Harry’s face was white.
I talked about fantasy then, which lies at the heart of my work with patients, but the inner world and the outer world can be difficult to separate, and the place where they conjoin or divide has been a blurry business in psychoanalysis from the beginning. We invent them, I said to Harry, the people we love and hate. We project our feelings onto other people, but there is always a dynamic that creates those inventions. The fantasies are made between people, and the ideas about those people live inside us.
“Yes,” she said, “and even after they die, they are still there. I am made of the dead.”
I had never heard anyone say it just that way: I am made of the dead.
Over ten years later, I can still see Harry in my living room performing her Anton skit, the parodic gesticulations of her protégé-pseudonym front. Time has thickened it, given it additional meaning because of the events that followed, especially her relationship with Rune. And now, as I recall her gestures in my living room and her grinning face, I feel haunted. Her melodramatic movements do not belong to the youthful hero who bids his lover (or mother) goodbye before he leaves for an adventure. They are the mincingly feminine gestures of the heroine, that creature who starred in countless plays and silent films, the golden-haired darling of heaving breast and rosebud lips, defending herself against the dastardly mustachioed villain who threatens her virtue. That day in my apartment Harry played Anton as a girl, which was in itself a form of revenge.
She projected onto him her vulnerable girl-self, the child that, I suspect, had been roaring back in her work with Adam Fertig. She had said to me that she felt only fear — without pictures or words. But she had already created figures and images from that emotion in her boxes. There is no doubt that Anton was Harry’s pawn. She had wanted an empty male vessel to fill with art, but Anton was not hollow. He was a person, and he was the one who had lived the adulation, who had been feted and touted, not Harry. He had come to her and claimed his rights as an agile performer, another kind of artist, to be sure, but an artist nevertheless. And I think Harry envied and despised him for his deftness. She had been naïve. She had imagined she could borrow the husk of a man for her revenge, but human beings aren’t disguises. If Anton had found himself caught in the net of Harry’s fantasies, she, in turn, had discovered that her protégé had his own dreams.
All thoughts of revenge are born of the pain of helplessness. I suffer becomes You will suffer. And let us not lie: Vengeance is invigorating. It focuses and enlivens us, and it quashes grief because it turns the emotion outward. In grief we go to pieces. In revenge we come together as a single pointed weapon aimed at a target. However destructive in the long run, it serves a useful purpose for a time.
I told Harry a story that afternoon because it seemed somehow relevant. I once had a patient who had been brutally assaulted when she was eleven years old. The man attacked her while she was walking home from a friend’s house on the Upper West Side. It was not a mugging; he leapt at her with a knife, sliced her neck open, and left her bleeding on the sidewalk. She nearly died. My patient reported that she had had no revenge feelings against the perpetrator. But years later, when a boyfriend left her, she couldn’t stop fantasizing about her ex-lover. She manufactured car and skiing accidents, terrible falls, illnesses, and sudden explosions, all of which he survived, but disfigured and paralyzed. In this maimed state, he would inevitably come to recognize that she was the great love of his life, that without her nothing he did had any meaning. After a while, images of his broken and bloody body would intrude on her thoughts suddenly and without warning. She had bouts of depersonalization, during which she would leave cruel messages on the man’s answering machine: I hope you get run over on your way home from work. She frightened herself. We spent session after session unpacking the meanings of the compulsive fantasies.
All Harry said was, “She must have had a scar.”
Yes, I told her, I had seen my patient’s scar: a clean, terrible line that had become a fold in the skin of her neck.
That night I dreamed I was in a long, empty corridor, and I saw Harry hunched over on the floor. I walked toward her and noticed a thin, deep cut in her neck. I began to worry that her head would fall off, and I gripped her neck to keep her head on. At my feet lay a piece of scrap lumber with a few nails sticking out of it. I must have let go of Harry, because I picked it up. A pair of tiny green eyes blinked and a red mouth began to move quickly, as if it were trying to speak to me. I heard nothing but was overcome by a feeling of pity. The sun from the window shone straight into my eyes, blinding me, and then I woke up.
There are many ways to untangle and interpret the bizarre condensations and displacements of dreams. My patient’s scar returned in Harry’s sliced neck. I must have been afraid one of us would “lose her head.” Of course, the dream is more about me than about Harry, although the half-alive piece of wood might have been an image of Harry’s work, which expressed deep parts of herself that were difficult to articulate in other ways. I’m not sure. Almost every day I sit with people, and I listen to them. Sometimes, with particular patients, I worry that I don’t really hear them. They are all trying to make sense of their stories, after all, just as Harry was; Harry, who had told me she believed there was something “terrible” hidden inside her.
Phineas Q. Eldridge (written statement)
Oscar Wilde once said, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” I played Harriet Burden’s mask briefly, and I do not regret it for a second. From behind my nearsighted, mulatto, queer self she was able to tell a truth. In the gay world, disguise has a long history, which has never been simple, so when Harry asked me to beard for her, it felt as if I were merely tying an extra knot in a very old rope. I am a performer, and I know that my face onstage can often be more intimate and more honest than the one I wear in the wings. But I have also had two identities offstage. In 1995, I slithered out of my first persona, the one I was born with, to become my second self: Phineas Q. Eldridge. The person who preceded P.Q.E., John Whittier, was a good boy, well behaved if a little dreamy, kind to animals, girls, and poor people (in that order), easily frightened, and, to use my mother’s word, “delicate.” I had my first seizure when I was four years old and my last one when I was thirteen. The doctors said I “outgrew” them. They belonged to my earlier, shorter, prepubescent body, the one we all shed, along with small jackets and pants and shirts and shoes that once fit it perfectly. The tremors came mostly at night, and not often, but the odors I sometimes smelled and the crawling sensations I felt and the tinglings and face-twitching and the drools and the blanks and the bed-wetting every night for years surely shaped my sentimental education.
When I think back on that four-eyed, interracial, epileptic kid dancing the tango with his little sister, Letty, in the recreation room of a split-level, solidly middle-class house outside Richmond, Virginia, I don’t find it at all surprising that he took to God even before his mama was reborn. At school I was a pariah, who had never lived down the full-body seizure that took place beside the slide on the playground in the third grade, but at church I shone, a pious little angel with a sacred affliction. Hadn’t St. Paul, father of Christianity itself, fallen down on the road to Damascus in a fit just like the ones I sometimes had? Harry was fascinated by the delicate, skinny, freckle-faced John with his black mother and white father who read a lot of books, watched movies on TV, and made up his own world called Baaltamar, a name plucked from the Bible (Judges), but which, in its first incarnation, looked like a Hollywood stage lot. In Baaltamar, overdressed villains with supernatural powers tangled with one angelic hero, my alter ego, Levolor (named after the window blind company because Levolor has such a pleasing lilt). I spent a lot of time in that magical country, just as Harry had spent a lot of time in her own head with an imaginary companion and a busload of anxieties. She, however, grew up godless.