A Tightly Raveled Mind

by Diane Lawson

  “But I did it over and over. And I liked it. Do you understand that? I. Liked. It. And I was good at it.” He put his head in his hands. “I thought I was eliminating the bad guy. Now I don’t even know who the bad guy is. That’s not true. I do know. The bad guy is me.”

  “You’re the most moral human being I’ve known,” I said. I meant it. I meant it in the sense that he knew his demons and had wrestled them hand to hand. “You’ve had to make choices that matter and live with the consequences.”

  “I’d be dead if it weren’t for you,” he said. “You treat me like a human being. Even after all the inhuman things I did. Can God forgive me?”

  This was the first mention Lance had ever made of God. The appearance of a loving power in his psychic landscape was a giant therapeutic step.

  “You were in an inhuman world,” I said. “No one is immune to that.”

  I’m not a religious person, but I’d come to understand that an analyst has to make some peace with the importance of religion, at least as metaphor. Freud failed at this, I think, dismissing spiritual faith kit-and-kaboodle as psychological cowardice. It wasn’t easy for me to develop a respectful empathy for the issue, having grown up with a father who kept me awake all night davening and chanting Kaddish when he was depressed and then, when he was manic, marching around whatever town we were parked in claiming to be Moses. But San Antonio is a church-going kind of place. Bible study groups are pedigreed, with membership passed from parent to child. Outsiders need not apply. I’d been burnt on that deal any number of times—talking to some other mother at the kids’ school, thinking we could be friends until the religious card got played and the conversation came to a screeching halt. For me personally, religion had done more harm than good. But I wasn’t Lance.

  “I think God forgives you,” I finally said. “Can you forgive yourself?”

  “When I think of your voice I can,” Lance said. “You’ve listened to things I could barely bring myself to put into words.”

  “You needed to know I could bear being witness.”

  “My other therapists couldn’t do it,” he said. “Maybe there’s something weird about you.”

  “Everyone has a dark side,” I said.

  Amen.

  Yvette Cunningham left a message canceling her one o’clock session, as she was all too prone to do. As usual, her call came in during my lunch hour when she knew I wouldn’t be in the office. Rather than take advantage of the midweek opportunity to explore her psyche, she’d opted to go water-skiing on Lake McQueeny with some “really good friends” she’d met the night before in a RiverWalk bar. She said she knew I’d understand and reminded me to bill for the time anyway. This was standard fare for Yvette—ditching her session last minute and sticking her psychoanalyst parents with the cost of a missed appointment. I knew the drill.

  Being psychoanalyzed is a loaded process for the child of an analyst. Given that the process represents the parent, the child brings a transference—irrational feelings from the past—to therapy itself. And with both her parents being analysts, Yvette had a double dose. If she took her analysis seriously, she—god forbid—felt she endorsed her therapist parents. If she blew me off, she symbolically destroyed them. And so she bounced from one horn of this dilemma to the other, looking for a place to claim as her own. To add to her baseline conflict about attachment, Yvette was leaving for vacation. I understood that, in the face of our separation, she needed (unconsciously of course) to show me I wasn’t important.

  Despite my insight into Yvette’s dynamics, a familiar feeling of shame started to snowball inside me, my old bad-girls-get-left feeling, a legacy from my father who’d dismiss me from his presence if I missed a beat chanting prayers: Yit-ba-rach ve-yish-ta-bach, ve-yit-pa-ar ve-yit…ve-yit-ro-man. Richard quickly became a master player on that vulnerability when we started dating. If he didn’t get his way, he’d quit phoning and ignore my calls, knowing full well that I’d berate myself for my shortcomings, binge on chocolate and let my studies go. He’d wait until I was a limp rag to come back around.

  I don’t waste time being hard on myself for marrying Richard. How would I have known to make a better choice? If my parents had a good moment in their marriage, I missed it. For all I know, they missed it too. By the time I was old enough to be curious about how in god’s name they’d ended up together, my mother refused to entertain the question. What my grandmother told me was that the man who would become my father—that jackass-son-of-a-bitch, as she faithfully referred to him—blew in like a welcome thunderstorm on a dead-hot summer day. He was just high enough in his first full-blown manic episode to literally charm the panties off a nineteen-year-old girl ready to seek her fortune somewhere more exciting than Overland Park, Kansas.

  My mother fell in love with my father. I fell in love with Richard. Love being the most overused, abused, imprecise word in the English language. I love the smell of mountain laurels in March. Also, B.B. King, thunderstorms, shrimp risotto, sleeping late, minimalist Italian furniture, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. I love Richard. Or loved him. Why? He possessed all my father’s best features without the violent mood swings. Throw in a family with a place in the community. Throw in financial security. It wasn’t love at first sight. Admiration. Envy. Those were my first feelings for him. I wanted to be him. Being with him was second best.

  I remember the exact moment I first felt something akin to real love for Richard. It was when I took him home, that once, after our engagement. At his insistence. Against my better judgment. By that time, my mother had absconded with what passed for the family fortune, and my father had sad seniority at Golden Years Nursing Home with only himself to blame. He’d abused his brain for years—untreated depression, doomed attempts to regulate mood with alcohol and less socially sanctioned substances, head-butts against a variety of hard objects in pursuit of various inadvisable behaviors (with and without the aid of intoxicants). The week after I left for college, perhaps inspired by the loss of his primary victim, he’d gone on a particularly violent version of his trademark self-pitying binge. He fell on his staggering way home, choosing a curb for the deal-breaking blow to his cranium. In retrospect, my mother’s decision to let him “sleep off” what turned out to be an impressive subdural hematoma can be faulted. But, really, what should have clued her that that night was different from all other nights?

  Richard and I had barely started down the hallway gauntlet of wheelchair-bound forms chorusing helphelphelp when his voice hit my ear. A voice that released a cascade of emotion: fear, shame, dread, rage. Not quoting Torah verse then, not roaring drunken threats to limb and life. Instead it was that lonely word I, the most basic assertion of self, drawn out like the plaintive howl of a penned animal, followed by WAAANNT TO EAAAAT.

  My father, secured in his chair by a Posey restraint, casually writhed in the light from the unadorned window of Room 114. On the opposite side of the small room, a lanky man, white uniform bright against dark skin, pulled pee-stained sheets from a hospital bed. They both greeted us with a puzzled look.

  I didn’t recognize the tragic carcass in front of me—unmoving claw-hands on bony arm-sticks, the caved chest, hairless legs covered in the bruised purple of defeated capillaries, yellow-horned toenails. The sight of him rendered me mute and immobile, a robot doll with her battery pulled.

  Richard finally stepped forward and put out his hand. “Mr. Goodman. I’m Dr. Richard Kleinberg, Nora’s fiancé.”

  My father looked up, his eyes jerking about their sockets in a wild search for meaning, his mouth chewing as if preparing a nasty spit. “LICK MY BALLS,” he said.

  With that, I came to life. My old incarnation—the placator, the peacemaker, the cover-it-all-up-er. “Don’t say that, Daddy.”

  The attendant shook out a clean sheet and laid it over the plastic-covered mattress. “That’s all he do say. Lick my balls and I wanna eat. Used to say Kiss my ass but seem like that expression drop out a few weeks ago.”

&n
bsp; “We’re all losing our brains, you know,” Richard said. “It’s just a matter of how much we’ve got left to lose.” With that, he bent over and kissed my father’s cheek.

  My father smiled.

  “I’m glad I met your dad,” Richard said in the car.

  “That creature is not my dad. My dad was an intellect. A Talmudic scholar. I want to eat? Lick my balls?”

  “Hold on, Nora,” Richard said, slipping into lecture mode. “Wouldn’t Freud say that both phrases are expressions of the libidinal drive? Our earliest experience of love is being fed, held to our mother’s breast. I want to eat, the baby wails from the crib. And Lick my balls? Just a plea for passive sensory pleasure? Touch me. Stroke me. Lick my balls. I’ll admit Kiss my ass is hostile, despite the tender verb. But isn’t it to your father’s credit that his love outlasted his hate?”

  It was the first time I’d heard anyone say anything kind about my father. I’d cried then, leaving black smears of mascara on the shoulder of Richard’s white Brooks Brothers shirt.

  That nursing home visit was the last time I saw my dad.

  I put him out of my mind.

  I closed his case.

  Or so I thought.

  Through the slow tick-tock of Yvette’s cancelled session, I tried to comfort myself. Of course you’re upset. You have a weak spot on the abandonment issue. Your mother was unattuned. Your father was abusive. But insight only goes so far. There are some twenty-five pathways running from the emotional brain to the thinking brain for every one running the other direction. The psychic lobbyist for rationality wields little power.

  The nagging, hollow eyes of my Freud bust tracked me moving around the office, until I finally turned him around, sticking his nose up against the books lining the shelf. Like it or not, every analyst has a personal relationship with Sigmund. Richard, of course, considered himself Freud reincarnated. My connection is an uneasy one. Some version of Freud is always watching me. At rare good moments, he approves of me, and we laugh together at the wacky things patients, my kids or I do. This is my Sigi, bopping around in my mental world, bearing a distinct resemblance to that plastic Freud action figure Alex gave me. More often, the Freud-in-my-head is that scowling sculpture, hovering heavy and critical, wincing at my every move. My own analyst, Dr. Bernstein, suggested these experiences weren’t about Freud at all, but my internalized manic and depressive versions of my father playing off against each other. It was a brilliant interpretation.

  Absolutely brilliant.

  But it didn’t change me.

  Chapter Ten

  When the kids and I rounded the corner after camp, Mike Ruiz was perched on the front fender of his LeBaron reading a worn paperback copy of Steven Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. His car was centered in the only No Parking Zone on the street, blocking access to the fire hydrant. He threw his cigarette in the gutter when he saw us.

  “I’m not a smoker,” he said, holding up his hand like he was being sworn in.

  “Oh?” I said. The kids hung back behind me. “Alex. Tamar. Meet Detective Ruiz.”

  “Are you a real detective?” Alex gave him a respectful once over. “SAPD? My dad consults there.”

  “Yep. Used to work Homicide. I’m a private investigator now.”

  Tamar stuck her head out from behind my back. “Do private investigators still get guns?”

  “That’s stupid,” Alex said, positioning himself next to Mike on the car. “I apologize for her. Are you going to figure out who’s knocking off my mom’s patients? If she doesn’t have patients, she can’t make money, and I might not get a car. I’m only four years away from my license.”

  Mike slid over ever so slightly, putting distance between himself and my son. I wondered if he was uneasy with physical closeness or if it was just a reaction to the day-old kid aroma.

  “I still have friends in the Traffic Unit,” Mike said. “I’d better give them a heads up.”

  By the time I ushered Mike through the front door, Tamar had let the dogs in from the courtyard. They skidded through the house like greased piglets. Gizmo affixed her nose to Mike’s cuff, while Pugsley hiked his leg and peed on the umbrella stand.

  Mike was like a dog at the vet himself once we got to my office, nose into everything. He checked the locks, thumbed my magazines, opened cabinets and the closet door, taking notes on it all. He finally stopped in front of my analytic couch.

  “People really lie down on that?”

  “Of course they do. Freud—”

  “Died in 1939,” he said. “I googled him.”

  Without warning, he bounced stiff-backed on to the couch. He lay there for a moment. A slow sadness filled the room. How do I explain this? Psychoanalysts don’t give credence to auras and the like, but people do carry their moods around them like clouds. Angry dark thunderheads. Sad grey fogs. Strained sunny hazes. An analyst learns to read the horizon, to make a forecast.

  “Once I solve this case,” Mike said, “you can psychoanalyze me.” He stood up sharply and stuck his hands deep into his pockets. “Just kidding. I’m a simple guy.”

  “No way you’re simple,” I said.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I shock the shit out of myself every day.”

  I didn’t say anything. When someone hears you’re an analyst, they want to be understood, want you to come up with a secret insight into them like you’re some kind of mind reader. I get enough work at work. But beyond that, I didn’t want to know Mike’s flaws. I was looking for a hero.

  Mike stared at me awhile. I noticed that his eyes had a touch of green in the blue. His mouth hung slightly open, as if he might say something. I had an impulse to go to him. To lean in to him. To rest.

  I started to sweat.

  I forgot to ask about his fee.

  “Well,” he finally said, raising his head to scan the ceiling and air vents, all the while scribbling on his pad. “I’ll bring my bug detector out here tomorrow. And I’m not talking insect control.” He took in the view of the street through the window. “No worry about confidentiality with this parking set-up. Naked eye could see license plates on a slow driveby.”

  I felt accused. “Who would think?”

  “That’s the problem,” he said. “No one thinks.”

  He turned away from me toward Freud and the shelves, as if he intended to inventory my books. I thought I’d heard some emotion in his voice, remorse maybe. If he’d been a patient, I’d have explored his comment. But trying to cure people who aren’t patients makes for a bad habit.

  “The gal that jumped?” he finally said. “Sorry, I can’t pull up her name just now.”

  “Allison Forsyth.”

  “Yeah. Met with her attorney and thought she could fly. I need that guy’s name.”

  “I don’t remember who she went to see.”

  “Check your records.”

  “I’m not sure she ever told me.”

  “You didn’t ask? Who? Where? What? Ever played Clue? Colonel Mustard in the Library with the Rope.” He ticked off each item with a finger, the volume of his voice escalating.

  “Analysts care about why,” I said, sitting down in my chair.

  “Why?” Mike said, leaning in toward me, exaggerated disbelief on his face. “Why, Dr. Goodman, is a mental jack-off.”

  “Give me a break,” I said, distracted by an intrusive image of him with his penis in his hand. An analyst learns to visualize, to translate the abstract into the concrete. This skill is essential for accessing deeply unconscious fantasies and is now reflex for me. At times it definitely complicates social interaction. You have no idea what people reveal without intention or awareness. I pulled my shoulders back. “Detectives most certainly do care about motives. You said it yourself.”

  “Only if it leads to the important stuff. Where do you keep medical records anyway?” He resumed his nosy pacing around the room.

  “On that computer,” I said, nodding in the direction of my desk. A latecomer
to technology, I was naively proud of this fact. Richard had insisted on my having a fancy setup like his. With him gone, I’d had to rely on Alex for technical consultation. “Psychoanalysts normally don’t write much down. A little history. Thoughts about how the treatment is going. Mostly analysts keep the stories in their heads. I have a diabolic memory.” I was proud of that too.

  “Tell that to the judge.” Mike was already booting the computer up. “This thing hooked up to the internet? Yeah. Wireless. Hmmm. Active Cases. Found it!”

  “The file has a password.”

  “Something mysterious, I’ll bet. Like your name? Birthday? Dog’s name, maybe?”

  He was right.

  “I have two dogs,” I said.

  “I met them. Remember?” He pointed at the dog hair ridging his pant cuff. “Pugsley? No. Gizmo? Yes. I’ll need copies. All patients. Dead or alive,” he said. “And change that password to something with usgov in it. Scares off the amateurs.”

  “There are no names attached to the records.”

  “If there is a serial murderer here, we aren’t dealing with an idiot. Man or woman. Young or old. How hard can it be to connect the dots for seven people? Down to five at last count.” He saw me flinch. “Sorry.”

  It was commentary, not apology.

  The kids bounced off the walls that night. They called each other Detective. They shot each other with silverware guns at the dinner table and argued about which patient was the murderer. Alex voted for Lance. Tamar thought Renee looked the meanest. I conceded her point.

  I had a fitful sleep topped off by a dream that ripped me awake: The kids and I are in Landa Library Park. I’m playing ball with a four-year-old Alex. It’s idyllic, soft focus. Tamar gets up off the blanket and toddles over with a juice pack in hand. I smile at her. She points the box at her brother. Blood comes streaming out the straw, covering him. He shrivels up like the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz. Tamar has a demon face. I yell, Bad girl. Bad girl.