Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

IN TOUCH WITH A SHITTY TOMORROW.

"Exactly," I said out loud, "better than being in touch with today."

THOREAU

"I have found little that is good about human beings. In my experience most of them are trash."

— SIGMUND FREUD

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

— HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Ten

CHEROKEE WAS OBSESSED. "I can't get it out of my mind," he said a few days later in my office up under the eaves of Toshiba, "that he's fucking her in therapy."

He looked worse than ever-strawberry-blond hair mussed, gorgeous blue eyes shadowed by lost sleep, lips set in a firm line. As if giving in to the grunge look his daughter Hope had copied from her cousins on the family vacation in Aspen, he had a week's growth of reddish beard, his shirt collar had lost its snap, and his shirt itself was stained with a reddish blotch shaped remarkably like South America. His jeans seemed baggy, as if he'd lost weight. His hidden messiness had gone public. He had gotten a little Schlomoesque.

"I can't get it out of my mind!" he said desperately. "The last thing at night, when I close my eyes to go to sleep beside her, there it is, a tiny voice, like a devil sitting on my shoulder whispering in my ear, 'He's fucking her in therapy.' And when I wake up-at five when she gets up-I feel okay for a few seconds and then-bam: 'He's fucking her in therapy.' I lie awake in bed from six to six-thirty, imagining. It's like I'm there with them, like I can almost see them."

"What do you see?"

"He's sitting in his chair behind that couch. She gets up off the couch and lifts her dress and shimmies down her underpants. She bought new underpants in Aspen. White satin, with a lot of lace?"

"No fooling."

"No. And not for me. I don't like white all that much. Ever since I hit her in Gstaad, no sex. Nothing. Everything is worse and…" His eyes glazed over. "There it is again: 'He's fucking her in therapy.' I was just then seeing her holding out

her hand and leading him to the couch and going down on all fours and hiking her skirt up to her waist. It's so vivid, almost as if I'm right there watching, peeping through a crack in the door."

"Have you and she talked about it?"

"Not a word. I tried, she won't. It's killing me. It never goes away. In Aspen, there I am with Hope and Kissy at the top of a mountain, looking out over a view you could die for, ready to start the run down, and I hear a whisper in my ear: 'He's fucking her in therapy.' At Eisner's party, there I am with the two Michaels-Eisner and Ovitz-on either side of me, and boom: 'He's fucking her in therapy.' It's like a secret I've got inside me. Like a cancer or a crime I committed or something. It's driving me crazy!"

He did seem a little crazy-eyes wild, lip twitching, hair askew, and foot twitching like poor Mary Megan Scorato's after Hannah hit her with microdose Placedon. Whether or not Schlomo was screwing Lily, Cherokee was in trouble. And the strange thing was that as Cherokee was seeming more crazed to me, Schlomo had started to seem more normal. No matter how much you despised him, you had to admit that his performances at his Outpatient Team Meetings and at the Misery Academic Seminars were brilliant. Not only brilliant, but human. Whenever he interviewed a patient, or supervised me on patients, he seemed to be able to get it, get with it, zoom in on what was really going on, and despite his Yiddish tummler style, I always came away with more understanding of the person I was trying to deal with. I would sometimes sit with him in the cafeteria as he mangled some mystery meat and dazzlingly talked shrinkery. My custom-made suit was a dream. Schlomo hadn't repeated his "in your lap, boychik" maneuver, which he claimed was part of a recently diagnosed illness related to his heart disease, a kind of hand-twitch-specific Tourette's syndrome. His sloppiness I had started to see as a well-known sign of depression, that child facedown in the pool. Sometimes Schlomo would even talk about Ike White's suicide, as a tragic event befallen a rising star. While every fiber of my being wanted to see Cherokee as basically a regular guy who was being tormented as any man would be by his wife's behavior, and Schlomo as at best sick if not

criminal, more and more I had perched on my own shoulder a devilish doubt, whispering, Maybe not.

"What the hell am I gonna do about this? C'mon, Basch, aren't you going to help me?"

It was the fourth time that session he'd asked me the same question. He'd talked for almost thirty minutes nonstop. What could I do? I knew something was missing in my work with him. No matter what I tried, I couldn't shake him out of his obsession. If I asked him about the obsession itself, he obsessed. If I tried to lead him away from the obsession, finding small openings with which to widen the scope, to other people in his life, he would talk briefly about these others but then-bam: "He's fucking her in therapy."

Again I tried to shift the content, asking him bluntly about the first thing he'd told me, back in July when he'd appeared at the Admissions Office at six in the morning: 'Tell me about feeling like a failure."

This led to his talking about his father's disdain for his not joining Putnam, Weld, Umbeshrein, Sanchez, and Brown, his father's Wall Street firm, and his going instead straight from Harvard Law to Walt Disney.

"Father always taunted me about that. 'Working hard, are you, Cher?' In fact I was working hard, a lot harder than him. People think Disney is all sweet mice singing and dancing with ducks and carefree retarded dogs and bad guys portrayed as fags or blacks, but it's as tough as they come. I busted butt for Disney, and it paid off. I… um, quit last year, got my golden parachute, retired. But he never respected me for it. 'It's Mickey Mouse,' he'd always say, 'Mickey Mouse.' "

"You have some feelings about your father?"

"Yeah yeah, but what am I going to do! Tomorrow morning when she gets up and I hear the water run in the shower and she comes out looking like a million bucks and goes off to him? I half think of getting a gun and blowing him away. Don't you have any ideas?"

"You have a gun?"

"You think I should get one?" he said, eyes sparkling with a sudden manic energy. "Good idea!"

"No! No, no. No."

"Shit. Well, do you have any other ideas?"

I was out of ideas. Everything I said, he said "Yes, but" to,

and went back to his obsession. Despite my training, I felt stuck. I knew how to interview people, but I had no idea how therapy worked, of what happened to bring about change. I had learned how to do things in the short run, but had no idea how to make things happen in long-term therapy. Maybe if I myself had ever been in therapy, I might have had some idea of what to do. Even Arnie Bozer, the lunkhead from the Land of Lincoln, had learned from his therapy with Schlomo, talking proudly of how he used Schlomo's interpretations to him in his early-morning sessions word for word on his own patients all the rest of the day, regardless of their diagnoses, gender, therapy issues, or anything else.

"Schlomo says," Arnie would say, " 'the unconscious is timeless.' This means you can say anything to anyone at any time. That's my policy, Roy."

My own long-term therapies with Zoe and Christine, and intermittently with Solmi's ex-patient Thorny, had been haphazard rough trips, with rare promising moments that later seemed not to "take." Zoe was back in Toshiba being detoxed, and Christine was back seeing me only because of Bozer's Heilerization. How did therapy work? How do people change? Do they? Did it?

Cherokee's jealous obsession was like a wall around a city. I'd tried all my techniques to get in, and nothing had worked. I had no idea what else to say. I feared that if I didn't help him now, he wouldn't come back for another session. Failure loomed. His eyes met mine.