Dr DeJ – I despise the man! Reasons? Many! For one thing, he’s a selfish lover. Back in the days when we were involved, he was solely interested in his own pleasure and cared not a whit for mine. Oh, he pretended to! He’s quite the actor! But when I complained, he’d twist things around and put the blame on me.
‘Your fault,’ he’d tell me. ‘You’re denying yourself pleasure. Many neurotic women are like that.’
Typical! But what else should I expect from such a Great Psychiatrist!
This was four years ago. We haven’t touched one another since. He’s moved on to other clinic employees – Nora, Noemi, and probably others I don’t even know about.
Not that I care! Let’s be clear about that!
For another thing, the man’s a phony – false right down to his core. I could give you plenty of examples, but I can see you’re really interested in this business with Agnès. Even there he showed himself false. He told her he was keeping her dolls safe for her, that he was concerned that if she left them around, someone would steal one and give it to his kid, and clearly her dolls weren’t meant for kids. Ha!
I know what he did with them. We all knew. He sold them, for quite a pretty penny too, is what I heard. One day Nora’s boyfriend, Hans, searched on the internet and found they were being sold at a Lucerne gallery for tens of thousands of Euros.
He was the Great Docteur DeJonghe d’Ardoye, of high Belgium nobility, trained in Jungian psychoanalytic practice, owner and proprietor of the exclusive Privatklinik DeJonghe. What a hoot! I think the name’s as phony as he is. We all call him Dr DeJ. As for his Jungian training, Nora and I did some research on that. Turns out he was dismissed from the Jung Institute for – guess what? – inappropriate sexual comments and non-consensual touching. Women there regarded him as a serial predator.
So why, you may ask, do we continue to work for an employer for whom we have so little respect? One reason only: he pays better than anyone else on the lake. In return, he expects loyalty and ‘amorous availability.’ I’m sure you know what that means.
So, are we sluts? Some call us that in order to shame us. In truth, we’re keen to see how this charade of his plays out. We await the debacle.
Two things you should know. First, the charges for residential treatment at the clinic are exorbitant, far higher than at comparable facilities. The monthly rate can exceed forty thousand Swiss francs. Can you believe it?
I don’t know what Agnès’s family pays. She’s been there for years, the most senior long-term resident. Her fee arrangement is probably less, perhaps 250,000 Francs per year. What does she get for that? Twice-a-week psychotherapy sessions with the Great Man, customized drug treatment, special macrobiotic diet, lovely two-room suite with a lake view on the second floor of the main chalet, and all the bits and pieces of fabric rags she needs to create those bizarre dolls of hers.
Here’s something else you should know. I have been working there for seven years, and never once in all that time has she had a visitor. Not one! Nurses who’ve been there longer report the same. It’s possible she hasn’t had a visitor in decades! I don’t know the exact number of years she’s been there. All the patient files are locked. Only the Great Doctor can access them. But, yes, decades seems about right. I hear that before she started making the dolls, she did a lot of sketching. There’s a big stack of sketchbooks in one of her closets. I expect they represent many years of work.
She rarely speaks. When she does, it’s usually in a whisper. She doesn’t fraternize with other patients, yet she doesn’t appear to be lonely. She seems to live very much in her own world. I’d describe her as gentle, but then those dolls she makes aren’t gentle at all. She doesn’t require much care from us. She pretty much takes care of herself in terms of dressing, bathing, that sort of thing. Basically, she’s being stored. In certain ways I’d describe Privatklinik DeJonghe as less a psychiatric facility than a place to store difficult people about whose very existences their families would just as soon forget.
But then along came Johnny!
He’s nineteen, still has adolescent spots on his face, is brilliant and also quite disturbed. Like several patients there, he says his family doesn’t care for him. At least he talks about it, which is more than Agnès does. In fact, that boy will talk on and on, even if no one’s listening.
I’m not sure why he started coming on to Agnès. She’s more than twice his age. Now they’re inseparable. This strange, silent American woman, who couldn’t abide the company of anyone, now hangs out a good part of every day with this gay English lad.
None of us can explain it. When I asked Johnny, he shrugged.
‘I like her, plain and simple,’ he told me. ‘Does there always have to be an effing explanation?’
He likes to throw curse words into conversations. He thinks they shock us. They don’t.
Maybe he’s right: there is no way to explain it, except to view them as two lost souls who found one another in the crazy little hot-house world of the clinic.
I’ll tell you something else about Johnny. He’s kind. He feels a lot of pain, I think, on account of rejection by his family. Far as I know, his only visitor has been his older sister. He worships her. Maybe that’s why he’s bonded with Agnès. Even though he’s gay, he likes strong older women. Agnès, being so self-sufficient, could appeal to that need. He told me once that he was ‘honored’ by her acceptance of him. The fact that she opened herself to friendship with him, while rejecting interaction with everyone else, tells him he has value in her eyes. Also, he admires her artwork.
Back to the Great Doctor. He’s got everyone there, including Agnès and Johnny, on serious drug regimes, capsules he has specially made up by a German compounding lab. He claims these drugs are both antidepressant and antipsychotic. When I asked him what was in them, he said it was a custom combination similar to a mix of Zyprexa, Celexa and Tranxilium and a few other things. Sounds nutty to me, but I’m just a psychiatric nurse.
I don’t know where things are going with Agnès. I’ve detected changes in her since she’s gotten close to Johnny. There’s something conspiratorial about them of late – whisperings and knowing glances, that sort of thing. Dr DeJ has noticed too. He’s asked me about it several times. ‘I have a feeling they’re cooking something up,’ he said. ‘Any idea what it could be?’
I shrug. Even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell him. We’ll just have to see, won’t we? Personally, I think it would be good if they did cook something up and actually saw it through …