Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (56 page)

A grim silence followed. I was keenly aware of the absurdity of our accounting, nevertheless his despair crept into me, distorting the objective silliness of our research. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Aren’t we forgetting the nine months she was pregnant?”

Gene shook his head. “No,” he said, in more of a groan than speech. “We didn’t do it while she was pregnant.”

“Not once?”

“No. Not after we knew for sure.”

“Why?”

“She didn’t—I mean, she let me once, but … She hated it, so … I mean she was pregnant. I didn’t want to force her to have sex with me.”

“As opposed to now?”

Gene glanced at me; then away, mumbling, “What?”

“You force her to have sex now?”

“Practically.” He grunted.

“Do you really mean—force?”

“No, I don’t force her, of course not.” Extreme irritation. “I whine. I complain. Day after day I bring it up until it gets too embarrassing and she has to let me. It takes about two weeks.”

“She never initiates sex?”

To admit this was too shameful for words. He nodded slightly, shifted further from me, eyes drifting to the carpet.

“Have you ever stopped asking for sex and waited—”

Again he cut me off impatiently, as if I were slow-witted. “Yeah! I tried that. I stopped asking. Five weeks later, I started begging again.”

“What do you mean, begging?”

Dragging the ashamed, muddy river of their intimate relations to find the body of reality took five sessions. Typically, his summary was a distortion. He didn’t beg or whine; he nagged, throwing numbers at her. “It’s been a week, honey,” was the sweet nothing he whispered in her ear. Catching her undressing for bed, emerging from a bath, bent over the stove, Gene would hug her awkwardly, probably groping a little (although I couldn’t get him to admit that) and ask for sex regardless of the situation’s romantic deficiency or impracticality.

It was clear, even from Gene’s presumably prejudiced testimony, that Cathy felt her life consisted of dreary work done in isolation. True, she didn’t have a job, Pete was in school every day until three, Gene helped with the boy’s care, and the cleaning woman came twice a week to do the heavy work; but that left five days of making beds, scraping dried jam from the floor, gathering the endless toys Gene bought and Pete scattered; and the shopping, cooking, making play dates, picking up and dropping off, went on without a break. To add to her woes, she was a stranger to the neighborhood. The mothers of Pete’s new schoolmates had a six-year head start sharing the trials and hilarity of raising their kids. They were friendly to Cathy on the surface, not truly intimate. From her point of view—Gene himself saw this—his work gave him an absorbing task and instant comrades. She could fit in neither with the mothers who worked nor the mothers who stayed home: the first group had no time for her, and she felt condescended to; the second had their schedules and friendships formed long before she arrived.

In their family life she craved privacy. Gene’s arrival home was the signal for her to disappear. Rarely did they do things as a threesome. Gene played with Pete on the computer or in the yard. Cathy went off by herself—to read on the bed, or take a bath, or go shopping—anything to be away from what must have seemed like a prison to her.

Gene did not describe Cathy’s life in exactly these terms, yet he came close to them. He was far from being unsympathetic to her. The reverse was true: he felt guilty. What he did not see (and I was sure must be the case) was that when Cathy rejected him sexually, she was probably rejecting what he had come to represent in her life: a series of dreary, lonely and unsatisfying tasks that were reincarnated each day.

Why didn’t she work?

With the repetition typical of therapy (retracing old ground with firmer and firmer steps) three more months’ worth of sessions were required to push through the vines of Gene’s guilt and confusion, hurt and anger, until Cathy’s passive self-defeating attitude and behavior were clearly revealed. She had failed to graduate college because of the unplanned pregnancy. She had intended to go on to medical school. The options available to her—secretarial, finishing her education, clerking in a store—she thought demeaning or too difficult to accomplish, considering where they lived and Pete’s schedule. Besides, she didn’t know if she wanted to become a doctor anymore. She felt too old to start now and yet she wasn’t interested in anything else. Just as her lack of friends in their new location was a false complaint (Cathy had been the same depressed, passionless wife back in Massachusetts), so was the complaint of not having a vocation. She made no serious attempt to discover or pursue one. I knew what Gene believed she really felt. It was time to probe this wound.

“You don’t think she loves you?”

Gene nodded. He believed she blamed him for the unplanned pregnancy, blamed him for her choice not to abort, blamed him that her college fantasy of womanhood and marriage was a poor match with the reality. In short, her spoiled life was his fault.

During lulls, for six sessions in a row, I asked, “You don’t think Cathy loves you?”

“I don’t care if she loves me,” Gene said on my sixth try, and with that answer pushed us onto a new path.

“You don’t!” I was glad at this novelty. I exaggerated my shock.

“No.”

“Oh come on. You’re telling me you don’t care if your wife loves you?”

“No.”

“You’ve said many times that it hurts you.”

“I was lying.”

“You don’t care at all?”

“No,” Gene insisted, petulant and stubborn. Since I changed my method, he often chose to resist me in the style of an adolescent. I was pleased by his pugnacious attitude—we were moving out of childhood at last.

“Hard to believe, Gene.”

“I really don’t.”

I waited.

“You know why?” he continued after a silence. “Because I don’t believe people love each other for a lifetime. That’s just bullshit. Everybody knows it’s bullshit. That isn’t what scares me.”

“Okay. What scares you?”

“I don’t think she loves Pete.”

He wanted to turn back to the safe trampled ground. We needed another push—our last breakthrough was four months old. “Now that
is
bullshit,” I said.

Gene seemed delighted. He said nothing, and grinned at me.

“Gene, you’ve done a very good job of trying to convince me you’re the better parent, and that’s okay. It’s natural that parents compete about who’s better to the kids, but this is a low blow. Of course she loves Pete.”

Gene continued to grin. There was malice in it, too. I was thrilled. He was silent for a while, the smile twisting into a frown. When he responded at last, it was a blunt challenge: “How do you know?”

“How do I know?”

“You’ve never met Cathy or Pete.”

“That’s right. All I know is what you’ve told me.”

“You’re on her side,” Gene said. He looked right at me, pointing a finger. “You don’t believe a mother could not love her child. That’s your problem. That’s why you can’t help me. You think it’s always the father’s fault. Well, if it weren’t for me, Pete would be a very fucked-up kid. He’d have no friends, he’d be too shy to talk in class and his teachers wouldn’t know how smart he is.”

“Is Pete smart?” I asked, curious.

My question left him open-mouthed. He had his trunks on, fists up, feet dancing, jabbing me with lefts and rights while I was chatting at a tea party. “You know he’s smart.”

“I do? You’ve never said.”

“Of course I’ve told you he’s smart.”

“No you haven’t. I assume Pete is smart. But you’ve never mentioned it.” His hands were down. “Cathy’s a good mother,” I punched.

He stared at me, dazed.

“Or I should say, she’s a good enough mother. And you’re a good enough father.”

“Good enough?” Gene said. “What does that mean?” He was disappointed by the grade I had given him as a father.

“A good enough parent is a term a psychologist invented to deal with the fact that even though all parents make mistakes and expose children to their neurosis most of them do little real harm. To raise a healthy child, it isn’t necessary to be cheery and always loving or always consistent. You just have to be good enough. Both of you are good enough. And Pete is doing fine.”

“How do you know?” Gene demanded. “How do you know we’re not beating the shit out of him? How do you know what we really do?”

“Okay,” I said. “Either you’re good enough parents or you’re an exceptional liar. Not only inventive, but you have great endurance.”

Gene sulked. I waited. Gene turned away from me.

I said, “Why does it annoy you I think Cathy loves Pete?”

“It doesn’t. I just don’t agree. I live with her. I see her with Pete. You don’t.”

“Okay. If I’m so wrong, why does it annoy you?”

“Because you’re my doctor. You should be on my side. And you’re not. You think mothers are always right.”

[This may seem to be an extraordinary statement. If anything, I had erred on the side of defending Gene against his mother and wife. His complaint is really against his own rationalizations for Carol and Cathy; projecting them onto me permits him to fight them. Since I had abandoned transference, I wasn’t pleased.]

“That’s bullshit, Gene,” I said.

His eyes returned to me—to study the stranger I had become.

“I think Cathy is blaming you for the choices she made about her life. I think she’s being unfair and unloving to you and you know that’s what I think. But I’m not going to let you escape from confronting her about what really bothers you with a fantasy.”

“What fantasy?”

“You’re angry at her that she doesn’t love you and you’re too scared to say so, but it doesn’t scare you to say it using Pete as a stand-in for yourself. That’s not fair to your son. And it’s not fair to Cathy.”

“You’re saying it’s easier for me to say she’s a lousy mother than she’s …” he trailed off.

“An emasculating, guilt-inducing, passive wife,” I finished for him matter-of-factly.

For a moment, he was quiet. Then Gene laughed. Loud and thoroughly. He broke off to ask, almost coughing, “What did you say?”

“An emasculating, guilt-inducing, passive wife. She made choices. She decided to have Pete, marry you and drop out of college. She regrets them. But they were her choices. You didn’t bully her—”

Gene raised a hand to stop me. “I’m not innocent,” he said.

“Oh?”

“I—I mean, I immediately offered to marry her and I talked about how much I wanted a kid—”

I cut him off, shouting: “I’m sick and tired of you always being on the side of mothers! You never think it’s their fault. It’s always the father who’s the bad guy.”

Gene grinned. “Okay, okay.” He nodded. “I get it.”

“Let’s cut the crap, Gene. She wants to blame you. You don’t want to be blamed. Tell her to change her life. Have a little guts, will you? We’ve analyzed you to death. You know why you’re scared to confront her. Your mother and father never confronted each other about their problems and when they did their marriage ended bitterly.”

Gene concentrated on this observation, staring at it so deeply he fell in and lost himself. “Maybe if they had talked when they were young … Maybe they would have stayed—”

“No,” I interrupted.

“What?”

“Stop looking for guarantees. There aren’t any. If you drop your solicitous husband act and be yourself with Cathy, maybe she’ll leave you. I don’t know. You’re a coward, Gene. It’s as simple as that. Other people are just as scared, just as confused, just as vulnerable. You’re not more sensitive than anyone else. You’re a coward.”

“I’m not—” Gene shifted his eyes away from the windows to look in a direction he always avoided: the door. “I mean, there’s no—” He stopped.

“What!” I shouted.

“I’m not gonna take this.”

“Then don’t.”

He stared at me, opened his lips, shut them. He took a long breath through his nostrils and stood up. I worried he would lose his nerve. At last, in response to a mysterious inner cue, he turned on his heels and walked out.

Two days later, Diane and I appeared in Juvenile Court to plead that our temporary custody of Albert (which had been in effect for nearly six months since his release from the hospital) continue in place of his sentence for three years in juvenile prison for raping and sodomizing his niece. It was May 2, 1989. We were petitioning Judge Martina Torres, who had found him guilty a week earlier. The timing was right because the new wing to house him and others was finished. During his trial—which coincided with construction of the dorms—he and three other boys had been sleeping on cots in Room A; two counselors stayed in Room B to supervise and care for the boys on evenings and weekends.

Albert, no longer on any drug, stood between Diane and me in Judge Torres’s chambers. He was nervous, shifting back and forth on his feet, head moving side to side. When I gave him what I hoped was an encouraging look, I was startled by his eyes. They were full of feeling. Anger, helplessness, and despair swirled in a storm of pain too turbulent for encouragement to becalm. How could the judge look at those eyes and not pity him? But we didn’t rely solely on the law’s keen vision into Albert’s emotions. Instead, Albert had been dressed for respectability in a blue blazer, white shirt, chinos, loafers, and a cheerful yellow tie that Diane had picked out for him.

Her show of support was important since she had treated his victim, his niece. Shawna was now living with a Quaker couple in Pennsylvania who planned to adopt her. She had adjusted well to her new circumstances. The immediate symptoms of her suffering—she had been neglected by her mother and beaten by her mother’s boyfriend for years before Albert’s assault—were relieved. Her reading and writing had improved dramatically; she made friends easily, slept and ate well. Nine months ago, before Diane’s therapy, those basics were almost impossible for Shawna. Indeed, at the time, a social worker and a psychologist appointed by the court to evaluate Shawna had labeled her as “learning disabled” and “preschizophrenic.”

[The latter is a new vogue term. It’s gibberish. Everyone who is not schizophrenic is preschizophrenic. The psychologist brilliant enough to predict schizophrenia is yet to be born.]