Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

Gene laughed, skeptically.

“I mean it. I don’t think there’s any reason for you to lie to me about anything. If you want to lie to me, that’s between you and me and we can work it out. But keeping a secret for someone else is not okay. It’s unfair to you.”

“She doesn’t mean to do anything bad,” Gene said plaintively. “She was scared if Dad found out, I …” He trailed off. His legs slid down and he turned a little in my direction. His voice was soft and childish. “She was just trying to help me.”

So my intuition was right. I was thrilled. I felt, irrationally, that I had a right to my work and my love, had been granted the title and deed to my own happiness. I suppressed my elation, of course. I was in mid-session, very much at the heart of Gene’s problem. “What is she scared of, Gene?”

“That he’d get angry at me.”

“Angry at you for seeing a therapist?”

“No. Yes. No. I mean, angry that I’m sick.”

Thanks to this new confidence in me, we made rapid progress that week. Gene brought up memories of his father’s intolerance of illness when he was a boy. The stories were typical of a neurotic’s: the meaning for Gene was out of proportion to the facts.

Within a few sessions we arrived at the key memory: one afternoon Gene had a sore throat after school. He thought he was in kindergarten or first grade, his age roughly six or seven. His father had a big job on the Upper West Side, building shelves for a gallery owner — thus this carpentry job was more than a way of earning a living, it was a backdoor contact he hoped would help get him a show. Gene wanted to go home. Don wouldn’t postpone returning with Gene to the job; he had promised the gallery owner to be finished by the weekend and it was Friday. He phoned Carol, but she insisted she couldn’t get off early. Don coaxed Gene uptown, buying him a toy, dosing him with Bufferin, interrupting his work to buy him pizza and an orange soda. (I had to dig for these details from Gene; what he wanted to remember was his father’s impatience and neglect.)

The most poignant aspect of the anecdote was its climax. By six o’clock, when the gallery owner came home, Gene felt feverish and nauseous. Afraid to interrupt his father, Gene had been suffering silently in a corner, choking on the sawdust, forlornly staring at an art book of Bosch’s visions of hell. He watched his father greet the owner and nervously show off the nearly completed shelves. The man wasn’t satisfied. There weren’t enough tall deep shelves for the art books. Don tried to explain that he could easily remedy this insufficiency, but the gallery owner complained that the two extra days it would take meant he couldn’t have a brunch on Sunday he had planned for a brilliant new painter visiting from Brazil. Don, in Gene’s memory, was seen for the first time as weak: apologizing, fawning, insecure, no longer the masterful artisan, but a fearful sycophant. Don promised he would work all night to repair his error.

“What? The noise’ll keep me awake.”

“I’ll work quietly,” Don said and, in Gene’s memory, bowed his head to whisper penitently, “I’m really sorry.”

“I’m not paying for the extra time,” the gallery owner said.

“Of course not. It’s my fuck-up,” Don said. “Look, my kid is sick. I had to take care of him. I got distracted.”

The gallery owner turned to look at pale, meek, ill Gene. “If he’s sick why is he here?”

Gene immediately threw up on the book of Bosch paintings. That image was keenly alive in his mind, vivid and horrible, of an alien orange substance erupting out of him. He recognized chunks of the slice of pizza. It soaked into the book’s binding, oozing between the threads. His father yelled while the gallery owner shrieked that the book was ruined, the shelves were useless, his weekend a disaster. He bullied Don into carefully cleaning the Bosch book while insisting that Gene sit in the bathroom, alone, in case he had another accident. The gallery owner eventually threw Don and Gene out, refusing to allow Don to return and also refusing to pay him for the work.

That extended the horror of this incident. Carol wanted Don to demand payment, but he was too ashamed and furious. He wanted to forget it. Gene, it turned out, was seriously ill with scarlet fever. He ran a high temperature for two days. He lay in bed, listening in a delirium to bitter quarrels between Don and Carol. Why didn’t Don demand justice from the mean gallery owner? Carol demanded. They had it out late Sunday night while they thought Gene was asleep. The argument ended with Don slapping Carol. She walked out and didn’t return until the following evening. Gene, although he was very uncomfortable, was afraid to ask Don for any nursing while she was away and also afraid that his mother would never return. He suffered terribly and in isolation.

Getting to these facts and feelings took many sessions. How Gene perceived each character’s motivation and demeanor was veiled and massively defended. Only through specific questioning could I get Gene to see that the image of his father’s behavior he carried with him — uncaring and violent — didn’t match what seemed to be his father’s rather passive approach to his problems. Nor did the image he carried of his mother — caring and victimized — jibe with her passive and neglectful behavior. Odd though this may seem to a lay reader, we spent months — not exclusively, a little bit each session — reviewing each of his father’s and mother’s choices. Why, I asked, did Carol, who presumably had a somewhat flexible schedule, not leave work an hour or so early and help out Don? (She had on other occasions.) This was a question Gene had never asked himself. He didn’t want to now, either. Why didn’t his father get a sitter and take Gene home, rather than drag him to the job? Why did he use Gene as his alibi for his own mistake? And so on. I was a pest, crawling over every inch of the story, asking such things as, why did Don feed him pizza? (An odd food for a sick child, I commented.) I found fault with everything they did and was very critical of both his parents.

Gene was irritated — understandably — by this apparently absurd microscopic examination of their care. He believed I was wrong to attack his parents as parents: the incident proved gallery owners were wicked, that his father lost his strength when he tried to please people in the art world (this was not articulated, but clearly felt), that illness in general wasn’t tolerated by his father, and that the slap proved Don had a violent temper which Carol and Gene had to avoid provoking at all costs.

Throughout, the common theme we discovered for the whole family was passivity and fear of anger. Gene, it turned out, had felt feverish before going to school and worse during the day, but hadn’t told his parents or his teacher, afraid of annoying his teacher and interfering with his father’s or mother’s work. It was obvious to me Gene had been taught years earlier that he wasn’t free to interrupt adult plans. Certainly he had been sold on the notion that there was nothing wrong with his mother and father placing his needs second to the authority figures in their lives, blaming each other or Gene, rather than confronting the true obstacle: their own fear and resentment of authority. Gene’s cover-up of this neglect was greatest when it came to his mother. He was shocked when I commented that her walking out and not returning for twenty-four hours while Gene lay feverish wasn’t caring.

“She was scared of Dad,” he said. “He hit her.”

For the one hundredth time, it seemed to me, I had to ask, “Did he punch her?”

“No, I mean—”

“What did he do, exactly?”

“I told you. He slapped her across the face.”