by Diane Lawson
“I do know what you mean. I grew up here,” he said. “The point is it could be another patient. That’s one possibility. But who else sees your customers come and go?”
“My kids sometimes.”
“How old?”
“My boy is twelve,” I said, feeling defensive. “My girl is ten.” Richard’s rule for surviving cross-examination: Just answer the question. No more. Give them any rope, and they’ll use it to hang you.
“Good ages,” he said. “Toilet-trained. Not into the smart-assed adolescent stuff yet. Wouldn’t put them high on my personal list of suspects, but for now you may have to sleep with the possibility that you have a serial killer for a kid.” He waited for me to laugh, which I refused to do. “What about the husband?”
“He’s out of the picture.”
“You’re widowed?”
“No,” I said, as Camille Westerman appeared in my mind, winking that wink. “Not yet. I mean, we’re separated.”
“Not yet?” He had a look on his face, amusement with a tinge of suspicion.
“I mean we aren’t divorced yet.”
“You’re going through a divorce?”
Strictly, the answer to the question was No, since that process, like everything else Richard and I tried to do together in recent history, had come to a halt. And until that very moment, No was the answer I’d given to anyone who had the nerve to ask.
“Yes,” I said.
“Has it occurred to you that your husband might be behind this?”
“No,” I said. My thighs began to feel damp where they touched. I pulled at my hem and uncrossed my legs, careful to keep my knees together.
“You answered that one pretty fast. Why so quick to rule out…what’s this guy’s name?”
“Richard.”
“Richard.” The pencil flew across his legal pad. “Go by Dick?”
“Oh god, no.” I couldn’t help but laugh then. “Never.”
“Okaaay.” He smiled. The eyes crinkled. “And what does our Richard do for a living?”
“He’s also a psychiatrist.”
“The plot thickens.”
“He has no interest in my practice,” I said, then added under my breath, “Or in me, for that matter.”
“Really? Why did you marry him?”
“Is this relevant?”
“Maybe. Think about it and tell me later. The point is your husband has psychological knowledge, access to everything and a motive.”
“What motive?”
“Take your pick. Any of the usual divorcing couples shit reasons—to drive you crazy, to ruin your life. By the way, are you having an affair?”
“No,” I said, then felt compelled to tack on, “of course not,” just in case he might get the idea that I was open to the idea.
“How about Richard? He fooling around?”
“My husband has a number of flaws. Infidelity isn’t one of them.”
“In my experience,” he said, “men are about as faithful as their options.”
Options. Camille Westerman popped into my mind again. Her pearl-rimmed cleavage. That wink. Would Richard? Could Richard? But she had her quarterback. What would she want with my husband?
Ruiz flipped his pencil around and tapped the eraser in a frustrated drum-roll. I tried to make my mind think in the direction he seemed to want to go. Until that moment, the idea of Richard being the deliberate mastermind of my bad luck hadn’t occurred to me. I’d become accustomed to accusing him of all varieties of hatefulness and pre-meditated attempts to make me miserable, but I couldn’t force the possibility of him as serial murderer through my mental software.
“I’m afraid you’re barking up the wrong tree,” I said.
“Excuse me, Doctor…” He put on his glasses and looked down at his notes. “Goodman. Good-man. The doctor is a good man. Just a little memory aid.” He pushed the glasses up on his head. “Most people pay me to know which trees need barking up. Woof,” he said coming out of his seat, sending my pulse from eighty to one-forty. He leaned across the desk. “But I’ll humor you. Let’s follow some other interesting scents. Could there be a camera on the telephone pole by your office? Where do your patients park? Is it visible from the street? Do their cars have license plates?”
I pushed back. My chair was already flush to a stack of boxes. “How could someone get information from a license plate?”
“Ho,” he said, throwing both arms into the air. He sat down, catapulting his chair back and typed into a computer on a stand right-angled to his desk. “Give me your license plate number. This crap is putting guys like me out of business. What do you want to know about yourself?”
“I couldn’t stop someone from doing that,” I said.
“That’s the point. Quit thinking this is all about you. Try considering the situation from someone else’s point of view.”
“Consider the situation from someone else’s point of view? What do you think I do all day?”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to insult you. Okay?” I glared at him for a while. “Look,” he finally said. “How about we do it this way? I come by your office later today? Get your bird’s eye.” He pointed his finger at me like we had something going together.
I wanted out then. My nose was still stopped up. I needed to center myself. Like any kid with a bipolar parent, I’m an expert at anticipating the other person’s mood. Mike Ruiz had my emotional compass bouncing around in an unstable force field. Foreground becoming background, mature concern for my patients battling an urgent and childish need for his approval.
“I have to go,” I said. “I have a patient soon. You’ll take the case?”
I don’t know why I said that. He’d made me question if I even had a case to take. But I needed help, and he was the only willing provider. That was one dimension, but there was also something about the way he spoke to me. No pretense. No deference. It made me nervous. And I liked it.
“I didn’t realize I’d impressed you,” he said. He sat back in his chair. It made a nasty creak. He put his glasses up on his head, crossed his arms and looked at me hard. He ran his tongue over his teeth.
“I don’t have many options,” I said, feeling a warm flush ascending my chest. “You can do it?”
“Things are a little slow now. Dog days. Folks lay low in this kind of heat.”
I handed a business card his way, holding onto it for a fraction of a second so he had to give a little tug. My hand had a fine tremor, but I don’t think he noticed.
“I can meet at four-thirty,” I said.
Mike scrutinized my card. “Like it says here, Doctor: By appointment only.”
Chapter Nine
I made it back to the office just in time for my ten o’clock session with Dr. John Heyderman. He slipped his hunched-over body through the door like a cat coming in out of the cold. He sat stiffly, then rolled down onto the couch. He didn’t seem to be breathing.
John was forty-five, but looked like a funny kid, the way child psychiatrists use the term. His forehead was too big and his jaw too prominent. He kept his orange-red hair in a high cartoonish flattop. His large hands, which he never seemed to know what to do with, were ill-matched to his short arms, which in turn were ill-matched to his gangly six feet, five inch frame.
With John, opening our session was always up to me. “What’s on your mind today?” I said.
“Nothing.” He squirmed on the couch. “Everything I think of is meaningless.”
John said this same thing every session. It was his hello. His way of re-connecting. I’d tried to analyze the statement. I’d tried every trick in the analytic book. I’d asked him about the meaning of meaninglessness, about the history of his feeling of meaninglessness, about his feelings about feeling meaningless, about how he thought I felt about his sense of meaninglessness. There was no discussion to be had. For John, meaninglessness just was.
“What meaningless things are you thinking about?” I’d hoped to insert some energy into the conversa
tion, but my voice sounded hollow.
He picked at the little pill balls on his dingy short-sleeved shirt. “Like whether to see her again.”
Her was a transvestite prostitute who hung out nights in Mahncke Park on Broadway near the Botanical Center. John’s life was so bleak that, in my book, his having sought this person out constituted psychological progress.
“That’s meaningless?” I said. “Whether or not you’d see the only person who holds you?”
“The way you put it leaves out that she’s a prostitute,” John said. “And that she’s a he.”
John had come for analysis to rid himself of his perverse behaviors, worried crazy that they were getting out of hand, doing his best to ignore that those very habits constituted his only pleasure in life. As seems to be true for all people with paraphilia, there was a vast rift between John’s emotions and his intellect. Throughout his life, John had bridged this mental chasm, this psychic split as analysts call it, by giving his disowned feelings expression in an impressive range of kinky stuff—pornography, fetishes (particularly baby paraphernalia), cross-dressing, masturbation with self-bondage. Most people stick to one type of perversion, but John had a lot of inner turmoil to manage, and no one activity could contain him.
The genesis of his psychopathology was no mystery. John’s mother, victim of an untreated post-partum depression, committed suicide when he was an infant. As some desperately depressed mothers do, she’d tried to take her baby with her, but a busybody neighbor discovered the two before the gas overwhelmed John. His traveling salesman father farmed him out to his own widowed mother, who let John raise himself. The little boy was left to his own devices to soothe his yearning, rage and despair.
“Her career does have implications for the future of the relationship,” I admitted. “But it doesn’t change that you’ve felt touched by the encounters.”
Although it freaked me out at times and worried me at others, I understood that John’s problematic behavior contained the inchoate memory of his childhood, the unthinkable kind of memory that is imbedded in the deepest part of our being, the kind of unremembered memory that shapes our affects and reflexive acts. In my mind, our work was all about getting these unacknowledged and unarticulated feelings into consciousness and into words. John, however, had no use for my cutting-edge understanding. He insisted our discussions stay in the pragmatic here and now.
“I can’t afford to be touched very often at her prices,” he said. “Especially when I have to pay you to talk about it.”
John owned the biggest pathology lab in town, a veritable factory that he’d developed to the point that it ran without him. Although the money rolled in faster than he could count it, he lived in a downscale efficiency apartment near the flood-plagued Olmos Basin and drove an ancient Dodge van. Money wasn’t the issue.
Paying her. Paying me. The issue of what he felt he could afford to invest in a relationship had possibility as a therapeutic inroad.
“So love must be paid for?” I said, my words immediately reminding me that Mike Ruiz had dodged the question about his fees. I had no basis for even guessing at the cost. Whatever made me assume I could afford him? A sense of helpless abandonment flooded me for a moment, an old childhood feeling. I picked up my pen and made a note to clarify this issue with Ruiz first thing.
“I know what you’re thinking,” John said. “You want me to sign up for a dating service.”
“I understand that the arrangement you have now feels safer.”
“Exactly,” he said. “She won’t reject me because it’s her livelihood. And I don’t have to worry because there is no way it could work out.” After a pause, he added, “It’s a lot like here.”
I found Lance alert at his waiting room post wearing his reflective surround sunglasses. He tightened at my greeting. Things had been tense between us since I’d mistakenly called him Howard the week before. He took his time getting up, then crossed the waiting room as if it were a minefield. Once inside, he cased the consulting room, rearranging the chair to give himself a fuller view.
Lance had never used the couch like a normal analytic patient. Classical analysts would say his analysis was invalid because of that. I think this kind of psychoanalytic orthodoxy is ridiculous. Don’t get me wrong. The couch can be a great tool for the patient. Also for the analyst. Howard Westerman couldn’t have owned up to having feelings if he’d had to see me. For him, the shame of such “weakness” would have been too great. Face to face, I would have been unable to conceal my impatience with Allison Forsyth’s whining self-pity or my irritation with Renee Buchanan’s boundless sense of entitlement. Looking at me, John Heyderman would have been too self-conscious about detailing his perverse behaviors to even begin to explore them. And Morrie Viner’s ruminations would have been unbearable if I’d not had the privacy to roll my eyes every now and then.
On the other hand, I knew that Lance could never tolerate having me sitting behind him. That he was in treatment at all qualified as a minor miracle. The couch is only a useful tool if it frees the analyst and the patient to focus on their inner lives in a productive way. The recumbent, facing-away position removes the reality of interpersonal distraction and social demand. Imagination is cultivated. Memory is reincarnated. The Unconscious seduced into making itself known. In Lance’s case, imagination, memory, the Unconscious were the problem. He needed every anchor to current moment reality he could get.
“We have the sunglasses again today,” I said. “You’re still upset about the name thing.”
“Oh,” he said, his voice sounding mechanical. “Is that what it means, Doctor?”
“That’s my best guess,” I said. Over the years, I’d learned to let his sarcasm roll off. “It’s hard to talk with you when you’re wearing them.”
“Some days are hard, Doctor. You should know that by now.”
Lance stared at me in silence for two full minutes. The glasses made him look like a giant insect. My eyes watered from fighting the urge to blink.
Finally he glanced at his watch and said, “The dream is back.”
My heart rate rose in sync with his obvious anxiety. Still I preferred this tense engagement to his mute rage or to an empty hour. “Tell me,” I said.
He blew. “I’ve been telling you for years. The fucking same dream.”
Of course I knew the dream he was referring to, but I also knew he needed to tell it and to keep telling it until he mastered the trauma it held.
“The details are important,” I said.
“Bullshit, Doc. You can’t help me. Just forget about it.”
The Doc meant he was softening toward me. I chose not to speak for fear of sabotaging the process. Several seconds passed before he let out a giant sigh and leaned his head back.
“Don’t leave me hanging,” I said, regretting the metaphor which I recognized had everything to do with my encounter with private eye Miguel Ruiz.
“I’m in the jungle. It’s the same crap. Just the way it happened. Jake and I are on that assignment.” He was trying to tell it like it was old hat. A twitch in his face and the catch in his voice said otherwise.
“Go on,” I said when he fell silent.
A tear slipped from under the left lens of his glasses, ran down his frozen cheek and dripped off his chin, a sight even harder for me to endure than his anger.
“Like I was saying, Jake and I are in the jungle. He’s on the ground. I’m in the tree scouting, trying to see what’s around. Before I know what’s what, the Cong come up on us. They put a gun to Jake’s head and chatter away. I figure the honcho is approaching. The guy we’ve been looking for. They don’t see me. I don’t know what do—save Jake or wait to nail the target. I freeze up, and the bastards shoot him. But then somehow the scene changed. I was a medic, not an assassin. Can you imagine that? Me saving lives? Jake is hurt, but it doesn’t look fatal. He’s lying in a field a few yards away. It takes so much effort to move. Like my arms and legs are full of lead. He sees I’
m coming. He smiles at me. God. He smiles at me.”
Lance couldn’t go on for the tears. He pulled a tissue from the box, the first he’d used in all his years of therapy.
“It’s not the same dream,” I said. “It’s not just the repetition of the trauma. If your mind can manipulate the situation, it can master it.”
Lance wasn’t interested in the theory. “He knew I was coming,” he said. “He knew I wanted to save him.”
PET scans show that the brains of people with post-traumatic stress register a memory as happening in the present. Lance wasn’t remembering—he was there. I put myself with him. “Jake knows that,” I said. “I’m certain he does.”
“But I let them kill him. His brains flew all over me.” He shivered and brushed himself off with his hands.
“You had a mission to carry out.”
For a second Lance looked at me as if he’d just come to and was trying to remember who I was.
“Fuck the mission. If he’d been your son, you would have wanted me to save him,” he finally said. “Don’t lie.” He gripped the arms of the chair and leaned forward.
For a panicked instant, my mind was blank. What if it had been Alex? I’d want him alive at any cost. I couldn’t deny that. But that wasn’t the issue. “The tragedy,” I said, “was that you had to decide between your friend and your duty. No one should have to make such a choice.”
Lance collapsed, sobbing. “There’s a monster inside me, and I never know when it will come out.”
“It hasn’t come out in over twenty years,” I said.
Lance looks like a solid guy. But it’s not strength. It’s rigidity, a thin veneer over a desperately fragile self. This was the moment I’d waited for with him—the memory with insight and deep emotion, enough feeling to make it real, but not so much as to overwhelm.
“But I think about doing people, Doc. Everyday. Someone just has to cut in front of my car, and I want to blow them off the face of the earth.”
“Everyone harbors murderous fantasies,” I said, quoting an axiom from my training. “Most of us have the luxury of never having to assassinate someone. Our violent fantasies aren’t burdened by the awful reality of having to carry them out.”
