Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

Was Julie right? Did these people think I was a failure after all? Had they taken the fantasies of my childhood to heart and continued to think of me as Bernie’s failed prodigy? And was I concealing something from them, accepting scorn while feeling superior? “I play along?” I asked Julie again. “I’m not aware of being phony. I feel sorry for most of them. For Aaron, certainly. And for Sadie. She’s always been very close to her family. I think she took my mother’s suicide harder than any of them and she loved Bernie, really loved him.”

“Jesus.” Julie slumped down onto the grass outside the gate. She reached for a cigarette. “You’re making me feel like a shit.”

I kept my eyes on the glowing, pristine court. “I’m in love with you,” I said, too cowardly and too ashamed of giving in to this feeling to look at her. “It’s been seven years. Supposed to go away. But I think of you every day and I realize today that I want you more than ever. I made a mistake. I should have taken you on any terms.”

I didn’t hear anything from her. I thought, in the distance, someone shouted joyfully from the house. That didn’t make sense, a whoop of happiness from people in mourning.

Finally, I heard her lips make a noise as she took another puff. But she didn’t speak.

“Maybe that’s why I keep bringing up family obligations,” I continued. “Just a sneaky way of complaining that you didn’t …” I couldn’t go on. I felt alone. I leaned against the fence and remembered a perfect shot I had once hit against someone, I wasn’t sure who, a down-the-line backhand on the full run, a typical stroke for a professional, but the only one I ever hit, a taste of greatness. Pointless in my life, yet I could still see the ball spinning over the net for a winner as if it were yesterday, as if it were full of meaning. “I’m sorry,” I said and turned to Julie.

She was huddled beside the open gate, head down. I knelt beside her. She looked up, face wet. She spoke passionately, but clearly. “That isn’t fair. You ended it. I said we should just go on—”

“In secret? For our whole lives?” I argued, passionately, as if no time had passed.

She straightened and pushed me with one hand, like an annoyed kid. “You have no right to keep it alive now. I love Richard and I love my children. Don’t make me feel guilty about that.”

I took hold of her shoulders and moved her toward me intending to kiss her. “I wanted to force you to—” I stopped.

“Force me to what? Tell them?” She nodded at the house. The tears had abated. She wasn’t in conflict. I was. These were settled matters for her. “How could we have made a family together in front of them? I have beautiful children. You don’t know. You’ve ignored them.”

“You know why.”

“You’ll do anything for them, for Aaron, for Helen, you’ll gush over their kids and you won’t even look at pictures of mine.”

“You can’t expect me to be glad that you’re happily married.”

“I am happily married.”

I let go. The impulse to kiss was certainly gone.

“I know you don’t want to believe that,” Julie said. “But I am. I love Richard. I’m furious at you that you won’t let go and see me for who I am. I’m a middle-aged woman with two kids and a husband. I was never as complicated as you wanted me to be. I loved you and I was willing to give up having a family to be with you. I couldn’t do better than that.” She sighed and covered her face. “I’m just as conventional as they are,” she mumbled. “That’s the truth.”

She was right, not about the last remark, but about me. Losing the fantasy of Julie was as painful as actually losing her, maybe more so. Her hands came away. I stared and tried to see the real woman. Was she there, the girl who had fought my mother and my uncle on my behalf? The woman who had once brought me the grace of mature love? The tennis court’s clarifying light left nothing for my imagination. She looked tired and her eyes were dead to the silent pleas in my own. She was a stranger and that meant in some way I was still a stranger to myself.

In the distance, a voice called, “Ray-feel!” A figure ran toward us from the house, a shape I didn’t recognize.

Julie squeezed my arm. “Be happy, Rafe. You deserve it.” She stood up. “Get away from us. We’re not good for you.”

“Ray-feel,” the figure called. He was carrying two racquets and a can of balls. The dumpy shape reached the border of the court’s lights. It was cousin Daniel, in his black trousers, his jacket and shirt off. He looked like a photograph of a turn-of-the-century boxer: bare-chested, big-bellied, in long dark pants. “Tennis, anyone?” he said and laughed.

“You drunk?” Julie said quietly.

I stood up.

“Come on,” Daniel offered a racquet. “I bet I can still beat you.”

“I’m sure you can,” I said and walked Julie back to my dead uncle’s house.

TONI REPORTED THAT GENE TALKED A BLUE STREAK IN THE FIRST SESSION, but said nothing. He was preoccupied by an offer from his boss, Theodore Copley, the leader of Flash II’s creative team. Copley had confided in Gene that he was seriously considering a job at Flashworks’s main rival, Minotaur. If he accepted, he wanted Gene to come with him. Gene believed the anxious contemplation of this decision — to leave the company where he had been successful and move his family against his wife’s wishes to another state — explained his insomnia. Toni was unconvinced. I hadn’t sent her any information on Gene or told her details of our work together. She asked for them now. I declined.

“Why? It would save time, no?”

“Remember Rosenhan?” Rosenhan was a psychology professor who sent a group of his graduate students into a psychiatric ward with instructions to fake schizophrenia. None were exposed by the experts, despite the fact that the impostors had been briefed only superficially about what to simulate. To prove his thesis beyond doubt, Rosenhan then presented a group of experienced psychiatrists with genuine schizophrenics, telling the doctors ahead of time that they were fakers. The doctors interviewed the real schizophrenics at length and agreed they were phonies. Rosenhan’s chilling conclusion: the psychiatrist sees what he expects to see.

“I’m insulted,” Toni complained. “And intimidated. I feel like I’m taking a quiz.”

“No, no. I’m concerned that what I thought was a successful therapy with Gene was a failure and I don’t want to prejudice you. I’m not sandbagging. I have more faith in your working with Gene than me.”

“Rafe, that’s a crock.”

“No, I mean it. I’m not really good treating grown-ups. I’m mesmerized by the past. I get stuck in the archaeology. With children, I’m always in the here and now.”

“Sounds like a rationalization.”

“It’s not.” I thought back to the grown-up Gene, in his student clothes, his boyish manner. Was he a grown-up?

Toni interrupted my silence. “Anyway, I thought Gene was a kid when you saw him.”

“Yeah, a teenager.”

“So?” Toni sounded triumphant.

“So what?”

“You’re telling me you don’t think you’re a good therapist for teenagers?”

“Toni, remember Bertha?” Bertha was a fifty-two-year-old black patient during my internship at Hopkins, a mute whom I and my colleagues diagnosed as schizophrenic. Toni discovered Bertha was from Haiti, did some research and eventually uncovered Bertha’s conviction that she had been hexed by a neighbor who, like her, practiced an obscure religion, a kind of Santería, a mix of Catholicism and a Voodoo sect. Toni gathered a group of us in the cafeteria at midnight during a full moon, lit purple candles, and we performed a ceremony (our solemnity was aided by two bottles of cheap red wine) that involved borrowing a skull from the anatomy lab. One week later, a cheerful, confident Bertha was discharged. That was one of many instances of Toni’s unusual ability to avoid the Rosenhan syndrome.