“Well?”
As I looked into her eyes, I knew all at once that I didn’t want to lose her and that’s what I said, but my earlier comments about Miranda had obviously been more revealing than I had intended, and rather than spend the night with her as I often did, I walked out into the cold night and made my way home.
AS I OPENED the door for Ms. W., I noticed that she looked more strained and wooden than usual. After she sat down, she said to me in a cool voice, “By the way, I saw your photograph at the opening of a show.”
“A show?” I said, completely thrown off.
“The photography show in Chelsea. Jeffrey Lane.”
I heard myself inhale as the words hit. It was now. November.
“I take it the artist is one of your patients.”
I had to tell her then that I hadn’t seen the show and that Jeffrey Lane was not a patient of mine. I added that whatever photograph or photographs were there had been taken without my permission.
Ms. W. sat up straight in the chair. “I’ve been wondering if talk, talk, talk does any good, you see.”
“Did viewing the pictures make you wonder that?” I asked.
“You looked so different,” she blurted out.
It’s hard to describe the loss I felt at that moment. It was as if I had been robbed of something very dear to me, and without even having seen the image or images, I felt the burn of humiliation. I was silent then for at least half a minute, trying to find an honest response that would not derail our work together. Finally I said, “It seems that a picture or pictures of me have been used in a way I probably won’t like, but we should talk about what you feel and why the picture was so strong it made you doubt the therapy altogether.”
Ms. W.’s voice had the clear, mechanical quality of a recording. “I don’t know you. You sit here and listen.”
I explained that I was at a disadvantage because I didn’t know what the image was.
“You look furious,” she said, and then, more softly, “Deranged.”
I understood. The idea of losing control, of madness, terrified Ms. W. Her mother had been agoraphobic, and for months we had talked about her fear of erotic feeling, her attraction to and anger at her father and me, her dread of “cracking up,” and now she had seen a picture that embodied her fear. When the session was over, I watched her leave the room. She walked like a person in a suit of armor. I put my head down on my desk and fought the tears I felt welling up in my eyes. If I hadn’t had another patient, I’m sure I would have sobbed.
WHEN I RETURNED home from work, I found Miranda’s letter and drawing. She had slid them under the door, just as Eggy had delivered her little objects to me when she was trying to get my attention months earlier.
Dear Erik,
I saw Jeff’s show this morning. The opening was last night, but I didn’t go because I felt sure I’d find myself in it, and with so many people around it would have been too much. He’s been so secretive about the big unveiling that I stopped talking to him about it. There are lots of photographs of Eggy and me. Most of them are harmless. Some are embarrassing to me, but there’s one of you that will probably offend you. I’ve been calling him all day, but he isn’t picking up his phone. I’ve left him messages. The wisest course may be to simply ignore it, but I want you to know I feel bad and regret having brought all this down on your head. Eglantine and I are spending the weekend with my parents. Call me anytime.
With affection,
Miranda
The drawing had been done in ink and colored pencil. In the upper third of the image, two small figures, a woman and a child, stood with their backs to the viewer on a street that looked like ours—a row of Brooklyn brownstones with tall trees, gas lamps, parked cars, and a fire hydrant. This level of the picture was black and white with some grays, and it made me think of a photograph. Without a distinct border, the colorless street scene turned into a blur of dark greens, blues, and muddy reds. Looking more closely, I saw a parade of smoky monsters with huge or tiny noses, gaping or absent mouths, flapping ears, bulbous eyes, and bestial teeth. One demon held an enormous phallus. Another had a hairy tail. Yet another appeared to be bleeding from his rectum. These grotesque bodies mysteriously became the tops of peculiar houses that grew upward at an impossible angle, part of another street that took up the bottom of the page, this one brilliantly colored. Lush foliage that bore curious-looking fruits covered doorways, windows, and steps. The woman and child were depicted again, somewhat larger in scale, but this time, they were in profile, facing each other as they sat on pink steps outside one of the houses. The little girl had wings.
ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON, I entered the gallery, wearing an old baseball cap and a scarf in an admittedly absurd attempt to hide my identity. As I looked from one wall to the other, I felt relief that I did not immediately see any prominent pictures of myself. The show was called Jeff’s Lives: Multiple Fictions, or an Excursion into DID. There was more than one room in the gallery, and despite my urge to rush around looking for myself, I decided to move systematically through the exhibition and started with the first room. The initial images were no images: four blank rectangles under which stood the caption No documentation of Grandparents. The two works that followed were large black-and-white photographs about two feet by four feet. They looked like old snapshots that had been blown up to many times their original size because they had lost much of their definition. A young woman in a flimsy nightgown lay on her side asleep, her face toward the camera. Dark makeup smudged the skin beneath her eyes, and scattered around her on the rumpled blanket were several open bottles of prescription pills. Early documentation of Mother was inscribed beneath the picture. Beside this was a photograph of a man in a suit walking toward a car with his head down. The caption read: Early documentation of Father. Early documentation of Me showed Lane as a boy of about seven sitting on the floor with a toy soldier in one fist. He appeared to have been caught unawares by the photographer, to have just turned his head and lifted his eyes. Despite its blur, the picture caught his wrinkled brow, clenched jaw, and hostile gaze. This large black-and-white photo was framed by color snapshots of ordinary size, all of Lane as a child, their contents banal, but somehow fascinating. A fat baby, a grinning toddler, a boy swinging a bat, sticking his tongue out at the photograher, wearing a rubber monster head, blowing out candles on a cake. A television screen ran a home movie. The boy, perhaps three years old, was seen opening a package. Just before the present was revealed, the screen went blank and started over. On the opposite wall was a wrinkled divorce decree from 1976, mounted over the mouths of the people I recognized as Lane’s parents, which in turn were mounted on a giant photograph, so blurry that the two figures looked like mere shadows. When I turned the corner and walked into the next room, I first saw a giant color photograph that had been subjected to some kind of digital distortion. It was Lane as a Francis Bacon painting, but in neon colors, his impossibly long chin dragged to a sharp point, his mouth undulating in a howl. The caption read: The Break.
Two large photographs hung on each of the adjacent three walls. It took me a moment to realize that they were all identical: an elegant black-and-white headshot of an adult Lane, obviously done in a studio with sophisticated lighting and equipment. The man looked like a movie star. All that changed were the titles: Good Student, Druggie, Lover, Stalker, Patient, Father. The video screen in this room played and replayed a typical crash from some Hollywood movie I didn’t recognize. A car drove to the edge of a cliff, fell over it, and burst into flames, upon which the film reversed. The car stopped burning, flew up the cliff, and backed up, only to surge forward again and reenact its destruction. Mounted under the screen was a newspaper article that reported the deaths of Lane’s parents in a crash.
I walked into what turned out to be the last room. The titles I had just read were repeated, this time in large black letters inscribed directly onto the wall over what first appeared to be collages of some sort—long thin rectangles
of combined pictures. I walked past Good Student and Druggie, but stopped to look at Lover when I saw Miranda. There were pictures of her both in color and in black and white. They varied in size and quality, but it was all Miranda: a younger Miranda with long hair in tiny braids. Miranda eating, sleeping, and walking, Miranda at a table drawing and standing in the middle of a room, laughing. As I continued to look, I began to feel the invasive nature of the project: Miranda crying, an angry Miranda waving her fist at the camera, Miranda dancing in some nightspot, Miranda reading a book, Miranda on a swing, Miranda in a nightgown looking tired, Miranda showing her slightly pregnant belly, Miranda waking up in a large bed. The place beside her was empty, but it was obvious from the sheets and the pillow that someone had slept there. The pictures made me sad. I was looking at the documentation of a real love affair. These were intimate pictures of a Miranda I didn’t know, someone who had been passionately connected to this strange photographer. At the bottom of the rectangle were twenty or thirty pictures of the empty bed. I thought they were all the same, but as I looked more closely, I saw that the sheets were configured differently. After she left him, the man would wake up in the morning and photograph the empty bed.
In the Stalker series, I found not myself but a blank where I should have been, a white cut-out that walked with Miranda and Eglantine toward the park, made my way to the office, and picked up the newspaper from the steps in the morning. There was also a series of pictures taken of me from above as I turned the key in my lock, but all that could be seen were the contours of my absent body. I remembered the sound of the shutter and realized that Lane must have been lying on the roof. I saw several pictures of the house, its number obscured, close-ups of the photos he had piled on my steps, our mailbox, the red sign he had painted on the tree and Miranda had removed, the unsettling image of Miranda without eyes, and many of Miranda and Eggy without me. Some of the pictures had captions. I recall reading Ex-Girlfriend, Daughter, and Excised Shrink Boyfriend. But I still hadn’t seen the picture that had upset Ms. W. and prompted Miranda’s warning.
When I walked over to the Father section, I spotted it right away. It was an eight-by-ten photograph, mixed in among many other pictures with the caption Head Doctor Goes Insane. But in that first moment, I wasn’t sure who I was looking at. Anger had contorted my face to such a degree that I was almost unrecognizable. Like a rabid dog, my eyes bulged and my teeth shone. I was dressed only in a threadbare pajama top unbuttoned to the waist and a pair of boxer shorts. The cowlick jutting from my hairline stood at attention, my Adam’s apple protruded, and my long naked legs and bony knees glowed pale in a dim light that had an unreal glint. In my lowered right hand, I gripped the hammer I had hastily retrieved from my closet. As I looked more closely, I noticed that the picture appeared to have been taken outside rather than from the stairs above the second-floor hallway. I saw the fuzzy outlines of parked cars, a sidewalk, and the street. Lane had altered the setting. Ms. W. had been mortified, not only by my vengeful expression and the sight of her analyst stripped of his dignity, but the photograph made it appear as if I had been raving half naked in the street, wielding a hammer. Beside it was an image of Lane with a large bruise on his forehead. Could I have caused it? No, I thought, he looked fine when he left. Near my own image, I saw one of Lane’s father, a photo of George Bush, the Twin Towers, a hospital corridor, and war images from Iraq. But I didn’t stay to study them. I backed away from the pictures, suddenly nauseated, and staggered out into the bright light of Twenty-fifth Street, where I squatted on the sidewalk for a moment with my head lowered to prevent the oncoming faint. Fathers.
When I felt more stable, I began to walk east toward the subway. Lane had taken a calculated risk. I didn’t know the law, but I felt I had grounds to sue him. And yet, he must have believed I wouldn’t take any action. I had lied to the police that night. I had pushed him into the mirror. A suit would be expensive and potentially make things worse if word got around. As I walked, I imagined other patients and colleagues standing in front of the photograph laughing. He knew, I thought. He saw. He wanted to humiliate me. He had. I felt lacerated with shame. I remembered him inviting me to the show, his use of the acronym “DID,” his laughter when I’d lifted my briefcase, my hands on his back, his head hitting the mirror. Confusion clouded my trip home. I couldn’t understand what Lane had meant by the pictures. Why had I had been removed from most of them? A wish, perhaps, that I would vanish? Miranda had advised ignoring it, but when I thought of Ms. W. and my other patients, that possibility seemed intolerable.
I left a message with Allan Dickerson, my lawyer. The threat of legal action alone might be enough to get the offensive picture removed. I called Magda and explained what had happened. I needed to consult with her about Ms. W. I needed advice. “Perhaps you could use some for yourself, too,” she said quietly.
BY THE END of the following week, Al had managed to have a black square put over the face of Head Doctor Goes Insane. Because street photography is broadly protected in the United States, Lane had changed the picture’s background to create the illusion that it had been taken in a public rather than a private space. Despite the fact that it was a matter of my word against Lane’s, the gallery made the compromise.
The photograph lived on, however, in Ms. W.’s head, as well as in mine. She was stuck on it, and its meanings multiplied. I had explained the circumstances, which she accepted and had offered her sympathy, but the humiliating image of me became an assault on her, a distorted mirror of the violent, mad person she felt inside herself. My interpretations failed at every turn. I had become convinced that at some level I was protecting myself.
“My mother hated ugliness of all kinds. Ugly vases, ugly rugs, ugly, vulgar furniture . . .”
I listened to this excursion in silence.
“She liked cool, smart things.”
I didn’t intervene. I just listened, and as she continued to talk, I didn’t feel bored so much as cloudy, which I attributed to Ms. W.’s vocal meandering from her mother, to me, to an irritable colleague, to a pile of papers she had to go through, to the weather, which was cold, back to the photograph.
She stood up, walked to the window, and looked outside. I thought about Lane for an instant, the photograph. Hidden fury made apparent. “Health is not a flight into sanity; health tolerates distintegration.” We all go to pieces with our patients from time to time.
I spoke to her back. “Sometimes looking in the mirror can be frightening.”
She turned around and then she said, “I had a dream. Somehow, I didn’t want to tell you, but after what you just said, I do.”
I made a sound of encouragement. Ms. W. almost never remembered her dreams.
“I was in my parents’ old house. The floor was greasy, which was odd. I walked in expecting to find my parents, but it was empty, abandoned, and then, all of a sudden, you were there sitting in your chair.” She paused. “Naked. Then I had a hammer in my hand, and I started to hit you on the head. I was so angry, much more angry than I’ve ever been when I’m awake. I was bashing you like crazy.”
I noted the word “crazy” and felt a pull within me, a distinct dread.
“But,” she turned around, “your skull was soft, pliable, and when I hit it, it didn’t bleed or anything, it just popped back into shape.” She paused again. “You were calm, just like now.”
A tremendous relief came over me. I felt as if I had been spared.
She held her hands out, palms up, and her brown eyes had lost their usual dullness.
“You took the hammer from me in the photograph,” I said, “to use against me.”
“What hammer?” she said.
“The one in the picture we’ve been talking about.”
“I didn’t see a hammer. Are you sure there was one?”
“Yes.”
Ms. W. was silent. “Not long ago, I read an article about unconscious perception. Sometimes we don’t even know we’re seeing something, but we are.
” The timbre of her voice had changed. It was warmer and lower.
“Something’s happened,” I said.
Ms. W. smiled. She sat down in the chair and leaned toward me. “Why is that? I feel alive for some reason. I feel like laughing.”
“Go ahead,” I said.
She chuckled. “It must be the hammer. Somewhere, at your house, I suppose, there’s a real hammer you use to pound in nails. That nutty artist broke into your house and took your picture when you were trying to defend yourself. The photo became part of an exhibition that I happened to see. I hated the picture, your face, especially, but I didn’t look at it long, and I didn’t see a hammer. Then it reappears in my dream. I don’t know why, but it feels like a magic hammer.”
“And after you dreamed that you smashed me with it and I didn’t die or even get hurt, it returned here in this room as a word in the dream story you told me.”
Ms. W. was still smiling. “Reincarnation,” she said.
The word passed through me with a tremor.
After the session ended, I remained sitting in my chair and looked outside. The bleak view of drab buildings, gone gray with years of the city’s filth, had taken on a slightly foreign air that surprised me. Through a bleary windowpane, I saw a woman stand up from her desk, lean over, pick up what must have been her purse, and march toward the door. It all happened in a matter of seconds, but as I watched her determined step, I felt a shudder of awe. The simplest things, I thought, are not simple at all.
WHEN WE MET for dinner at the Odeon that Sunday, Inga informed me with a smile that she was busy “rearranging her past,” and she wanted my help. I was good at putting pasts in order, I said. For me, it was just another day at the office, but as soon as I had said it, my sister’s jocular tone changed to an emphatic one. It was time for resolution, truth-telling, and confrontation. She wanted me to accompany her to a meeting the following Thursday with Edie and Henry and the redheaded journalist we had long referred to variously as the “Burger woman,” “Cheese Burger,” and “Burger with Fries.” I was to be a large rock of sorts, behind which Inga could take refuge if the winds blew too hard. “I’m afraid of those letters, but what can I do?” she said. “If Joel really is Max’s son, he deserves something from his father’s estate.” The meeting was imminent because Sonia had agreed to a DNA test. The results were due on Wednesday. Inga believed her daughter’s resistance had vanished for a single reason. My niece had fallen in love. “Finally,” Inga said. “You know, she’s messy now, positively grubby in her habits. Of course it happened gradually over time. For a couple of years I’ve felt a slow and steady relaxation of her standards, but it seems to me that after her explosion on September eleventh, she’s let go. When she comes home, she throws her clothes on the floor and leaves her bed unmade. I find ashes and makeup on the floor. It’s wonderful.” My sister grinned. Sonia’s beau was a tall, skinny college senior with a French father and an American mother. “A lot of hair,” Inga told me. “Other than that, I can’t tell you much about him. He writes songs. She said she’d bring him by tonight to meet you. They might be there now.”
The Sorrows of an American Page 27
