Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

“What’s a mistake?” I asked. We were late and needed to cut this conversation short, but I didn’t want to seem to be running from it.

“You’re too conscientious,” she said in a decisive tone. “That’s all.”

“Can a doctor really be too conscientious?”

“The world’s gonna break your heart, Rafe, if you care that much about everybody and everything. Joseph’s not a friend to you. He wants to brag to the world that he’s taught Rafael Neruda how to treat his patients.”

“Now you’re being neurotic,” I said. And immediately regretted it.

There was a heavy silence. I heard her breathing and that was heavy also, labored and dangerous.

“Sorry,” I said quickly. “I mean, Joseph isn’t like that and anyway he can’t take credit for my work. We’re not really in the same field. No one would believe him, for one thing.”

“Okay. Let’s drop it.” Her tone was irritated and irritating. “We have to get going.”

“Look, maybe Joseph’s research can help improve my treatment. Why is that something to be afraid of?”

“You’re not understanding what I’m saying. Is that deliberate? Do you really not understand?”

“I really don’t.”

“Okay.” She sighed. “Let me try to say it again. You’ve cured dozens and dozens of kids — there are plenty of people out there, like Felicia, like ‘Timmy,’ who owe their lives to you, and Joseph talks to you like you’re incompetent. And he treats me like I’m a waitress. I can’t take it. And I don’t think you should take it. I think it’s neurotic!”

“Diane, I discovered a long time ago that no blessing is unmixed. Joseph has a brilliant mind and for him to use it well he needs the illusion that his is the most brilliant mind in the world. That need is nothing to envy, because it’s doomed to be unsatisfied. I value his friendship. I know, and I know it for sure, that if I really needed Joseph, he would do everything to help me. But when we play games — and that’s what an argument is to Joseph, a game — he has to win, or at least seem to win. That’s what he needs from me.”

“So you’re enabling him?”

“Diane.” I couldn’t fight my irritation. “I’d really prefer it if we didn’t use jargon.”

“What you mean is, if I didn’t use jargon.”

“No. Jargon is jargon no matter who’s using it.”

“Look, Rafe, honey, all I’m saying is if a patient talked like you are—”

“Diane, we’ve got to get going. I’ll pick you up and we’ll finish this on the way. Okay?”

“I’m done. I’ve said what I have to say.” Her tone was clipped.

“You sound furious.”

“I’m not. I’ll be waiting downstairs.”

At first I didn’t feel my reaction. I left calmly, happy to be in my car driving on the empty Saturday morning streets. A few blocks from Diane’s apartment, however, my heart raced as I rehearsed replies, some angry, some earnest. But when I turned onto her street, I laughed. It was funny. We were having a fight, a married fight.

I stopped laughing.

We were having a fight over our identities, testing the limits of each other’s private selves. Just how deep did I want Diane to plant her flags in my life’s terrain? She didn’t know about Joseph’s rescuing me from the streets of Washington Heights. She didn’t know that he had spent his childhood in isolation, that he had no clue how to conduct a friendship. She didn’t know that Joseph himself belied his conviction that all of human character is merely a matter of how the chemistry was mixed at the instant of insemination. Joseph’s ideas were driven by the emotional need to prove his parents had no damaging effect on him. How could he blame them for anything after what they had suffered in Germany?

Diane knew none of this and, to be fair to her, how could she comprehend my behavior without the information? (I also wondered why I hadn’t told her. Did I resent that I owed Joseph anything? Did I want to maintain an illusion for Diane’s benefit that all the giving was on my side?) The most tangled knot for me was the self-consciousness of any exchange with her. I was sure Diane wouldn’t agree that, in spite of Joseph’s emotional need to believe environment had no impact on people, his ideas might still have a great deal of objective truth. Once I told Diane his history, she would probably feel affection for him and she would forever dismiss him intellectually. This weakness, a reductive view of human beings reinforced by her training, a need to feel in secret command of why people behaved as they do as a prerequisite for tolerance, was the dark side of her initial interest in psychology.

In the same vein, I believed she dismissed my fear of falling victim to what Joseph suffered from — seeing only those facts that confirm a comforting theory of life — as nothing more than a by-product of the traumas of my childhood. She knew of the passionate ideologies of my childhood and its results: my mother’s suicide, my estrangement from my father, Uncle’s alienation from everyone he loved, my nervous breakdown, my own attempt at self-murder. But those bald facts weren’t really all of it. Not even my mother’s incest (a secret from all but Susan Bracken and Diane), not even that would fully explain my attitude. The lurid events are too overpowering in themselves; in their glare, the effects on the real person cannot be seen. She would have to hear as complete an account as this to understand. And would she hear it? Or would she hear it as a psychologist? I didn’t want to be Diane’s patient.

Or did I? Did I need her as a woman or as a therapist? Did I want to be loved or understood? Were both possible? With Julie that was never a question. She was a part of my life despite her ignorance of all its facts. She understood without telling. She loved without questions and answers.

Of course I could push our relationship through this impasse. A single anecdote about Joseph’s mother would melt Diane’s objections to him; a recounting of how he saved me from my mother’s abandonment would silence and embarrass her. She would tolerate my investigation into his research as some sort of repayment and leave me alone. But that was a trick really, a manipulation. Did I want a relationship that I was managing?

These questions played in the background while Diane got in the car, kissed me with an open lingering mouth, settled in the seat and energetically reviewed aloud her notes from our first interview with the children we were about to see. Apparently the subject of Joseph was closed. Just as well, I thought. The mid-November day was cool, but a pale sun struggled to make us comfortable and implied that day might be our last chance to enjoy being outdoors before winter settled in. Entering the clinic, I longed to escape the office. Diane did too. She whispered, “I wish we were in Paris.”

The last of our interviews, Albert, our abused and abusive thirteen-year-old, arrived late, just before lunch. With him, atypically, were two men. One waited outside with Al while the other came in to speak to us privately. He identified himself as a paratherapist — a term new to me that I assumed meant he was a glorified attendant. He explained Al had attacked another boy at the Yonkers shelter that morning. Al broke the boy’s arm and threatened to gouge out his eyes with a spoon he had filed down. They decided to bring him to our session anyway, although he was going to be shipped back to Metropolitan State Hospital and would lose his privilege of coming to see me for the other two scheduled sessions. I would have to see him in Met State’s adolescent lockup ward in the future. (That meant a barred room reeking of garbage from Dumpsters behind a side door.) The paratherapist, a bald man, asked if he should stay in the room for our session. Diane was upset by the news of Albert’s violence. I said she should call a cab and go home. She protested weakly; I insisted. She had confessed during our drive up in the car that Al’s brutalizing of his niece (Diane’s patient) prejudiced her against him. The news of this attack on another child would only intensify her dislike. After she left, I told the attendant I could handle Albert alone.