Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

This class division was obliterated only in the receiving line, where you got to balance your crumpet and jumbo shrimp and bloodied rib and drink in one hand and have the other clasped damply by Lloyal von and the sycophantic Nash and Jennifer T. and Blair "the Handsome" Heiler and the drug brownshirt Errol^Cabot and then the Doves-ah, those Doves! — the world's most charming analyst-astrophysicist tag team, these Doves trying hard, at least at this party, to put a little oy back ingoy.

After a few quick glasses of the vodka punch, things got rosy, and rosier still when Jill appeared in a dark pink jumpsuit unbuttoned a touch too far, showing the edge of a lighter pink brassiere. Her underwear never ceased to amaze me. Like a good therapist, in every meeting she gave you something, in terms of glimpses of her underwear. I poured her a punch. Jill was the kind of woman who, when she enters a room, everyone stares, as if she had sparkly dust sprinkled over her like that glitter at parties, a dust of fame, so that you felt that,

by being with her, some of the glitter couldn't help but sprinkle off onto you, and even the morning after, rising from your tired bed and getting dressed for work, you'd find little pieces of glitter on your wrist or your neck, and all during the day come across more pieces stuck in weird places-behind your ear, in the webbing between your fingers, on your thigh.

"I've got a clinical question for you," Jill said. "I'm feeling-"

"Wait," I said. "First, I've got a clinical question for you."

"Yeah?"

"What's your insurance coverage?"

"No, really. I'm feeling kind of blue, you know, with the holidays and all, with no family. So just tell me, is it like going to go away?"

"What else is it going to do?" I asked, thinking 309.00, Adjustment Disorder with Depressed Mood. She thought for a second.

"That's just what I wanted to hear," she said. "Do you take Visa?"

We went through the receiving line. The Chiefs of Misery gawked at her, especially Lloyal and Nash and Errol and Blair Heiler, who took Jill's hand with the somber lasciviousness of a world-expert lecher, and then confronted her by raising it to his lips as if she were a DD with RHS-Dissociative Disorder with Really Hyper Sexuality.

Things started to have that fluid feel where you think you're being witty but you have a niggling sense that you're not being as witty as you think. Hannah and Henry appeared in dark suits like twins dressed exactly alike by an oafish mother. With them was a tall woman with chiseled features, cropped hair, and walled-off eyes, also dressed in a dark suit and wrapped in a demonic silence. This was the woman who had replaced Bob Marley as Henry's hero, the classic Freudian psychoanalyst, A. K. Lowell. With each of my attempts to engage any of the three of them, Dr. A.K. would pull her haunted silence more tightly around her, and Hannah would roll her eyes up to her Great Analyst in the Sky and talk about her latest workshop, a Jungian Rodeo Quest in Boulder, and Henry would peer inward, his face twisting in terror at what he saw.

Malik swam in, wearing a ridiculous plaid sport coat over a

sweat suit, mopping sweat from his face with a remarkably petite Israeli Army towel. With him were his former patient and now AA sponsor George, and Mr. K. They'd just come from a half-court three-on-three basketball game in the gym.

"So tell me, Malik," I said, nodding toward Mr. K. and George, "how come these patients of yours are always so interesting?"

"Easy," he said. "I've developed a sliding scale, based on how boring they are. You do a sport today, Basch?"

"I'm about to."

He glanced at Jill. "I mean aerobic."

"More punch?" Jill asked me. I handed her my glass. She left.

"Watchit, Basch," Malik said. "Sex in Misery is tricky."

"Uh-huh. So what's with the sliding scale?"

"The more boring they are, the higher their fee. Every month we evaluate it, and if they've gotten less boring, their fee goes down."

"Who decides how boring they are?"

"We do it together, right, Mr. K.?"

"Yes, er, no, I hardly pay anything anymore."

"Pretty soon I'll be payin' him," Malik said. "Gotta go, Basch. Can't be around all this booze."

"There's a Christmas Alkathon," George said, "and a new meetin'."

"It's called 'the Brain-Damaged Group,' " Mr. K. said, laughing.

"The thing about bein' sober," Malik said, watching Jill walk toward us, "is that for better or worse you grow a conscience." He winked.

Before I could figure out what the hell he meant, he was rocking away, again singing that same damn Aerosmith song. He disappeared into a thicket of social workers, just as Jill arrived with my punch.

Then suddenly, there before me and Jill, was Berry. I felt myself go hot around the ears, the neck, the throat.

"Oh hi!" I said way too loudly.

"Hi, Roy," she said. "I was driving by and thought I'd stop in."

"Berry, Jill," I said, tightly. "Jill, Berry."

"Heard a lot about you," Jill said.

"Oh?" Berry asked.

"Roy and I worked together on Emerson."

Small talk was made. I felt drunker, in a world all afloat. Things turned glassy, glassine. Sweat pooled in the hollow of my back. We three made weird talk with several shrinks.

Jill went for more punch and Schlomo Dove came over, sloppily dressed and looking particularly ugly, his jowls pressing down on the wilted collar of his white shirt, open at the neck so that gray hairs sprouted out over the loose, nooselike knot of his necktie. It was a stained number sprouting the same kinds of tropical fruits that currently graced the Barracuda's dress and hat for her Amazon outing.

Schlomo started hitting on Berry, so shamelessly that her eyes popped in amazement. She shot me an "Is this a joke?" look, and tried to repel him. Things turned pitiful. Luckily, Viv cut in:

"Four more admissions, Cowboy, one the Virgin Mary."

"Gotta go," I said.

"I do too," Berry said. "I'll walk you out.

"When can we talk?" she asked when we were alone in the hallway.

"How 'bout tomorrow?" I said.

"How 'bout tonight?"

I hesitated. Jill and I had plans. "Fine. Come over at eight."

"These shrinks!" Berry said, at the door. "What a bunch of losers! They're like twelve-year-old boys, looking at your tits before they look into your eyes!"

"Twelve's pushing it. I'd say about nine."

"This brings it all back-the way they demoralized me, in my training. The men who run these places are pitiful!" She stared at me. "Maybe that's it."

"It?"

"For you. We've got to talk."

"All hell's breaking loose, Cowpoke, soc'mon!"

"At eight."

I did my admissions, the last the Virgin Mary with a Chief Complaint of "Three times in the Bible Jesus said 'I'm going to die' and nobody even stayed up with him and talked with him they all went to sleep and if there'd been any women among his disciples you can bet they'd try to comfort him by suckling him with these two gorgeous thirty-eights."

296.44, Bipolar Disorder, Mania, with Psychosis and Exhibitionism.

At quarter to five I went up to my office in the attic of Toshiba to pick up my stuff. A woman was waiting for me. Her hair was bleached platinum and she was dressed all in black. On her lap was a wrapped Christmas present, all angels. Who could this be? She turned.

"Christine?" I said, surprised. My blond Lady in Black had gone platinum?

"Oh, Dr. Basch, thank God you're here!" She blew her nose loudly. Her eyes were red with weeping. "Can I see you?"

"Sure. I've got a few minutes. Come in."

I hadn't heard from Christine since she'd announced for Arnie Bozer and walked out into the door, bloodying her nose. Since I, Heilerized, had Heilerized her.

"I've got a headache to die from. Aspirin won't touch it."