left her to the cooking and took a shower.
There was, of course, another possibility, that the laughing man she was fleeing from was not
her
brother, but
my
brother; and that the guilt stemmed from her failure to flee fast enough.
When I returned to the kitchen she came and put her arms around me.
“You will help me, won’t you, Charlie?”
Chapter Nine
Y
ou will help me, won’t you, Charlie?
I had no appointments the next morning but I was in my office by nine. The night of the dinner party at Walt’s apartment, I’d heard it then, the almost imperceptible cry for help. I heard it but I paid no attention to it, and why? Desire. Desire accompanied by the almost imperceptible answering cry from somewhere in my own psyche: yes, my darling, I will help you. It is the narcissism of the psychiatrist, or of this psychiatrist, at least, to play the indispensable figure of succor and healing. This is how I appeared to my patients. But it seemed I’d made that same implicit promise to my lover. I had made the promise and she had heard me and now she was telling me it was time.
It was nothing if not oblique. We did the daily traffic, talking about ourselves, our work, other people, food, money and such, and at the same time another conversation was beginning to go forward, on my side renewed sexual suspicion, on hers the discourse of her needs, which she spoke in a strange, hushed, foreign tongue addressed not to me but to a primal absent other with whom her arrangements had been made in early childhood, or so I presumed, probably her father. What was I to do?
Nothing. I wasn’t her doctor. I’d refer her to someone.
There are good reasons why a doctor must not attempt to treat members of his own family and other intimates, as I had learned at great personal cost. It must not happen again. I had no desire to exhume Nora Chiara’s childhood. I had no curiosity, no interest in it at all. When I was working at the psych unit and first became familiar with the posttraumatic disorders, I encountered many horrifying nightmares. I came to recognize them as the expression of memories the mind couldn’t process and therefore repressed. With someone laughing in her ears Nora had run from a destructive force she called the opposite of wind, then woke up and for several seconds remained trapped in the emotional climate of the dream. She was left sobbing and shuddering, and clung to me like a child. I didn’t take this lightly. I was apprehensive the following night, and for several nights after, as to whether there would be a recurrence.
Then came shattering news. For some weeks I’d been worried about Joe Stein. I was aware that there was trouble at home. He was a disturbed man, and to live with him would have been difficult for any woman. I had met his wife once, soon after the beginning of his therapy, and found her to be a competent, mature individual, quite strong enough in my opinion to help steer this tortured man through his crisis. But it seems there came a day when she decided she’d had enough. He had worn her out and used up what to me had looked like a store of goodwill more than adequate to see them through. What had he done to her? Whatever the immediate cause, Stein found himself deserted in his predicament, and rather than go home to an empty house in the suburbs had spent the night drinking whiskey in his office in the financial district.
In the early morning he had climbed out onto the ledge outside his window. High above the street, between the canyon walls of silent office buildings, he had stood flattened against the stone with the wind picking at his clothes and the sun rising over the eastern shores of Long Island, just starting to touch the masonry of the old downtown skyscrapers. I don’t know how long he stood on the ledge. He was six stories up. Then he jumped. The fall would surely have killed him had he not landed on the canopy of a sandwich shop on the ground floor, which broke the fall
There was, of course, another possibility, that the laughing man she was fleeing from was not
her
brother, but
my
brother; and that the guilt stemmed from her failure to flee fast enough.
When I returned to the kitchen she came and put her arms around me.
“You will help me, won’t you, Charlie?”
Chapter Nine
Y
ou will help me, won’t you, Charlie?
I had no appointments the next morning but I was in my office by nine. The night of the dinner party at Walt’s apartment, I’d heard it then, the almost imperceptible cry for help. I heard it but I paid no attention to it, and why? Desire. Desire accompanied by the almost imperceptible answering cry from somewhere in my own psyche: yes, my darling, I will help you. It is the narcissism of the psychiatrist, or of this psychiatrist, at least, to play the indispensable figure of succor and healing. This is how I appeared to my patients. But it seemed I’d made that same implicit promise to my lover. I had made the promise and she had heard me and now she was telling me it was time.
It was nothing if not oblique. We did the daily traffic, talking about ourselves, our work, other people, food, money and such, and at the same time another conversation was beginning to go forward, on my side renewed sexual suspicion, on hers the discourse of her needs, which she spoke in a strange, hushed, foreign tongue addressed not to me but to a primal absent other with whom her arrangements had been made in early childhood, or so I presumed, probably her father. What was I to do?
Nothing. I wasn’t her doctor. I’d refer her to someone.
There are good reasons why a doctor must not attempt to treat members of his own family and other intimates, as I had learned at great personal cost. It must not happen again. I had no desire to exhume Nora Chiara’s childhood. I had no curiosity, no interest in it at all. When I was working at the psych unit and first became familiar with the posttraumatic disorders, I encountered many horrifying nightmares. I came to recognize them as the expression of memories the mind couldn’t process and therefore repressed. With someone laughing in her ears Nora had run from a destructive force she called the opposite of wind, then woke up and for several seconds remained trapped in the emotional climate of the dream. She was left sobbing and shuddering, and clung to me like a child. I didn’t take this lightly. I was apprehensive the following night, and for several nights after, as to whether there would be a recurrence.
Then came shattering news. For some weeks I’d been worried about Joe Stein. I was aware that there was trouble at home. He was a disturbed man, and to live with him would have been difficult for any woman. I had met his wife once, soon after the beginning of his therapy, and found her to be a competent, mature individual, quite strong enough in my opinion to help steer this tortured man through his crisis. But it seems there came a day when she decided she’d had enough. He had worn her out and used up what to me had looked like a store of goodwill more than adequate to see them through. What had he done to her? Whatever the immediate cause, Stein found himself deserted in his predicament, and rather than go home to an empty house in the suburbs had spent the night drinking whiskey in his office in the financial district.
In the early morning he had climbed out onto the ledge outside his window. High above the street, between the canyon walls of silent office buildings, he had stood flattened against the stone with the wind picking at his clothes and the sun rising over the eastern shores of Long Island, just starting to touch the masonry of the old downtown skyscrapers. I don’t know how long he stood on the ledge. He was six stories up. Then he jumped. The fall would surely have killed him had he not landed on the canopy of a sandwich shop on the ground floor, which broke the fall
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