Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

Over the next month, my life changed dramatically. Uncle rented a furnished three-bedroom apartment and hired an English couple, a butler and cook, to make sure someone was there on the many nights he never came home. A car took me to school, then to Halston’s, and back to the temporary home with Richard and Kate, who served me as if I were an exiled and disaffected young lord, someone deserving of respect and pity. I visited Julie on Friday nights and Saturday mornings, joining Uncle and a woman friend for Saturday nights in Manhattan. The “friend” was Tracy, my uncle’s mistress of many years, although they pretended to me to be recent platonic acquaintances. I told Halston many secrets; none were the big one. We reviewed what I remembered of the attack on my parents in Tampa. Halston didn’t dig for too many details; I assumed that was because he had heard my mother’s account when she was his patient. He also took me through my mother’s abandonment of me during the Bay of Pigs invasion. Again, my recollections, at that point, were blocked, but Halston didn’t have much interest in the details, anyway.

[I am trying to keep this free of later retrospective evaluations of Dr. Halston’s technique because they would muddy a clear picture of the therapy as I experienced it then. At the time, the transference was excellent. Obviously, I had no distance on Dr. Halston’s methods; therefore, to insert them into accounts of our sessions would distort reality. I am concerned, however, that professionals will need to know at this point that I wasn’t blocked about the facts of what had happened in the past, not really, except for a few lurid details. I was blocked about what I felt and what the facts meant to the wider world. To use my favorite depiction of distorted thinking: I knew 2 plus 2 was the equation, I just didn’t know that they would add up to 4—in my calculations, there was a different sum every day — and I had no conscious awareness that the answer of 4 was a taboo number.]

Halston focused on what I felt during the two days and nights my mother left me alone, especially my reaction to Uncle taking me to live with him after she was arrested. In general, contrary to what one might expect of a Freudian-based therapist, he concentrated on my contemporary relationship with Bernie. Indeed, it provided one of the rare occasions he seemed to argue with my perceptions.

“Uncle didn’t rescue me,” I said.

“No? You used the word rescue.”

“Yes. But I asked him to. It wasn’t his idea.”

“He came and got you and took you in.”

“Yes.”

“Wasn’t that rescuing you?”

“Yes, but …”

“But?”

“It wasn’t his idea.”

“I see. So it wasn’t a rescue because you told him to.”

“No, I don’t mean that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I told him what he wanted to hear, so he would rescue me.”

“What did he want to hear?”

“That he—” I paused. This was dangerously close to a final surrender.

“That he …?”

“That I loved him.”

“And you don’t love him?”

“No.”

“Is that the big secret?”

“No,” I said.

“But it’s a secret?”

“Yes.”

I enjoyed the talks, just as I enjoyed my silence at school, the falling away of my old friendships, and the new interest of the hipsters, as they noticed my hair growing longer and my withdrawal from participation in athletics. I shocked one of the school hippies when I approached him in the bathroom to ask if I could buy a nickel bag of grass. He watched, impressed, as I took a hit from a sample joint, released the smoke from my mouth and rebreathed it through my nostrils, à la Sandy. My credentials established, I was allowed to make the purchase. Thus supplied, I discovered a new joy, getting high alone at night and pleasuring myself in a luxuriant orgy, intensified by the heightened sensation and vivid fantasy the drug made possible.

Meanwhile, on Fridays and Saturdays I pursued my new goal, the shedding of my cumbersome, embarrassing, and — I was convinced — unhealthy virginity. The immediate obstacle, I believed, was a man, a member of Columbia’s SDS steering committee with whom Julie was in love. At least that’s how I interpreted their late-sixties style of dating: they slept together; he discussed everything with her; she adopted his ideas, sometimes with more passion than he felt; and they went together to most events, whether they were political meetings or the movies. They would have denied they were a couple, since they believed monogamous relationships were “bougie” (their slang for bourgeois), possession of a person being an extension of capitalist ideas; besides, Julie believed exclusive relationships were especially wrong for women, inevitably male chauvinist in practice, since inherent in the idea of ownership was the assumption of male control. This self-deception was accepted by their friends, thanks to their general political agenda. I need hardly explain why, despite my age and sexual inexperience, I was so much wiser about the depth and power of even a radical’s need to love, be loved, and to possess his beloved with a monopolistic grip that would have impressed Andrew Carnegie.

In one way, Julie’s lover encouraged my own hopes. Gus was a tall, skinny half-Jewish, half-Irish New Yorker raised by parents who had been members of the American Communist Party. Other than his reddish hair and freckled skin, he wasn’t that different in physical appearance from me; and his social background was as close to mine as one could reasonably expect. I met him on the second Saturday I stayed with the women after my panic attack. Biting his nails, his legs bouncing restlessly, Gus questioned me about my politics, the kids at Great Neck High, and my reason for quitting the “genius program.”

“Sandy,” I said. She looked up from the picket sign she was creating with a black Magic Marker. A demonstration against the building of the gym was planned for later that day. “She radicalized me about it,” I said, talking in their jargon. “I realized we were being exploited in an elitist way.”

Sandy smiled. Her skin was too dark for a blush to be noticeable, but pleasure at my flattery was in her eyes.

Gus’s mouth, which tended to hang open a little, like a friendly, overheated hungry dog, drooped a bit lower and he nodded thoughtfully. “Right on, Sandy,” he said and then resumed biting his nails. “You want to start a chapter of SDS at your school?” he asked as he chewed.

“I’m not a leader,” I said.

“You shouldn’t be,” he said. He spat out a fragment of nail. “Leadership is dinosaur thinking. You should be in the vanguard of creating a way for the other kids to educate themselves and create their own organization. That’s why we don’t believe in going into schools and setting up chapters ourselves. That’s age chauvinism.”

“Rafe would be a good choice,” Julie said. She was in a black leotard and faded jeans. She looked extraordinary: at the peak of youth’s bloom, her skin as luminous as porcelain, her black hair glinting, her big brown eyes full of passion and yet as innocent as a fawn’s. To look at her for more than a few seconds was painful, although it was also a sublime pleasure. “He’s political and a real teacher. And he wouldn’t try to dominate them.”

Gus nodded. “How can we help you do it?”

I said nothing. More secrets were piling up. The need to impress Julie and her friends, including her lover, was insistent, but I couldn’t risk my uncle’s wrath by openly embracing left-wing politics. And Halston? Dare I tell the doctor about my new secret life — or was it too close to my mother’s madness? Halston might believe Ruth’s ideology caused her lunacy.