Shh, she said, closing the door behind us. It’s all right. I mean it’s not all right. But it’s okay. I called him.
You called him?
I found Mom with a bottle, she said. Right after I got home. She was trying to hide it under the kitchen sink, and I couldn’t believe it, I thought she was doing so well, and it was three-quarters empty, and I don’t think the dog drank it. I could smell it on her, and see it on her face. You know.
I knew.
I called you right away, Daddy, she said, tears appearing in her eyes, but they said you were in some important meeting. I didn’t know what to do. I called Dr. Steiglitz. She kept asking for him.
Kelly could see from the look on my face, bewildered and angry, that her explanation was not assuaging me.
Since when do famously successful shrinks make house calls? I asked.
I don’t know, Daddy. I guess maybe they do. I just called him to ask him what I should do. Should I take her to the hospital? What should I say to her? Should I be angry at her? I was so confused. And he said, ‘I’ll be right there.’
The tears were streaming down her face. I was too angry to pay attention.
Since when do shrinks make house calls? I repeated, looking at the door to the living room.
I was in a rage. I should have been grateful, I suppose, that this famous doctor was there, giving my wife hands-on personal treatment at the first hint of a relapse. But something about him, about his silky manner, about the way Melissa shrank and groveled in his presence, gave me the creeps.
I went back to the living room, prepared to tell him to get the hell out of my house.
Steiglitz got up and most unctuously excused himself. Had to go. Needed at the hospital. So sorry to disturb.
As we reached the front door, he said in a whisper, I’ll call you tomorrow with a report. For now, I’d suggest she not be left alone.
Slick enough to anticipate me. Slick enough not to touch me, this time. No handshake. No tentacle over the shoulder. Just got the hell out of there.
Smart bastard. I might have hit him in the nose.
I turned to Melissa. She was huddled in the corner of the sofa, knees to her chest, arms around her knees. Cheeks streaked with mascara.
Melissa, I said.
She stared straight ahead at the wall.
All the angry energy left me. An unutterable weariness descended.
Let Steiglitz deal. Let that scumbag deal. More power to him.
I slunk out of the room, went upstairs. Turned on the computer. Logged on. Anything. Anything to get me away from this.
Kelly appeared in the doorway.
Daddy, she said, what’s going on?
Nothing’s going on.
Okay, she said, with a hint of anger. Be like that.
She left. She closed the door quietly.
She knew. She knew I needed to know she was angry at me. And she knew I needed to be left alone. And she knew how to make both happen at the same time.
But something broke in me that night. The last tie to Melissa. The last thread of hope. That I could be the one to bring her back to life. That we could once again see life through shared eccentric glasses, and laugh.
37.
The morning was drab. I was confused. Disturbed.
When I’m confused and disturbed, I call Sheila. Well. When I’m even more confused and disturbed than usual, I call Sheila.
I called Sheila.
She answered the phone. I was taken aback. This was a rare and pleasant event. I didn’t have to sit through her minutes-long voice mail message, reciting the triage of telephone numbers: in an emergency, call… in case of urgent need, call…Subtle distinctions, but apparently understood by her clientele.
Don’t tell me, Sheila, I said. Your ten o’clock didn’t show up?
You are correct, she said.
Coke? I asked. Barbiturates? Compulsive masturbation? Run-of-the-mill alcoholic?
Silence.
I’ll be right over.
I grabbed a cab. It smelled of ginger and anise.
I told Sheila about the night before. Steiglitz. Melissa. Weirdness. How I’d allowed myself to be overcome instead by what strangely felt like jealousy. And how embarrassing it was, to feel that way. About a doctor, however oleaginous, who not only was there to help my wife recover, but was doing so on his own time. Who had demonstrated again and again, if one sat back and took the more objective view, that he, and only he, of all the people who had treated her, could put his finger on the pulse of her addiction. Could actually get a reaction from her.
Yes, said Sheila, but is that so hard to understand? You’ve failed her, in your eyes. He hasn’t. Yet, at least. It’s hard to face. You resent him. You hate him for being the man you can’t feel yourself to be.
She may have been right. But I wasn’t ready to talk about how much of a man I couldn’t feel myself to be.
I wanted to talk about good and evil.
Shrinks hate that topic. Hovering behind the notion of good and evil is the death of their profession. If we all went back to confession, they’d have nothing to do.
So we segued into the shrink-authorized version: Why was I so obsessed with it? Why was I so obsessed with whether or not I was a ‘good’ person? What the hell was wrong with me anyway? (That’ll be two hundred dollars, please.)
One could put it down to the usual claptrap about the affectionless childhood – if nobody loved me I must have been bad. And I haven’t gotten any better. So I must still be bad. I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to prove otherwise. To my long-dead parents.
And that was probably true.
But what did it buy you?
Or it could be that the tattered shreds of whatever conscience (superego, please) I had left were desperately trying to dam the flood of narcissism that threatened to engulf me.
But what was that, other than a different way of saying the same thing?
Narcissism is widely misunderstood, Sheila said. Most people think of it as overweening self-regard. Love of one’s own reflection. But that’s not it at all. Narcissism is, in fact, a form – perhaps the very definition – of self- loathing.
Narcissus drowned himself, didn’t he? I asked.
Exactly.
I recalled a passage from Norman Mailer’s biography of Picasso. Mailer – himself no stranger to the notion of self-regard – explained, as I recalled, that the narcissist simply regards nobody’s feelings as paramount to his own.
It’s that simple.
It’s the midway point, I said, between the saint and the psychopath. The one who doesn’t credit others with any feelings at all. And the common wisdom has it backwards there, too, doesn’t it? Most people think of the psychopath as unfeeling. In fact, the opposite is true. The psychopath has raging feelings, insatiable desires. It’s
