Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"What cursing?"

"The cursing under your breath at Mom? It's terrible to hear."

"I don't curse under my breath at your mother and why would I?"

"You do. She can't hear it, but we can."

"I'm not aware of my doing that and if I do I'll stop."

THE LIT-UP CONDOS in the muggy night seemed like mausoleums. Jill and I sat in the car outside. The old people were out on their lime-tinted balconies, but I had an image of the three floors of screened balconies as cages. From somewhere came a tune from Fiddler on the Roof, and from somewhere else came a woman's voice saying, "You never talk to me it's like living with a dead man and I can't stand it!" — followed by jagged sobs. The night seemed polluted. I started driving. Slowly, aimlessly.

"He-lo-oh," Jill said. "Hi there. Remember me? Where are you?"

"I feel like I failed, totally."

"It was intense. That cursing is something else. But hey, at least it's a family. Mine's gone."

"I remember once-or think I remember-sitting at the kitchen table with my father and brother, and my mother screamed and next thing I knew there was a knife sailing through the air at us, and it stuck in the wall above our heads. I thought it was normal. It was crazy."

"Mine was just as crazy. Except for the UFOs."

"My father used to be a photo nut, took thousands of pictures, and there's not a single picture of me as a kid that shows me smiling. How can he live, with all that bitterness? What's eating him up? Her? Lousy golf? Me? Does he miss dentistry? What? And whatever I do, it's never enough."

"Never 'normal' enough?"

"Yeah."

"So maybe they're helping you break out."

"No joke. Being with them makes me want to be totally outrageous, totally crazy, risk everything, self-destruct! Makes me want to run, leave the country, leave the whole damn planet!"

"Now you're talkin'. Kiss me here." She led my hand to her belly.

"I can't do that while I'm driving."

"No foolin'. C'mon. I need handling."

"Handling?"

"Women need handling, like horses."

"Now? Can't you wait till we get back to the hotel?"

"No. Hot weather makes me hot." She grabbed the steering wheel and ran us up onto a shoulder, in the lee of a stone wall around a low barracks of condos. Across the way was an empty lot, with a sign announcing that another nine holes were coming soon. A Winn Dixie glowed in the distance. We went backseat and were soon doing what was sure to be illegal on this public thoroughfare, and in my mind was a question:

What is all this perfect order, this Utopia of houses and cars and weather, a denial of?

At first I thought it was a denial of dying and death. But no, death was famiiiar to uiese senior citizens; in fact it brought

out their best in terms of funeral arrangements and shipping bodies back up north and the widows banding together to adjust to the good life alone. Then I realized that with everything on the physical level having been taken care of as meticulously as making a house safe for a baby, what was being denied was whatever else there was after every material object including luxury items had been satisfied. Malik might say-and say with sorrow-that here alas was a denial of purpose, a denial even of joy, under the guise of the pursuit of happiness.

MISERY WAS A ghost mountain the next day, deserted by shrinks, except forme in Admissions. Not having Nash and Tunaba around made it easier. Compared to dealing with my family, dealing with people with severe mental illness was easy, for I had the authority of being their doctor. Some of it was even fun, like my Number 3, the new young editor of The Town Crier, Toby Updike. Immobilized recently by a broken leg-he'd slipped on the freakish ice outside the barbershop one afternoon as he was hustling along to a tryst with the wife of the town treasurer-he came in psychotic, with a Chief Complaint: "Someone sent me a memo saying: 'Name all your employees broken down by sex.' "

Viv and Primo were there, and the day took on a kind of festive tone as we worked together to handle the holiday horrors of all the happy families. I started enjoying myself, rocking and rolling along to the tune of whatever insurance would pay for, in terms of what was normal mental illness. But then, late in the day, I got a shock, in the form of my buddy Henry Solini.

He had been doing his scheduled rotation on Thoreau, the Family Unit, run by the classical Freudian psychoanalyst A. K. Lowell. Now he appeared in Toshiba to evaluate Toby Updike, for transfer to Thoreau. At first I didn't recognize him.

Henry Solini, the Henry Solini whom I'd last seen dressed in Rastafarian-cool, was now wearing Misery-tight: a new, three-piece suit and a red tie with dark blue regimental stripes, which, as I looked closer, I saw were in fact row upon row of Misery logos-half-moon, pine tree, duck rampant. His pony-tail and curly hair had been shorn to an ominous fuzz, accentuating his male-pattern baldness, and he was growing a goatee

and moustache. His earring was gone, and in his breast pocket was a thick cigar.

"Solini!" I cried out. "What happened?"

He stared at me blankly. Two seconds. "What makes you ask?"

"You look all Freudian!"

Two seconds. "I had a consult with Schlomo Dove? He said I had to drill down to the roots of my 'gay-latent' and the only way to do it was to go under psychoanalysis? I started last week with Dr. Edward Slapadek?"

"Oh," said Primo. "Is he outta jail now?"

Solini jumped.

"Just kiddin', Doc."

"Hannah's therapist?" I asked. "What is this? Is Schlomo getting a kickback?"

Two seconds. " 'Kick… back'?" Solini said, his brow furrowing like a schnauzer dog's. He was taking my joke seriously. Often before he'd seemed to space out by focusing past me onto a scene in the distance, but now he seemed to have turned inside out, and focused on a scene somewhere in a vast inner distance, shutting out me and the real world entirely. It made me feel as if I didn't exist.

Two seconds. "It's like an A-bomb has exploded in my belly? — what an association?" He reached into his inner suit-jacket pocket and whipped out a small, leather-bound notebook with the kind of brass clasp you see on a girl's first diary, unclasped it, slid a Cross pen from its leather loop in the binding, turned the point out, scribbled down the association, turned the point back in, slid the pen into its loop, closed the notebook, reclasped it, and whipped it back into his inner pocket. Noticing me, he asked:

"You got an analyst yet?"

"Noway."

"Yeah," he said, walking away, "I hear he's pretty good?"

Nine

KEEPING IN TOUCH turned out not to be Cherokee Putnam's strong suit. Since the day almost a month before when he'd told me about confronting Schlomo Dove, I'd only heard from him once, an e-mail haiku:

Mountains misty, Kids nifty, Wife nasty.

Cher, Gstaad

I had pored over this, trying to decipher Ms emotional state, as one tries to unpack a love letter. There was a certain airy lift to the message, a Heileresque health in that "nasty," and a startling new intimacy in that "Cher." And yet the "nasty" was nasty, and the overall compression, however poetic, seemed a shadowed resignation to ongoing pain, like the throb of a toothache with your dentist still dead.

A few days before Christmas he had called me at home, something he'd never before done. The family had just flown in from Europe, and was just about to fly out the next afternoon to Aspen. He wanted to see me the next morning. "She's seeing… seeing him," he said bitterly, "so I might as well see you."

"I'd be glad to."

When I saw him, the torment in his eyes made my heart hurt, and hurt all the more for his appearing so healthy. Winter-suntanned, every hair in place, navy-blue sweater framing his face like a Brooks Brothers ad for a handsome face in a crew-neck sweater, he was gorgeous. He said he felt like shit.