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 the rest of us who are emotional ciphers, in his mind. What was it that Ted Bundy said, with a shrug? There’s a million brown-haired girls out there in the world; who’s going to miss another one or two?
Or three dozen.
And it’s the fear, I’m guessing, of descending to that state that drives a certain type of borderline narcissist, like me, to his obsession with ‘goodness.’
Which notion Sheila deftly used to steer me off the abstract plane.
That might explain all the strong women, she said.
How is that connected?
You’ve always needed a woman.
I can’t deny that. But that hardly makes me unusual.
But more particularly a strong-willed woman. One who will tell you what to do and think, in no uncertain terms. Because you can’t trust yourself to make those decisions.
Yes. Melissa had been like that, once. Long ago.