Twisted: The Collected Stories (8 page)

“Please,” Harry said in a soft voice.

“It’s happened a couple of times now,” she began reluctantly. “Last night was the worst. I was lying in bed and I heard this voice. I couldn’t really hear it clearly at first. Then it said . . .” She hesitated. “It said it was my father’s ghost.”

Motifs in therapy didn’t get any better than this, and Harry paid close attention.

“You weren’t dreaming?”

“No, I was awake. I couldn’t sleep and I’d gotten up for a glass of water. Then I started walking around the apartment. Just pacing. I felt frantic. I lay back in bed. And the voice—I mean,
Pete’s
voice—said that it was my father’s ghost.”

“What did he say?”

“He just rambled on and on. Telling me about all kinds of things from my past. Incidents from when I was a girl. I’m not sure. It was hard to hear.”

“And these were things your husband knew?”

“Not all of them.” Her voice cracked. “But he could’ve found them out. Looking through my letters and my yearbooks.” Things like that.

“You’re sure he was the one talking?”

“The voice sounded sort of like Peter’s. Anyway, who else would it be?” She laughed, her voice nearly a cackle. “I mean, it could hardly be my father’s ghost, now, could it?”

“Maybe he was just talking in his sleep.”

She didn’t respond for a minute. “See, that’s the thing . . . He wasn’t in bed. He was in the den, playing some video game.”

Harry continued to take his notes.

“And you heard him from the den?”

“He must have been at the door . . . Oh, Doctor, it sounds ridiculous. I know it does. But I think he was kneeling at the door—it’s right next to the bedroom—and was whispering.”

“Did you go into the den? Ask him about it?”

“I walked to the door real fast but by the time I opened it he was back at the desk.” She looked at her hands and found she’d shredded the Kleenex. She glanced at Harry to see if he’d noticed the compulsive behavior, which of course he had, and then stuffed the tissue into the pocket of her expensive beige slacks.

“And then?”

“I asked him if he’d heard anything, any voices. And he looked at me like I was nuts and went back to his game.”

“And that night you didn’t hear any more voices?”

“No.”

Harry studied his patient. She’d been a pretty girl in her youth, he supposed, because she was a pretty woman now (therapists
always
saw the child within the adult). Her face was sleek and she had the slightly upturned nose of a Connecticut socialite who debates
long and hard about having rhinoplasty but never does. He recalled that Patsy’d told him her weight was never a problem: she’d hire a personal trainer whenever she gained five pounds. She’d said—with irritation masking secret pride—that men often tried to pick her up in bars and coffee shops.

He asked, “You say this’s happened before? Hearing the voice?”

Another hesitation. “Maybe two or three times. All within the past couple of weeks.”

“But why would Peter want to drive you crazy?”

Patsy, who’d come to Harry presenting with the classic symptoms of a routine midlife crisis, hadn’t discussed her husband much yet. Harry knew he was good-looking, a few years younger than Patsy, not particularly ambitious. They’d been married for three years—second marriages for both of them—and they didn’t seem to have many interests in common. But of course that was just Patsy’s version. The “facts” that are revealed in a therapist’s office can be very fishy. Harry Bernstein worked hard to become a human lie detector and his impression of the marriage was that there was much unspoken conflict between husband and wife.

Patsy considered his question. “I don’t know. I was talking to Sally. . . .” Harry remembered her mentioning Sally, her best friend. She was another Upper East Side matron—one of the ladies who lunch—and was married to the president of one of the biggest banks in New York. “She said that maybe Peter’s jealous of me. I mean, look at us—I’m the one with the social life, I have the friends, I have the money. . . .” He noticed a manic edge to her voice.
She did too and controlled it. “I just don’t know why he’s doing it. But he is.”

“Have you talked to him about this?”

“I tried. But naturally he denies everything.” She shook her head and tears swelled in her eyes again. “And then . . . the birds.”

“Birds?”

Another Kleenex was snagged, used and shredded. She didn’t hide the evidence this time. “I have this collection of ceramic birds. Made by Boehm. Do you know about the company?”

“No.”

“They’re very expensive. They’re German. Beautifully made. They were my parents’. When our father died Steve and I split the inheritance but he got most of the personal family heirlooms. That really hurt me. But I did get the birds.”

Harry knew that her mother had died ten years ago and her father about three years ago. The man had been very stern and had favored Patsy’s older brother, Stephen. He had been patronizing to her all her life.

“I have four of them. There used to be five but when I was twelve I broke one. I ran inside—I was very excited about something and I wanted to tell my father about it—and I bumped into the table and knocked one off. The sparrow. It broke. My father spanked me with a willow switch and sent me to bed without dinner.”

Ah, an Important Event. Harry made a note but decided not to pursue the incident any further at that moment.

“And?”

“The morning after I heard my father’s ghost for the first time . . .” Her voice grew harsh. “I mean, the morning after
Peter
started whispering to me . . . I found one of the birds broken. It was lying on the living room floor. I asked Peter why he’d done it—he knows how important they were to me—and he denied it. He said I must have been sleepwalking and did it myself. But I know I didn’t. Peter had to’ve been the one.” She’d slipped into her raw, irrational voice again.

Harry glanced at the clock. He hated the legacy of the psychoanalyst: the perfectly timed fifty-minute hour. There was so much more he wanted to delve into. But patients need consistency and, according to the old school, discipline. He said, “I’m sorry but I see our time’s up.”

Dutifully Patsy rose. Harry observed how disheveled she looked. Yes, her makeup had been carefully applied but the buttons on her blouse weren’t done properly. Either she’d dressed in a hurry or hadn’t paid attention. And one of the straps on her expensive, tan shoes wasn’t hooked.

She rose. “Thank you, Doctor . . . It’s good just to be able to tell someone about this.”

“We’ll get everything worked out. I’ll see you next week.”

After Patsy had left the office Harry Bernstein sat down at his desk. He spun slowly in his chair, gazing at his books—the
DSM-IV, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,
the APA
Handbook of Neuroses,
volumes by Freud, Adler, Jung, Karen Horney, hundreds of others. Then looking out the window again, watching the late-afternoon sunlight fall on
the cars and taxis speeding north on Park Avenue.

A bird flew past.

He thought about the shattered ceramic sparrow from Patsy’s childhood.

And Harry thought: What a significant session this has been.

Not only for his patient. But for him too.

Patsy Randolph—who had until today been just another mildly discontented middle-aged patient—represented a watershed event for Dr. Harold David Bernstein. He was in a position to change her life completely.

And in doing so maybe he could redeem his own.

Harry laughed out loud, spun again in the chair, like a child on a playground. Once, twice, three times.

A figure appeared in the doorway. “Doctor?” Miriam, his secretary, cocked her head, which was covered with fussy white hair. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Why’re you asking?”

“Well, it’s just . . . I don’t think I’ve heard you laugh for a long time. I don’t think I’ve
ever
heard you laugh in your office.”

Which was another reason to laugh. And he did.

She frowned, concern in her eyes.

Harry stopped smiling. He looked at her gravely. “Listen, I want you to take the rest of the day off.”

She looked mystified. “But . . . it’s quitting time, Doctor.”

“Joke,” he explained. “It was a joke. See you tomorrow.”

Miriam eyed him cautiously, unable, it seemed, to shake the quizzical expression from her face. “You’re sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine. Good night.”

“ ’Night, Doctor.”

A moment later he heard the front door to the office click shut.

He spun around in his chair once more, reflecting: Patsy Randolph . . . I can save you and you can save me.

And Dr. Harry Bernstein was a man badly in need of saving.

Because he hated what he did for a living.

Not the business of helping patients with their mental and emotional problems—oh, he was a natural-born therapist. None better. What he hated was practicing Upper East Side psychiatry. It had been the last thing he’d ever wanted to do. But in his second year of Columbia Medical School the tall, handsome student met the tall, beautiful assistant development director of the Museum of Modern Art. Harry and Linda were married before he started his internship. He moved out of his fifth-floor walk-up near Harlem and into her town house on East Eighty-first. Within weeks she’d begun changing his life. Linda was a woman who had high aspirations for her man (very similar to Patsy, in whose offhand comment several weeks ago about her husband’s lack of ambition Harry had seen reams of anger). Linda wanted money, she wanted to be on the regulars list for benefits at the Met, she wanted to be pampered at four-star restaurants in Eze and Monaco and Paris.

A studious, easygoing man from a modest suburb of New York, Harry knew that by listening to Linda he was headed in the wrong direction. But he was in love with her so he continued to listen. They bought a
co-op in a high-rise on Madison Avenue and he hung up his shingle (well, a heavy, brass plaque) outside this three-thousand-dollar-a-month office on Park and Seventy-eighth.

At first Harry had worried about the astronomical bills they were amassing. But soon the money was flowing in. He had no trouble getting business; there’s no lack of neuroses among the rich, and the insured, on the isle of Manhattan. He was also very good at what he did. His patients came and they liked him and so they returned weekly.

“Nobody understands me sure we’ve got money but money isn’t everything and the other day my housekeeper looks at me like I’m from outer space and it’s not my fault and I get so angry when my mother wants to go shopping on my one day off and I think Samuel’s seeing someone and I think my son’s gay and I just cannot lose these fifteen pounds . . .”

Their troubles may have been plebeian, even laughably minor at times, but his oath, as well as his character, wouldn’t let Harry minimize them. He worked hard to help his patients.

And all the while he neglected what he really wanted to do. Which was to treat severe mental cases. People who were paranoid schizophrenics, people with bipolar depression and borderline personalities—people who led sorrowful lives and couldn’t hide from that sorrow with the money that Harry’s patients had.

From time to time he had volunteered at various clinics—particularly a small one in Brooklyn that treated homeless men and women—but with his Park Avenue caseload and his wife’s regimen of social
obligations, there had been no way he could devote much time to the clinic. He’d wrestled with the thought of just chucking his Park Avenue practice. Of course, if he’d done that, his income would have dropped by ninety percent. He and Linda had had two children a couple of years after they’d gotten married—two sweet daughters Harry loved very much—and their needs, very
expensive
needs, private school sorts of needs, had taken priority over his personal contentment. Besides, as idealistic as he was in many ways, Harry had known that Linda would leave him in a flash if he’d started working full-time in Brooklyn.

But the irony was that even after Linda
did
leave him—for someone she’d met at one of the society benefits that Harry couldn’t bear to attend—he hadn’t been able to spend any more time at the clinic than he had when he’d been married. The debts Linda had run up while they were married were excruciating. His older daughter was in an expensive college and his younger was on her way to Vassar next year.

Yet, out of the dozens of patients who whined about minor dissatisfactions, here came Patsy Randolph, a truly desperate patient: a woman telling him about ghosts, about her husband trying to drive her insane, a woman clearly on the brink.

A patient, at last, who would give Harry a chance to redeem his life.

That night he didn’t bother with dinner. He came home and went straight into his den, where sat stacked in high piles a year’s worth of the professional journals that he’d never bothered to read since they dealt with serious psychiatric issues and didn’t
much affect the patients in his practice. He kicked his shoes off and began sifting through them, taking notes. He found Internet sites devoted to psychotic behavior and he spent hours online, downloading articles that could help him with Patsy’s situation.

Harry was rereading an obscure article in the
Journal of Psychoses,
which he’d been thrilled to find—it was the key to dealing with her case—when he sat up, hearing a shrill whistle. He’d been so preoccupied . . . had he forgotten he’d put on the tea kettle for coffee? But then he glanced out the window and realized that it wasn’t the kettle at all. The sound was from a bird sitting on a branch nearby, singing. The hour was well past dawn.