Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [45]
“It is when it tricks someone. I’d rather you lied. At least if you lied, I’d know you cared what I thought.”
They sat in silence as the train rumbled along the banks of the brown, unstirred Danube. Younger watched her profile. He wondered why or how he saw vulnerability in her, when none showed anywhere on her face or figure. “I do care,” he said.
“You don’t.”
It was a principle with Younger not to say a word more about himself, his past, his thoughts, than he had to—at least not to women. They always asked him to; he never did. Evidently he was losing his principles. “It was November of 1909,” he said. “Her name was Nora. Would you like to hear about it?”
“If you don’t mind telling me.”
“She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever met,” he continued, “to that point. Totally different from you. Blonde. So fragile you thought she might break in your hands. Self-destructive too. I guess I liked that. We had a good six months. In my experience, that’s not too bad—a good six months. But there were danger signs even then. I remember taking her shopping for wedding gowns. She got it into her head that the mannequin modeling dresses for us—a girl of about sixteen—was mocking her. I made the mistake of asking Nora what the girl had done. She accused me of defending her. I made the further mistake of laughing. That fight lasted two days. But things really began in earnest after the wedding, when she found some notebooks of mine. Psychoanalytic notebooks; case summaries. My women patients tended to—well—they usually began acting as if they were in love with me, which is exactly what’s supposed to happen in psychoanalysis. You can ask Freud if you don’t believe me.”
“Of course I believe you,” said Colette.
“The notebooks recorded what happened during each hour of analysis: what my patients said to me, my own inner reactions to them, and so forth.”
“And so forth?”
“Yes.”
“You—you liked your patients? And you said so in your notebooks?”
“One of them. Her name was Rachel.”
“Rachel. Was she pretty?”
“Her figure was like yours,” Younger replied. “So yes, she was pretty.”
“Did she want to sleep with you?”
“She certainly did,” he said.
“You mean you did to her what you tried to do to me—and she let you.”
Younger only looked at Colette.
“I don’t blame you,” she said. “A pretty girl coming to your office every day and lying down on a couch and telling you her secrets? If I were a man, I would have found that—appealing.”
“Many analysts sleep with their patients. Freud doesn’t do it. I didn’t either.”
“You did with Nora,” said Colette.
“Not before I’d married her. And she wasn’t my patient—not really.”
“I see. You didn’t do anything with Rachel; you only said in your notebook that you were attracted to her. So you didn’t understand why your wife was upset with you.”
“That’s right,” said Younger.
“Well, that was very foolish of you.”
“Really? If women want their men never to have been attracted to another girl in all their lives, it’s not the men who are being foolish.”
“What did you say to Nora?” asked Colette.
“I chided her for having read my notes, which were confidential. That was an error. She charged me with trying to hide my ‘romances’ from her. She developed an elaborate theory according to which the entire notion of confidentiality in psychoanalysis was designed to allow doctors to have affairs with their female patients. A point came when not an evening would go by without some reference to my ‘romances.’ She said that I disgusted her. That I was unfeeling. That I was weak. She began to throw things. First at the walls, then at me.”
“And you were like a stone—impassive.”
“More or less.”
“That must have made her even angrier,” said Colette.
“Yes. She started to hit me. And kick me. At least she tried to.”
“What did you do?”
“Well, she was very young, and she’d been through some nightmarish events. On top of which she was very slight. I found it almost endearing when she tried to hit me. So I took it, suppressing my temper. Actually, I don’t think I knew the extent to which