Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

CHEROKEE HAD CANCELED several times. Each time, he'd left a message, in pleasant tones, that he was too busy and things were going well. I felt bad, for I liked him and felt that in our two meetings when he was in crisis we'd really

connected. I figured that given his WASPdom, where any opening up is followed by a more harsh closing down, he was ashamed to see me again and had, to use Zoe's phrase, "gone back into his Happy Box." Later that week when he walked into my office all tan and fit and relaxed and aglow from having healthy horses under him all summer, I smiled, as did he. Like old friends catching up, we began chatting.

Italy for him had been "transforming," bringing back childhood memories of living there from age seven to fourteen while his father was in the American diplomatic corps. His Italian had come back easily, the underpinning grammar snapping up the remembered words. The beauty had been overpowering.

"One night in Tuscany we took a walk in a field, and suddenly there were fireflies! Hundreds of fireflies-lucciole- like shooting stars in the dark field, just as in my childhood! It was so exquisitely beautiful!" He sighed. "Where are they now? Did you see a single firefly this summer? Even one?"

With surprise, I realized I had not. "No."

"No, they're gone from here. Compared to Italy, we live in a dump."

He talked about his childhood in Rome, summering near Siena, his brilliant, reserved, diplomat father, whom he loved terrifically until his slow death a few years before; and his stern, crazed mother, whose life in Roman society circles had ended abruptly with the family's transfer back to the States, now a recluse in Sun Valley, Idaho, never having seen her grandchildren.

"Narrowness of mind," he said, "seems a Putnam family trait."

"Except for your name. Where'd it come from?"

He lit up and with transforming animation told me that it came from a great-grandfather, Honor Putnam, a descendant of the brothers John and Thomas Putnam, two of the elite of Salem, Massachusetts, villains of the Salem witch trials. It turned out that Honor, having taken part in the massacre and resettlement of the Cherokees from their home in the Appalachians to the reservations in Oklahoma, had a vision of the hell he might face and named his next-born son Cherokee. "I'm actually Cherokee Putnam the third," he now said, "and for a while people called me 'Trey.' Never met Honor, of course. Funny, I dream of him, sometimes."

He fell silent. There was a sense of peace in my small office under the eaves. Yet I was troubled. But for his enthusiasm for the fireflies, there had been no feeling, no affect, in anything he'd said. It felt surface level, phony. The sense of peace turned to a sense of stalling, like when engines cut out on a small plane. Our time was almost up and there had been no mention of Lily.

"So what's going on with your wife?"

"Oh, things are better now. I feel a bit sheepish, actually, getting so upset. I think we can stop these meetings. Thanks for all your good help." Pleasantly he talked about the resurrection of his sex life with Lily. The rift in Italy had provoked a cliff-edge despair in both of them that bad \e5 to the most romantic of reconciliations, a long weekend "sans enfants" at a hotel called the Summerhouse in Nantucket, a weathered mansion overgrown with roses, fireplaces, and moonlight on the Indian summer pacific Atlantic, and lovemaking to the sunrise. "I just wanted to stop by and say so long and thanks."

You'd think I'd' ve been happy for him, and shaken his hand and said, Good work and good luck, but no. It all seemed too nice, especially given the vulgarity of Schlomo. After weeks of Heiler I could not help but hear, in his "things are better," the negative, and said, "So things are worse?"

"No, no, Basch, I said things are better."

"Are you sure?"

He paused. "Yes, I'm sure. That first weekend in Nantucket she was hotter than she ever was with me before, and it's kept on since. She's been an animal. Almost like analysis with… with him has freed her up." "Him?"

A shifting in his seat, a chagrin on his face. "You know who."

"You won't say his name?" He stared at me. I could sense anger there, maybe even a borderlinelike rage, and felt that if I could just get to it with him, we could get to the reality, break open that narrowness of mind, yes. "What about her underwear?"

His jaw clenched. "She had… a red garter belt."

1 "A red garter belt?" He looked at me suspiciously. "What the hell are you implying?"

"You angry?"

"No, I'm not angry, I'm wondering what you're trying to do here."

"I'd be angry, if it were me."

We stared at each other, his beautiful blue eyes narrowing, as if looking out from a cottage into a sunset turned harsh. Then he abruptly got up and left.

I felt a hit of dismay and rose to go after him, but it was as if I felt Heiler holding me back, warning me not to blow it. I opened the door and looked down the hall. He was striding away, gesturing to himself. Suddenly he slammed the wall in fury with a clenched hand. What the hell had gotten into me? I was going to lose him! I took a step out into the hallway, feeling guilty that I had provoked him, that I'd driven him away, that he wouldn't be back.

PROVOCATION, Blair had chalked on the board the other day, = ENTICEMENT.

Bullshit, I thought, but immediately came a second thought, that in fact a few simple questions from me had tilted us from pleasantries to connection, from well-bred niceties to rage and suspicion. He had gotten angry, and he was really there. Sadly, I sat back down. One or two tiny comments from me, and his paranoia and rage-all that Latent Negative Transference toward me-had blossomed. Maybe he was a BPO. BPO with GE-Gorgeous Eyes. The Borderline Theory said that soon Negative would rum Positive, and he would heal.

"WHAT'S THATT BERRY asked, grabbing me by both ears, so my head felt like a jug held by its handles. It was a few days later, and we were naked in my turret, making love.

"What's what?"

"What you're doing. Grunting like an animal, using dirty words."

"That's Krotkey."

"Krotkey?"

"Renaldo Krotkey, the borderline expert. Krotkey came out the other day in the Times saying we don't use enough animal sounds and obscenities in sex."

"Are you crazy?"

Berry and I had been having a rocky time. Our lives were so different, mine with sick adults, hers with happy kids. As

I'd gotten more into Heiler, she'd gotten more guarded. Our flare-ups, for me, were provoked by her astonishing ineptitude with real objects-dropping things, losing things, things flying out of her hands. Berry had grown up with a terror of taking action in the physical realm and this had been transformed into a carelessness that had almost killed us several times as we'd traveled the world. Now her carelessness was merely irritating-she left dishes and coffee cups in the bathroom and piled up in the sink, keys and books and clothes everywhere; her cat, when he visited, habitually vomited in the turret at night, so that I'd sometimes get up and step in squishy cat vomit on my way to the bathroom. Things were rough. Yet we both knew that the rigors of "health care training" didn't last forever.

The phone rang. It was my patient Zoe, calling me at home, again. True to Heiler's prediction, I was paying for not being unlisted. She had gotten in the habit of calling me late at night, screaming at me and refusing to get off the line. This time I'd had it. Berry could overhear the conversation.

"I'm feeling pretty desperate," Zoe said.

"I told you not to call me at home."

"Oh, too good for me, are you?"

"It's not that-

"In the middle of something unusual? Like sex with your wife?"

How do they do it? I asked myself. How do they know? I said, "Why are you calling meT