session. She has saved the dream, the best part, for last. Mickey focuses on this description, nodding, making encouraging sounds. This is, after all, his meat. He asks, “So, what do you make of this?”
“A coping mechanism? She can’t really admit the emotional effect of the trauma she was subjected to, so she lays it off on the will of God. She’s got guilt feelings too about the death of her mother and the little boy, so she…so if blessings and afflictions are really the same thing, she can resolve both the guilt and the trauma. She’s suffered, she caused suffering, but it balances out, and it’s all God’s fault anyway.”
Mickey nods, smiles. “Mm, yes, a good reading. And also I think some of the problems we have with this kind of sexual abuse are on the guilt side too. The little girl is being rubbed, the feelings of pleasure are genuine, she’s got Daddy all to herself, and this especially when the mother is cold and rejecting, as we have here. You would agree?”
Of course she agrees, even though at some deep level she does not believe a word of it, she does not believe that Emmylou Dideroff fits into the standard psychological paradigm, much less its Freudian province, but what else does she have?
Mickey Lopez is regarding her closely, and the expression on his face is turning from collegial to therapeutic. “Speaking of trauma, you don’t look so good.”
“I’m fine, Mickey.”
“You’re twitchy, and you got no color in your face. You want a Valium? A Xanax? Half a milligram, you’ll relax….”
Everyone wants to dope me, she thinks, I’ve seen something I shouldn’t have seen and they want me to go back to sleep, and then, Oh, great! Paranoid ideation, just what I fucking need on top of the obsessing and the hypochondria, and she really does feel a little flu-ish….
“No, I just need a break,” she answers, forcing a smile. “I’ll go home and take a shower. I’ll be fine.”
Outside the building she makes a cell call, leaves a message, and by the time she has returned to her car, Paz is ringing back. She tells him she has the next notebook and he tells her he’ll meet her at her house.
She gives herself over to driving, pretending that she has just learned how and has to consciously will every action: red light means stop, so foot off the gas foot on the brake press gently, glide….
Paz is there when she arrives.
He takes the notebook, locks it in his car trunk. He says, “You doing anything right now?”
“Not really, but you know, Jimmy, I’m wiped. I just want to go and lie down.”
She turns away from him, her door is a blur ahead of her, but now he reaches out and holds her by the arm. “What happened?” he asks, and she pivots neatly and puts her face against the hollow of his neck. And without her planning in any way for this to happen, now it all comes out, the full story: the demon face earlier, the maniac today, the violence, Emmylou, the dream, and the casting out of the evil spirit, especially that part because she knows somehow that Paz will understand this, that it will not scare him or make him think she is nuts herself.
And he is the first significant person of the day who does not offer to tranquilize her. Instead, he hugs her for a sufficient time, and she is proud of herself for not blubbing against his nice suit, and then he says, “Let’s go for a ride. I want you to meet my old partner, Cletis. He’s good on this kind of stuff.”
Fourteen
What passes for goodness among us fallen humans is generally not much more than a mutual picking of lice from our fur, and a suspension of our desire to eat each other up, it is only social goodness, like the nanny telling the docile child what agood little boy. We must be good in that way, not killing stealing lying, so as to help us accumulate more of the world’s riches. Only God is really good, and only those who allow God’s reflected glory to shine out of them can be accounted good on earth. I didn’t know that then and so I was confused by my encounter with the nurse Sister Trinidad Salcedo. In a strange way (can you say this?) I was innocent of good. I was like a sexually pure girl from way back, a Victorian, say, who understands that there is something being hidden from her, because she is not totally isolated from society and she sees the signs all around her, the giggling factory girls, the innuendos, the looks of men in the street, and observes the behavior of her peers. She is curious, let us say, she feels cheated and incomplete, perhaps?what is this horrible thing I’m supposed to avoid that the world takes for granted, that the world thinks is the most important thing? So with me good was my forbidden fruit. I was attracted to it, and repelled at the same time. For if good was a fraud, like Ray Bob’s churchgoing, then I was just fine, a beast like the other beasts I now hung out with in the Market squat. But if not, if the worldwasn’t just Grab and Fuck, then
Then the world could not be borne. I say this now, knowing what I know now, but then it was not even a thought, just a psychic itch, a feeling of vague discontent, expressed as annoyance and short temper. I was reading stuff too, stuff I couldn’t understand too well because I didn’t get it and it pissed me off, how could glorious brilliant me not get everything on the page? I recall that when I read my Russians I had to put down Crime and Punishment because I couldn’t understand why the asshole turned himself in, what was thatstuff going on in his head, what confession and repentance meant. I mean I knew the words and their formal meanings, but the underlying thought had no grip on my savage mind.
Nevertheless, I read all the time. I had my whore-address library card and I was a frequent visitor to the Coconut Grove library in Peacock Park. Books was my street name by then. Hey, Books, whatcha reading? I would read to them sometimes, mainly books that had been made into movies, they ripped these off from stores or found them on trash piles, the kids especially, barely literate but they knew about Star Trek and Star Wars and Harry Potter. They couldn’t afford the movies but they wanted so much to be included in the great American media dream.
The life of the homeless: not much to say here, unromantic, dirty, violent in spurts, softened by drugs, sex, and booze. I could handle it pretty well, but what I really wanted was to get together with Orne Foy, and I didn’t know how to do that. I had his number and I called him from time to time, but he had nowhere to return the call. I tried giving him a phone booth number, but that got too frustrating, waiting there all day and going crazy when someone would come in and use it.
I also tried to attract the interest of Sister Trinidad, but no luck there either, I had imagined nuns were always trying to make you holy and get you to go to church like the church ladies in the Amity Street church back in Wayland, but apparently not, she seemed not to care much about that, only healing the bodies of the homeless, and that in a distracted manner, like her eyes were focused on another place entirely. She didn’t chat, she was close with information, she wouldn’t tell me what the brass angel meant and I didn’t like the way she looked at me like I was nothing in her eyes or like I had made a mess like a little kid and she was waiting for me to get hip to it so I could clean it up. I sensed that I bored her, which was insufferable. We can forgive bores, but never those who are bored by us as La Rochefoucauld says in my Quotation Book.
So one day when she hadn’t given me the treatment I thought I deserved as queen of the universe I went back to the Market in a bad mood. I decided to do some coke to cheer me up, I still had most of the bag I took from Jerrell’s place. It was daytime and the main squat was pretty cleared out except for the people sleeping off a drunk and the regular junkies and who should I meet there but Tommy and we did a number of lines together and then it seemed like a fine idea to go to one of the offices upstairs and have a fuck the poor dumb shit. I put it in his mind, an act of pure evil.
After that he was crazy for me, strange because Carmen loved him and would do anything for him, but men are like that I have found. He would send her off on errands for him, get him some food he had to have or cigarettes or out to panhandle and as soon as she was gone up to the offices, filthy places full of junk and broken glass and plaster dust and stinking of piss and cats, another romantic affair for Emmylou.
It was the plaster dust that gave us away, she spotted it on my back and she must have been smarter than I gave her credit for or maybe she was just smart about this one thing, because she came in on us while we were doing it and threw a screaming fit, and I cleared out for the rest of the day. To say the devil made me do it is now a joke, but I recall wondering all that day why I did such a foolish and uncalculating thing to a girl who had never done me anything but good, who had probably saved my life, with a man I didn’t particularly care for. But you know
