Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"I do. Like an underdog is appealing." "Exactly. But then I start thinking that if I, given all the reasons to hate him, if / can like him, doesn't that mean that there's something there that she could like, even love? I mean if he's human, she could fall for him, right?" I nodded, having gone through these same thought processes myself, about Schlomo. "But then again, he's so goddamn human, so up front about who he is and what he's Eke, it's like… like looking at a hot pastrami sandwich or something-what you see is what you get-the meat, those little specks of spices, the mustard, the kaiser roll-you look in those ink-dot little eyes in that wide-open mess of a face, with no trace, not the slightest trace of duplicity-and believe me, I've spent my life in my family and in lawyering dealing with duplicity-and you figure there's no way he can be lying to you… especially about sticking his pitiful little pecker into your wife! But then, that thought brings up the opposite-what a perfect body and face and demeanor for a lie! It's mind-boggling! I don't know what to think now. But the guy's a charmer, I'll give him that." A charmer he was. Schlomo had done his number on Cherokee, as he'd recently been doing on me. After our meeting when he'd thrown the cigar into my crotch, and before I'd had a chance to send him the bill, his tailor had shown up at my office door. Reginald was his name and gaiety was his game, not only in terms of homosexuality but also in terms of manner. He was as neat and perfumed as Schlomo was sloppy, as glancingly funny as Schlomo was blunt. Caricaturing a gay tailor measuring a straight man for a suit, he measured me for a suit-the tape-touch on the inner thigh first a challenge of denial and then a hoopla of giggles, reminding me of my parents dragging me down to a cousin in the garment district for a wholesale bar mitzvah straitjacket in dark wool-and then brought out thick books carpeted with swatches of fabric in a myriad of textures, patterns, and hues, telling me his life story and then assuring me with fond farewells that I would receive the finished product in no more than one week and that it would fit "perfetto." Sure enough one week later there it was at my office door and I tried it on and it fit perfetto.

Since then Schlomo had been on his best behavior with me, helloing cheerfully from various sectors of the Misery

campus, oily schmoozing with me when we chanced to cross paths on a path or a quad or in a tunnel or a hallway, and flattering me to high heaven through third parties, letting me know in various ways that "Schlomo's door is always open." I'd even attended a few seminars where he'd performed, brilliantly and yet earthily-like a college professor somehow not mummified by academe-up on his tippy-toes in that sloppy grand opera without music or slides or notes or overhead projections or computer printouts, seeming to be telling everyone the down and dirty about psychiatry, including his outrage about the ones neglected by Misery, "the Great Unwashed." He was fascinating, and brilliant-and funny. You had to laugh, first at him, and then, since he was laughing at himself, with him in laughing at himself, and then at a world that had created him and you laughing. Laughing with him, it was hard not to like him. Liking him, it was hard not to believe him. I didn't know what to think anymore.

"So now, I don't know what to think," Cherokee was saying as we were ending the session. "I feel better for having confronted him, and I feel that sex between her and him is absolutely absurd, but his making me feel better worries me more, about him and her."

"You and Lily have to talk about this. But you may not be able to do it alone. I'd be glad to see the two of you together, to try and help."

"Good point," he said enthusiastically. "I'd do it, but I doubt she would. Anyway, it's impossible for a while. We always do Thanksgiving with her family in Philadelphia, and then we always do December in the Alps-Gstaad-and then the Rockies-Aspen. I won't be back until after New Year's." I was disappointed, and must have shown it, for he said, "Hey, don't feel bad, when I come back we'll really get down to work. That little fart opened up some damn good stuff, about Father and me. 'Oedipal,' Schlomo said, 'even for a goy, you got major Oedipal. Go deep. Tell Roy G. Basch I said to go deep, poppa and momma and boychik Cherokee the American Indian prince.' " Cherokee shook his head. "You gotta laugh, right?"

"Gotta. But you wouldn't want to try to meet, even talk on the phone?"

"Hey-you suggested I try 'different' once, and it was

disaster. Why do a different different, and double the disaster?"

"But how can you go on vacation with Lily for six weeks with this hanging over you and she not willing to talk about it? Won't it be unbearable?"

"It's called 'normal.' Father and Mother did it for fifty-one years. In their generation-and all the ones before it-men and women never talked to each other, right? Unless, maybe, it's different with Jews?"

I smiled. "A lotta screaming and crying," I said. "Not much talk."

"So, hotshot, have a fun holiday. See you in the New." "Why don't you keep in touch by phone, or fax or e-mail." "Keep in touch?"

"Check in. I think it would be a good idea. Like weekly?" He thought this over and smiled. "If you need me to, sure." We shook hands. This tune my grip was stronger than his. He winced. "Oh," he said at the door. "When I went back downstairs, that moron, that Future Farmer of America, was still waiting, whistling something from Man of La Mancha. Where do they find these guys anyway?" "Disneyland."

"Ha! Haha! Yes!" We laughed hard, together-that "click." "And you know something, Basch? When I worked there, / did my best to create them! God! Ciao ciao."

He left, leaving a smile still on my face, but as it too left, I was surprised that his afterimage was, for all that wealth and determined good cheer, unpressed, rough-textured, faded from pink, and sad.

BURNING GREEN BEANS filled the air, and then, when Berry rushed to the pan and threw it in the sink and turned on the tap, the sizzle of steam.

We were at Berry's apartment. She'd decided to cook us dinner, a green bean and tofu stir-fry. Ever since we'd gotten back to America, we'd mostly eaten out or done takeout, cultivating a kind of United Nations of restaurants, each of which reminded us of a place we'd been. We'd started the evening guardedly loving, but everything seemed intent on going wrong, much in the way that, when things start to break in a house, the reign of breakage continues until most major fix-it

men have been called. Little things were irritating me: the knot and tangle in the curly phone cord, which, when I picked up the receiver to answer a page from Viv, sent the whole phone crashing to the floor; the piled dishes in the sink and jungle of makeup, tops off, in the bathroom; and finally her cat, a pedigree Russian Blue named Keejer. Berry's family had always had cats and dogs; my family, owing to my father's fear of unanesthetized animals, had had no pets but guppies. The smell of stale cat food and the pieces of cat litter between my bare toes had always been irritating, and now even the cat himself, sitting like a fake cat staring at the kitchen cupboard where Berry said there must have been a loose mouse, the castrated cat himself turning to stare at me with a terrorizing disdain, bothered me. I stared back at him, suddenly understanding that if our sizes were reversed, he would long ago have killed me and eaten me.

Tonight he seemed even more disdainful than usual, and I couldn't help wondering who else he was disdaining, when I wasn't around. Cherokee's suspicion, and my thing with Jill, had made me more suspicious of Berry. I'd said nothing about Jill, nor had Berry about anyone else. I felt torn and in torment, keeping a secret from the woman who'd always been the one to whom I told my secrets. As the evening went on I'd felt-like when you're swimming off the cold coast of New England and suddenly you're embraced by a warm thread unraveling from the sensual weave of the Gulfstream-the twin currents of rising joy and rising sadness, dreams done and dreams deferred. Things between us felt as fragile as nostalgia. Fragile not only from our other hidden lives, but from the gap between her healthy work with kids and my warped work of becoming a shrink.