequeathed me, I began to immerse myself in the books that he had vainly tried to get me to read when we were students. I read American and European history. I read European and Euro-American novelists, dramatists and poets. I read Europe’s and America’s philosophers and theologians, their biographers and autobiographers. I visited museums to look at European and Euro-American art. I wanted to understand my new patients not simply as people formed and shaped in America, but as Americans influenced by the traditions of the Europe they or their ancestors had fled from.
But the research that I undertook to better understand the patients I had inherited from Jonathan led me, inevitably, to examine my own condition as an American. In the monographs and books that I published during this period, I wrote of my patients as people who had a memory of deprivation and persecution and were determined, in their new environment, not to be deprived or feel persecuted again. I explained the psychical need of my fellow Americans from Europe to assert themselves and be dominant in their new country. But, behind the neutral, academic tone of those publications, was my firming acknowledgement (and consequent despair) that as my fellow countrymen had fled Europe and come to America to be powerful and white, so I had come to be powerless and black; and that the only way to escape from my condition was to follow the European example and flee America as they had once fled Europe, long before my own semi-enforced departure.
But I no longer wanted to flee America. I was establishing a reputation as an important and influential American. I was important – despised representative though I was to some Americans – precisely because I was so deeply involved with things American. I could not imagine myself as important, influential or relevant in any other country. Besides, even though I told myself that I had overcome my obsession with Carol, I felt that to leave America would be to abandon her. I was definitely not now about to leave America.
I began, instead, to research the ways in which the powerful and the powerless, the strong and the weak, the dominant and the dominated have, historically, lived w
ell together. I explored the psychology of the slave-driver who was himself a slave, of the colonial administrator, himself one of the colonized, of the leader from among the conquered who accepted appointment by those who occupied his country. I became an expert in the psychology of the collaborationist in all his guises and disguises.
I did not call him a collaborationist. I used words such as shrewd, practical and pragmatic to describe him. I underlined his firm grasp of reality, his unsentimental ability to read and make the best use of the historical moment. Consensus, compromise, the absence of distracting, unattainable ideals, or self-deluding fantasies, were, I wrote, what made such figures seize and successfully manipulate the important roles that the impersonal forces of history created for them. It was as a result of writing that book and of the revulsion for myself that I felt after I had finished it, that my attitude to my Euro-American patients changed.
I had observed, in the American novels I had read, that when Americans from Africa and from Europe both appeared, they became blacks and whites, but that in books where Americans from Africa did not appear, Americans from Europe ceased to be simply white and, no matter how long they or their ancestors had lived in America, became Anglo-, Dutch-, German-, Italian-, Jewish-, Catholic- or every other kind of hybrid American that reflected where in Europe they or their ancestors had come from.
I decided that I would deprive my patients who were Americans from Europe of this comforting hybrid sense of themselves; to persuade them that their attachment to cultural, ethnic and religious origins in Europe was sentimental and self-deluding and served only to mask their deep fear of confronting themselves as American; and to force them to accept that their essential condition as Americans was necessarily to be white, in opposition to those of us who were not. No matter what they came to see me about, I made it my business to underline for them, insistently (though in all kinds of unobtrusive ways), the ever-present danger to themselves of Americans like me who, educated or uneducated, rich or poor, criminal or law-abiding, forced them, by our mere presence, to give up their cherished, hybrid notions of themselves and become, necessarily and often brutally, for their own protection, American and white. I did not blame them for this deplorable but unavoidable change. Instead, I emphasized the difference between the cultured European-Americans they liked to think they were and the brutally pragmatic American whites we had forced them to become. I wanted, no matter how diverse their cultural, religious, political and ethnic origins in Europe might have been, to entrap them as inescapably within their single condition of American whiteness as I felt entrapped in my single condition of American blackness. I wanted to make them as destructively and self-destructively white as possible, to make racists of those who were not, and make more racist those who already were. I was careful always to use words like barbaric, uncivilized and savage to describe those of us who forced this unwanted transformation upon them. But, by stressing the ugliness of the transformation itself, I ensured that they asked themselves whether they had not become, through no fault of their own, and merely to protect themselves from us, brutal and barbaric and savage, too. The idea was to mangle them psychologically, confuse them about who they were, raise questions in their minds about who they otherwise might have been. I wanted to make American whiteness necessary, but ugly and something they should be ashamed of, and at the same time render them dependent upon those of us who forced this self-preserving whiteness upon them. I wanted to debase them and to make them come willingly to be debased by me. I convinced them that I was the man to help them cope with the unavoidable curse of being white in late-twentieth century America. I made them dependent on me. In this way, I satisfied my deepest need not to feel dominated by any of them.
My practice grew. I was often overworked; I sometimes saw the same patient three times a week. I was becoming a very rich man. I was becoming rich in America by alleviating anxieties that I had myself reinforced or provoked in those referred to by others, privately, as bohunks, dagos, kikes (I list them alphabetically because I want to insult none of them in particular), micks, polacks, tockos, wasps; as well as a host of others whom it would be tedious to mention.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It was during this period of public success and private and vengeful satisfaction (which even so did not alleviate my discomfort as an American) that, one night, I switched on the television and saw Carol again. Her chest was heaving. Her eyes blazed. As the camera moved slowly closer to her, she whispered fiercely, her face more angry than I had ever seen it, that no white brat, none whatsoever, would cripple her son and get away with it.
The newsman explained. Carol had slammed a door so violently on a child’s fingers that two of them had to be amputated. In his neutral newscaster’s voice he went on to say that, a week earlier, a playmate had accidentally slammed a door on her seven-year-old son’s fingers, but that the playmate was not the youngster Carol had maimed. I sat up in my chair. My heart beat violently. I heard the newscaster say, in his bored voice, that he would keep us abreast of that late-breaking story. It was now eight years since I had left Carol’s apartment for the last time. Unless she had known another man while we were married or during the months immediately preceding or following our marriage, she and I had a son and she had told me nothing about it.
I thought I had forgotten her. But, that night, I jumped awake from a dream that would recur until the end of her trial, in which I always saw her, eyes closed, mouth open with awe and wonder, as if impaled against the bare wall of a large, empty room, by a man whose back was always towards me. When I fell asleep again, I found myself in a large empty room – all white: white walls; white carpet, immaculately clean; and with white lighting so skilfully arranged that no shadow showed. There was a white crib in the centre of the room. Under the gossamer lace that covered it, I saw my American son, the one I hadn’t known I had. He seemed to be sleeping. I approached the crib, lifted the veil and saw that his hands, lying on the white sheet on either side of his face, had been cut off neatly at the wrists.
This time, I did not go back to sleep. I thought of his half-brothers, the half-European and the half-African, living with their mothers, fatherless, somewhere else in the world. I thought of them as safe. I felt good, worthwhile. As if their safety was the result of my own deliberate planning. I thought of parents and their children during that long sleepless night, and, in particular, of the parent I had read about, a father who loved his daughter enough to set her ablaze because he did not want to hand her over, as the court had ruled, to his ex-wife whom he despised. Alone in the dark, I acknowledged the enormity of Carol’s contempt for me, and decided to respect it.
I followed her story in the newspapers and on the first day of her trial, headed for the courthouse. I should have gone earlier. The line of people waiting to enter the courthouse stretched for blocks. Policemen, on foot and on horseback, watched them. I took my place in the line and asked the nearest policeman what my chances were of getting into the courthouse. He asked what trial I wanted to attend. I told him. He thought my chances were pretty good. It would have been different, he said, if I had wanted to attend one of the other trials. I asked him what they were about. He said that one was about a man who had killed thirty teenagers over several years and buried their bodies in his basement. He had eaten the hearts of some and regularly drank beer out of the skull of one of them, which he kept in his refrigerator. “Pretty gruesome,” the policeman said. I asked about the other trial. He said it was about two hunters who had killed a man in the woods.
While he was telling me this, another policeman announced through a bullhorn that there were no spaces left in the rooms where those other two trials were being held. Many of the people who were waiting to enter reluctantly left and, as a result, it was not long before I was next in line to enter the courthouse. An old man in front of me, who was leaning on a cane, and whose veins showed bluely through the skin of his hands, was permitted to enter. But, as I prepared to follow him, the policema
n barred my way, saying the room was now full and I would have to wait for someone to leave before I could be allowed in.
I stood indecisively for a moment. I did not want to miss the trial. I had taken my first vacation in years in order to attend it. Suddenly, the old man emerged from the courthouse and hastened past me, muttering angrily to himself. I was allowed to enter.
Once inside the courtroom I understood. The people attending Carol’s trial had arranged themselves in two groups. On one side sat her supporters who, in all their complexional variety, were black. On the other side were her adversaries. They were nearly all white. At the far end of the back row of seats, on the side of the room where Carol’s supporters sat, was the seat that the angry white man had made available to me. I gratefully took his place.
The man sitting next to me introduced himself. He was immediately friendly, as if he and I had known each other for a long time. During breaks in the trial he made supportive remarks about Carol that I felt he expected me to agree with. He wore glasses. There was a gap between his upper canines. His hair and short beard were white and curly. He made me feel, uncomfortably, that I was part of a team supporting Carol and concerned only with exonerating her.
The trial began. The prosecutor said he would show that Carol was an unfit mother, an angry, vengeful woman who had been divorced at least twice, who by her horrible deed had pushed back the cause of race relations in America by at least a hundred years. Because of her, two American children, one white the other black, would be maimed and malformed for the rest of their lives. He said many other negative things about Carol and ended by saying that she was dangerous and should be jailed for a very long time.
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