Читать книгу A Tightly Raveled Mind - Diane Lawson - Страница 7

Chapter One

Psychoanalysis is not and has never been the fashion in Texas. It’s a pull-yourself-up-by-your-cowboy-bootstraps kind of place where psychiatrists are only for crazy people. Texas psychoanalysts like to say they grow their own analytic patients, meaning people come seeking a quick fix for emotional pain and learn about the enduring value of self-knowledge as a by-product.

In no small part, my own success could be attributed to several advantages provided me by my former husband Richard, as he would have been the first to tell you. There was the money, of course—the plump cushion of his inheritance, on top of the income from his high-end psychiatric consulting—which allowed me the luxury of being selective about patients I took on. My office on the grounds of his childhood home was in a classy part of town, and, although I’d kept my maiden name for professional purposes, enough of the right people connected me to Dr. Richard Kleinberg and his old San Antonio bloodline to ensure my business card would be handed out in the best places. In Texas, as in most of the country, Jews are well enough regarded, as long as they’re doctors, lawyers or accountants.

On the other hand, I’d given up a lot for Richard. My career was just getting going in Chicago when he started lobbying to move back to San Antonio. From what I’ve observed, Texans must get a homing microchip implanted in their brains at birth. I’m not talking about everyday nostalgia for one’s home town. I’m talking about some primordial imperative for return. I’d agreed to relocate if, and only if, I could have my ideal practice. I would not, as too many psychiatrists have come to do, run patients through the office at fifteen-minute intervals with only a prescription to show for the encounter. I would restrict my work to psychoanalysis, the real five-times-a-week kind, not some watered-down version. Richard, under the influence of the migratory urge to reinhabit his birthplace, swore that he wouldn’t dream of pressuring me to make money.

I should have known better. His complaints about me not pulling my weight and my other numerous faults grew like weeds in his native soil. However, after a few years, despite domestic turbulence and brutal summers, I’d settled into a comfortable, if not blissful, routine. I was good at my job—or thought I was. And I liked my work: listening each day to the details of the lives of my seven patients, exploring the intricacies of their minds, trying to help people like Professor Howard Westerman get comfortable in their owns skins. So much for my good intentions. Like Private Investigator Mike Ruiz says, that and ninety-nine cents will get you a breakfast taco at Panchito’s.

The Monday that my patient, Howard Westerman, blew himself to kingdom come started out like any ordinary workday—like the kind of everyday day that feeds our communal delusion that everyone we care about will live forever. I’d felt my standard urgency to be at my station for Howard’s eight o’clock session. Once, early on in my work with him, I’d dawdled over the newspaper, reluctant to plunge into my routine, only to emerge from my back door to find him pacing the balcony of my converted carriage house office. He’d flat refused to use the couch that session, circling the room instead, talking in fragmented sentences, rolling a cat’s eye marble—the “lucky” one he always carried in his pocket—around in his fingers. I got the message about his desperate need for order. From then on, I’d done my best not to disrupt him.

This in mind, I’d pushed through the weekend’s worth of stale air in the waiting area that day to switch on the lamp and straighten the magazines before closing myself into the consulting room. I’d registered my usual irritation at the sight of the glass-paned door, a choice Richard had insisted upon for aesthetic reasons. It was that wavy kind of glass—some fancy Italian something, totally opaque of course—but it always struck me as posing too permeable a barrier for a therapeutic sanctuary.

I’d gone about my morning ritual: making coffee, adjusting the blinds for the morning sun, fluffing the pillow at the head of the couch, and covering it with a fresh tissue. When I finally looked up, the clock read 7:56, which was late for the painfully punctual Howard. I held my breath, anticipating the strike of his heavy black wingtips on the metal staircase. As if to provide a substitute sound, the resident redheaded woodpecker started pounding the tree by the window. The clock rolled to 8:00. I poured some coffee, burned my tongue on the first sip and thumbed through a psychiatric journal full of articles on schizophrenia, PET scanning and the thirty-one flavors of bipolar disorder before tossing it in the trash. There was no possibility of missing Howard coming up the stairs. I’d checked the waiting room anyway. Empty.

In theory, a patient coming late constitutes resistance to treatment. Not necessarily a big deal, just something to talk about once he or she arrives. Part of the process. Grist for the mill. Under ordinary circumstances, the analyst can even afford to experience a patient’s tardiness as a small gift. There are always calls to return, letters and bills to open, private thoughts to savor, fingernails to file. But I knew deep down this event was far too un-Howardly to consider ordinary.

Howard came seeking analysis when his socialite wife Camille put the divorce gun to his head. Their twin boys would be off to college in the fall, and she’d told him she didn’t fancy spending the rest of her life with a human robot. Howard, having grown up in rural West Texas, came by his lack of emotion honestly. He’d survived the bleakest of childhoods—seventh child of twelve, an emotional cipher for a mother, a hellfire Pentecostal minister for a father—by making feelings irrelevant. I‘d immediately understood Camille’s complaints about Howard. The man possessed no vocabulary for feelings, much less a clue as to what might require one. He was maddeningly and irrationally rational. All the same, I’d come to be quite fond of him, certain there was a tender guy inside awaiting rescue. My rescue.

I paced around the office as Howard’s minutes ticked by that morning, doing what an analyst does, letting my mind free associate about what had been going on in his treatment. I recalled that a chink had appeared in his defensive armor in our previous session, his Friday appointment.

“My wife said to tell you that I made her coffee this morning,” he’d said.

“What makes that important?”

“Usually I just make it for myself. I don’t know what got into me.”

“And?”

“She kissed my head.” Trained to know that I want to hear about feelings, not just behaviors, he’d squirmed and added, “It felt okay.”

It made sense that he’d be shut tight in reaction to this lapse, but it wasn’t his style to be late. By 8:15, I was fighting down the urge to give him a call. I knew it would be to quiet my nerves, not for him, so I cleaned out my purse instead. I took my time, throwing out the wadded credit card receipts, paper clips and even one desiccated lipstick I’d bought on impulse but never wore because the color made me look sallow.

I hate patients no-showing. Always have. It makes me feel that I’ve screwed up in some way. In an attempt to soothe myself, I began to circle the consultation room, looking out each window in sequence—the two parking spaces just off the street, the elm with the frenetic woodpecker still hard at work, the view of the back of the house screened by a huge, flaming-pink crape myrtle and the old live oak cradling the children’s tree house in its branches. The beauty of our backyard raised the ugly question of what I’d do for a workspace should Richard and I go through with the divorce. There was no doubt I’d have to relinquish the house, a consideration that only served to ratchet up my agitation.

I remember the accusing gaze of my life-sized bust of Freud, a graduation gift from the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, following me from his spot on the bookshelf. To appease him, I’d asked myself what the good Dr. Sigmund would say about the situation. He’d say, of course, that Howard’s defenses were loosening. That this was a great opportunity for insight! I’d rolled these ideas around in my mind like worry beads. It didn’t help.

In retrospect, I was far too concerned about things that had no importance—like whether I’d made some therapeutic mistake or whether Howard’s absence presaged my losing a hard-earned analytic patient. In retrospect, I wasn’t concerned enough about things that really mattered—like the fragility of the human psyche and life itself. Or the potential for one terrible event to start a catastrophic slide down a slope made slippery by fear and selfishness.

For all the good that retrospect does.

I learned Howard was dead on the nightly news. I was putting dinner together, cooking being one of the few downsides to Richard’s and my separation. The kids had been fighting over which show to watch for their thirty-minute television allotment. As punishment, I made them endure the wrap-up of the day’s traffic jams, city council spats, and detailing of San Antonio’s intractable summer heat. They wrestled around on the rug, keeping the bickering just below the threshold of what would set me off again.

“Mom, look! It’s your patient.” Alex jumped up, knocking his Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper onto the rug, the beige and sage green oriental Richard had haggled into possession on our Turkish honeymoon.

Professor Westerman’s face on the screen—the stunned photo from his Trinity University Chemistry Department ID badge—was unmistakable.

“Hey, Stupid. Mom can’t say who her patients are.” Tamar was smug. “It’s called con-fi-den-ti-al-i-ty.”

“Dwarf-brain, it says he’s dead. If he’s dead, she can say. Privacy Case Law. It was on Dad’s TV show last week.”

“Whoa! He blew himself up.” Tamar’s eyes opened wide. “Maybe it was a suicide bomb.”

“He wasn’t a terrorist. That’s so stupid,” Alex said. “They think it’s an accident, Mom. Can we change the channel now? Pleeeese?”

I thought about the voicemail I’d ended up leaving that morning. Howard’s wife would find it—her husband’s analyst politely but firmly inquiring as to his whereabouts. I imagined her return call: This is Camille Westerman, calling on Howard’s behalf. He regrets not being there for his appointment, but he is in smithereens. Do you charge for sessions missed due to unanticipated death?

I soldiered through the motions of our dinner routine, total numbness alternating with gut-ripping waves of guilt. The word blindsided kept looping around in my mind. As if somehow I could have seen it coming, which maybe I should have. Mike Ruiz says people get blindsided because their eyes are closed. I take offense at that—or pretend to—a private investigator presuming to teach a psychoanalyst something about denial. About repression. About the power of the Unconscious to put our head up our butt and keep it there. But the fact is that I didn’t see Howard Westerman’s death coming. Or the death of my second patient, as Detective George Slaughter, SAPD Homicide, would take great pleasure in pointing out. Or even that of my third patient, which I would witness with my own eyes. Despite years of experience as a psychoanalyst, I failed to anticipate each and every one of those fatal events, not to mention the violence I would prove capable of myself.