Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

I saw her arm twitch. Fearing she was thinking number 2 number four, I felt an urgency to ask her about Christine, with whom I was also stuck.

"Can I ask you quickly about Christine, the one who-'

"You followed down to the tennis court."

"How do you know about that?"

"The one who gave you that sweater you are wearing."

"How… how…?" I was stunned. "Who told you?"

"If you were analyzed, you would no longer blush. Be careful, Dr. Basch. All you have in this field is your reputation. You just raped that patient."

"What!"

"Seduced her. By taking her sweater as a gift. Gifts are never just gifts, but parameters-uncontrolled events influencing the analysis."

"But it's just a sweater."

"A sweater is never just a sweater. You slip your 'head' into it. What comes to mind?"

"Penis into vagina. But I don't believe it."

"Freud said, 'Women's strongest motive in coming for treatment is the hope that they might somehow still obtain a penis, the lack of which is so painful to them'-'Analysis Terminable and Interminable.'" Again she opened the new leather-bound ledger. "Go on."

I told her about my work with Christine, leaving out the meeting with Cherokee. Why ask for trouble?

"She said, 'You're better than two Bayer aspirin'?" A.K. shook her head. " 'Two bare-ass prin'? And you don't believe it's all about the penis?"

"At first maybe, but the last session, she said, 'You're turning out to be a real friend, helping me. I can see you helping people in your family. I see you rushing in, like the Red Cross, healing the cholera in your family.* "

A.K. nodded and then seemed to grow larger, head larger, eyes larger, pupils dilating as if in astonishment, dark brown, even black. I felt transfixed by her, as if caught in headlights at night. Finally she said:

"But deep down, with your family, you feel that you are the cholera."

Boom! A bomb went off in my gut. Boom! Shrapnel rained down. A vista opened up inside, a vista of me in my family, my feeling that I never satisfied them, that I was always disappointing them-those accusatory tears of my mother, those puzzled stares of my father from the dental chair-always bringing sadness to them and leaving them with sadness, like that last trip to Florida with Jill, the sadness of my aloofness, of Jill not being Berry-my father hadn't written to me since! — the first time he hadn't written in all the years since I left for Harvard. Feeling that I was always letting them down, I had tried harder and harder to achieve things, starting every conversation with my latest achievement, bringing prizes home-like my boyhood friends who hunted on the Polish Sportsmen's hunting preserve out by the Lone Star and Universal Atlas quarries would bring home first squirrels and rabbits and then deer, first a doe and then, finally earning their manhood, a buck-as if, if I brought home big enough prizes

my achievements could win their love, and yet gradually it dawned on me that no achievement can win love-

"All you have in this field," A.K. was saying, grasping the fourth and final yellow number 2, "is-"

"Your reputation."

"And your penis."

Boom! Shrapnel rained down.

"Explore," she said firmly, the pencil almost aligned with the three others. "Listen in the material for the penis envy."

"I will," I said, trying to rise from my chair but suddenly feeling so weighted down that at first I failed. It was as if I'd been sitting on a planet of a lot greater gravity, say Jupiter. With immense second effort I hoisted my leaden bulk to my feet-which felt far away. "I will explore."

"You can't, fully."

"Why not?"

"You haven't been analyzed."

"I have to be analyzed to explore fully, to treat my patients fully?"

But the four pencils were now strictly aligned. I was history.

"Thanks," I said, feeling a strange gratitude of such bizarre intensity that it seemed to be controlling my mind and my legs, so that it was all I could do to resist the urge to make a slight bow of obeisance, like a slave to a kind pasha. I staggered out.

"YOU'RE SO LIKE into me tonight!" Jill said that night as we lay on the rug in front of a dying fire in the house up the street, cuddling. She was back from a UFO conference in New Jersey. The couple who owned the house was away. Their dog Muffle, a big mutt, lay nearby. I was treating my heartbreak about Berry with alcohol and sex and love. If I thought of Berry with a man, my obsession with Jill helped me feel I had no right to be jealous, and if I thought of Berry with Chandra, my mind went round and round. At first I would feel happy for her for being with someone she described as so solid and sensual and spiritual, and then I would feel a panic of envy and wish I could find someone like that and sometimes with alarm I would realize that that someone might in fact have been Berry.

"You have some fantasies about that?" I asked. All evening

long I had been trying out the Three Techniques A.K. had taught me.

"Shhh!"

"What?"

"Shush!" She looked around. Muffle whined pitifully.

"Is someone there?"

"Them."

"Who?"

"From the UFO." Tail between her legs, Muffle waddled out.

"They're here?"

"In a ring around the rug."

"Shit."

"I just knew they would follow me back from Newark."

I stared right and left and tried to struggle up. Nothing.

"Don't stare at them, dum-dum," she whispered. "Just act normal."

"I don't see anything," I whispered back.

" 'Course not. You can't see 'em. C'mon."

"With them watching?"

'They're here to learn. C'mon."

With a little coaxing, I did my part as an earthling to demonstrate the use of what A.K. had referred to as "the powerful tool of psychoanalysis."

At some point and to my alarm, as if implanted in my hetero head as an experiment by aliens, I found myself thinking of Cherokee.

ELEVEN

"IT'S NOT WORKING. This therapy's not working. Let's just forget it"

It was a week later, halfway through my session with Cherokee, and I was about to lose him. I had used the Malik approach, first trying to persuade him to bring Lily in with him for a meeting. No way. Then I had suggested that his obsession with Schlomo fucking her was a turning away from his life.

"What life? I've got no life. You don't get it. This overshadows everything. Focusing on it with you has made it worse. It's there constantly now, just below the surface: 'He's fucking her in therapy.' Today, the only thing I'm looking forward to is seeing your patient Christine again after my session's over. In fact, I might as well leave early. Spend some extra time talking to her." He started to rise from his chair. "Let's just forget it. I guess I'm just a hopeless case."

My heart sank. And I'm just a hopeless case as a therapist.

The past week had been a weird, conflicted time. There were only four patients on Thoreau, and so I had had time to read and think. And play basketball. Malik had organized a LAMBS game for the four adolescents, and I'd joined in. Even Oly Joe had uncurled once a day to play. But I had also started reading Freud, the papers A.K. had suggested: for Cherokee, paranoia; for Christine, penis envy during interminable analysis.

The paranoia paper was incredible. In a scant twelve pages Freud managed to describe the neurotic mechanisms in the normal condition, jealousy, the pathological condition, paranoia, and the reason for both these conditions, "a defense against homosexuality." I'd been struck by how

perfectly Cherokee fit Freud. I'd copied out a few quotes, which were now lying before me on my desk:

Delusional jealousy represents an acidulated homosexuality, and rightly takes its position among the classical forms of paranoia. As an attempt at defense against an unduly strong homosexual impulse it may, in a man, be described in the formula, "Indeed I do not love him, she loves him!"