Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

I searched for the book she told me about at the mall next to the institute, bought a copy, and went to the supermarket — where I found only half of what I needed to complete the treatment. I was unable to find an important aid for Halley’s sense memory. To my surprise, I discovered from the assistant manager that the manufacturer doesn’t sell it during the summer. I decided to take a chance on the slow-moving inventories of New York’s delis.

I departed for the city. I arrived late, almost ten o’clock, thanks to a violent summer thunderstorm. The decaying West Side Highway became a black river and the street’s potholes were muddy ponds. I crawled for an hour and a half from the George Washington Bridge to Central Park West in the seventies, a distance of five or six miles. There were no parking spaces so I used the garage opposite my sublet. The driving rain had stopped. At last, I felt smart again — sure enough, I found one box of what I needed in an all-night Korean grocery store. I walked the block to her apartment building. I announced myself to the same doorman who had assured us the cherry bombers were going to lose fingers.

He told Halley my name, said, “Hold on,” and offered me the intercom, explaining, “She wants to talk to you.” Its receiver was no different than an old-fashioned phone’s.

“Rafe?” Halley’s voice crackled as they always do on intercoms — as if coming over a shortwave radio.

“Yes.”

“What’s …? You’re here to see me?”

“I’m here to tuck you in,” I said and winked at the doorman. He smiled slyly, then looked away, as if he shouldn’t be listening, even if I didn’t mind. “I have Malomars,” I said.

She came in loud. “What?”

“Ma-lo-mars,” I said slowly. “I have Malomars and hot chocolate.”

That got me a puzzled look from the doorman. The storm hadn’t cooled things off. The reverse, in fact. The city air was as thick as steam — the sidewalks seemed to be boiling the rain.

She was at her door when I came out of the elevator, hair wet, dressed in a large white men’s T-shirt that reached her knees. She watched my approach with her head tilted, black eyes wide and unafraid. I pulled the box of Malomars out from the grocery bag. “Good,” I said, handing them to her. “You’ve had your bath.”

She took the yellow box in both hands, staring at it as if it couldn’t be real. With her head down, she was no taller than my stomach. Cradling the bag in my left arm, I ran my right hand over the top of her damp hair, gathering it. I tugged gently. “Put this in a ponytail,” I said.

She raised her eyes. They narrowed. She stepped back, breaking my hold, the door opening wider, yet still blocking the way. She asked, “Is this game for you or for me?”

I reached into the bag and showed her a box of Nestle’s mix. “Hot chocolate, Malomars, and a bedtime story. You know how I like to read bedtime stories,” I said.

She stamped her foot. “Just tell me!” Annoyed at herself for that display, she shut her eyes, took a breath through her nostrils — their flare was quite pretty — and said softly, “I don’t care. I just want to know.”

I let the Nestles box slip back into the bag, stepped into the doorway and looked down at her. “I love you,” I said. And then a whisper, “This is for me.”

I heated the milk in a pot on the stove, shunning the microwave, noisily stirring the sides with a metal spoon. I hadn’t covered this point with her mother; that was how I remember Grandma Jacinta made hot chocolate. I would listen from the next room to the slow scrape of metal on metal and anticipate the sweet taste. There wasn’t a brown mug like the one Mary Catharine had described, but the white mugs Halley owned were large and would feel heavy in her hands. I put four Malomars on a plate, poured the hot chocolate, and brought the drink and cookies to her bedroom. On the way, I got the book I had brought from my raincoat.

Halley, her hair braided into a tail that draped down her right shoulder, was propped up by two pillows in bed, clutching a small stuffed white bear.

She sipped the hot chocolate and said, “Mmmmm.” She took a bite of a Malomar.

“Don’t you want to dip it?” I asked.

“It’ll be messy.”

“You’ve been a good girl. You can dip.” I opened the book, Goodnight Moon, holding it in my left hand, and began: “In the great green room, there was a telephone, and a red balloon.” She dunked half the Malomar, spread her lips over the melting chocolate shell and sucked at the gooey interior. I slid my right hand under the covers and ran the tips of my fingers up her thigh.

I left an hour later. The procedure took ninety minutes. Double a normal therapy session, but I had been slowed down by her initial resistance, and this was, after all, our first one.

She complained that I didn’t allow her to touch me. In the early throes of orgasm, she asked to see my penis — using a child’s words, of course: “Can I see your thing?” I said no, that she was dirty.

As she climaxed, when I leaned over to whisper in her ear, she yelled, “Don’t say it!” I assume she meant my blunder during the bath adventure of reminding her that Gene died for her — although the bath scene had a different goal than my new one and therefore I can’t say it was a blunder. This time, as her belly undulated against my arm, I whispered, “You’re a good girl,” over and over until she was finished.

After I left her room, she called for me plaintively three times. Waiting in her foyer, ready to hurry out if I heard her leave the bed, I didn’t hear (nor did I expect to so early in the treatment) the tears, the sobs of abandonment, that I believed would mean we had achieved a breakthrough.

The next day, I arrived late at the Carnegie Deli. There was a line spilling out the door waiting for tables. I didn’t see Edgar or Stick so I joined its end. A short man in an expensive three-piece came up to me. “Dr. Neruda?” I nodded. “Mr. Levin’s waiting for you inside. Follow me.”

He led me through a narrow path between jammed tables, and around waiters carrying plates of towering sandwiches above their heads. A pastrami and corned beef came within an inch of my nose. “You’re too tall,” the pale, sweating waiter told me. “Sit down already.”

Edgar, Stick, and Didier Lahost had been seated in the closest thing to a private table, all the way in the left rear corner, against two mirrored walls and with no one to the right because of the kitchen door. Even so, we were crowded in, bumped repeatedly, and of course the noise was deafening.

“Edgar, this is a ridiculous place to get acquainted with someone. Hello, Monsieur,” I added to Didier, and began an imitation of my father, a model for me of how to be charming. I was, at once, curious about the stranger, teasing toward the powerful presence of Edgar and apparently intimate about my life. I treated Stick as if he were my child, talking about him in the third person, sometimes answering for him. I asked Didier if his name was Alsatian. They hadn’t bothered to inquire about his history and he was glad to tell it. When he mentioned that his mother was Spanish, he and I were off. She turned out to be an Asturian, the neighboring province to my grandfather’s, Galicia, and the birthplace of my Uncle Pancho. I told the story of Francisco abducting me from Uncle Bernie — delighting Edgar, naturally, since this now encompassed Great Neck gossip. I was very lucky in the coincidence of a Spanish connection with Didier. That made it easier to isolate Stick, dimming his light before Edgar, and exacerbating his mild paranoia (a presenting symptom of sadism) into a frenzy.

Our cheerful conversation lasted for more than two hours, past three o’clock, when the popular Carnegie emptied out considerably and we could lower our voices. Edgar used a cellular phone to cancel a meeting, saying he was having too good a time listening to me spill the beans about Bernie.