Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (99 page)

Halley said, “You want some coffee?” I nodded. She waved to a man at a small refreshment stand that had been closed when we arrived. There were four people at the pool, one in the water, two talking, another reading the
Times.
The attendant started toward us. Halley called, “A pot of coffee,” and he wheeled back to his bar.

“Thanks,” I said and rubbed my face.

“Why didn’t you tell me you don’t know how to swim?” Halley asked.

That was it. That was the surface message of the dream. The bathing suit and my mother’s warning. I had told Stick an idiotic lie that I couldn’t swim and I almost gave it away unintentionally. I was too groggy to think it through. Should I reveal I had lied? Would that be fruitful? And did I hear right? Was he changing to swim? That wasn’t good. I didn’t care for him to resume his daily ritual of triumph over his father on the eve of the encounter session.

“Can’t you admit it when you don’t know how to do something?” Halley fanned herself with the paperback. She had put on dark sunglasses. It hurt my sleepy eyes to look at her. She glowed in a rectangle of the late afternoon sun while I was in a shadow thrown by a wing of the stone hotel. In fact, I felt chilled because the air was dry and cool, hinting at the coming autumn.

I wanted to say (I should say, my id wanted me to say)—I know how to swim, you stupid bitch. I can do everything better than your asshole father. A slice of me was rotting—infected by them. That was why I had summoned an image of myself as my mother in the dream. The dream was a warning that my ego was disintegrating in the countertransference; I was, to put it in laymen’s terms, losing my objectivity. My reaction to Halley’s taunt was that of a lover: emotionally invested in the competition with her father, rather than merely using it for the therapy.

Halley put her book on the glass table and picked up the iced tea. “I can teach you how to swim,” she said. She sipped.

“Who taught you?” I asked in a croaky voice. The pool attendant was coming with a tray. Thank goodness. I needed coffee. “I learned at summer camp,” she said. “You’re lucky Stick didn’t teach you,” I said and laughed. “Why?” she asked. The coffee was there so I ignored her. I drank two cups in a row. She watched me through the black lenses. Black eyes through black glass, I thought, and decided it was time to begin, time to push for a breakthrough before I had nothing left for leverage. “Really,” she said, at last, her voice soft and loving. “I’d really like to teach you. At least let me give you that. We could do it right here. The pool doesn’t get any deeper than four feet.”

I cleared my throat. Behind her, in the distance, I saw Stick appear from the stone building, a towel draped over one shoulder, wearing a navy blue bathing suit the length of bermuda shorts, his feet in hippie leather sandals. “I told Edgar the other day …” I cleared my throat again. “Excuse me. I told Edgar that if Centaur is a success it’s to your credit on the marketing side and Andy Chen’s on the creative. I also told him you’re more qualified to run Minotaur than Stick. He was intrigued. So maybe it isn’t such a bad idea for you to socialize with him.”

Halley was in the middle of raising her glass to lips. She missed a little when I said she was more qualified than her father to run Minotaur. She tried to center the glass as she tipped it to her mouth. That didn’t work. Some tea dribbled down a corner and off her chin. She caught that with her hand, leaned forward with a jerk, and more tea sloshed out onto her towel. “You’re kidding,” she started.

I nodded toward Stick. “He’s coming. And I’m not kidding. You could easily become Edgar’s mistress. You’d dazzle him—with your cleverness, your energy, and yes, with your body and expert lovemaking—he’d give you anything you want. I told you, Halley. I love you. I’m going to make sure you don’t sell yourself short.”

“Hey, Rafe,” Stick called as he reached the border of the pool’s tiles. “How are the courts here?”

“Hard surface. Pretty fast, I think.”

He reached us. Halley was still, her black eyeglasses fixed on me. He draped a towel on the chair next to his daughter. “Maybe we’ll hit before dinner.”

I rubbed the underside of my right thigh. Earlier in the week I had strained the hamstring going for a volley. “You know this still feels tender. Maybe I’d better rest it.”

“You should do some laps,” he said. “That’ll help it recuperate.” Now he had surprised Halley. She jerked her head at him. “But, Daddy, you said …” she started and then stopped. He ignored her. So did I.

“I can’t swim, Stick, remember?” Since I was going on the attack, I decided to maintain the lie. Restoring a feeling of superiority might relax his vigilance.

“Oh, that’s right,” he said, pretending to recall. “But you’re so coordinated, such a good athlete. Come in. I’ll teach you the crawl. I’m sure you’ll get it in a few minutes.”

“No thanks. I think I’ll go up to the room. We’ll play tennis on Sunday.” I stood up.

“Really, Rafe,” Stick stepped in front of me. His hands were on his hips. He breathed in sharply, inflating his impressive pecs. “A grown man should know how to swim.”

“But Stick,” I put a hand on his bare shoulder. He tried not to show tension at my touch. I scanned down, openly studying his puffed-up chest. I said quietly, “God, you’re in great shape.” I hurried on, raising my eyes to his, and squeezed his shoulder, “I thought you understood—I’m not a grown man. I’m just a very self-confident ten-year-old.”

I left them together. Whether or not Halley told him my lie that I had recommended her to Edgar as a future manager of Minotaur, the crisis would come soon. Either she would completely accept me as her new father figure—to the extent of choosing her next lover and marking Stick as someone we were going to
get
out of the way—or she would inform Stick that I was really the deadly foe he feared and he would be forced to act.

I didn’t go to my room. I took the elevator to the second floor and stood by a hallway window with a view of the pool. When I reached my observation post, Stick still hadn’t gone into the water. He stood beside a seated Halley, not looking at her. She peered across him toward the refreshment stand. But they were talking. That is, Stick was doing most of the talking. Halley occasionally answered briefly.

“Don’t tell him,” I whispered, and it’s still an open question for me whether this was the doctor or Rafe talking. “Make the leap, my beautiful little girl. It’s time to leave home.”

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN
Breakthrough

I
WROTE WORDS ON A BLACKBOARD WHILE THEY POURED COFFEE
(
THERE
was herbal tea for Stick) and grumbled about the fact that I had removed all the chairs from the cabin. Outside, at eight-thirty it was still cool, although the sun shimmered on Green Mountain pond and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Jack had his eyes on the east end, the fishing and camping side.

Earlier, during our seven-thirty A.M. phone session, Halley told me, “Well, you win, you bastard. Last night, I gave Jack every opportunity to invite me to his bed. You’ve put him back into the big bosom of his ‘adorable little family,’” she finished with a poor imitation of Amy Truman’s Southern accent.

“He’s small fish,” I said. “You’re going for the Great White Shark—Edgar and the company he’ll give you to run.”

“You’re crazy.”

“No. Remember, I’m the doctor.”

“I don’t use sex to get ahead.”

“That’s true,” I said. It was true. Her love affairs weren’t practical; at least, not to her. “But it isn’t sex I’m talking about. That’s merely the way Edgar will get to know you. Maybe he won’t even bother to go to bed with you.”

“I still say you’re crazy,” she said. “No one can run Minotaur better than my father.”

I couldn’t tell, frankly, if that meant she had betrayed my lie to her father. My guess was no, since she pretended, in order to hear more encouragement, to believe my proposal wouldn’t work.

On the blackboard, I wrote the words: NERD. THE GLASSHOLES. GEEK HEAVEN. PRINCE OF DARKNESS. SOFTHEAD. BEER BRAINS. LEECH. By now, the mumbling and giggling about how to get comfortable on the cabin floor stopped. When I turned to face them, I had their full attention. “You’ve all heard the cliché that life is really just high school. Well, for a lot of people life often
is
high school, but it isn’t meant to be. Adults are supposed to understand that differences in taste, appearance, behavior and abilities are the natural order. Adults are supposed to have learned, in high school, that when human beings are successful, they used these differences to their advantage. Teenagers have a good excuse for dividing into cliques and making up mean nicknames for the cliques they don’t belong to. Adolescents are discovering who they are. Their hold on identity is tenuous. To know who they are, often first they have to know who they are not. But a mature person, to put it in business terms—a winner—is someone who has confidence in his or her identity and who isn’t afraid of differences. I’m not talking about racism or religious tolerance or other sorts of general tribal identity. I’m talking about confidence within the tribe. You have formed a unit to forage for food and shelter and, for better or worse, the personnel of Minotaur are your only resource. The words up here are a sample of the high school nicknames used secretly within your tribe. Their existence proves you are not a mature group. They prove you are losers.”

Tim Gallent, whose long stringy blond hair was washed and combed for the first time since I had met him, laughed. A nervous whinny, actually, that continued to escalate in both pitch and volume. His eyes were wide and they moved desperately back and forth from Andy to me. Andy was seated on the floor beside him. They made quite a contrast: Andy’s bowl of black hair and pale face; Tim’s mane of blond hair and florid skin; Andy’s long skinny legs folded neatly under him; Tim’s wide thighs pushing his stumpy legs away from a big belly. Andy mumbled something to Tim, who immediately covered his mouth with his hand. Muffled giggles continued, though subsiding. As for the others, most of them watched me like penitent children. The exceptions were: Jack, whose green eyes regarded me with interest and no alarm; Halley, head tilted, smirking at me as if we were sharing a joke; and Stick, who sipped his herbal tea without any affect—he might have been watching a dull television show.

“If people want to laugh, or yell, or throw up, pee on the floor, that’s okay,” I said. “I’m not a member of your tribe. You don’t owe me loyalty or respect. Go ahead and laugh, Tim.”

He removed the hand from his mouth and lowered his head. “Sorry.”

“What for? I know that the chief of your tribe is here and that he can cast you out into the wilderness. You know that he has asked me to lead you in these sessions. So you might think in dealing with me you are dealing with him. But that’s not true. I have an understanding with the Prince of Darkness. Isn’t that right?” I asked Stick.

He had put himself at the rear. Tim covered his mouth again. Martha Klein and Jonathan Stivik turned to look at their boss. Halley lifted her eyes to the ceiling, her smirk broadening to a smile. The rest stared ahead, but too stiffly, obviously wanting to look.

Stick put his mug of tea on the floor and cleared his throat. “I guess you’re talking to me, Rafe. That’s good. I’ve always wanted to be a prince.”

There was polite laughter. I continued, “The Prince of Darkness knows I’m going to make you all say things that are taboo in the normal rules of the tribe. If he doesn’t like the result—well, let me ask you, Prince, who will you blame?”

“I’m going to blame you, Witch Doctor,” Stick answered and this time there was loud, genuine laughter.

I smiled. “Very good.” I turned and wrote WITCH DOCTOR on the blackboard while I continued, “This morning we’re all going to use our high school names. But first,” I faced them again, “since these names aren’t of your own choosing, the Witch Doctor will tell you who you are.” I pointed at Jack. “Stand up, Glasshole.”

Timmy laughed again, this time normally.

Jack stood up. He was on the other side of the room and a little behind so he had to step forward and turn to catch Tim’s eye. He asked, “Are you enjoying yourself in Geek Heaven?”

Andy bent over, laughed and smacked the floor. “Geek Heaven,” he repeated. “It’s us!” he said and laughed.

I had them get up one by one and accept a pejorative. A couple of alternates were cheerfully suggested that I agreed to, but I resisted outright invention, insisting on those they had actually used before, with one exception. Stick and Halley were the last two on the floor. “Get up, Prince of Darkness,” I told Copley. That left Halley alone and unnamed. Her smirk was long gone. She looked small, young, and surrounded.

“Well,” I asked the group, “what do we call her?”

It became obvious that she didn’t have a nickname they all used. That didn’t surprise me, since she presented a different persona to each one. “Glassholette,” Tim offered and laughed, but the others didn’t join him or clap to show approval.

I peered at her. “I don’t think so.” I scanned the group. Jack seemed to want to talk. “Yes?”

“Queen of Darkness,” he said solemnly, green eyes on me alone. He swallowed afterwards. I knew that he had been brave and I winked at him.

“Is that how the tribe thinks of Halley?” I asked. I noted that, although this ordeal would bring most people to the verge of tears, Halley’s black eyes were calm, eerily abstracted, and her body, in a half-lotus, remained still and at ease. A defense certainly, but to call Halley’s emotional shield a “defense” is to forget that the armor of a tank is there to protect its gun, not the passenger. She wasn’t wounded. I didn’t imagine for a moment she could be by this group. I looked at Martha, who had shown little apprehension about the game. “What do you call her, Leech?”

Martha was a big-boned fleshy woman, overweight by modern standards, although realistically she couldn’t keep her broad shoulders and wide hips free of fat unless she were to starve. She also had the misfortune of a pug nose, too small for the scale of her broad forehead and wide mouth. “Miss Halley.”