The Poser (20 page)

“‘An oedipal pantomime' is what he called it. Part of his New Method. But I began to actually choke him.”

“And what happened?”

“I stopped myself, of course. When I did, he began coughing and rubbing his neck, and I was terrified I'd actually hurt him. ‘Good job,' he said when he'd caught his breath. ‘Excellent!'”

 • • • 

It happened with the doctor's embrace that first session. Like an athlete returned from a long injury, I rediscovered the genius of my limbs, and in the weeks that followed I became, both in and outside of his office—on the benches of the lawn and in my room alone—a second, better Orphels.

An impersonation hadn't fixed me this way since Bernard. I quit my need for cigarettes. Memory of the gun no longer weighed on my hip. When I thought of Fantasma Falls, I felt, if anything, empathy for the people in it—for Nathan, all the Julie Darks, even for Bernard. Toward my fellow patients and the conscientious nurses, for the very birds and bees I brimmed with this same empathy: empathy, which is the surest sign of remove. I was so improved, in fact, it didn't rattle me in the least when word began to spread, and patients began to recognize, through the veil of my beard, the face of Harry Knott.
How did I end up here?
I was asked by a stooped patient with sunken eyes. In Orphels's voice, I told the truth: “I almost killed a man.”

Above all I listened greedily. The doctor, I discovered, had fashioned himself into a kind of key, a key of person, unlocking the men and women of the world. On the cushioned perch of a bay window, at tables in the mess hall, I began to conduct impromptu sessions. Underneath an oak tree. In a back carrel of the library, strangers confessed to me. It had to do with my eyes, my smile. A man who couldn't stop chewing his nails told me about the niece he had, in the depths of addiction, prostituted. A curly-haired patient with abstracted blue eyes admitted that he may have killed a man—caught a bum mugging a woman, struck him with a lead pipe, right there on the street, then ran away.

Ideas were striking. A new act. I'd call Max after my release, imminent, I knew, given my rapid convalescence. We'd resurrect our old stage show, with a twist: I would now be Doctor Giovanni Bernini (Max could make up some bunk about a European medical degree). Each volunteer would come onstage and lie on a chaise, and I, Doctor Giovanni Bernini, regal in my chair, would tease out each one's story until the audience—all of us together—had experienced that lurid, healing joy: the airing of another's secrets. “An Experimental Evening with Doctor Giovanni Bernini,” we'd call it, or “You, with Doctor Bernini.” The first volunteer might be hard to come by, but after that, who wouldn't want their story confirmed before an attentive audience? It was what all of it had been pushing toward: the
insides
of another person.

Of course, the interior
I was most attentive to in those weeks was that of Doctor Orphels. That he hadn't yet noticed my stolen speech or upright posture I considered a miracle. I was terrified he'd picked up on it that day he accused me of projection, but there had been no mention of it since. Every day he revealed his innermost experience without the slightest hesitation. No pausing or stuttering, no pocket-digging or side-glancing. The good doctor looked me right in the eyes and confessed, divulging his life story in a voice as airy as his office. There were no walls inside the man. Every question I asked he answered, and in this thoroughgoing manner, like a homeowner showing a burglar around his house, Doctor Orphels opened all the drawers of a forty-year life, handed me his secrets. Like a man confessing directly to a spy.

“All my life it had been my father's plan for me to enroll at City University for premedical studies,” the doctor began one afternoon. “And when the time came, I did explicitly that. My parents paid for a studio apartment in midtown with the expectation that I would commit myself to class work. A sensible enough plan, except I was completely unable to focus. Let me say, I have an outspoken unconscious mind. I am thankful for it. For some it's all but disabled: a person might be speeding toward a doomed marriage, an entrapping career, but their unconscious—whether through dreams or sickness or any of its usual emissaries—will keep mum. Mine, however, is, well—let's say, forthright. So it was at school. It—my unconscious, I mean—wouldn't let me focus. For the first time in my life I suffered anxiety attacks, couldn't sleep at all. Soon I stopped attending class altogether. It wasn't so much a decision as a pattern that developed. I didn't tell my parents, of course. On the nights I came home for dinner, I told them school was splendid, though I hadn't been in weeks.”

“How did
you occupy yourself?” I asked.

“Worrying, as you may know, is a wonderful hobby. It occupied me quite a bit until I discovered something even better. City University is situated in midtown, near the Handelmen Towers, an area flooded with bankers and stock traders. It wasn't long before I befriended some of these people at lunch counters, neighborhood bars. Understand, the world of finance had never interested me. Jews, they say, are divided into two strains: the mercantile and the Talmudic, and I fell comfortably into this latter category. Money was important, certainly, but only as a means to a greater pursuit: of medicine, for instance, the mind, God. These brokers and bankers were the first men I'd met who had devoted their lives to money as an
end unto itself
. Every day they herded into the revolving doors of those midtown skyscrapers, those temples to money—disappeared for ten hours—then came pouring out, each with their slight variation on the same uniform: the fedoras, Italian suits, Swiss watches. Like vestments. The first ones I met were soft-spoken, especially when money itself came up. Real dollar amounts. They had nicknames and code words for it, as if saying the name would be blasphemous. I don't mean this sarcastically: Money for them was a religious object. I started in the mailroom.”

“All while telling your parents you were enrolled at school?”

“Yes. As it happened, I found I had a talent for the financial life, the sangfroid for it—that might be the word. In four years, I became a full-fledged trader of stocks. In seven, I had bought a large penthouse apartment uptown.”

“Seduced by the high life?”

“Not at all. I've never succeeded in becoming a materialist. I know very well the limits of such consolation. Some of my colleagues may have believed they worked to furnish a certain lifestyle—a word I have never found much use for—to buy their wives diamonds, for instance, or to take lavish trips to Rome, but it's not true. You know what money gives us? Why people worship it?” He smiled. “It's a freedom from reasons. Money is the most efficient way to rid your life of reasons. No one ever questions
why
you want money. Doing something for the money can never be the
wrong reason
to do it. I wanted to eradicate the whole chorus of reason from my life, that life of my father. In this effort, money was a perfect aid.”

“Your parents found out, I assume.”

“They did, yes. I don't remember exactly when or how. My father, of course, was horrified. For months he wouldn't talk to me. Neither he nor my mother. By abandoning medicine, I'd betrayed them. By choosing the world of finance, doubly so. Keep in mind, he was a European intellectual. All of this was foreign to them, and yet my father's disapproval, which once might have paralyzed me, had no effect now. ‘What is it you
do
all day?' he would say. ‘What does all this matter? It
means
nothing.' But when he asked me this, I was wearing my finest Italian suit, driving them around in a chauffeured car, so his questions were barely audible, if you know what I mean. You could barely hear them over the shine of my cuff links, my watch. I distinctly remember my father getting smaller.”

“Money talks?”

“I think of it this way: My wealth was my moat. I felt it especially with my colleagues, men I had worked with ten hours a day for eight years. I knew their wives, their children, their mistresses, yet we didn't know each other at all. We were all separated by our moats—our suits, our drivers. That's how we wanted it. We were made wonderfully apart, by money.”

“I don't quite understand. What happened? How was it you ended up here, as a doctor?”

“My father dropped dead of a heart attack.”

“I'm sorry.”

“So people say when a stranger dies.”

“How did you take it?”

“At the time I took it surprisingly well. I escaped into my work.”

“Hadn't you already?”

“Such is the nature of escape: Since one can never truly accomplish it, one goes to further and further lengths trying to. Many nights I slept in the office. I traded day and night. My coworkers were perplexed, I think, and couched their perplexity, as many do, in jokes and nicknames. I was known as a ‘horse'—what we admiringly called our hard workers—but never before had I, or anyone at the office, steamed ahead with this kind of urgency: pacing the office day and night, yelling (something I never used to do) at subordinates who bungled my orders. And yet it worked. Watching money accrue in my bank account, watching certain stock prices rally still brought me a near-religious peace, and I thanked God that it could still be so, that money could be my medicine. Once a week I visited my mother, an occasion I very much dreaded, so I dressed in my finest camel-hair coat and treated her to very expensive meals. I gave her gifts: a fur stole, a jeweled pendant, objects she couldn't pretend to want. My father's death had obliterated her. I knew on some level, as everyone does, that I was not entirely well, but I believed that it would pass. A few weeks later the skin ailment appeared.”

“What ailment?”

“A rash on my fingertips that soon spread to my palms, up my arms, and down my back. It looked like a second-degree burn. Quite painful.”

“Did you go to the doctor?”

“I am a Jew, Giovanni. I went to
many
doctors.”

“And what did they say?” I asked.

“It was a food allergy, a rash, a bug infestation. The diagnoses were too diverse to be trusted. Within a month it had spread to my chin. I had to wear a handkerchief over my face. There were fewer handshakes, fewer drinks after work. I had gone from likably eccentric to dangerously so, dressed absurdly in huge wool coats with a bandana around my mouth. It was a panicked time. Some must've thought I was dying. There were moments when I myself did. Alone is when I felt safest. I have never been religious—was not raised to be—but I couldn't help but wonder if I was being punished.”

“For?”

“Betraying my father.”

“I see,” I said. “And how did you find out the cause of it?”

“Accidentally,” he said. “I had taken a week off work. Some doctors recommended I do it. The stress of work and of my father's death might, they hypothesized, cause this kind of spectacular nervous reaction. The theory never held much sway with me since my work, no matter how busy, always brought me more peace than anxiety, and yet here I was, away from the office, much improved. In just a few days, the rash receded entirely from my face and back. My fingers were clearing up, too. Imagine how relieved I was. Yet the rash was not eradicated. Indeed, when I paid for groceries or a carton of milk, the peeling worsened in my fingers, my skin itched terribly. So it was that I came to understand.”

“Understand what?”

“I was allergic to money. That week away from work, my skin was better at all times, except when I touched hard coin.”

“Is such a thing possible? Were you handling so much currency at the office?”

“The allergy, I soon realized, didn't require physical contact with money. If I was making a phone call about a trade, for instance, the receiver irritated my ear. If I was sitting in my office—where stocks were bought and sold—my breath shortened.”

“You were allergic to the
idea
of money?” I asked.

“In a way, yes. I was allergic to those objects that through any concatenation of events led me to money. So I came to understand. Of course, it required much trial and error. I now consider it my first diagnosis as a psychoanalyst.”

“What then?”

“After much hand-wringing—all too literal, I'm afraid—I decided to visit a psychiatrist. Given my perverse history with the profession, you'll understand my reluctance to do so, but I saw no other option. This was an ailment for the mind—a mental allergy, as it were—so I required a mind-doctor, a shrink, a second father.”

“What were you hoping to get out of your analysis?”

“The goal was simple: to rid myself of this skin problem and return, unimpeded, to work. That's what I found so ironic. Mentally, as they say, I had never enjoyed my work more, yet my body was somehow revolting against it. Of course, my analysis changed everything.”

“How so?”

“To recapitulate all the reversals, revelations, frustrations, terrors, and insights that occur in successful analysis is to do it a grave disservice. Suffice it to say, I realized I was in the wrong line of work. Often the body cries out on the mind's behalf. Such was the case with me—I told you mine was a forthright unconscious! The more we engaged in analysis, the more my skin cleared, yet the more my skin cleared, the more I loathed and feared my office. My associates, men I had worked with for over fifteen years, men whose company had brought me solace and sturdiness—they looked like cowards to me now, collaborators and liars. They lived in a mode of evasion. That's what money seemed to me now: an exercise in postponement. Watching it accumulate brought me dread. When would I spend all this money? What would spending it
do
? I'll put it this way, though the words only skim the surface of the experience: The moat, the moat of money, protected me
too
much. It cut me off from the kind of human engagement I had so long run away from and now sought again. I realized I could not escape my father. Nor did I want to. My destiny—I use the word intentionally—was to become a psychoanalyst.”