Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

Errol handed it to him. Chests puffed like chickens, he and Win left.

Malik took the pills from Nurse Hall and threw them into the garbage. He tore the lavender consent form into confetti and threw it into the garbage too. "We already got one drug treatment worse than the disease," he said, "why go for two? It's the NPT-the Nobel Prize Technique. Mention the possibility of the Nobel Prize and they go limp. Won't hear anything you say for five minutes. Everybody go home."

'To my husbandT' Hannah said. Six months earlier, after her analyst had discovered healthy narcissism and moved to L.A., she'd impulsively married Billy ben Lube, a Lubav-itcher Hasid, in a ceremony with a cast of thousands in Brooklyn. She had confided in me that the marriage was not going well.

"You can stay at my place tonight, Hannah," I said. She said she might, though I didn't believe she would.

My exhaustion-induced fuzziness had gotten even more fuzzy, and a while later I found myself pacing up and down in front of my secretary Nancy, saying, "I'm not normal."

"Oh come on, Dr. Basch, you are so normal."

"Not so normal," I said, transfixed by her vaccination mark, lying like a flattened flower, say a white poppy, on her bronze deltoid. "Call me Roy."

The phone rang. Nancy handed it to me.

"Dr. Basch," a voice said, "this is Christine. Your patient?"

"Oh fa!"

"What's wrong?'

"Why nothing, nothing, what's wrong with you?"

"I didn't say there was anything wrong yet."

"Are you okay?"

"No. But I would like to see you next week."

"Great." We set a time, and hung up.

"Of course she called," Malik was saying out on the lawn after I'd signed out. He was in shorts and a new LAMBS T-shirt, getting ready for a game of tennis with Mr. K., finishing an organic radicchio, and drinking coffee from a styrofoam cup.

"How'd you know?" He started juggling three orange Day-Glo tennis balls.

"She saw that your following her down to the tennis court was dumb for a shrink but basically human. Her feeling your caring helped keep her alive. Zoe too. She's the real suicide risk. She's gonna be tough. But if we can just stop acting like doctors, then they stop acting like patients, and things move. The potential in humans is amazing! An incredible mystery of nature!"

"Yeah, well right now I'm not into the incredible mysteries of nature."

He laughed. "Sorry, I get carried away. You did good. Go home."

I didn't move. Feeling exhausted and confused, I was reluctant to leave him yet. He noticed, and asked me what was the matter. "I'm feeling a little lost."

" 'Course you're lost, you're finding your way. It's called 'learning.' We all used to do a lot of it as kids."

"But can't you give me something to take home with me?'

"Hey, good asking! Listen close: stay on the side of the angels."

"Angels? You're crazy!"

"Y'gotta be crazy to do this, 'n' you gotta be deft. Like in sportsl"

"Wait. Why'd you stay with me last night? You didn't have to."

"Gotta show ya what I understand."

"Okay, red-hot, what do you understand?"

"I understand 'psychiatrist' in Greek means 'Healer of the life-breath, the spirit.' And that maturity is a topspin backhand. Catchu later."

"But if shrinks specialize in their defects, what do you specialize in?"

"I'm eclectic."

"No defects?" He was doing jumping jacks, raring to go, and said nothing. I pointed to the styrofoam coffee cup. "Want me to throw that away?"

"Away? Cowboy, Cowboy-you still think there's an 'away'?"

"INTO THE GARBAGE?" Berry asked, amazed. "This Malik seems a little strange."

"Who isn't?"

It was later that night and I was lying naked on my bed in the seven-sided turret of my loft. I watched Berry reach around and unhook her bra and then shrug her shoulders to let the loops drop and free up her breasts, and my exhaustion was overcome by excitement. I thanked God that after all our years together our sensuality was still somehow mostly new. She quickly slithered down her panties and feigning modesty covered herself as best she could and lay down beside me, my kishkees echoing to that thick lush black triangle, a furry

pillow for my cheek. Side-by-side skin-beside-skin, the air lush with her perfume which called up our time in France the Dordogne the previous summer tonight maybe even the anniversary of same the cemetery high above our hill village and river valley the headstones strewn with wildflowers wild poppies roses daisies, and the air tonight tingling with imagination, it was thrilling and I wanted it to last as long as death. I knew I was idealizing her and part of that was sexual but if an exhausted burnt-out man can't idealize a woman sometimes what is there to live for?

And so Berry and I lay side by side and naked in bed in the hot silky night, staring out the five windows of the turret, listening to the sounds of a suburban summer evening: TVs, marital strife, kids, cars, and the last malignant shrieks of power tools of many sorts.

"How was your day?" I asked.

"Great. I just love being with these four-year-olds, it brings it all back-childhood, the energy, the incredible curiosity! And they're so funny! This one little girl, Katie, she's so smart and she thinks she knows everything, and she was going on and on about something so I said to her, 'Katie, you're per-severating,' and she looks at me and says, 'Yeah, I know.' "

We laughed, but the laughter was shaded by our failure, two years before, to conceive. We'd even gone to a doctor-me, to a doctor! — but nothing abnormal was ever found. We'd stopped trying. We were living with the shadow.

"Sounds wonderful," I said, "being with normal little kids."

"The two things they learn in school are how to eat 'snack,' and how not to share. But they're so sweet!" She sang, "Will and Eva go wash your hands, Will and Eva go wash your hands, Will and Eva go wash your hands, ride, Sugar, ride!"

"Sweet, yeah," I said, trying to hide my cynicism, after having had my hands in slit wrists and my face in borderline rage for the past thirty-six hours.

"Okay, okay," she said, picking up on it-she could read me better than anyone in the world; she had that same sixth sense about me that Malik had about everyone. "Let's have it. YourdayT

I told her about Malik, about how he seemed to respond to what you said by putting a spin on things the reverse of what you'd expect, and how, as I kept telling him I didn't know

what I was doing as a shrink, he kept telling me that my not knowing was terrific and to keep on not knowing for as long as I possibly could.

"At least," Berry said, "this Malik isn't accepting the Misery version of what's 'normal.' He sounds like he's been hurt pretty badly too."

"You're right." I told her about his being an alcoholic. My fingers were on the nape of her neck, caressing from the nuchal line of the occiput, along the trapezius, onto the deltoid insertion.

Berry sighed, and asked, "Where are you about Ike White's suicide?"

I stiffened. "Please, not now. I didn't really know him."

Outside, a siren wailed. We listened it down into silence. Crickets filled the vacuum, edging the silence with cellolike chirps.

"But you respected him a lot. Just tell me what you feel."

I froze. "I don't know."

"I know you know, hon. You can talk to me about it, it's okay." But it wasn't and I couldn't and said nothing. "Oh boy," she went on, shaking her head, "you've got that 'I work in mental illness' look. That's the way I used to look, trying so hard to make it in psychology, remember? It's so different now, so much easier, being on the opposing team."

"Opposing?"

"Mental health."

"Oh. Yeah."

"Can you talk at all?"

"I'm wiped out, fresh out of feeling, for today." I stroked her breast.