Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind Read online

  Dr. Berman had not slept well. At four in the morning an ambulance siren had wailed its demented warning as it raced past her block. She had walked to the window and stared out at the eastern sky. The sun beneath the horizon was pushing its way toward her slowly, too slowly. And all through the night she had dreamed: wallpaper from old rooms she once knew well, lamps that had sat on desks in whose drawers she had once hidden a lover’s letter as well as the tax forms from the years before, a dress ripped, a glove without its mate, and always the sound of a ringing alarm clock, in the almost darkness of the city where the glow of the blue, green, red Empire State Building, its needle pointed into God’s eye, never disappeared entirely. Again she thought about her mother. Her mother had been dead some fifty years and no longer had any skin on her bones, which Dr. Berman knew well enough.

  Five hardback copies of her book, The Nightmare and Its Vicissitudes, marched along on the shelf behind her chair. Their electric blue covers demanded attention. Her name on the book’s spine was clear as a trumpet call. She unpinned her hair and it slipped down over the collar of her suit jacket. Her hair, white at the mostly hidden roots, was a shade of red, auburn, maybe too orange, too even, too perfect, but commanding as she wished it to be.

  Her colleagues liked the word vicissitude. Freud had used it. It had always sounded to her like the hiss of a snake. She too liked its dangerous echo. Now she was writing a book on memory or she would write a book on memory. Or maybe she could no longer write a book. Actually for her last book, the one titled Lust and Longing, she had hired a ghostwriter. She didn’t have the time or the energy to write each word herself. It had become hard to form the sentences, to hold them in her head as she was reaching for the next thought. The ghostwriter was a secret. No one would ever know. She would never tell.

  Some nights she dreamt in numbers that floated across her brain as if it were a chalkboard. She saw formulas and equations and measurements and theories. She had been the only girl in some classes. But in those classes she had known joy. When she woke from those dreams she felt confident and refreshed, as if somewhere it had rained on dry ground and new seeds might grow.

  Things she remembered:

  Her mother, what her mother had died of, but she wouldn’t say, not now.

  A poem she had memorized in the third grade.

  She wouldn’t say it now. No need.

  The medical school auditorium and the boy who took her back to his room after the liver function lecture and what happened there. She could remember that and the stuffed monkey with the pink cotton tongue perched on his bookshelf, a remnant from his childhood home, a sign of immaturity she should have taken seriously.

  The corpse, the body, her body, and her partner’s, to slice and name. It was female and the pubic hair was black, and the clitoris had withered so it was impossible to find.

  The Waterford china plates she had bought in the roadside antique store in Vermont one autumn when they had gone to a wedding. She remembered whose wedding it was: almost. She remembered the inn where they spent the night, the strawberry jam they had for breakfast and Howard running his fingers over her mouth to remove the crumbs that had gathered in the corners.

  And then she remembered the red and orange leaves on the trees. They stopped at a road stand to buy a basket of apples, too many apples, most of them soft and bruised.

  The black appointment book, there it was under the paper “Object Loss and the Fetish in Early Childhood” that had been sent to her by a Norwegian analyst she had met in Geneva several summers ago.

  She had a son. His name was Gerald. She believed in the good enough mother, and all that entailed. But she also believed in spine, upright spine and discipline and order, and she believed that the world rewarded effort. She hired a nanny from Jamaica and went back to work, ten days after Gerald’s arrival. She did not alter her teaching schedule. She added patients as referrals came from the head of this committee or that. She became a training analyst the year Gerald started nursery school.

  She was interested in sexual obsessions and wrote and delivered papers at meetings across the country and abroad on transsexual identifications and sadistic or masochistic fantasies. She knew why she was interested in sexual obsessions.

  Those subjects have many vicissitudes.

  If Gerald was not always in her mind it didn’t mean that he wasn’t present on occasion.

  Gerald became a handsome child. She kept his hair long, with bangs hanging almost into his pale blue eyes, and his oblong face, while not like her father’s which had been sharp, intense, alert to danger, seemed kind and peaceable. The nursery school report said he was a good sharer and liked to build towers and would try hard to do puzzles if asked. He was pleased when it was his time to water the plants or feed the hamster.

  Howard took the boy to the zoo on Sunday mornings when they were in the city and sometimes took him to the office, letting him crayon on printing paper at his assistant’s desk. The boy was partial to his father: male identification, a defense against Oedipal feelings. She understood: a normal affliction of early childhood that causes havoc in the brain, until death erases its last trace.

  She had read all of Margaret Mahler on separation anxiety and the development of the self in the second year of life. She had read all of Anna Freud’s descriptions of the stages of childhood. She knew that sexual thoughts were as natural to the child under seven as the sky above and the soil below. She knew that toilet training involved a separation from what the child misconstrued as a body part, and so became frightened by the flush and disappearance of his own product. She knew that when Gerald woke at night with a dream of fiery dragons about to eat him, or screamed that a building collapse was about to suck him underground, he was only struggling with his desire for her, an illicit desire he would have to abandon.

  She read the words of Melanie Klein who was convinced that children wanted to chop up, devour, eat, trample the inner organs of their parents, because of the frustration of their baby genital desires. Maybe or maybe not. She did agree with some of what she had read: underneath the sweetness of the blue pajamas with the little rabbit hopping repeatedly over the sleeves, her son was also in a trap that would not spring. Iron bands of want and need, fastened by fear of retaliation, oiled by guilt, enforced by a desire to murder, accompanied his quite banal childhood. He warmed his little arteries beside a bonfire of ardor for the very persons he might destroy if he weren’t so small and so cute in his bunny pajamas.

  Sometimes Dr. Estelle Berman looked at Gerald and saw a demon and sometimes she saw a sleepy child whose thumb was often in his mouth, bending his teeth outward, consoling him for the condition of childhood, which would not be altered by any special pleading in any particular instance.

  She had a nine-year analysis of her own. Was it successful? Of course it was successful. She had found the root of her ambition and she had recognized that she was flawed. She knew why she was flawed. She forgave herself, or tried to, for the meanness that swelled up within her when she saw a woman more beautiful, more seductive than she. She understood that rivalry was a normal human condition, as common as heartburn and the occasional bad cold. And there was more, much more, she lost her fear of strangers stalking her. She stopped gaining and losing weight with each shift of her mood. She learned to feel almost comfortable in other people’s homes, even if they were more expensive and glorious than her own. She learned to listen to other people’s boasts and see underneath the bravado, observe the anxiety that settled on the coffee cups after desert. She knew she was a tough lady, and she didn’t expect to become a delicate princess.

  She had married well in the Victorian novel sense of the word and this gave her insurance against the vicissitudes of life. She had gold pins and thick bracelets set with rare stones. She had necklaces with pearls and real coral. She had gold earrings she caressed with her fingers when she was deep in thought. Her jewelry was not timid or discreet. It admitted to its expense and required respect.

  After her own analysis she no longer believed she was a bad person. Or rather she believed that all persons were bad and she, no worse than her neighbor or her friend or her colleague.

  Her patients, on the couch or in the chair, accepted her words, gratefully, most of the time. She knew when to speak and when to wait. It was a skill that was perfected with time. She heard the skipped heartbeats, the gasps, the tiny sounds of pain that patients uttered, one and all, as they repeated the tales of their lives, the crucial facts, the losses, avoidable and unavoidable. She responded to the patient or she did not according to some instinct that told her to wait, more is coming, or speak now or the moment will pass and never return. Each session was a dance, a danse macabre, not a ball. She was responsible. She was sometimes loved and sometimes hated by her patients. She was almost never bored. Patients lied to themselves, they hid their bitter sharp thoughts, or they spilled them out before her like so many pennies in the blind man’s cup, or they wept when they remembered lost love and denied lust. They wept when they saw that their pride was false or their hope futile.

  Was she kind? You did not need to be kind to do the work. Was she always right in the way she saw the patient, the story before her, the dream that had been brought to her office? Of course not. She was sometimes right and sometimes kind and frequently she could follow the dream down the royal road of the unconscious and find the buried message that waited there.

  Between patients she often changed clothes. She had suits and jackets and shoes for all occasions. She went to professional meetings at her institute. The first Tuesday of every month, she had a committee meeting to discuss the teaching program, the admissions of new students, the appointing of new training analysts. She swam in the waters with others who also knew whom to court, whom to deny, whom to woo. She enjoyed the encounters around the table, in the halls, just as the capos in the back rooms enjoyed their colleagues, their poker games, the urgency of their encounters. She was also an editor of a prominent international psychoanalytic journal which required her to attend meetings in Portugal, in Brazil, in the Loire Valley and other places where psychoanalysts gathered in the summer months, their spouses in tow, their passports in the hotel safe, their afternoons spent in museums and gardens and churches across the globe.

  Her father was shot in a bar in Las Vegas over an unpaid gambling debt.

  No, that wasn’t true, although she often told the story.

  He died in a hospital in Charlottesville of cirrhosis of the liver, which was no surprise to anyone, least of all his daughter.

  Most of the time, her patients accepted her words gratefully.

  Suddenly on a spring day when the dogwood trees in Central Park were just opening their blossoms, a soft white haze on their limbs, Howard Berman felt a deep pain in his chest and within seconds his lips had turned blue and he was gone. He left his wife enough funds to take care of herself and her near-grown son. At the funeral many prominent psychoanalysts wrote their names in the guest book. Some patients of Dr. Berman also appeared and sat in the back of the room. Was her heart breaking? It was hard to tell as she greeted mourners in her living room. She was composed as she had always been. She knew that death was never a surprise, only relatively sudden. It was always there, ignored or not, it was there. She had her ways of keeping together, allowing fear and grief just so much of its due and no more. She was strong, her friends said. Three days after the funeral she resumed her regular schedule and if she was in some kind of pain, makeup hid the traces.

  Nevertheless she was mourning. She paced the apartment. She ached in her bones. She came down with a strep infection and when the fever abated she tripped on a rug in her office and fell, spraining an ankle. She was angry too, bristling at the household help, scowling at the doorman, and cutting her friends off in mid-sentence. At night she curled herself into a fetal position and rocked back and forth in her bed. She knew the worst would pass but that was of no comfort as waves of anxiety, how could she continue, washed over her again and again.

  She went to a meeting of psychoanalysts, an editorial meeting of a major journal, and she said nothing at all. As the meeting broke up three other analysts, colleagues, asked her to join them in a taxi. They dropped her off at her corner and then watched as she walked in the wrong direction away from her door. One of the doctors jumped out of the cab and grabbed her elbow. This way, Dr. Berman, he said, and walked her through the lobby and right to the elevator that would take her to her apartment. There was talk. She didn’t hear it.

  In the middle of the night Dr. Berman woke up in her bed, felt about for Howard’s arms and legs and his back that was wide and warm with a large mole between the shoulder blades, and remembered that he was gone, and turned on the light. The thought that came to her was not pleasant. She wanted a daughter, a beautiful daughter, whom she would have loved and brought to adulthood. There would be no excess of self-love in her child because she would have been loved enough.

  Maybe, maybe not. Dr. Berman knew that like her Chicago colleague, she might have failed. Careful, she warned herself, do not love Justine as if she were yours. Love her only as your patient, which means warily, conditionally, alertly. Wounded birds have a way of dying and sometimes they spread disease.

  Lily the cat jumped on the bed, lightly as if a feather had blown onto the blanket.

  Justine came late to appointments. The doormen had recognized her and whispered to each other and called down to the superintendent when she came so he could wait in the lobby and catch a glimpse of her long legs when she left. Justine brought her new puppy to her session. It was a small black pug. A gift from an admirer. The pug sat calmly on Justine’s lap. Lily jumped down from the windowsill and arched her back and showed her claws and let out a sound between a scream and a choke. The pug opened its sleepy eyes and jumped down and immediately wet the carpet. Was that the point, to stain something that belonged to her doctor? Dr. Berman picked up Lily and tossed her into the hall. She would have liked to do the same to Justine. But she said instead, Tell me about the abortion, and Justine with more drama than necessary described it all. There was no surprise there for Dr. Berman.

  Justine didn’t show up for her next appointment or the one after that.

  Dr. Berman walked in the park and considered what mistake she might have made. How could she hold this movie star who always got what she wanted and never got what she wanted? What would have happened if she had let Lily scratch the eyes out of that pug?

  She called Justine, just to remind her of her next appointment. I’d like to see you, she said, even if that was not as professional as it ought to have been.

  Justine returned. The boyfriend left for Italy for a vacation with his new love. Justine did not want a new love. She wanted to sleep all day and watch television until the stations turned dark.

  One of her security staff took the puppy for his children who lived in Long Beach in a small house not far from the ocean.

  Justine did not need or want antidepressants. She had her own medicine cabinet and her ways of restocking it whenever necessary.

  Dr. Berman answered her phone when it rang loudly at two in the morning. It was Justine wanting to tell her some childhood memory, a sexual play with a neighbor boy. Justine wanted to have all of Dr. Berman, all her waking hours and her sleeping ones as well. Dr. Berman told Justine that she would see her at her appointment later in the week. Her voice was neutral, her tone warm enough, but the truth was Dr. Berman did not like being called in the middle of the night. If she had she might have been an obstetrician.

  Justine told Dr. Berman about her mother’s boyfriend who was supposedly painting her mother’s portrait but then it appeared as if he had more in mind than a nude descending a staircase. Justine had been brought to his studio one afternoon and the painter had put his fingers in her vagina when her mother was fixing tea in the kitchen down the hall.

  Justine’s mother did not believe her. Justine’s mother often said things to her father in a language that Justine couldn’t understand. Neither of course could her father but that didn’t appease Justine. Also, this mother insisted on sending Justine to a kibbutz where she had to clean out cow dung. Three summers lost, said Justine.

  I hate her, Justine said.

  We’ll see, said Dr. Berman.

  No, said Justine, I really hate her.

  Yes, said Dr. Berman.

  Do you think I’m beautiful? asked Justine one day.

  Do you think you’re beautiful? Dr. Berman returned the question.

  Everyone thinks I’m beautiful, said Justine.

  And you? asked Dr. Berman.

  Justine didn’t like the question and she didn’t answer it.

  Some months later Justine said something that pleased Dr. Berman, enough for a real smile.

  She said, I think you should call me Betty. I’d like that.

  Dr. Berman said, Betty is a good name.

  Justine had already tried to drown Justine in a river of vodka.

  Then one Thursday morning when the penguins in the zoo were diving into their pool, behind the glass wall that separated them from the visitors who admired the penguins because they endured their imprisonment in the stage set that had become their home without visible signs of misery, Justine, who walked through the park on her way to Dr. Berman’s office, followed by her security people, was jostled by a stranger who put his hands on her chest, before the guys could grab him and shove him and chase him away.

  I hate this city, she said to Dr. Berman.

  And she decided to go back to LA She had heard from her former boyfriend who was now over the stripper, who was actually an up-and-coming actress who was on location in India, and he had asked Justine to return to him. If she didn’t come right away, he might kill himself.