Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

A neat thin man in a tweedy sport jacket and Woody Allen glasses stopped me, asking, "Are you a doctor?"

My guard went up, like an off-duty pediatrician is on guard around kids.

"Yes."

"My name's Sedders. I think I need admission to the hospital."

I clicked on what I'd learned to be the first question of any psychiatric interview, and as empathically as possible asked, "Do you have insurance?"

"Yes, that's the problem."

"How's that the problem?" I asked, framing a Chief Complaint of / have insurance.

"It's managed care, an HMO. 'Healthycare Incorporated.' Admission has to be approved by two doctors from the HMO, and none will return my calls. I've been trying all day. Most of the time all I get is a busy signal. The office is in Washington. State."

"Keep hitting 'redial.'"

"I do. When I do get through I get a secretary, never a doctor."

"Is it an emergency?"

"That's what the secretaries all ask. I'm not sure. It's certainly urgent. I'm thinking seriously of killing myself."

"How seriously?"

"I'm not sure. I have no standard of comparison."

"Tell them it's urgent. Be a little more self-assertive."

"You think if I say that, they'll get the doctors to call me back?"

"It's worth a try. Keep redialing."

"Thanks muchly, Doctor-" He read my name tag. "-Basch. You're the first doctor who's taken the time to talk to me. I feel a little better already."

"Good."

When I got home there were three messages on my machine:

"What a boffo session, Doc. Nothing Mickey Mouse about you. I feel better. Good luck with that sweet family of yours on Thanksgiving. I'll try to keep in touch. Putnam."

"Don't worry, buddy, I love you."

"Me. Call me. Now."

Eight

FLORIDA IS WHERE my parents are dying and living.

"Roy?"

Florida is where a lot of great Americans die.

"Quick or you'll miss them!"

I opened my eyes and it was still dark. Florida. In a hotel with Jill. I followed the tropical breeze toward her. "What time is it?"

"Just before dawn. Look."

She was standing on the balcony, wearing nothing. Her back was to me. My eyes went from her punk thatch over her muscular shoulders down the line of her spine and then to the incurring of her rump, one leg straight, the other hiked up on the railing of our balcony, like an explorer sighting a shangri-la. I walked over, leaned against her, and clasped my hands over her slightly rounded belly. "What?"

"E.T.s-Extraterrestrials."

"Again?"

"This time for real. See that? What do you think that is?"

I followed her finger and there, across the long flat surface of the Gulf of Mexico, were four ovals of light, hovering in the breaking sky. "Airplanes," I said. "We're not that far from Tampa, and the flight paths to Central America and the Islands."

"No way," she said, and, as if in answer to my skepticism, the ovals dipped down toward the surface of the water, not in the unison of some kind of reflection, but each a little differently, and then seemed to bounce, two, three, four times on the mirror of the sea, before, hovering again for an instant, they waggled once and were gone. "You never saw airplanes do that!"

As we stood there I could feel the tension in her body, her tight tummy, her sporadic breathing.

"I'd give anything to go up," Jill said quietly.

"Up?"

"With them. People have, you know. People do."

"You believe those stories?"

"I've met people who have. Lots of people. In Montana last summer." I stroked her tummy. "Mmm, nice. I've thought, a few times this year, that they followed me back. I'd wake up and feel them there, by my bed."

"You saw them?"

"Sensed them. I have something to tell you, Roy." She turned to face me, pivoting like a ballerina on one leg, hiking the other leg, which had been on the railing, over my hip. "I think they were here."

"Here?"

"In our room. Around the bed. Last night when we were making love."

"The little perverts."

"They were just curious, that's all." She put her palm to my cheek, looking into my eyes. She was taller than Berry, almost my height. "Do you think I'm crazy? Are you clicking away with your little DSM diagnoses?"

"Nope. That was no airplane. Do you think they're dangerous?"

She shook her head no, put her chin down, and leaned into me, forehead-to-forehead. I felt wetness on my eyes, and realized she was crying. I asked what was wrong. "My mom saw UFOs, and when I was in high school they had her picture in the paper-it was a small town-and when I got to school the next day the other kids really got on me-called her a loony and all. So it means a lot that you accept this in me."

"And it means a lot to me that-" I was cut short by her gesture of appreciation, which was, by stepping up on a low cast-iron balcony table, hiking herself up to straddle me.

'Think you can handle it?" she asked coolly, as if she were asking whether the guy wires to the main pole of a tent would hold.

"I'll die trying."

"Hmrnm," she said, encircling my neck with her arms. "Know the difference between fucking and making love?" I said I did not. "In making love, you kiss." Putting one finger under my chin, she looked into my eyes and smiled, and I

smiled, and then slowly, maybe a millimeter at a time, she moved toward me, her mouth opening, her tongue lying in it like a pink cushion on a purple couch, and kissed me.

LATER THAT THANKSGIVING morning we drove to my parents' condo. I had switched coverage with Amie Bozer, he taking my Thanksgiving Day, I his Christmas. He was still dating my former outpatient, Christine, who, after my Heiler-izing her, had never come back to see me again.

"This is a very special Christmas for me, Roy," he'd said. "I'm taking Chrissy home to Indiana to meet the folks. Thanks so very much."

I usually spent Thanksgiving with Berry at my family's house in Columbia, New York, but in the past year my father the dentist had retired to Naples, Florida, and had invited us down here, to celebrate with my brother and his family, who were flying in from Phoenix. Berry was going to her parents' in Maine, saying that she didn't feel comfortable being with my family with me right now. Although I hadn't told her explicitly about Jill, I had a sense that she knew. Jill had no family nearby. She had no money either, and I had paid her airfare. Misery had paid my airfare, for me to be its representative at a conference entitled "Is Psychotherapy Dead-or Just Mismanaged?"

"What did you tell your parents about me?" Jill asked as we parked the rented cobalt Saturn carefully in the lined box marked Visitor Car in the condo lot.

"That we worked together, and we both were down here for a conference."

"Uh-huh. And they've met Berry?" I nodded. "They like her?"

"They love her."

"Okay. Just like to know what I'm walking into."

"It won't help. No preparation helps." An hour before, I had found an index card in my wallet, written by Berry and me after our last visit here:

How to Survive a Trip to Your Parents'

1) Live Through It; 2) Breathe and Smile; 3) Primum Non Nocere: First, Do No Harm; 4) Get Out of the

Condo-Change the Setting; 5) Pray; 6) Try to Surprise Them, Without Hostility; 7) Get Set to See Yourself at Your Very Worst.

Family and Berry. They seemed to go together. Recently she'd said to me, "It's as if we grew each other up. You and I were each other's ticket out."

"Out?"

"Of our families."

Now, her image rising up in my mind's eye like a dental X ray rising up out of a developer in that eerie red light of the darkroom in my father's office, I felt torn. Why was I doing this? Being with Jill could be a big mistake. I stared up at the four-story concrete-block building, identical to another beside it. Each condo had a railed balcony protected by green screening, giving each a lime tint. The lot was full of huge American luxury cars. I spotted my father's Chrysler New Yorker. 'The biggest car Chrysler makes and it has the most trunk space." He would say this with pride. I would feel irritated, and then guilty. Why should a man's love of his big car irritate his son?