Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

IN ZOE'S INDIVIDUAL therapy the next day, I got stuck again. She was still feeling great about the family therapy session, talking about what "great guys" her father and mother were and how it had all been "good fun" and "healing." Part of me felt it had been a good session, yet part of me saw A.K.'s point, that we hadn't really drilled down to the deeper roots of the problem. Malik had said that the issue was alcohol and drugs, from which all else followed; A.K. had said that the issue was sex, repressed, from which alcohol and drugs followed. So far in the session I'd tried to take the Malik route, working on her suicidal drinking and drugging in Rancho Mirage, but she minimized it:

"It's not that bad. Thorny tried to get me into this AA stuff, but I can't. It's way too religious for me."

Nothing I tried would move her from this position. I felt stuck.

"So, Doc," she said, cheerfully, "what's on your mind?"

"What comes to mind, about what's on my mind?"

"I dunno. I feel so good now. Like I don't need to be in the hospital anymore. You've helped me. Knowing you were here made me come back. I feel now that we're more equal, like I'd like to know more about you."

"Like what?"

"Little things, like what kind of car you drive, V stuff like that."

"And what's the first thing that comes to mind about my car?"

"That it's big and powerful, one of those big new Beemers."

"You have some thoughts about my car?"

"I think, I dunno, that you must like it."

"You have some feelings about my liking it?"

"Why all these questions, Doc?"

"Our shared task is to explore, and these questions may help."

"Okay. I'll do whatever you want. Within limits."

"Limits?"

She squirmed, adjusted her legs, lifting her skirt briefly, showing her thighs. "I've been having a lot of… like funny feelings about you lately. And I had a dream. I just remember a piece of it."

"Apiece?"

"Your car-it was a big black Beemer-turned into a… a… I can't say it."

"A penis?"

"Uh-huh."

"My penis?"

Nodding, she stared at her bare feet, then curled them up under her thighs, flashing white panties. "This isn't… wrong, is it? Is this okay?"

"Better than okay. This is psychoanalysis."

"Far out." She blushed. "Okay, Doc. You're the boss."

"GOOD, GOOD, EXCELLENT," A.K. said in supervision that afternoon as she wrote down what Zoe and I had said, until we came to my penis and she said, astonished, "You said whatT

"You told me to explore the erotic transference."

"She didn't bring up your penis, you brought up your penis. You made one of the worst mistakes in the book: counter-transference distortion."

"Which is?"

"Your shit gets in the way of her shit. Let's see if it can be saved." She worked the right side intently. With each pencil stroke and frown I felt myself fade, lose bulk, like an astronaut

too long in space. I waited and waited. Finally she put down her ledger and said, "She will run away."

"How do you know that?"

Her answer was to reach for number 2 number four.

ZOE RAN AWAY that night.

The next day I went to supervision with A.K. and said, "You were right. She's gone. And she won't be back."

"If you now make the correct interpretation, she will be back."

"Now?"

"hi her scheduled session."

"But how can I make the correct interpretation to her if she's not there?"

"Every time someone leaves," A.K. said, "it's as if they take with them a little piece of our heart."

"What's the correct interpretation?"

We sat in silence, a proclamatory silence, for the rest of the session.

AT THE TIME of Zoe's session the next day, I sat in my office and left the door open in case she showed up. I free-associated to her, running through her whole history, from our first stormy meeting when I'd felt a "click" of connection with her, all the way through to her fantasy of my "big black Beemer," which was really not a marvel of German engineering but my penis. As I sat there letting her fill my head with her self wherever she was, I felt-like a cloud coalescing from thin air solidly enough to cast a shadow-a coming together of her life, and I saw her as a girl desperate to engage her mother, and then as a baby hungering for love but being fed privilege, and suddenly I saw the present, all the men and sex and drugs, in terms of this past, and I whispered an interpretation to where she would have been sitting: "You'd like to mop the floor with your engulfing mother, for not giving you enough."

ZOE WAS BACK the next morning. I was amazed.

In our session she was hungover, apologetic, and weepy. She'd gotten drunk and picked up a guy and gotten laid and robbed. I felt horrible-it was all because of my mistake.

In supervision with A.K., after I'd finished recounting the

session, she kept on scribbling on the right side like a car motor kicking over after the ignition has been turned off, the pencil making loud scritches. She said:

"You seem bright, but you keep making bad mistakes."

"But today I said almost nothing."

"Because you said almost nothing, when you should have. You failed to ask the crucial questions, to explore her acting out by running away."

"I did ask her about running away."

"Oh?" She took up her pencil again. "And what did she say?"

To my surprise, I drew a blank. "I don't remember."

"You do remember."

"No, I don't."

"You do, but you're blocking. Your memory is repressed, buried under tons of unanalyzed garbage. You blocked out the most crucial part of the session."

"Why?"

"How do I know? It's your neurosis, not mine. You seem bright, but intelligence can take you only so far in this field."

"Are you saying I need analysis?" She smiled. "Look, I'm getting more and more confused. I don't know when I should be silent with her and when I should talk. I never know what I should say. I don't know when to explore, when to interpret, when to have the lead weights, when to weigh in. How do I do this, anyway?"

"It is an art. It is very hard to learn, to be good at. Even a genius like Freud had trouble learning it." She puffed up, her eyes got big. I grabbed the arms of my chair. She said:

"You might not be good enough."

Ka-boom! A blow to the head, my ears ringing my mother standing there looking down at me her eyes red with weeping and asking, "Can't you help me, Roy?" and I not knowing what to say but saying to myself, "Stay like this and don't show anything on your face and it will be over," feeling iced by her love and as she turned away her shoulders shaking with sobs hearing a voice inside saying, "Compared to a normal boy certainly compared to that nice boy Mitchell Cohen down the street you're not good enough not good enough you're really not good enough…."

LIFE WITHOUT BERRY suddenly was unthinkable. That night I spent alone at home, obsessing about all the ways I had blown it. I felt lonely and desperate. Jill was at a UFO symposium; Malik was away in Akron, Ohio, on an AA retreat. I hadn't seen Berry since that night she'd walked out saying, "You need help!" Another example of my not measuring up. We'd talked on the phone a few times. At the start of each conversation we were both so relieved to be back in touch that we'd said we ought to get together, but as we'd talked, our rapt yearning for what was had been overwhelmed by the stark differences of our current lives, and we'd hung up with more coolness than when we'd started, with no further plans. In the wake of these phone calls I'd always felt shattered, having realized what I was losing. Do men only know what they've lost when they've lost it, when it's too late? In hard times, especially in the House of God year, Berry had always been there for me. So that night, in the hollow echo of desperation, I picked up the phone and called her.