“Big Blue?”
“IBM. Listen, I know you’re busy, but could I come by for a drink? I saw you on Nightline. I mean, I only saw it. I didn’t hear you. There was too much noise in the bar. But I read in the papers what you did. It’s great.”
“Thanks. I didn’t do it alone, I—”
Gene wasn’t listening. “Could I see you? Just for fifteen minutes. I know you’re busy. But I read in the paper your office is in upstate New York—”
“Not very far upstate. White Plains.”
“White Plains? That’s enemy territory. Anyway, we live in Massachusetts and when we come into New York to visit Dad, we stay in the city, so this is my chance to see you.”
“It’s late for me to go out, Gene—”
“I’m not that far from you. Just one drink?”
“How about tomorrow? For breakfast.”
“I’m leaving first thing. Only take up a half hour and then I’ll get out of your hair.”
This grown-up Gene — he was twenty-six now — certainly didn’t sound or act passive. That was gratifying and his eagerness was touching. He was a success of mine. Why shouldn’t I bask in a real therapeutic win, rather than the overblown praise of the trial?
We met in the lobby of the Ritz and went to their staid, virtually empty bar. Gene seemed a little taller, although he still had his mother’s wiry body and smooth youthful skin. He was dressed younger than his age, in a rumpled blazer too short in the sleeves, chinos that were too long, spilling over his scuffed loafers, and a denim shirt with a casual red knit tie. If Gene claimed to be a freshman at Harvard he would be believed. His boyish appearance didn’t give him the look of an IBM killer, but his was the world of computers, which I supposed was populated by youthful gunslingers.
He gushed about me for a little bit while we waited for his gin and tonic to arrive, saying he had followed my involvement with the Grayson case from the beginning, and that it didn’t surprise him I had become a famous psychiatrist, although he was surprised (and disappointed, I wondered?) to find out that I treated children exclusively. He asked when I had left the Tenth Street clinic for White Plains and why I had chosen to focus on abused kids, but his interest in my replies was perfunctory. Soon he was telling me about himself, with considerable pride. He had joined Flashworks, then a fledgling company, immediately after graduating from MIT and was put on a team of engineers and hackers given the critical job of designing prototypes, racing against a rival group within the company as well as against the other two major computer manufacturers. Flash II, the machine so successfully debuted only the day before, represented two years of grueling work, and promised, Gene claimed, to make Flashworks the number one computer company in the world. “Can you believe it? I’m a success.”
I said I could believe it and congratulated him. I noticed he was wearing a wedding ring. “You’re married?” I asked.
“Oh yeah. Junior year at MIT. And I got a son!” He was on the edge of his chair, talking energetically, though slurring his words. His eyes retained his boyish timidity, a tendency to avoid mine, rarely glancing at me, and those were darting movements, as if to catch me unawares. “He’s six.” He squirmed in the Ritz’s huge leather wing chair and pulled a wallet from his back pocket. It was falling apart, stuffed with bills and slips of paper. I looked at several photos of his boy, Peter, and his wife, Cathy. Peter’s hair was curly blond, the curls from Gene, the color from the mother. He had an appealing face, also a mixture of his parents: Gene’s big wondering eyes and expressive eyebrows; his mother’s strong chin and tight mouth. Cathy’s looks weren’t a surprise. Other than the sandy blonde hair and pinched mouth, she had Carol Kenny’s shape and attitude — wiry, head pushed forward, eager for approval, smiling too hard. Stop being a shrink, I told myself, and said, “What a beautiful family, Gene.”
“They’re great!” he said. “Thank God for my wife. She made me who I am.” He glanced at me — the darting look of confirmation — and then away, reaching for his drink. “And you. I’d have no life at all if it weren’t for you.” He drained his glass, bouncing ice cubes against his teeth.
“You did it, Gene. You’ve made a success of your life. You know, that’s the scam of psychiatry. The patient does all the work and we take all the credit.”
Gene put his glass down. He cleared his throat and frowned. “I don’t believe that,” he said quickly and rushed on. “Cathy once asked me about you and I realized something terrible, really embarrassing.” He checked on me fast and then focused on a hunting print behind my chair. “I never asked you anything about yourself. I just poured my heart out for three years and never found out anything about you.”
“You were right. You instinctively understood that I was merely a symbol. You knew everything about me you had to know.”
That earned me the longest look of our relationship: head cocked, his wide mouth twisted into a blend of curiosity and amusement. “What do you mean?”
“I was a stand-in for whomever you were working things out with. Sometimes I was your mother, sometimes I was your father, sometimes I was you, or parts of you anyway.” I realized I had fallen into pomposity, used to lecturing from all the testifying and interviews. I waved my hand. “Don’t worry about it. If you hadn’t gone off to college we probably would have continued the therapy for a while—”
“Really?” Gene interrupted pointedly.
“Not for long. Not really to discover things, just a more gradual end to the therapy. If you had had separation problems in general, we certainly would have taken our time, but you were eager to get on with your life and that’s healthy. Anyway, as part of that weaning, I guess you could have asked some things and realized I was just a person, someone quite different from the incarnations of the therapy. But I don’t approve of therapists and patients becoming friends afterwards. I trained under my psychiatrist — you remember Susan Bracken?”
“Sure. She was your doctor? No kidding.”
I nodded. “First she was my shrink, then she was my training analyst, finally my boss. We became good friends. But she’ll always be something other than merely a person to me. In fact, I no longer work for her partly because I couldn’t resist the urge to run to her for help with every patient. And, although I like to think I’m her friend, she’ll always be more than just a friend to me.” I looked at my watch. “I really have to get some sleep …”
“Sure.” Gene waved to the one sleepy waiter left on duty. He asked for the check, which was instantly produced. Gene stopped me from reaching for it. “It’s mine. This is the first time in my life I’ve got an expense account.” He sent the waiter off with a hundred-dollar bill.
“How are your parents?”
“Dad’s great. I mean, he’s moody. You know, up and down about his career, but really he’s having a good time. And Mom.” He sighed. “Mom never really got over the divorce and then she got sick.”
“Something serious?”
“Yeah. Ovarian cancer. She died just before Peter was born.” Gene spoke with no affect, as the jargon goes. No sadness, no anger. Just the fact. I considered the timing. His mother had died three years after our last session, while his new wife was pregnant and he was graduating from college. The death of a parent is always stressful, naturally, and those circumstances would have made it much more so. To borrow a phrase from Gene’s work, my professional systems came on line, a bit wearily, but instinctively.