Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

The sudden sight of the two people standing there had made my mind flash on the black-and-white photo that A. K. Lowell had on her desk, which I'd seen the night I'd gone there for dinner, after tennis. A.K., in a summer dress, was standing beside Schlomo Dove. She was taller. His arm was around her. Ike White was standing farther off to one side. Schlomo had been A.K.'s training analyst at the Freudian Institute. Schlomo

had been Ike's training analyst too. A.K. had had a six-yearlong analysis with Schlomo, five days a week. Ike too. Like Lily and Zoe, in the photo A.K. was young and tall and slender. Her nose was still big and bent, but soon to be straightened. Her light brown hair was short.

"Schlomo must have been screwing her too," I said. "During her analysis with him. She's the perfect victim for us-impeccable credentials, and she must have taken notes during her analysis, about everything that went on. And she's tough. No one could rattle her on the witness stand."

"But she'd never admit it."

"I can force her."

"You have proof?"

"I might. That's why we're heading back."

As we drove back down from the mountains, we felt more connected than we'd been in a year. Over and over in my mind I saw that black-and-white photo of the three of them-a smiling Schlomo with his arm around a tentatively smiling young Jewish woman in a summer dress, and there, apart a little, with a pained look on his face, little Isaac White.

OLY JOE'S LEDGER was still in the false ceiling above my chandelier. We took it down, turned the light up, lay back together against the headboard of the bed, and started reading.

There were hundreds of pages divided by that vertical line. The right-hand side was lurid and crude. "I suck your sweet boy's cock till you come," was pretty regular. "When I feel your little boy's cock rip at my asshole my clit gets big as a dick," was not atypical.

"Do you believe this?" I asked Berry.

"It's sickening."

"Uh-ohhh. Here it is. Listen." I read, " 'Sucking your cock isn't like sucking Poppa Schlomo's 'cause his is shorter and thicker and he can be sucked a lot longer before he gets off.' "

I looked up at Berry. Her eyes showed her revulsion.

"But would you actually make that public?" Berry asked.

"Her thinking I would might be enough."

'To make her go public? And ruin her reputation?"

"Ruining Schlomo's might save hers. And she and Ike were best friends. There's a limit, isn't there, even if someone's been psychoanalyzed? Maybe if she smelled blood in the

water, if she knew there were two other victims filing suit, she just might take the chance. It might never have to be made public at all, if Schlomo sees the light. It would never come to trial. Gilda says these things never do. If it gets close, they settle out of court. It all comes down to money." "You're forgetting one thing."

"Which is?"

"She's an analyst. She can claim it was all fantasy, all in her mind. Her countertransference to him."

"Yeah, except for what Oly Joe wrote, in blood."

Reading the entire volume, I found many other passages where A.K., using the powerful tools of psychoanalysis, free-associated from Oly Joe's penis to Schlomo Dove's penis. The descriptions of what went on between A.K. and Schlomo-his "you buy the condoms," the Ziploc bag-matched what Lily and Zoe reported. There was a passage that at first seemed to defy physical possibility, which had Schlomo masturbating her with an unripe banana while she performed fellatio on him. And there were several detailed descriptions of the geography of the Schlomo Dove penis.

First thing the next morning, I drove to my neighborhood L'il Peach convenience store and photocopied several of these pages. Then I drove to the nearest Rank Bank and opened a safe-deposit box and left the ledger there. At ten minutes before the hour I called A.K.'s secretary Nancy. I said I had an urgent matter to take up with A.K. and needed an appointment that day.

"She's just breaking from her nine o'clock. I'll ask her." She put me on hold. She brought me back. "She will not see you."

"When can she see me?"

"I'll put you on hold." She put me on hold, then came back. "Roy?"

"Yeah?"

"She says 'never.'"

"Fine," I said. 'Tell her I'll be right over."

I went down the hill from the Farben to Thoreau and sat outside her office. At ten-fifty the door opened. Out came some poor bastard, rail-thin and pale as a pustule, all dressed up in a three-piece suit like A.K.'s, looking as if he'd just spent fifty minutes with a demon. I walked in and stood in front of

her desk. She was doing her crossword on the rail-thin pale guy, but she stopped and stared up at me.

"It is in your interest to talk to me." Silence. 'Two women who have had Schlomo Dove as their therapist are about to sue him for sexual abuse. He was fucking them during their analyses." Silence. "I know that you too were a victim of his abuse." I thought I caught the slightest hint of movement, a clench of her jaw, but it might have been a play of sun across the skylight, or a bird. "I know from your ledger on Oly Joe. I have the ledger in my possession, locked up tight." I held out one photocopied page. She did not take it. I placed it carefully on her desk.

Seeing her sitting there so alone, so trapped in her mutilated mind, seeing her muscular body and surgically remodeled nose, I felt for her. How sad it all was. But sad as I might have been for her, I was more sad for Cherokee and the gunshot that in a single moment had put a curse on his two young children, and had started a chain of suffering that would echo down through not only their whole lives, but the lives of their children, and their children's children. Outrage swept away my sadness for her.

"I would hate to have to make these notes public," I went on. "If you decide to come forward, as a Schlomo victim, I wouldn't have to, would I?"

A.K. picked up a pencil and held it, eraser down, on the desk. I had never seen this before from her, her holding a pencil vertically, point up, and was encouraged.

"Why, it might never need to be made public at all. Your contacting Schlomo might be enough to scare him off."

The eraser tapped on the desk, once, twice, silently. I could have sworn I saw the sharp point tremble, a breath caught in all this desiccation.

"It's Monday. I'll give you till five o'clock Friday to make up your mind."

Often in the past I had walked out of that vile office feeling like so much deadweight. Now I walked out feeling light.

Twenty-one

A.K. REMAINED SILENT, day after day, all that week. I told Hannah and Henry about the ledger, and swore them to secrecy. As the week went on, I was preoccupied with what was going on with A.K. She faced an impossible choice. I felt some sympathy for her. I recalled Viv and Primo telling me that as a first-year resident in Misery, before she'd gone under analysis with Schlomo, as Aliyah K. Lowenschteiner, she'd been a bright, young, fun-loving, and funny woman. Her nickname, Viv had told me, was "Sunny." Descended from a long line of eminent kosher butchers, not only had she been the first in her family to go to college and med school, but through sheer gutsiness she'd risen to the top of every class, and had gotten admitted into Freudian heaven, the institute. Then one day, she'd gone to the head of the institute, a man analyzed by Freud himself, and, expecting to be matched with a lesser analyst, walked out instead matched with Dr. Schlomo Dove himself. Imagine her joy. She had it made.

I saw how that moment of what she must have seen as her greatest success was in fact the moment of her downfall. She was doomed. Could she have done otherwise? Could she at any moment have stopped? Before the nose job? Before the first touch? Before the first fuck? Before the first banana? I too had felt Schlomo's mesmerizing power. When I'd gone to him to confront him about his abusing Zoe, he'd overpowered me, shamed me, made me doubt my own eyes and ears. To be with that monster five times a week? Who could resist doing what he told you to do, especially when he said it was necessary for the success of the analysis? I saw, then, that Schlomo wasn't even primarily into sex. This was about power. This was rape. Schlomo was a classic rapist.