“He’s dead,” I said. “He killed his wife and committed suicide two months ago.”
Diane sat on the edge of her desk. She gaped at me. “No.”
“Halley dumped him. Copley, her father, fired him two weeks later. His wife was threatening to move out of state with their son. He had no job and lost their one asset, the house. Well, Gene didn’t know the house was gone. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but …” I waved a hand in disgust. “That’s bullshit. I know exactly what happened. Copley and Halley had decided Gene was getting too big for his britches. He was asking for a piece of the company and he had the loyalty of the whole creative team. They had a new kid genius Copley thought could replace him. Between the two of them, they knew Gene’s situation, they knew how to make it as bad as possible, because just beating him down wasn’t enough. What if he went to a competitor? Although, that wasn’t it. What they did wasn’t practical — that wasn’t the real reason. What they did had the vicious irrationality of madness.” I was talking to myself, I realized. I tried to focus on Diane’s blank, still-amazed face. “That night, the night he murdered Cathy and killed himself, that was the night Gene realized how much they wanted to hurt him. Cathy confronted him with a letter calling in the loan on the house, exposing the fact that he’d been fired, that he had no way of stopping her from moving, and that he couldn’t meet the next support payments. In a flash he understood Halley was in a league with her father, he understood that for years his life had been an elaborate con game, that he had thrown away his marriage, his child, and his career for nothing. He was a fool as far as they were concerned, a ridiculous man. All his life he had lived in fear of making demands and pushed him past that fear. I cured him.” I laughed bitterly. Diane was staring at the carpet, kneading an eyebrow. “I told him if he asserted himself with his boss, he’d be rewarded for his years of service. I told him his fears that Halley didn’t love him were neurotic. I not only sent him into a battle he wasn’t fit for, worst of all, I stripped away his one puny defense, his tortoise shell. He was safe. Don’t you see? Diane, are you listening?” She looked up. “He wasn’t getting what he was worth at the company because he knew, instinctively, that kept him safe. He didn’t allow himself to fall in love with a beautiful, self-assured woman like Halley because he knew he couldn’t survive her rejection. He didn’t defy his wife because he knew he couldn’t survive her anger. He was miserable, sure. He was being taken advantage of, sure. But he was safe.”
Diane pushed off from her desk. She returned to the chair, pulled her legs under her, and sat on her haunches. “It didn’t make sense to you, so you arranged to meet them, is that what happened?”
“You’re wearing contacts,” I said. “That’s why you look so different.”
“Yes! Yes, you got it. I’m on the prowl. I want everything to be different. I don’t want anything to remind me of you. Not even when I look in the mirror.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, yeah, you’re real sorry. What do you want me to say? That you’re responsible for Gene’s suicide? That you shouldn’t cure neurotics because maybe their illness protects them?”
“Yes. Say that, if that’s what you think it means.”
“Jesus,” Diane whispered to herself. “This is your insane perfectionism. Your God-complex.”
“Are you saying you don’t think what I’ve discovered is true? Copley and his daughter are mentally ill. If you believe the DSM III, if you believe everybody from Jesus to Freud to Phil Donahue, these people are sick. They should be miserable, they should be—”
Diane kicked out her legs and stood up. “They’re mean. That’s all. They’re shitty people. Deal with it. Grow up.” She waved at the door. “Go!” I didn’t move. She stamped her foot. “I can’t believe you came here to talk to me about this crap! That can’t be why you’re here. I don’t think this is my vanity talking. You can’t be here to talk about these creeps.”
“Diane! Goddamnit! Listen to me!” She backed away, startled. Had I yelled that loudly? I was on my feet, I realized, and I was advancing on her. I swallowed, took a breath and also stepped away from her. I made an effort to speak calmly. “You have a first-rate mind. Use it. Reach for something bigger than just mechanistic technique.” She breathed through her nostrils, her arms crossed protectively; but her eyes were waiting, prepared to listen. So I continued, “We divide the world into two groups — the well-adjusted and the dysfunctional. These people aren’t serial killers. They’re not sociopaths. On the contrary, they honor society and society honors them. They are well-adjusted but they have none of the healthy relationships that all the theorists maintain are the basis of being well-adjusted. No real love to sustain them, no true intimacy. And yet they function. They function at a high level. What do we call their psychological condition? We don’t have a category for it.”
Diane’s shoulders slumped. Her arms uncrossed and drooped. She shut her eyes. “Sure we do.”
“We do?” I was encouraged. Her tired voice meant she was taking me seriously.
Diane leaned against her desk and rubbed her eyes. I whispered, “Are you going to tell me?”
She uncovered her eyes. They were red and she looked at me hopelessly. Despite the forceful words, her voice was enervated. “I’ll tell you, if you promise you won’t debate it. That after you hear what I think, whether you agree or not, you’ll get the fuck out of my office, you’ll get the fuck out of my clinic, and you’ll get the fuck out of my life.”
So that was the price. I didn’t understand her equation. And I didn’t care, as long as I got to hear its sum. “I promise.”
“This is really what I think. Ph.D. and all.”
“Okay.” I felt profoundly relieved. No matter what she said, I would have something, something I could take with me. Something to discard or accept — that didn’t matter — I would have something to anchor me again to the world.
Diane said, “We’ve had a word for it from the beginning of human history. What you’re describing — these self-serving, heartless, destructive and perfectly respectable people — they’re evil. And there’s not a goddamn thing we can do about them.”
CHAPTER TEN
The Banality of Evil
STICK PROVIDED THE ANSWER. I DISAPPEARED FROM MINOTAUR FOR three days, leaving a message with Laura that I couldn’t make the tennis date, offering no explanation. I retreated to Baltimore. From there, I checked on Pete Kenny, who, according to David Cox, the child psychologist in Arizona, was doing better than expected.
“Perhaps he’s strong,” I said.
“Well, I guess that’s part of it …” Cox reacted to my comment doubtfully. “He’s getting a lot out of the sessions. He’s articulate about his feelings, about how much he misses his Mommy and Daddy. Also, his grandmother is very loving. Not smart, but loving.”
“He needs inner strength,” I insisted. “He needs your help, of course, and he’s fortunate his grandmother is doing her job, but, in the end, unless he’s strong that won’t be enough.” I told him I would pay Pete’s bills even if he doubled him to four sessions a week and that he should continue to tell Grandma the therapy was free.
For three days I focused on the new problem Diane’s remark had defined for me. She had used the word evil as a form of surrender: less a description than a pejorative; not a diagnosis, but a despairing judgment. She had been clever and helpful in not applying it to the obviously ill or sociopathic: serial killers, rapists, child abusers. She had been right to reserve evil for Stick and Halley, my sane, respectable and thoroughly legal twosome, as opposed to everybody’s favorite target for the appellation: monster tyrants of history. Hitler and Stalin are the prime examples of our century, although humanity has provided a constant supply, and our century has many more than merely that dynamic duo. But Hitler and Stalin, from all reports, were profoundly unhappy men. Only a willfully blind psychiatrist would declare them to have lived in homeostasis. There is a simple measurement that can be taken: Hitler and Stalin were less content and more paranoid as their power grew. Their appetites increased by what they fed on, craving more enemies and more killings to maintain the same level of comfort, rejecting opportunity after opportunity to preserve themselves and their power, destroying not only those who opposed them, but those who longed to help them. They were obviously ill. The question is, what do we call the hundreds, indeed hundreds of thousands of people, who obeyed fervently and worked passionately to help them? The Silent Majority? The Good Germans? Stalinists? Conformists? I don’t mean concentration camp guards or Bebe Rebozo. I don’t mean those who did wrong and looked the other way for the base purpose of gain or survival. I mean those who were happy to live in an unjust world, who function as well under Hitler as they do under Bill Clinton.