The Death of Eli Gold

She looked at his eyes, scanning them for insincerity. In this instant, their deep brown seemed to her the opposite: the substantial brown of leather book covers and panelled walls. And if eyes are the windows to the soul, like her mother was always saying, then substance, tangibility, something in Eli’s soul to hang on to, was what she needed to see in those windows. She knew that his words could as easily have been said by her to him – he was the one who didn’t want to get married in a church – but this fleeting moment of Eli being serious – serious, for once, about them – was more important.

‘You’re right, of course,’ she said, adding her other hand to the hand pile on the table. Their four hands together, his two in between hers, looked like a sandwich in which the dark meat filling could not be contained by the two small slices of white bread. The radiator croaked again, and then gushed, as the hot water inside forced its way along the cast-iron coils.

‘It must be like a coral reef,’ said Eli, looking away from her towards the sound.

‘Sorry?’

‘Inside the radiator. The water’s having such a hard time getting through it, heating it up – inside, it must be studded with rocks of fur and scale, sprouting off the sides and up off the bottom, like a coral reef.’

Violet looked towards the heating implement. ‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Have you got a pen?’

She shook her head.

‘What, nowhere? Not in amongst all the God knows what you carry in your handbag?’ Underneath its normal New York insouciance, his voice betrayed, a hint of petulance.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said, picking her handbag up off the floor and starting to file through it anyway. ‘You’re the one who wants to be a writer.’

‘I know.’ He opened his palm. ‘But I’m also the one who can’t keep hold of anything.’

She tutted, although smiled at the same time, pleased at the notion of coupledom – you’re this, I’m that, my weaknesses, your strengths – that this declaration assumed.

‘Why don’t …?’ Violet began, about to suggest asking the waitress, but before she could finish he had leant across the table, his pinched waist awkwardly angled against the Formica edge, and extended his long index finger towards the window. On the fogged-up glass, he wrote: Inside the radiator, a coral reef.

‘What use is that?’ she said, as he sat back in his chair, surveying his handiwork with a satisfied air. Various other diners in the Piccolo were looking round from their tea and cakes and staring. Violet felt annoyed by this action. When he had written on the ceiling in the Eagle it had felt spontaneous, a sheer outpouring of self, but this had an element of self-consciousness about it, of deeply considered writ-erliness. It felt contrived. ‘Are you going to telephone a glazier? To cut the window out for you?’

She noticed you could now see through the window, or at least through the bits of window revealed by his letters. This fractional view obscured the daily commotion of the Liverpool Street forecourt, lending its towers and turrets something of the collegiate calm the architect must have intended.

Eli, however, was still looking entirely at the window. ‘I don’t need to take it away,’ he said. ‘I’m sure that’ll do as an aide-mémoire.’

* * *

How many therapists, then, has Harvey Gold been through? The answer, leaving aside the many friends and minor acquaintances who he has, in his more frantic moments, forced to listen to his troubles, is eight. They are:

1. Prof. Stephen J. Wilson, professor of child psychology at the University of New York 1957–78, a Winnicottian (trained, in fact, under the man himself), writer of numerous significant case studies and one commercial work, Neither Angels nor Monsters, bought in its millions in 1966 by young American family-starters desperate to escape the parenting traps of their parents. Eli met Wilson at a party in 1974 thrown by Susan Sontag, just after splitting with Harvey’s mother, his third wife: Joan, the pale-faced postgraduate student he had settled upon as the prospective third way between Violet’s artlessness and Isabelle’s sophistication. Joan was always a feminist, but had become, immediately following Eli’s desertion, arch; he mainly switched off during her recriminations, but had managed to catch ‘and no doubt you haven’t even stopped to think about what your fucking selfish fucking behaviour will do to our child …’ On meeting the professor, therefore, it occurred to him he could kill two birds with one stone: rebut at least one section of his ex-wife’s rants, and gain a further bit of cachet with the New York literary salon, enamoured as it was at the time with psychoanalysis, by putting his six-year-old son into therapy. This, at least, is how Harvey now reads the fact of his having had a short series of sessions with Professor Wilson. Of the sessions, and of Professor Wilson himself, he has very little memory, although, once in a while, in his dreams, an image of his father seems to merge with that of a smiley, kindly, white-haired benevolent, who emerges from behind a plain white door to say: ‘Now Harvey – do you remember when the bed-wetting started?’

2. Donovan (‘Donny’) Lanes, a counsellor, really, rather than a proper therapist, who Harvey saw once a week while an English student at Leicester Polytechnic in the mid- to late 1980s. This was during a period, Harvey knows now, when he was not depressed. He thought he was depressed, but in fact he was simply attracted by the idea of depression, in order to cement some sense of his own seriousness. Actual depression, Harvey knows now, is quite different, being a condition much less like the student Harvey imagined – something gaunt and brooding and gravitas-gaining while at the same time sexy; Socrates crossed with Robert Smith of The Cure – and more like a continual panic attack crossed with severe influenza.

Donny’s main focus was Harvey’s mother, which struck Harvey at the time, even before he was an old hand at therapy, as a little route one. It being the mid- to late eighties, however, it may have been less about his counsellor adopting a crude Freudianism than a fascination Donny developed with Joan, the proto-feminist. When Harvey talked of Joan – of her bookish, pinned-back beauty, of her endless fury with Eli, of her insistence on keeping him always informed, even as a child, of her agonizing and infinitely various menstrual issues, of her aggressive intelligence, of her ongoing project to write a feminocentric response to Solomon’s Testament called The Solo Woman’s Testament – he could see in his counsel-lor’s eyes an excitement, a love even, growing at this picture he was painting of an undiscovered English Gloria Steinem. Harvey could almost see the book cover forming in Donny’s mind – Joan Gold (she had kept the name, despite everything): A Woman’s Struggle by Donovan Lanes – even as he once again took her side on another instance of what Harvey had previously thought of as a clear infliction of maternal damage.

Donny was particularly energized by Harvey’s revelation that Joan had, in her late thirties, become a lesbian. Harvey had known, even at the time, even in the confusion of puberty, that his mother had made this choice politically. All Joan’s choices were political, and, at the same time – in Harvey’s opinion – psychological: motivated, that is, by a need to enact some kind of revenge on Eli. Because this revenge was ongoing – Joan never seemed able to find the emotional or sexual act that could completely cancel out the outrage of his leaving – it had to conform to the changing political tapestry of the times. The politics of the mid-seventies necessitated that her revenge take the form of sleeping with – and dismissing from her life immediately afterwards – an enormous number of unsuitable men; the politics of the late seventies and early eighties required becoming a lesbian. As he grew into adolescence, Harvey found it hard to believe that, ten years after their divorce, the anger inside his mother towards her ex-husband could still be powerful enough to impel her towards a completely new sexuality. In truth, the teenage Harvey, already the person he is now, already astounded, flabbergasted, by the pin-down force of desire, simply could not accept that sexuality could be shepherded in this way. Sexuality, Harvey thought and thinks, directs you, not the other way round. He feels guilty about this; it makes him, in his mother’s language, a reactionary.

The sessions – and particularly any attempts to talk freely on this subject, of sexuality and its discontents – were hampered a little by Harvey’s growing suspicion that Donny was gay. This was not something which Donny proffered, but he did, Harvey noticed, have a tendency to draw any conversation towards the subject of safe sex. Moreover, he was, when not counselling, the singer in a local electronic duo, and Harvey had noticed that all the singers in the electronic duos of the time, The Pet Shop Boys, Soft Cell, Erasure, all had something in common. He wasn’t sure about Sparks.

Harvey tried very hard, in a very mid-1980s way, to think himself into a space during the sessions where it didn’t matter that Donny might be gay, but it was problematic. Firstly, because Harvey assumed, despite his possession at the time of hair so stiff with Studioline it made him look like a permanently alerted porcupine, that Donny found him attractive; and secondly, because, even though Harvey was not then depressed, from the tiny acorns of his faux-depression the enormous black leafless tree of his real depression would still grow, and it was women, obviously, and the tension between his desire for every other pixie-booted one he saw on campus, and his fractured and difficult relationship with his girlfriend-from-home, Alison, a timid, passive aggressor with a sharply cut bob, which formed the basis of much of his emotional complaint. Suspecting that Donny might be gay, and therefore not subject either to the desire for, nor the demands of, women, made Harvey feel like talking about it all to him was, as it were, preaching to the never-going-to-be-converted: too alone, even in the distinct separation of the therapy room. When he spoke of his terror, for example, of the prospect of splitting up with Alison, Donny would nod sympathetically, but Harvey thought he could detect a certain blankness in his slightly bulbous blue eyes, and attributed this – despite Harvey’s complete ignorance of the lifestyle – to Donny living within a world where sexual traffic was always free-moving, and the idea of desire becoming bogged down in the dull pull of attachment was anathema.

Two months before he left college, however, Alison left Harvey: for Donovan Lanes, who was neither, it turned out, gay, nor entirely ethical about passing on revelations from his sessions to the partners of some of the students he was counselling. There was then a period of fifteen years, during which Harvey disavowed therapy.

3. Laurence Green, a straightforward no-nonsense Freudian. He even had a white beard and glasses. The now genuinely depressed Harvey – clinically depressed, to give it the term that separates the illness from the everyday experience – did the sessions on a couch and everything. He used to face Laurence’s formidable bookshelf and wonder, since Laurence used to say virtually nothing, whether the solution to how he felt could be found in any of them. His hot flushes: could they be sorted by Bruno Bettelheim’s The Art of the Obvious? The suffocating tightness in his throat: would there be something on that in Separated Attachments and Sexual Aliveness by Susie Orbach? The raised, banging heartbeat: any joy in Self in Relationships: Perspectives on Family Therapy From Developmental Psychology, edited by Astri Johnsen and Vigdis Wie Torsteinsson? When, having given up on prompting a response from Laurence, the sessions would fall into silence, the name Vigdis Wie Torsteinsson would sometimes rotate at high speed in Harvey’s head – Vigdis Wie Torsteinsson Vigdis Wie Torsteinsson Vigdis Wie Torsteinsson Vigdis Wie – until he wanted to scream. This tic had also happened to him on other occasions with the names Benedict Cumberbatch, Barack Obama, Tiscali broadband and the phrase ‘Apples, hazelnuts, sultanas, raisins, coconut, bananas’.

4. Adrienne Samson, the sixty-three-year-old Kleinian. Their sessions were somewhat overshadowed by the death, halfway through their time together, of Harvey’s mother. Joan had always been powered by rage, a magnificent, sometimes inspiring rage, but then came the great forgetting, the neurological airbrushing, of Alzheimer’s, which meant that she forgot what it was she was angry about. Harvey never quite realized how much he felt for his mother until she got ill. When the time came to move her to a residential nursing home in Ashford, and the manageress of the Day Care Centre in London that she had been attending said to him: ‘We’ll miss her: she’s so sparky and fun and interesting – she really perked things up here …’, he found his throat closing and tears of sadness and pride welling in his eyes.

As the disease worsened, Joan imagined that she was still married, and that Harvey, on his visits to the nursing home, was Eli. Eventually, Harvey found it easier just to go along with this idea. The more Harvey accepted the role of Eli, the more Joan was placated: he even bought a pair of glasses exactly like Eli used to wear in the 1960s in order to avoid his mother asking where his glasses had got to. He saw, at these times, even if only through the distorted lens of dementia, a version of something he had no memory of, which perhaps only existed before he was born or when he was very young: his mother happy and in love. He got a sense of what marriage to Eli might have been like before it went bad; he saw peace on her face. He wondered how it would have been – what it would have done, or not done, to him – to have been brought up by a mother like this. The visits were, in a bleak way, blissful.

The leaving of them, however, was not. Every time he said goodbye, Joan would die more than a little. She would panic; then she would get angry. For Harvey, these moments were a weekly microcosm of his parents’ divorce. There was comfort in that at least – that by the time he reached the door of her tiny room, Joan, shouting at him to fuck off and not come back ever, was recognizable once more as the mother he knew. Towards the end, though, this pattern changed. Then, when he left she would only get sad. Once, she asked, with great clarity, ‘Which wife am I again?’ To which it occurred to Harvey to say, the only one, my love, but he found that it felt wrong to lie within the lie, and so simply answered, truthfully, ‘The third.’ Another time, Harvey turned back to say goodbye and she had taken all her clothes off. She did not pose for him in some grotesque sexual way. She simply stood there. It seemed to Harvey a statement of self, of wanting to strip all things away in the hope of being re-seen and re-found. It seemed to him like that for a moment, before he closed his eyes.

Adrienne found much to chew on here. She suggested, more than once, that Harvey taking on the role of Eli in these visits was not something he was doing just to keep his demented mother calm, but that it had an oedipal motivation. She pointed out that he had referred, often, to his mother’s singular beauty when she was young. Harvey, who had only been talking about his mother’s beauty because he thought it might relate to his general over-investment in beauty, and therefore to his wider issues with women, and who found the basic idea that all men unconsciously want to fuck their mother absurd, countered that if the Eli-acting was serving a buried need, it was more likely to be a desire to be like his father, the Great Man he so clearly had not grown up to be. But he didn’t truly believe that either. It was just something he said in therapy, used as he was by now to playing the game. In his heart, he really, really thought he was just doing it to help his dying mother have the version of reality she wanted.

5. Zoe Slater, an EMDR specialist. EMDR, which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, involves a therapist moving his or her finger backwards and forwards while the person with the problem watches it and thinks about their problem. It’s based on the idea that a state similar to REM-sleep is induced by the eye movement, which mollifies the memory of whatever it is that causes the watcher anxiety. It was designed for people with serious post-traumatic stress – rape victims, shell-shocked soldiers – and Harvey, knowing this, felt bad, trying, while following Zoe’s finger, to focus on his narcissistic, ignoble little sexual pain. Plus Zoe was reasonably attractive – certainly for a therapist, who, on both sides of the gender divide, tend to think that facial hair and elasticated waistbands are the very dab – and looking for a long time at her finger would tend to lead Harvey’s mind the wrong way.

6. Dr Anthony Salter. A proper psychiatrist, Harvey’s only one. A very small man – Harvey often wondered if he could legally be classified a midget – Dr Salter seemed to be mainly interested in a tiny, idiosyncratic memory, which was that when Harvey was a young child, and started crying, or being upset about anything, Eli used to say to him: stop hacking a chanik. Harvey had only mentioned this in passing, and explained to his psychiatrist that it was just his father speaking, as he often would, in nonsense language, but Dr Salter came back to it again, and again, as if stop hacking a chanik might be the primary cause of Harvey’s psychic ills; so much so that after a while Harvey felt moved to say to him – although never did – stop hacking a chanik. Dr Salter’s other main proffered solution was to prescribe antidepressants. Harvey would come back after a few weeks, to tell him how the antidepressant hadn’t worked, and he would prescribe another one.

7. Dr Xu. Dr Xu was not an actual psychotherapist, but an acupuncturist and specialist in Chinese massage. Harvey went to him because his depression had become by this time so bodily, so located in his chest and his legs and his skin that he thought only manipulation of his frame could help. He still often thinks that the way to peace is for him to be touched: that if he could have someone permanently stroking him – on his back; on his feet; wherever it is on the body that the reassurance centres lie – his anxiety would be brought under control.

Dr Xu did his best to pull and prick Harvey’s depression out. Harvey wasn’t sure about the underlying ideas of acupuncture – the meridians, the yin and yang organs – but he knew that Karl Marx had said that ‘the only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain’ and, not being prepared to flagellate himself with thorns, wondered if pins in his skin might do the trick. And it worked: in the room. Lying on his back, looking not unlike the bloke out of Hellraiser, he would find himself distracted by the pain out of depression. The skips and jumps of electrical current induced along his muscles by connecting needles did seem to be clearing his system of something; or maybe the cold evidence they presented, that the body is simply a machine, made him feel more positive than usual about the prospect of finding a fix.

It only worked, however, while it was happening. It only worked when the needles were in his flesh. By the time he returned to his house from Dr Xu’s practice in Sevenoaks, a journey of some thirty-five minutes, Harvey would be feeling as anxious as ever. To try and extend the life of the treatment effects, Dr Xu prescribed Harvey some extraordinarily foul-smelling herbs, the drinking of which as tea made him more depressed than ever. Dr Xu did also offer him the odd piece of psychotherapeutic advice, consisting mainly of the not unheard-before imprecation that he should live in the moment. It would be proper to report that Dr Xu did not fall into the stereotype here and tell Harvey that he should rive in the moment: it would be proper but it would not be true. Harvey felt, for a whole host of reasons, that he should not laugh at this, but since Dr Xu, when offering this homily, himself always laughed, as he also did while applying needles, prescribing herbs, walking on Harvey’s back, or offering him the buttons of the Visa machine for payment, it seemed almost rude not to.

Even without the Chinese pronunciation, Harvey has never been keen on the live-in-the-moment thing. He knows people think it is the key to happiness, but it seems to him that he, driven by his physical impulses, lives always in the moment. If he buys a sandwich at 10 a.m., intending to eat it for lunch, he will eat it as soon as he gets back to his house at 10.15. If he feels tired, wherever he is, he falls asleep. If he sits down at his computer intending to spend four hours writing ghost-biography, he will spend three hours and forty-five minutes of that allotted time watching internet pornography. That is what living in his particular moment is: and it has brought him to a depression so severe it feels as if large weights have been sewn onto the inside of his skin.

8. See below.

‘But obviously, I can’t get back in time for the session,’ says Harvey, frantically looking at his watch. The phone call to Dizzy Harris has gone on for over five minutes, and he knows, since he is still unable to remember the fucking pre-dialling number, that it is costing him a fortune in hotel charges. ‘I’m in New York. I can’t leave because my father might die any day. You’re my therapist. Have a fucking heart.’

There was a silence on the other end of the line, a silence that Harvey took to be judgemental. This made him feel furious in two ways: first, because he was being judged – in that particularly infuriating non-reactive therapist’s way – and secondly, because those five seconds of silence just cost him, he reckoned, ten dollars.

‘As you know, Harvey, I’m entirely sympathetic to your situation,’ said Dizzy in his measured burr: Dizzy speaks posh Scottish, an accent that modulates very easily into patronizing. Harvey hates that tone, especially now, when he feels that it is being measured out in small Dickensian piles of his coins. ‘But most of my clients, if not all of them, are in difficult situations emotionally. And they all have to work with me according to the same rules. Which I did explain to you at the beginning.’

Why, thinks Harvey, did I go with this twat? I should have known straight away from the name: what kind of therapist – no, what kind of twat – calls himself Dizzy? Not even as a nickname – Dizzy is his name, or at least he’s made it his name, it’s on his books, the ones forever lined up prominently on his shelves: Psychological Dysfunction and Mental Wellness, by Dizzy Harris. Overcoming Bad Belief by Dizzy Harris. Beyond Anxiety Disorder by Dizzy Yes That’s Right You Heard Me Dizzy Harris. Dizzy calling himself Dizzy is all part of what’s wrong with Dizzy, which is that he is a self-styled colourful character, the type of person who might wear a multi-coloured waistcoat, although in his case he announces his colourfulness by wearing, for the sessions, a velvet smoking jacket and bow tie. For the first session the bow tie was at least matching; but latterly he has greeted Harvey at the door of his west London consulting rooms wearing one that has been striped, and another polka-dotted.

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