Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

Diane smirked. “Was she foolish enough to go after you?”

I nodded. “She even bothered to pretend to have bought my book on incest and read it years ago—”

“Is that an assumption? Your book was a bestseller.”

“Not an assumption. I fell for it at first. But later, I had a moment alone to check. On the back page I saw the remnant of a new sticker from a second-hand bookstore.”

“Which one?”

“The Strand.”

“Kind of ironic, no?”

“Ironic?” I asked.

“We used to go there. Remember, Rafe? On Sundays we’d have bagels in bed and walk in the Village?” Diane turned her head and frowned at the door. “So how was she? A true narcissist should be a great lover — at least in the beginning. Totally devoted to your pleasure, huh? Must have been the blowjob of your life.”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t admit what I had done, that I had played an unscrupulous trick to confirm my diagnosis. Diane, of all people, would have had reason to be appalled.

“That good, eh?” Diane got up, walked to her desk, and opened a drawer. “Okay, here’s your moment of triumph.” She came out with a pack of Camel Lights, removing one and lighting it. “Yes, you’ve got me smoking again. You not only broke my heart, you’ve got my lungs.” She took a long drag. “The worst thing is, you can’t smoke anywhere in this fucking self-righteous world. Every asshole on earth thinks they have the right to live forever.” She exhaled a foul cloud toward me. “God. I had an interview with Lisa Dorfman’s father — a court-ordered interview to determine if he was rehabilitated enough to have visitation. Remember what he did to her? Fucked her up the ass in front of her baby sister and then put her in a tub of scalding water? So I light up a cigarette and Mr. Dorfman asks me to put it out. Second-hand smoke is dangerous, he says, I’m putting his health at risk. I should have put it out in his eye.” She took another drag, lids shutting halfway with pleasure. “What do you want?” she asked and exhaled another cloud.

“They’re happy.”

“Who’s happy? Oh. You mean the sadist and the narcissist? You know that would make a good name for a heavy metal group.” She picked up a square glass ashtray, returned to the chair, and balanced the ashtray on her knee. She tapped it with her cigarette. “They’re happy? What do you mean — happy?”

“I mean, they have all the symptoms of their diseases, except one. They’re not unhappy. They function well. They don’t mind the emptiness of their emotional lives. They see everyone else as weak. They are content. They are in homeostasis.”

“God bless us, every one,” Diane said, taking another drag. She squinted at the window, chin up, and blew out a long thin stream. “So? Mazel tov, they’re happy. Who are they, anyway? How do you know them?”

“The narcissist is Halley.”

Diane shook her head, bewildered. “Halley?”

“My former patient, Gene Kenny? She’s the woman he left his wife for. And the sadist, her father, was his boss.”

“Was his boss?”

“You don’t know,” I said, realizing my mistake. “It was after we split up.”

“Split up? Is that how you think of it? Jesus Christ. That’s a masterpiece of understatement.” She pressed her cigarette out. “Wait a minute.” She twisted and tried to slide the ashtray onto her desk. “What the hell—” she couldn’t reach, so she stood up to put it there while talking, “—are you doing? Making contact with a patient’s—?”

“He’s dead,” I said. “He killed his wife and committed suicide two months ago.”

Diane sat on the edge of her desk. She gaped at me. “No.”

“Halley dumped him. Copley, her father, fired him two weeks later. His wife was threatening to move out of state with their son. He had no job and lost their one asset, the house. Well, Gene didn’t know the house was gone. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but …” I waved a hand in disgust. “That’s bullshit. I know exactly what happened. Copley and Halley had decided Gene was getting too big for his britches. He was asking for a piece of the company and he had the loyalty of the whole creative team. They had a new kid genius Copley thought could replace him. Between the two of them, they knew Gene’s situation, they knew how to make it as bad as possible, because just beating him down wasn’t enough. What if he went to a competitor? Although, that wasn’t it. What they did wasn’t practical — that wasn’t the real reason. What they did had the vicious irrationality of madness.” I was talking to myself, I realized. I tried to focus on Diane’s blank, still-amazed face. “That night, the night he murdered Cathy and killed himself, that was the night Gene realized how much they wanted to hurt him. Cathy confronted him with a letter calling in the loan on the house, exposing the fact that he’d been fired, that he had no way of stopping her from moving, and that he couldn’t meet the next support payments. In a flash he understood Halley was in a league with her father, he understood that for years his life had been an elaborate con game, that he had thrown away his marriage, his child, and his career for nothing. He was a fool as far as they were concerned, a ridiculous man. All his life he had lived in fear of making demands and pushed him past that fear. I cured him.” I laughed bitterly. Diane was staring at the carpet, kneading an eyebrow. “I told him if he asserted himself with his boss, he’d be rewarded for his years of service. I told him his fears that Halley didn’t love him were neurotic. I not only sent him into a battle he wasn’t fit for, worst of all, I stripped away his one puny defense, his tortoise shell. He was safe. Don’t you see? Diane, are you listening?” She looked up. “He wasn’t getting what he was worth at the company because he knew, instinctively, that kept him safe. He didn’t allow himself to fall in love with a beautiful, self-assured woman like Halley because he knew he couldn’t survive her rejection. He didn’t defy his wife because he knew he couldn’t survive her anger. He was miserable, sure. He was being taken advantage of, sure. But he was safe.”

Diane pushed off from her desk. She returned to the chair, pulled her legs under her, and sat on her haunches. “It didn’t make sense to you, so you arranged to meet them, is that what happened?”

“You’re wearing contacts,” I said. “That’s why you look so different.”

“Yes! Yes, you got it. I’m on the prowl. I want everything to be different. I don’t want anything to remind me of you. Not even when I look in the mirror.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re real sorry. What do you want me to say? That you’re responsible for Gene’s suicide? That you shouldn’t cure neurotics because maybe their illness protects them?”

“Yes. Say that, if that’s what you think it means.”

“Jesus,” Diane whispered to herself. “This is your insane perfectionism. Your God-complex.”

“Are you saying you don’t think what I’ve discovered is true? Copley and his daughter are mentally ill. If you believe the DSM III, if you believe everybody from Jesus to Freud to Phil Donahue, these people are sick. They should be miserable, they should be—”

Diane kicked out her legs and stood up. “They’re mean. That’s all. They’re shitty people. Deal with it. Grow up.” She waved at the door. “Go!” I didn’t move. She stamped her foot. “I can’t believe you came here to talk to me about this crap! That can’t be why you’re here. I don’t think this is my vanity talking. You can’t be here to talk about these creeps.”

“Diane! Goddamnit! Listen to me!” She backed away, startled. Had I yelled that loudly? I was on my feet, I realized, and I was advancing on her. I swallowed, took a breath and also stepped away from her. I made an effort to speak calmly. “You have a first-rate mind. Use it. Reach for something bigger than just mechanistic technique.” She breathed through her nostrils, her arms crossed protectively; but her eyes were waiting, prepared to listen. So I continued, “We divide the world into two groups — the well-adjusted and the dysfunctional. These people aren’t serial killers. They’re not sociopaths. On the contrary, they honor society and society honors them. They are well-adjusted but they have none of the healthy relationships that all the theorists maintain are the basis of being well-adjusted. No real love to sustain them, no true intimacy. And yet they function. They function at a high level. What do we call their psychological condition? We don’t have a category for it.”