Charisma: A Novel

by Barbara Hall

  “Any abuse?” he asks, getting back on track.

  “Nothing special.”

  “Run-of-the-mill abuse?”

  “You got it.”

  “You mentioned that your parents were opposed to your being an artist. When did this begin?”

  “High school, I guess. But I scared them a long time before that.”

  He writes.

  “Dr. Sutton, can we talk about what’s really going on?”

  “What is that?”

  “You are afraid to hear my story.”

  “I’m trying to do that.”

  “No. The real story. What happened after the event. What’s happening now.”

  “The guides.”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re getting there.”

  “I don’t think we are. I think we’re avoiding it.”

  “Ms. Lange, I promise, we will get there. But in my mechanistic, cause-and-effect world, every aspect of a person’s life is connected. It’s all interwoven and cannot be compartmentalized. It’s a continuum, if you will.”

  “I will if you will.”

  He doesn’t smile. “There is no way to separate what’s happening with you now from what happened to you as a child and as a young adult and so on.”

  “I get it.”

  He leans forward. “Why do I get the feeling that you are humoring me?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t think you got feelings like that.”

  “Okay. Why am I picking up in your body language and the tone of your voice that you are humoring me?”

  “Because I’m humoring you.”

  “Why are you doing that?”

  “Because you’re not ready.”

  “Ready?”

  I nod.

  “So that’s your job? To take care of the therapist?”

  I swallow and breathe through my nose and listen to the silence to see if I can pick up on them.

  Just tell him.

  “I’m afraid of your anger,” I say.

  This actually causes his head to jerk. Then he sits back in his chair.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you felt that way. I’m not angry.”

  “My mistake.”

  But we both know I am not mistaken.

  He doesn’t write this down.

  Chapter 12

  Dinner with his family makes David feel small and cheap. No, worse than that. Learning disabled. Autistic. He feels they see him this way, too. He knows it might be projection but sometimes things are what they seem.

  It is a house full of doctors. His father is an internist, his mother is a gynecologist, his brother is an orthopedic surgeon, his sister is a family practitioner, which is the latest generation of internist. To them, he is out of the circle. He’s a bit of a witch doctor. People’s psyches aren’t of interest, because they are completely outside of the vessel, the physical form, the machine—the only thing that is, in fact, real for his family.

  His older brother is a poser. He loved sports in high school but was a terrible athlete. This is his way of hanging out with jocks. No, more than that. This is his way of controlling them, becoming God for them. They made fun of him in high school; now they can’t make a move without him. He tells stories about the Lakers and the Dodgers and the Clippers whom he’s gotten to know—names that mean very little to David, but admitting that would put him even deeper in the dunce’s corner.

  Rich Sutton is very preoccupied with his status. He wears expensive clothes and has an expensive haircut and a spray tan, and a little bit of work has been done around the eyes and chin. He drives a Ferrari. His wife, Sherry, seems to despise him but she never has to see him and they probably have some kind of understanding. They are in love with their lifestyle, not each other, and as long as that is maintained, the pH of the relationship is balanced. David realizes that he’s this hard on his brother now because as a kid, he idolized him. There is nothing so difficult to bear as a fallen hero.

  Greta, his younger sister, dances for their parents’ approval. Every time they get together she has another story about some amazing diagnosis she made against everyone’s protestations. She has a perky face and a gymnast’s body but she has been unable to settle down with a man. She cycled through underemployed men until she got tired of picking up the check. Then she began cycling through married surgeons, which is where she is now. A married plastic surgeon, no less. Their parents don’t know this. She’s sure he’s going to leave his wife. She’s so sure of it that she hints at their relationship to their parents, which makes David nervous. He knows it won’t be well received. He knows Greta will have a mild breakdown in the face of her parents’ disapproval. Whenever he sees her leaning toward this path, he interrupts with meaningless conversation.

  He tries not to talk about his practice. On the rare occasions when he does, he only gets a few sentences in before his father starts questioning the hard science of his profession. Then he’ll say that doctors of his kind are pharmacists. They make a diagnosis of the disorder of the week and dispense drugs. No matter how much David tries to protest, he looks guilty. He is on the conservative side of the drug debate. He prefers not to prescribe unless absolutely necessary. But the patients demand it and sometimes he capitulates to avoid losing their business. He tells himself he is worried about their psychological pain, and he is, but he’s also worried about their business.

  The problem with discussing his job lately is that he has started to feel the way his father does. He knows he got into this profession out of a genuine desire to help people in pain. He knows that he still does that and is driven by that. But the profession itself has changed so quickly and so comprehensively that he has scarcely had time to keep up with his motivations. Resisting the pharmaceutical remedy feels like trying to resist the Beatles in the ’60s or, more accurately, McCarthyism in the ’50s. But does the holistic approach work much better? Does the talking cure liberate anyone or just make them addicted to talking? He worries that they begin to fall in love or at least identify with their conditions so completely that giving them up would be tantamount to death. Every breakthrough seems to lead to another buried problem and even he doesn’t know what’s at the end of the rainbow anymore. Life is difficult. This is the thing he cannot cure.

  The dinner is on a Sunday night at his parents’ house in Holmby Hills. This is not where he grew up. As a child they lived in a small house in a nondescript area of Westwood and his parents worked at UCLA. It wasn’t until later in life that they became interested in money and both went into private practice. When the kids were all gone, his parents finally purchased the kind of house one would fill with children. They say they are waiting for grandchildren. David feels that perhaps it’s something else, that they didn’t want a home their children might mess up, and now they have the luxury of living in the style to which they dreamed of becoming accustomed.

  The dining room is large and ornate, full of heavy dark furniture and candelabras and mirrors and gilded frames. They have a cook now. They are served around the table. It feels like a Merchant Ivory movie.

  The meal is cassoulet and David has his work cut out for him, extracting the foods he does and doesn’t like from the concoction. He has learned to do this surreptitiously so his family doesn’t make fun of him. Rich is droning on about a baseball player’s rotator cuff and David is grateful for the filler.

  “Where’s Jen?” Greta suddenly asks.

  It takes him a moment to realize she’s talking to him.

  “Oh. She’s working, I think.”

  “On a Sunday?”

  “She does her prep work on Sundays.”

  “What is her prep work?” his father asks.

  “I don’t know. We don’t talk about the specifics of our work that much.”

  “Why not?” he asks.

  “Donnie, they can’t,” David’s mother, Verna, says.

  “Why not?”

  “Because of patient confidentiality,” she says.

&nb
sp; “They don’t have to get specific.”

  “That’s not the only reason,” David says. “I just like to leave work at the office. I want to talk to Jen about other things.”

  “What things?” Rich asks.

  Sherry looks up with interest. She waits.

  “We like to cook. We talk about cooking. We talk about the book she’s writing. That’s not really like work. We talk about vacations we want to go on. Camping, we like that. Lately we’ve talked about surfing.”

  “Surfing?” his mother asks with alarm, as if he’s talking about joining a cult.

  “Stop, I’m getting depressed,” his father says and everyone laughs.

  “Why is that depressing?” David challenges.

  “Well, David, what’s it about?”

  “It’s about our interests. Things we are interested in.”

  “Not very intellectually stimulating.”

  “Not everything has to be intellectually stimulating.”

  “Well,” his father says, and leaves it at that.

  “We sometimes talk about politics,” David pipes up and he feels like Greta, chasing his father’s approval.

  “What about them?” Rich asks.

  Sherry has gone back to eating, seeing that none of this is going to help her relationship.

  “Just what’s going on, what the ramifications are.”

  “Is she liberal?” Greta asks.

  “As far as it goes.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “We take a measured approach. It’s not a passionate debate. It’s a discussion.”

  “Don’t you want to have a passionate debate?” Greta insists.

  “No. I find that getting angry about politics is just a deflection. An avoidance.”

  Unwittingly, he has wandered into his world.

  “How is that?” his father asks.

  “All of that bile and vitriol, it has nothing do with politics,” David keeps going. “It’s just rage. Rage always has a moving target.”

  “What do you mean, darling?” his mother asks, as if he has stopped making sense and it concerns her.

  “I mean, Mother, how can anyone get that worked up about health care? They can’t. It’s just a replacement. All rage, which is unexpressed hurt, is rooted in the childhood. It is an immature emotion. It moves around because the person does not feel safe to place the anger where it belongs.”

  “And where is that?”

  “The father, usually,” he says. He’s tired of it. He has found his nerve.

  “Your father?” his mother asks, turning pale.

  “Not my father. The father. The father figure.”

  “Why the father?” his father asks.

  “Because rage is associated with violence. Violence is most often associated with men.”

  “Don’t women feel rage?” his father asks and it almost seems like genuine interest.

  David feels irrationally encouraged, as if he’s never kicked this football before.

  “Of course they do, but it’s socially unacceptable in women. So they learn to decompensate in different ways. Women are allowed to cry, so that’s a form of releasing rage. In many ways, it makes them the healthier of the genders, which is probably why they live longer.”

  “Interesting,” his father says, then gives his wife a furtive wink.

  David feels the very rage he is talking about building somewhere at the base of his skull.

  “My goodness,” his mother says.

  “You two act like you’re hearing this for the first time,” Rich says. “Like you stopped reading medical journals somewhere around the turn of the century.”

  “I probably did stop reading them around then,” his father says.

  “Not this century, Dad,” Rich says.

  David is surprised and moved to witness his brother’s defending him. The rage dissipates and he’s overcome by a desire to ask his brother to go to a ballgame. He doesn’t really follow sports anymore so the kind of game doesn’t matter. Any kind of game involving a ball.

  “It’s just always a bit surprising,” his mother says. “I spent all my days trying to get healthy babies born into the world. We probably neglected what the women were going through emotionally. We probably forgot the women were doing anything but carrying the babies.”

  “Yes,” David says, “you probably did.”

  He says it without rancor because he feels none but he can see that his mother is hurt. He feels the judgment in his father’s eyes now. He doesn’t know how to talk to them. He, who specializes in talking.

  He pictures himself standing up and pulling the tablecloth off the table, leaving the dishes intact, magician style. Or better yet, he pictures himself dematerializing.

  “I think he’s right,” Sherry says.

  Everyone looks at her. Her collagen lips seem to be quivering a little.

  “Right about what, darling?” Rich asks.

  “No one cares about how women feel.”

  “I don’t think that’s what he said. That’s not what you said, is it, bro?” Rich asks.

  David doesn’t know if that’s what he said. He doesn’t know why Rich is calling him bro, which he’s never done. Maybe it’s how sports people talk to each other. He looks at his plate. He has devoured the cassoulet and can’t see anything left that he wants to eat.

  “Daddy,” Greta says. “Did I tell you I diagnosed a case of scarlet fever this week?”

  “What the hell?” he says. “I haven’t seen that since medical school.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I referred him to an infectious disease doc. Labs came back positive.”

  “How did you come up with that?”

  “Strep is going around.”

  “But it rarely presents that way.”

  She shrugs. “I just knew.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  The chitchat goes back to things that make them all comfortable.

  David wonders how the evening would shift if he suddenly said, “Hey, did I tell you I am treating someone who hears from spirit guides? That’s right. Invisible guides talk to her. She has a foot on the other side. She’s able to tell us what God thinks. Do I think she’s crazy? Well, of course I think she’s suffering some kind of delusion, but certifiably insane? No, I don’t think she is. How do I explain this? I don’t. And sometimes, I don’t even want to explain it. I just want to let it be.”

  It scares him how much he wants to say it.

  It scares him even more how much he is starting to believe it.

  Chapter 13

  I officially meet Shaggy in sewing class.

  I have been percolating on the gentle giant for a while now. Since the incident in the dining room I have noticed him lumbering around the courtyard. Other than my decision that he is an artist—a judgment I made when I witnessed him building cities out of his food—I haven’t come up with much except that he’s definitely having trouble reining in his brain.

  He doesn’t talk to anyone, ever, that I can see. He stares at the ground a lot and smokes. When he’s in the common room, he stares at the television as if he’s not really seeing what’s there. Sometimes he stares at the middle distance as if he’s seeing spirits. Nothing alarms him or even seems to register until something gets loud. If someone yells or something falls to the ground his attention is immediately snared and his face turns red and he looks as if he might kill the source of the sound with his bare hands. The most he ever says about it is, “Hey!” Because when the noisemakers see who is disturbed, they don’t want to make a thing about it.

  Shaggy enjoys sewing class. He’s meticulous about it. We have our choice of hand or machine sewing. The class offers crocheting, knitting, embroidery, quilting, pillow or clothes construction for those able to concentrate at that level. There are only a couple of people who want to go near the machines and I figure they are already sewers in life and it is second nature to them. One thing about bein
g crazy, it doesn’t inspire one to venture across new horizons. Familiarity is what they want. Busywork. I myself am not afraid of learning anything new, I just struggle with the point of it. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to have to be here. Not here, crazy palace, but here, on earth.

  Shaggy is doing some kind of fancy overlay. Something between quilting and embroidery. He is stenciling designs, then cutting the fabric up into little pieces and sewing them on a larger piece of fabric. I want to take a look at it but I have a feeling he won’t like that. I concentrate on my crocheting and after a few minutes I’m surprised to see him lumbering in my direction.

  He can’t know your interior mind.

  “Can I have some yarn?” he asks. His voice is low and soft.

  He doesn’t remember me but why would he remember me?

  “Excuse me?”

  “I need yarn,” he says flatly.

  “Oh. There’s some on the table.”

  “I need yours.”

  “Oh?”

  He pauses and scratches his head, which makes his blond hair stand up.

  “I need it for blood,” he says.

  “I’m sorry?”

  He seems frustrated. He gathers his thoughts, then tries again.

  “I want to make blood on my design and you have all the red.”

  I look down and see that I do indeed have a generous amount of yarn in the neighborhood of red. I would call it maroon but I don’t want to get into it with him.

  “Okay. Take it all,” I say, handing him a skein.

  “I don’t want it all. Just a foot or so.”

  “It’s easier if you just take it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I’m bored with this color. I want to switch.”

  “I hate to take your yarn.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  He takes it and starts away, then comes back. “I’m Willie.”

  “I’m Sarah.”

  “Thanks, Sarah.”

  “Do you mind if I come look at your design?”

  “What?”

  “I’m interested in what you’re making.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  I follow him as he lumbers back to the small round table where he was sitting. When he sits at the table he looks like a huge boy being punished in school. But he doesn’t sit now. He stands towering over his piece of art, which is carefully spread across the table. Somehow he has created an abstract design of a shark eating a woman. But it’s not scary or macabre or even funny. It’s strangely beautiful. I can’t stop looking at it.