Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"No, I'm just a little nervous."

"How sweet! How really sweet!"

"Maybe it's the booze."

"Sweet!" She bent and kissed me as she had that first time, all cherry-blossomed and suntan-oiled and with the sweet sorrow of lovers parting, and then she drew slowly away and led my hands to her breasts, and I caressed the tips with my fingers and then my lips and lay back again sighing. She sighed and said with hearty appreciation, "God your lips feel so goodl" and that did it and we did it and it was wild and hot and blond and wet and fantastic.

Walking her back to her house up the street in the moist dark of a moonless night, I felt so appreciative of her, of her frankness and suffering and not needing to psychologize it and of her passion and of the way the pungent wet lace of light

brown hair when it dried had fluffed up like the punk cut on the crown of her head, well, it felt a little like love. We parted with another tender kiss, soft as a baby's cheek, a baby's tongue.

"I never had a martini before," she said sleepily, boozily.

"I love that whirling underwear," I replied boozily, sleepily.

Each into our healthy SELFs, sex-OBJECTs to each other, we parted.

The next Monday afternoon she and I met on Emerson, and she had a few questions: Was I married or engaged or in a relationship? I hesitated. "Hide it and you're dead," she said. So I answered the questions about my relationship with Berry. "You gonna tell her?"

"I don't know." Guilt rushed up, spilled all over. I thought to myself that I'd better not see Jill again, and if so why should I even think of telling Berry? I'd loved Berry for a long time and with a terrific intensity and depth. Things were rocky, but they would smooth out, as they had in a small way in a phone call the night before, at the end of the weekend, although we'd both avoided asking the terrifying question, what we'd each been "busy" with. Jill was new. The sex had been great, our selves big and hot and able to move wetly hard against each other. The love was new, shallow, with little momentum, and could be stopped now with little loss. I said, "I haven't thought about it."

"You better." She sighed. "It's tough for me too. But I've been through the ringer with men, and now with all this other stuff I don't want to get hurt in the near future. I'm really attracted to you."

Despite my feelings about Berry, and realizing that if I wasn't going on with this I'd better not rev it up, I revved it up with the truth, saying, "And I'm attracted to you. Like a damn magnet."

"Yeah. Guys make me feel so frisky about sex. But don't hold your breath. It may never happen again."

"Who said it would?"

She smiled, her eyes sparkling with mischief. Punching me playfully on the deltoid, but so hard that I winced, she said, "Me."

LATE ONE CRISP afternoon in mid-October I sat in my cramped office up under the eaves of Toshiba with Christine, my blond Lady in Black. I would be on call all night long. That morning as I had driven the country road in my old Mustang convertible with the top down, under the pleached arbor of seared red sumac and blared yellow birch, acorns falling amidst the squashed squirrels, I felt angry that I couldn't be out playing in this day so full of chilled hope and possibility but had to be locked up with 350 lunatics. Cherokee hadn't called back, and I found myself thinking that this was not only okay but good, that his Latent Negative Transference toward me was maturing, and that he'd show up again when it was ripe, starting to turn to Latent Positive. Shimmering in and out of possibility was the helpfulness of the Borderline Theory. Not the clearly ridiculous stick figures, no, but rather the idea that, as with a spoiled child, you had to be cruel to be kind. Being nice to borderlines hadn't worked; Heiler firmness had started to.

Autumn was the debut of a series of international borderline meetings. Blair had flown off to Frankfurt for a conference on the psychopathology of immigration into Germany, entitled "Borderline Germans and German Borderlines." He'd left Solini and me in charge of Emerson. Before he left he had done stick figures for us and Hannah, figures and an equation: SELF = POWER. MORE SELF = MORE POWER. Looking down at Henry and me, Blair had said, "Don't be pussies. Just Do It." Clearly Blair's own power in Misery came from a pristine and relentless SELF-Iove.

Since my first session with Christine, when she'd threatened suicide and I'd chased her to the tennis court and she'd said she'd rather talk to a mortician, things had gone well. Using Malik, I'd been more or less human with her. She'd stopped talking about suicide, dumped her boyfriend Rocco, and was taking tennis lessons. I'd asked her why she always dressed in black, as if in mourning.

"I am in mourning. For my father, and for men in general."

"Men in general?" I'd asked.

"My problem is I see the potential in men. I never only see what's there, I see what could be there. In every relationship, I try like hell to help men to fulfill that potential, and I'm always disappointed. Like with you."

By the time Malik had left, she had gotten a lot better, and since she was a lot better, her insurance had started to hassle me. I kept getting calls from a young-sounding woman-a girl, really-her "case manager" in Tulsa who demanded to know increasingly personal details about Christine: Was she having sex with her boyfriend? If she was depressed, why wasn't she on drugs? Couldn't it all be PMS?

On the basis of my answers, the teenybopper in Tulsa would authorize another two sessions at a time. It was infuriating. One day I said to her:

"You're making it impossible for me to do psychotherapy with her."

"Yeah, I know," the girl said, her chewing gum snapping loudly. "We don't like to pay for psychiatrists to talk to people anymore."

"What do you mean?"

"We onny pay psychiatrists to hand out drugs."

"Well, who the hell are people supposed to talk to?"

"Gotta putchu on hold."

I fought; the girl in Tulsa won. Christine's insurance no longer paid for therapy. She paid Misery herself, a reduced fee. If patients knew how much their insurance companies knew about their personal lives-their spouses and children, their sex lives, their finances, everything really-and how all this data was just lying there on big computers available to millions of great Americans, would they allow it? Which is why, Malik said, lawyers never used their insurance to pay for their psychotherapy and insisted no record be kept of their visits-which, of course, was against the law.

Therapy with Christine was hard. She was a fantastic weeper, like my mom. She'd spend the first five minutes sizing me up, and then talk about her newly dead father and other men and start to weep. She would weep for at least the first half hour, two lines of mascara streaking down her cheeks as if in a sad race. Five minutes from the end the weeping would stop, the makeup would be blotted into raccoon eyes and, knowing we had only five minutes left, she would demand to know why I wasn't helping her. Every time she left, she made me feel like a failure. She was my last patient on Tuesday, and the rest of every Tuesday I spent awash in guilt that I had let her down. Tuesday nights were hell.

UD

I'd resisted seeing Christine in terms of the Borderline Theory. It would be like applying Heiler to your child. Yet now, staring at her, a bleached blond Madonna sitting there dressed all in black-from the tip of her black pointy shoes through her black skirt and suit jacket and up to her black beret aslant over her freckled face, encircling her bleached blond hair like a hellish halo, her black mascara and dark lipstick and nail polish, and her legs in black tights not only crossed but recrossed toe-under-ankle-watching her go in an instant from rage to tears and back to rage, it was hard not to notice that she fit many of the Krotkey Factors, hard to resist the idea that here before me was no normal neurotic but a BPO with HF-Hysterical Features-and also with the classic Borderline Sign, BTP-Black Toenail Polish.