by Jacob Rubin
“Insult him?”
“After dinner every Sunday night, he and I would go into his dark, cluttered office, in the basement of our brownstone. He would lock the door and lie down on the chaise, where his patients went. I would sit in his chair, where he sat with his patients, and he would force me to insult him.”
“And you did?”
“Of course. I was young. Thirteen, fourteen. Too young to rebel. I wanted only his approval. Now to gain it, I had to insult him. I had no idea what to say.”
“What did you?”
“He fed me lines.”
“Fed them to you?” I asked.
The doctor smiled ironically. “Ah, childhood.”
“What were they?”
“‘Call me a fraud. Tell me I’m a small man with an overgrown reputation. You will dwarf me. You will outshine me. Say, “You are a shit, Father.”’”
“And did you?”
“I couldn’t disobey.”
“How did it feel, to do that?”
“At first I mumbled, and my father said, ‘Speak up, son. Scream it!’ He wanted it louder. Eventually, I did. Afterward, every Sunday, I went in my room and cried.”
“Did your mother know he was doing this?”
“My mother did whatever Father thought was best. If he believed something was important, she did, too.”
“Did you resent her for that?”
“Of course. In childhood one finds time to resent everybody. I don’t anymore. I understand. Part of the responsibility of any parent is to provide his child with something to resent. Or else there’s a kind of stagnation, an inertia, from generation to generation. Resentment is the language with which parents speak to their children.”
I smiled again. “Sounds like something your father might say.”
“My father was often right, Giovanni. That was the problem. Nothing, I don’t think, is so insidious as the truth. If he had been an abject brute, that would have presented its own challenges, its own traumas, yet it would have been easier, in the end, to rid myself of him. But he wasn’t. He was a brilliant and insightful man.”
“Who forced you to insult him,” I said.
“Worse than that, I’m afraid. By the time I turned seventeen, my father had all but anointed me his confidant. I was his first son, you see, and he interpreted this role with a kind of biblical intensity. He would take me into his office, lie down on the chaise, and confess. This, when I was eighteen. He worried my younger brother was too dull. That he no longer found my mother attractive. In many ways I became his psychiatrist, though in truth he orchestrated all that happened in that room. He divulged some very private things to me. Confessed that he’d cheated on my mother. With a patient, no less.”
“He told you this?”
“A Russian-Jewish girl, a nineteen-year-old. Her father, a renowned dental surgeon, had brought her in. She suffered from fainting spells, anxiety, and hysterical deafness. After a few months of analysis, though, my father was able to locate the source of her neurosis. The patient’s father, you see, had made it his habit to belittle and disparage her and did so terribly during crucial stages of her erotic development. As a result, she felt herself to be worthless. Social settings of any kind created such anxiety in her that she fainted or ‘went deaf.’ My father uncovered this all fairly quickly. Yet as any analyst knows, naming the problem is simple in comparison with treating it. It’s in treatment that true ingenuity is required. You may look at a patient—sit across from him day after day—knowing exactly what’s wrong with him, what it is precisely that troubles him. But that insight is meaningless if you don’t know how to provoke such insight in him.” He shifted in his chair. “As it happened, my father tried a number of things: hypnosis, word association, even some Gestalt methods, which he generally considered frivolous, but nothing reached the girl. It was around this time my father was experimenting with his New Method, the one I would eventually study. This New Method—it depended on the concept of transference. Have you heard the term?
“It’s a common, indeed inevitable, occurrence in psychoanalytic treatment. When a patient transfers a deep psychic attachment—one usually with the father or mother—onto the analyst. In most schools of thought this transference is considered a kind of spell, one that must be broken. The New Method, however, involved exploiting this spell, this transference, very explicitly, so that the doctor—well, let’s say, if the patient will inevitably transform the doctor into her father, the doctor, my father believed, must play the role of the father, must become the father the patient wished she had. A second, better father. Sometimes this meant he would act domineering, sometimes meek. The character the doctor played would depend on the patient.”
“And in this case the better father would sleep with his daughter?”
“My father believed the patient needed to perform the incest moment so as to free herself from its grip.”
“Did any of this work?”
“Of course not. She became infatuated with my father. His refusal to sleep with her again she took as a confirmation of her worthlessness. Fun for the night, then in the trash. Daddy’s mistress, instead of Daddy’s bride. She had a series of hysterical episodes, even told people what my father had done, but no one, not even her own father, believed her word over Micah Orphels’s.”
“Your father admitted all of this to you?”
“He said, ‘I’ve made many mistakes and will make more. But it is all in the name of science, which is, by its nature, provisional.’”
“And how did you take it?” I asked.
“Since I was supposed to act as his analyst, I said, ‘Do you really believe sleeping with her was a scientific exercise?’ He said, ‘It gave me brief physical pleasure, sure. It catered to my ego, yes, but principally it was an experiment in treatment. A failed one, in this case, but I believe I have found a New Method. It needs to be implemented more carefully, but the future lies in transference.’”
“Why deny doing it to the patient’s family then?”
“I asked him that exactly. ‘They wouldn’t understand,’ he said, and their misunderstanding would ruin his reputation. Prevent him from helping the patients who depended on him so.”
“Did you believe him?”
“No. I was beginning to understand that he was a dangerous narcissist, a master of justification. I hated him and resented my mother for allowing him to run wild. He once asked me to simulate choking him.”
“Choking him?”
“‘An oedipal pantomime’ is what he called it. Part of his New Method. But I began to actually choke him.”
“And what happened?”
“I stopped myself, of course. When I did, he began coughing and rubbing his neck, and I was terrified I’d actually hurt him. ‘Good job,’ he said when he’d caught his breath. ‘Excellent!’”
• • •
It happened with the doctor’s embrace that first session. Like an athlete returned from a long injury, I rediscovered the genius of my limbs, and in the weeks that followed I became, both in and outside of his office—on the benches of the lawn and in my room alone—a second, better Orphels.
An impersonation hadn’t fixed me this way since Bernard. I quit my need for cigarettes. Memory of the gun no longer weighed on my hip. When I thought of Fantasma Falls, I felt, if anything, empathy for the people in it—for Nathan, all the Julie Darks, even for Bernard. Toward my fellow patients and the conscientious nurses, for the very birds and bees I brimmed with this same empathy: empathy, which is the surest sign of remove. I was so improved, in fact, it didn’t rattle me in the least when word began to spread, and patients began to recognize, through the veil of my beard, the face of Harry Knott. How did I end up here? I was asked by a stooped patient with sunken eyes. In Orphels’s voice, I told the truth: “I almost killed a man.”
Above all I listened greed
ily. The doctor, I discovered, had fashioned himself into a kind of key, a key of person, unlocking the men and women of the world. On the cushioned perch of a bay window, at tables in the mess hall, I began to conduct impromptu sessions. Underneath an oak tree. In a back carrel of the library, strangers confessed to me. It had to do with my eyes, my smile. A man who couldn’t stop chewing his nails told me about the niece he had, in the depths of addiction, prostituted. A curly-haired patient with abstracted blue eyes admitted that he may have killed a man—caught a bum mugging a woman, struck him with a lead pipe, right there on the street, then ran away.
Ideas were striking. A new act. I’d call Max after my release, imminent, I knew, given my rapid convalescence. We’d resurrect our old stage show, with a twist: I would now be Doctor Giovanni Bernini (Max could make up some bunk about a European medical degree). Each volunteer would come onstage and lie on a chaise, and I, Doctor Giovanni Bernini, regal in my chair, would tease out each one’s story until the audience—all of us together—had experienced that lurid, healing joy: the airing of another’s secrets. “An Experimental Evening with Doctor Giovanni Bernini,” we’d call it, or “You, with Doctor Bernini.” The first volunteer might be hard to come by, but after that, who wouldn’t want their story confirmed before an attentive audience? It was what all of it had been pushing toward: the insides of another person.
Of course, the interior I was most attentive to in those weeks was that of Doctor Orphels. That he hadn’t yet noticed my stolen speech or upright posture I considered a miracle. I was terrified he’d picked up on it that day he accused me of projection, but there had been no mention of it since. Every day he revealed his innermost experience without the slightest hesitation. No pausing or stuttering, no pocket-digging or side-glancing. The good doctor looked me right in the eyes and confessed, divulging his life story in a voice as airy as his office. There were no walls inside the man. Every question I asked he answered, and in this thoroughgoing manner, like a homeowner showing a burglar around his house, Doctor Orphels opened all the drawers of a forty-year life, handed me his secrets. Like a man confessing directly to a spy.
“All my life it had been my father’s plan for me to enroll at City University for premedical studies,” the doctor began one afternoon. “And when the time came, I did explicitly that. My parents paid for a studio apartment in midtown with the expectation that I would commit myself to class work. A sensible enough plan, except I was completely unable to focus. Let me say, I have an outspoken unconscious mind. I am thankful for it. For some it’s all but disabled: a person might be speeding toward a doomed marriage, an entrapping career, but their unconscious—whether through dreams or sickness or any of its usual emissaries—will keep mum. Mine, however, is, well—let’s say, forthright. So it was at school. It—my unconscious, I mean—wouldn’t let me focus. For the first time in my life I suffered anxiety attacks, couldn’t sleep at all. Soon I stopped attending class altogether. It wasn’t so much a decision as a pattern that developed. I didn’t tell my parents, of course. On the nights I came home for dinner, I told them school was splendid, though I hadn’t been in weeks.”
“How did you occupy yourself?” I asked.
“Worrying, as you may know, is a wonderful hobby. It occupied me quite a bit until I discovered something even better. City University is situated in midtown, near the Handelmen Towers, an area flooded with bankers and stock traders. It wasn’t long before I befriended some of these people at lunch counters, neighborhood bars. Understand, the world of finance had never interested me. Jews, they say, are divided into two strains: the mercantile and the Talmudic, and I fell comfortably into this latter category. Money was important, certainly, but only as a means to a greater pursuit: of medicine, for instance, the mind, God. These brokers and bankers were the first men I’d met who had devoted their lives to money as an end unto itself. Every day they herded into the revolving doors of those midtown skyscrapers, those temples to money—disappeared for ten hours—then came pouring out, each with their slight variation on the same uniform: the fedoras, Italian suits, Swiss watches. Like vestments. The first ones I met were soft-spoken, especially when money itself came up. Real dollar amounts. They had nicknames and code words for it, as if saying the name would be blasphemous. I don’t mean this sarcastically: Money for them was a religious object. I started in the mailroom.”
“All while telling your parents you were enrolled at school?”
“Yes. As it happened, I found I had a talent for the financial life, the sangfroid for it—that might be the word. In four years, I became a full-fledged trader of stocks. In seven, I had bought a large penthouse apartment uptown.”
“Seduced by the high life?”
“Not at all. I’ve never succeeded in becoming a materialist. I know very well the limits of such consolation. Some of my colleagues may have believed they worked to furnish a certain lifestyle—a word I have never found much use for—to buy their wives diamonds, for instance, or to take lavish trips to Rome, but it’s not true. You know what money gives us? Why people worship it?” He smiled. “It’s a freedom from reasons. Money is the most efficient way to rid your life of reasons. No one ever questions why you want money. Doing something for the money can never be the wrong reason to do it. I wanted to eradicate the whole chorus of reason from my life, that life of my father. In this effort, money was a perfect aid.”
“Your parents found out, I assume.”
“They did, yes. I don’t remember exactly when or how. My father, of course, was horrified. For months he wouldn’t talk to me. Neither he nor my mother. By abandoning medicine, I’d betrayed them. By choosing the world of finance, doubly so. Keep in mind, he was a European intellectual. All of this was foreign to them, and yet my father’s disapproval, which once might have paralyzed me, had no effect now. ‘What is it you do all day?’ he would say. ‘What does all this matter? It means nothing.’ But when he asked me this, I was wearing my finest Italian suit, driving them around in a chauffeured car, so his questions were barely audible, if you know what I mean. You could barely hear them over the shine of my cuff links, my watch. I distinctly remember my father getting smaller.”
“Money talks?”
“I think of it this way: My wealth was my moat. I felt it especially with my colleagues, men I had worked with ten hours a day for eight years. I knew their wives, their children, their mistresses, yet we didn’t know each other at all. We were all separated by our moats—our suits, our drivers. That’s how we wanted it. We were made wonderfully apart, by money.”
“I don’t quite understand. What happened? How was it you ended up here, as a doctor?”
“My father dropped dead of a heart attack.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So people say when a stranger dies.”
“How did you take it?”
“At the time I took it surprisingly well. I escaped into my work.”
“Hadn’t you already?”
“Such is the nature of escape: Since one can never truly accomplish it, one goes to further and further lengths trying to. Many nights I slept in the office. I traded day and night. My coworkers were perplexed, I think, and couched their perplexity, as many do, in jokes and nicknames. I was known as a ‘horse’—what we admiringly called our hard workers—but never before had I, or anyone at the office, steamed ahead with this kind of urgency: pacing the office day and night, yelling (something I never used to do) at subordinates who bungled my orders. And yet it worked. Watching money accrue in my bank account, watching certain stock prices rally still brought me a near-religious peace, and I thanked God that it could still be so, that money could be my medicine. Once a week I visited my mother, an occasion I very much dreaded, so I dressed in my finest camel-hair coat and treated her to very expensive meals. I gave her gifts: a fur stole, a jeweled pendant, objects she couldn’t pretend to want. My father’s death had obliterated her. I knew on
some level, as everyone does, that I was not entirely well, but I believed that it would pass. A few weeks later the skin ailment appeared.”
“What ailment?”
“A rash on my fingertips that soon spread to my palms, up my arms, and down my back. It looked like a second-degree burn. Quite painful.”
“Did you go to the doctor?”
“I am a Jew, Giovanni. I went to many doctors.”
“And what did they say?” I asked.
“It was a food allergy, a rash, a bug infestation. The diagnoses were too diverse to be trusted. Within a month it had spread to my chin. I had to wear a handkerchief over my face. There were fewer handshakes, fewer drinks after work. I had gone from likably eccentric to dangerously so, dressed absurdly in huge wool coats with a bandana around my mouth. It was a panicked time. Some must’ve thought I was dying. There were moments when I myself did. Alone is when I felt safest. I have never been religious—was not raised to be—but I couldn’t help but wonder if I was being punished.”
“For?”
“Betraying my father.”
“I see,” I said. “And how did you find out the cause of it?”
“Accidentally,” he said. “I had taken a week off work. Some doctors recommended I do it. The stress of work and of my father’s death might, they hypothesized, cause this kind of spectacular nervous reaction. The theory never held much sway with me since my work, no matter how busy, always brought me more peace than anxiety, and yet here I was, away from the office, much improved. In just a few days, the rash receded entirely from my face and back. My fingers were clearing up, too. Imagine how relieved I was. Yet the rash was not eradicated. Indeed, when I paid for groceries or a carton of milk, the peeling worsened in my fingers, my skin itched terribly. So it was that I came to understand.”
“Understand what?”
“I was allergic to money. That week away from work, my skin was better at all times, except when I touched hard coin.”
“Is such a thing possible? Were you handling so much currency at the office?”
