Desolately, Maya flipped back to the preface. There she was heartened to read Bender’s observation that family issues did not receive a separate section because you couldn’t get very far in any of the listed subjects without touching on family. “There is no life without family — just as there is no malady without family,” Bender observed tartly. This set him off on a wistful recollection of Tolstoy’s eternal maxim about unhappy families from Anna Karenina, an elegant transition to the first section. Maya flipped closed the book. What explained the universe’s obsession with this novel? She had cracked its stiff cardboard spine at last in tenth grade with an excitement exceeding her first sexual congress (which had taken place not many months before). What followed described the sexual congress as welclass="underline" confusion and then disappointment. Why would a woman like Karenina fall in love with a man like Vronsky? He was handsome, apparently, though Tolstoy did not make him transcendently so; other than that, it wasn’t clear what he had in his favor. And Maya had heard the phrase “a woman like Karenina” many times before she wondered what was so special about Karenina herself, her endless mooning and splashing of hands. The whole setup felt provincial, long-winded, tiresome.
She looked at Alex, but he had closed his eyes and leaned his head against the wall. She opened the book once again. Here and there, Bender’s discussion was leavened by lovely turns of phrase of which she had not imagined the therapist capable. “The husband and wife are the long conversation,” she saw on one page. On another, he referred to immigration as the “cold shower of a new life.” In the celebrity section, which turned out to be a section on celebrity scandals, Bender dispensed with Bill Clinton’s indiscretions in one sentence—“I did not vote for him”—before settling into the subject that truly held him: the Kennedys. And it was here that Maya began to glimpse the logic behind the approach Bender was, quite possibly, employing on her son at that very moment. For Bender, the Kennedy curse was nothing more mysterious than a series of sons buckling under the obligation to live up to their forefathers. “It often happens in families,” Maya read with a chill, “where children are passively and obediently doing what their parents want without their own understanding.” To think, stamp-sized JFK Jr. saluting his father’s coffin with a stoic expression because Jackie O had explained that Kennedys don’t cry! “Perhaps it would have been better if he had cried!” Bender shrieked uselessly into the abyss of the young martyr’s memory. “He even did not want to take his last fatal flight,” Bender insisted, pointing out that the young Übermensch was an Untermensch pilot. “His wife wanted that,” the section’s last line tolled like the bell of a graveyard. Maya saw Bender shaking his head as he walked off the stage.
Was Max obeying his parents against his will? (And what did his will want? to eat grass?) Maya was not heartened by this theory, but she was lifted, at least, by the arrival of some theory. Until this emergency circumstance, the Rubins — and now Maya counted herself among them — had regarded psychology as the province of lunatics and emotional diddlers, but in actuality it seemed full of ideas, and relatively normal human beings trying to arrive at answers to formidable questions. Maya felt a new fondness for Bender. However, this impression was dispelled by the author’s presentation of another case study, involving a young man only a handful of years older than Max — Sam. Sam’s problem was that he had not asked to be brought to America, but had been, at an impressionable age, and the shocking unfamiliarity of what he encountered, coupled with his voicelessness in the matter, spurred him into a violent seesaw between quasi-autistic withdrawal into Russian books and music (increasingly dark) and bouts of rage and destruction of American property. Until he sat down for a talk with psychologist Bender.
“‘It is we who came to the Americans, not them to us,’ very carefully I was telling Sam,” Bender relayed. He expanded his vista: “Pioneers of new lands did not have culture shock, because first of all, they were not passive! They were realizing clearly that they were going to another world. And they were acting: either attacking or being attacked. They felt themselves the seekers, not the victims of new circumstances.” Bender relayed from his own history: “I remember how one of our first American friends liked to say: ‘I have only one life, but you, two.’ Both of them must be settled inside us, I told Sam, making us twice happier.”
Was the doctor proposing the opposite of what he had suggested by JFK Jr.’s experience? The young Kennedy had been ruined by assimilating too much the circumstances he was brought into; Sam, on the other hand, had to dive into them in order to save himself. (Dive he did, “very carefully taking the first steps in his new life,” according to Bender’s humble postscript.) Or was Maya, due to her inexperience, failing to understand that there was no contradiction at all?
Dejected, Maya looked at Alex again, but he was still trying to pretend he was not there, his eyes closed and his arms crossed at his chest. Bella, who turned to face Maya every several minutes to propose the taking of coffee (upturned pinky, inquiring expression), was blissfully fixed on her computer screen. Maya felt vastly alone. She had the impression that outside the drawn shades of Bender’s office existed a pure nothingness; she would open the front door of the converted ranch home and find beyond the aluminum-stamped steps a clean void. Inside, all resembled an ordinary doctor’s office on Skyline Extension; out there, the opalescent deep. Maya coughed out a noise of self-ridicule, drawing a solicitous stare and a pinky from Bella.
Maya’s stomach roiled. The void was also inside her. What a sentiment. Perhaps one did not even have to pay Bender; one could simply visit his reception room, whereupon the premises would confer a measure of enlightened unease. But then imagine what paying treatment might do, Maya thought, excitement returning to her; once again, she touched the hope that Max would emerge from Bender’s office cured rather than baffled. Maya sensed that she had been short on such hope, and this was the reason a quarry was going off inside her stomach. That, and the parade of insights, or at least possibilities, that was besieging her. She felt slightly high.
At the end of Bender’s opus, Maya found a third diagnosis of Max’s condition, though initially she disliked drawing lessons from the section on homosexuality. Citing the stories of homosexuals such as — here Bender committed a slight Freudian slip of his own—“the world-renounced dancer gay Nureyev,” Bender posited that rather than some kind of genetic destiny, homosexuality was either a rebellion against female liberation or a response to rejection. (Eleanor Roosevelt doted on her husband, but after he spurned her, what was she to do?) The next paragraph stopped Maya: “We must not forget that God created male Adam and female Eve. He did not create two gays or two lesbians. We are living in an open democratic society, not to tolerate any power over us. But we cannot say the same about power of the rules of Life!” In other words, genes are not a democracy. What had been written in JFK Jr.’s genes? In Sam’s? In Max’s? In her own? And was that what mattered, then, rather than resisting or welcoming circumstance? Maya wanted to ask Bender, though she felt the words would not form coherently if she spoke them out loud. She flipped to the end of the book. The back cover offered a glimpse of the author himself gazing solemnly into a mirror, the toll extracted by his emissions (their echo so disproportionate to their meager span of ninety-five pages) hooding his eyes — the greenhorn of the front cover transformed.