Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"And what makes them get better?"

"Onny one thing matters, I mean really."

"Yeah?"

"If they like you."

"You think?"

"I know." She smiled. "They like you, Roy. And so do I."

"It's mutual. You are something else!"

"Nofoolin'."

"But what about Cherokee?"

"That was a very bad tragedy. But you learned from it. Nothin' this whole year taught you as much as him, God bless 'im." She blew her nose, loudly. "So anyways, send me a picher postcard sometimes, willya?"

"I don't know where I'll be."

"You can always call collect."

"How can you stand it here?"

"Somebody's got to, right? What can we do? We can't just walk. Besides," she said, patting her bluish-blond beehive, "women like me are getting in line to inherit the earth. Can I ask you one favor?"

"Anything."

"Can I kiss you?"

I blushed, and my head had barely nodded when I felt her teeth clack against mine-holy moley what an overbite! — and then her lips were on mine, and then to my surprise there was a quick flicker of her tongue on mine.

"Remember, Cowboy. You can always call Misery collect."

MY LADY IN black, Christine, sat with me in my office up in Toshiba late that afternoon. Still Madonna-platinum, she wore a sleeveless black blouse, short black shirt, and black tights

with flowers entwining up toward no-man's-land. Her nails and lips were scarlet. I told her I would be leaving Mount Misery.

"What? How can you do this to me?" she said. "After all this, you leave? What the hell's wrong with you? Why are you doing this?"

I wanted to tell her I'd been fired, but I couldn't. "I'm sorry," I said. "I know it makes you angry-"

"You bet! Unbelievable. I take this very seriously. You don't!"

"I do."

"Yeah, sure. Oh boy. Maybe I've been wrong about you. I mean you kriew how suicidal Cherokee was," she said, her anger rising, "and about his big insurance policies that were coming due. I know you couldn't tell me, but couldn't you have somehow warned me?"

I felt a hit of dread, a snakebite in my gut.

"Well?" She stared at me, wild-eyed. "C'mon-respond?'

Her inflamed anger inflamed my dread. Feeling trapped, I backed away emotionally. Pure dread-old, familiar. Dreadlock.

"Oh God," she said in disgust, tapping a scarlet nail on the arm of the chair.

But then something new happened. All at once I saw this dread so clearly, it began to lessen. For the first time in my life I saw that it was not my psychopathology festering under the enamel of my mind, but merely a fact, called dread. Over and over, through millions of deflections of love, I had learned to become an agent of disconnection, in the name of becoming a man. As women had come toward me in love, I had fled, imagining that I had to do something to win that love. Then I realized: it's not just me, it's all of us men, trying to become champions. We run from the love that is there for the asking, to try to become champions, to win the love we are running from. We men run.

I saw, then, the mean-spiritedness of theories that blamed our mothers or fathers for this. It isn't our mothers or fathers, it's what we learn about preserving the myth of our separate selves by disconnecting from relationships. It's not sick, it's normal. It's all of us normal men caught in the most violent and fragmented time of human history, screwing it up

together. When old men call us "soft" for being too connected, and tell us we need to become more quintessentially male, we follow like sheep. And all the while what we need to do is not become more male, but be more connected. Mutually.

All this shot through my mind in an instant. Seeing it so clearly, as not only about me but about my gender, it seemed to ease and lose its grip on me. The muscles of my neck softened. My shoulders eased down. I breathed. The softening and easing and breathing made me realize how hardened and tight I'd been-I'd actually been holding my breath. Breathing out, I felt a touch of humility. Breathing in, calm. I said:

"Cherokee never told me just how suicidal he was, or about any insurance policies. What did he tell you? Maybe we can understand it, together?" "You didn't know?' "No, I'm sorry to say I didn't" "Did you ask?" "I tried."

'Terrific," she said sarcastically, looking down into her lap. I understood. The issue wasn't me, or her, but us. The "we" in the room, which seemed so solid right then that you could shape it, yet so ephemeral that it was the unseen historical forces shaping you. It wasn't my dread, but merely dread; not her anger, but merely anger. The psychopathology wasn't in her or in me, but in the way that we were meeting. Perhaps there was no such thing as "psychopathology" at all.

My job right then was to hold this "we," this connection with her, hold it for both of us. That was my job as a doctor. To use my experience with others who had suffered and my vision born of that experience to bring someone who is out on the edge of the so-called "sick" into the current of the human. To take what seems foreign in a person and see it as native. This is hearing. This process is what the healing process is. This is what I signed up for, years ago. This is what old Dr. Starbuck in Columbia did, taking care of the town, inviting me into medicine. This is what I had done moonlighting. This is what good doctors do. We are with people at crucial moments in their lives, healing. How hard it had gotten, in these hellish hospitals and institutions encrusted with machines and desiccated hearts and dead

souls, to get back to authentic suffering, authentic healing. How much we have lost.

Now I took on the job happily, even with zest. Holding this "us," this connection, right here right now in this suddenly fine moment. Holding this connection as a father learns to hold not so much a crying baby but the connection with a crying baby, a baby overtired and needing to be held and rocked to sleep, a baby who can sense if the arms around her are constricted with anger and trying to control her, or if the arms are open to merely being there with her. If the arms are angry and controlling, the baby will struggle against sleep no matter how tired she is. If the arms are relaxed and open, she will ease down into the feather down of sleep, yes.

"We've had a hard time, Christine. Can we try, together, to understand?"

She looked up at me. I sensed her seeing the depth of my concern. I felt that "click" of opening that I'd felt with Zoe my first night on call.

Click. I saw Christine see it. I sensed her feeling seen. Despite herself, she smiled.

We began to talk about us, and Cherokee. Talk as good friends might, of a mutual friend. Our words were strung together to help hold us. And then all at once we stopped talking and were still. We sat awhile in stillness.

Thwop! Thwop! The sound of tennis balls being hit, coming through the open window, rising from the tennis court below. The sounds were sweet, full of resilience and bounce, reminding me of hearing, through a stethoscope, a healthy heart. The seasons had come round. We both smiled.

She said, "You know what you did that helped me the most?"

"Followed you down to the tennis court."

"Yeah."

"I felt it was such a dumb thing to do at the time," I said. "What helped you, about my doing that?"

"That it was such a dumb thing to do. It showed you were a person. People don't do smart things all the time, they do dumb things. And you hung hi with me, through all the dumb things we both did, through Cherokee and everything, you hung in with me."

"We hung in together, yes."

She sat still again, her hands hi her lap. "I guess I just don't want to go through life not knowing if I've ever been loved."

She looked up. Our eyes held. "Christine," I said, "you are loved."

In the past she would have cried. Sobbed at the smallest sadness. Now she did not. She smiled, as did I. She asked, "Why are you leaving?"