Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"I thought you did well at Disney?" I said. "Disney is suspect, to my people. But the real killer, lately, is that I feel like a failure in my marriage." "Tell me about it?"

He opened up about his sense of failure in feeling things, especially when his wife asked him what he was feeling. "The other day we were sitting on the beach after a marvelous

picnic lunch. The girls were off with the nanny. We're both feeling good, okay? And Lily turns to me and asks, 'What are you feeling, hon?' Her asking seemed to paralyze me. 1 felt a sense of-I don't know-you'd have to call it a sense of dread, as if I were saying to myself, 'Nothing good can come of my going into this with her, it's just a matter of how bad it will be before it's over. And it will never be over.' "

I laughed at this, and he smiled. "I know," I said, "I've felt that too."

"Really?"

"Oh yeah. What happened then?'

They'd gotten into a terrific fight, ending up with his going off sailing alone, and her going home. Now, suddenly, he and I were working together, on the same team, trying to puzzle out his pain. It felt like we were friends. In my month as a shrink I'd never felt this before. At the end of the session he said he had forgotten to tell me they would be off on vacation for the month of August "We always go to Via Cigno, our house on the Vineyard. Ever since I can recall, every August, Via Cigno. And I mean every. The rituals in WASPdom are carved in stone. August the first, go to Vineyard. Labor Day, come back. Hell could freeze over on August first, and the WASPs would still get to Vineyard Haven." We laughed. "But this year… I don't know." I asked about this year. "He-" He bit his lip, his brow and eyes twisting in jealousy. I realized that he couldn't bring himself even to say the name. "He does August at Wellfleet. She won't be seeing him, but it's just a short ferry ride-"

"Why not do something different?"

"Different?" he asked, as if I'd suggested he do something lethal.

"Sure. Go someplace else, someplace you and Lily love?"

"Genius! Basch, you are un geniol" He laughed, clapped his hands, and let fly with a stream of Italian, voice ringing in that half-dopey, half-tragic lilt, hands pointing and waving like crazy. "Toscana! Our favorite place in the world. We'll rent a villa, with a pool for Hope and Kissy, and cavallil Horses! Ha! I grew up there, honeymooned there. Magnifico! Magnifico psichiatra, magnifico paziente! As Hope says, 'Like awesome!' Ciao ciao!"

He did the Italian hand wave and trotted out. I felt great. His

dread, his feeling a failure in relationship-I'd sometimes felt it too, with Berry. Maybe underneath we were similar? I remembered, then, a day riding the tube in London, as six English schoolboys entered and stood, each in a blazer and jacket and cap and umbrella, and you could see each as his life went on getting more tightly wound up in darker blazers and then dark suits with that dark vest for added tightliness and black hats and black brollies, the years accreting with terrifying certainty, darkening that boyish glitter. Decades on, you couldn't poke a pin underneath that suit, that black. Here, now, with Cherokee, we were starting to undo it. He'd gone out of my office boyish, yes.

Now, as Malik and I walked along toward the Farben, a stream of sensible cars flowed past us: mostly Volvos, Saabs, and those big American babies shaped like coffins. These safe, solid cars moved along in an orderly flow, most containing a man in a suit. One curly-haired little man in a big black Caddy turned out to be a honking, waving Schlomo Dove heading for vacation on the Cape, his bumper sticker reading: I'D RATHER BE IN THERAPY. Here were the "talk therapists" of Misery, each having finished their six o'clock at six-fifty, heading home in their safe cars to their thought-to-be-safe first wives and even-less-safe second wives and safe-but-perplexed children suffering from what Malik said was a disease called the "analyst's child syndrome."

With the exodus of the doctors came the liberation of the patients. Barred from the cafeteria during lunchtime, the patients were heading for chow in groups of about a dozen, each hall of Misery herded along across the broad perfect lawns by a mental health worker, the frozen trudge or shuffle signifying the dose and overdose of drugs, as well as diagnosis, which came last. Malik pointed out to me the hopping, skipping manics, the herds of trudging depres-sives, the paranoids darting and peering, tree to tree, the schizophrenics seeing in each bush a bear, in each dusky cloud a closet, the psychopaths trying to hustle the eager-to-be-hustled hysterics-even a rare agoraphobe, squinching down like a soldier running crazily to make the next foxhole. The group from the Child Unit was particularly heart-wrenching, the kids in bright colors in one long linked chain, a many-colored crocodile, the last segments limping along

spastically, trying to keep up. When the doctors went safely home to supper, Misery changed for the brighter and the wilder.

The weather too was changing. Ever since my arrival the Misery air had been that heavy, damp, polluted gunk that makes your lungs act like dehumidifiers and your head like the collecting tank. Now the sky was uneasy, with small bruises far off to the northwest where a first edge of the cold front sliding down from Canada was encountering the fat, couched heat from the Gulf of Mexico, billowing up over the south face of the mountains, clouding the shimmer on the oblong lake. The day, darkening as it went, seemed filled with portent. We entered the Farben. Malik tapped on the bulletproof glass protecting the operator, Viv. She buzzed us in. Viv was a short plump woman of fifty with gray-blond hair in a beehive perched on her head, and blue eyes under plucked brows. Her voice-all clackety and tough-suggested a tenacious, working-class background. I liked her at once. She was just back from her vacation.

"Roy? Like Roy Rogers? Mind if I call you 'Cowboy'? It's not every day a woman like me is given French pastries by a handsome young doctor. Is he like you, Lucky?"

"Not yet," said "Lucky" Leonard Malik, "but he has potential."

"The human potential movement is one of my absolute favorites," Viv said. The switchboard squawked, a frantic voice asking to speak to the Doctor on Call, me. Viv put the caller on loudspeaker. With one eye on us she asked a few questions, found out that the caller already had a therapist but was hesitant to call him at home. "Doll, you're paying good money for his time-you call him right now, 'kay? Tell 'im Viv at Misery toldja to do it." A few more interchanges and the caller, calmed, hung up.

"Genius, Basch," Malik said, "genius. Did you catch it? I mean the first question you ask in the psychiatric interview?" "The first question is, 'Tell me, how are things?5 " "Nope. The first question is, 'What is your insurance coverage?' "

"Didja tell this cowboy to be nice to me?" Viv asked coyly. "Viv is the night operator. She screens all calls. This magnificent woman is all that stands between you and the mass of

Great Americans seeing TV ads saying 'Unhappy? If so, if you want to feel better, dial 1-800-2MI-SERY.' Viv is your guardian angel. You promise to treat her accordingly?"

"I do."

"I hereby pronounce you man and operator."

We sat chatting in the bulletproof back room. Viv and I ate pastries, Malik broccoli.

"Broccoli?" I asked.

"Antioxidants. Best protection against prostate cancer."

"Uh-huh. And just where is it you put the broccoli?"

"Ooo-wee!" Viv cried out. "That can hurt!"

"You laugh," Malik said, "but you don't know shit. Let's talk organic, let's talk leafy greens."

Like many athletes, Malik was meticulous about what he put into his body. Now he waxed poetic about wax beans and soy nuts, kohlrabi and kale, and cabbage, red and white. He claimed to be able to actually taste the pesticides in nonor-ganically grown fruits and vegetables, and challenged us to test him. Vegetables were mostly revolting to me, and I soon tuned out.