Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

" 'Cause I care, kid, and I feel like I'm losin' you, fast."

His words hit home. A warmth spread through me, over me, all the way up to my ears. No matter what, he had stuck with me, through the year. "Yeah," I said, "I care too. It's just that I'm feeling a little lost."

"I'm with you, Roy."

"Lost?"

"Feeling a little lost too, yop." He smiled, sadly, those dark eyes glistening. He coughed back tears, once, twice.

"Why?" I said. "What's wrong?"

"Just life," he said quietly. "Life as it is, life as it could be?"

The rest of the afternoon I was in a funk, a gloom so murky

that I was barely functioning, tripping over wastebaskets and bumping into doorjambs. On the way out I passed A.K.'s secretary, who'd once been my secretary, Nancy.

"So long, Nance, see you tomorrow. If I'm still alive."

"Look at you! Your clothes are all rumpled, your eyes look like, I don't know, black eyes or something. You look terrible."

"You should see it from this side."

"Remember, Roy, you're not crazy."

"From where I am, crazy's a step up. At least it's a definite."

"Hey, you'll make it. She likes you, you know."

"Who?"

"Dr. Lowell."

"Me? She told you that?"

"She'd never say it, but I can tell. She like really likes you. G'night."

Enlivened by this, I walked out. As I bundled up to meet the cold, suddenly there she was beside me. If I looked terrible, she looked terrific, the soft fur collar of her stylish black coat pulled tightly up to her cheeks, framing her closely cropped head of light brown hair, which at that moment shone like a corona against the golden happenstance of a fake gas lamp. Hearing me, she turned. The gold light made her face look bright and fresh.

"I don't get it, Dr. Lowell," I said. "I listen to one or two patients a day and wind up a total wreck, while you listen to patients and supervisees all day long and you look as fresh as ever. How do you do it?"

"So who listens?"

I stared at her.

She laughed. She actually laughed! "That was a joke. Don't be so stiff all the time, Roy. Laugh a little."

"I will."

"Good evening."

"Good night. Yes, yes."

I watched her disappear into a sexy black Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. The door closed with a powerful thunk. Despite the inhuman cold, I felt a glow in my chest, a warmth. Might I just be good enough, after all?

TWELVE

WAS IT CYNICAL of me, or idealistic, to give Freud a chance with Cherokee, Christine, and Zoe?

Despite myself, despite everything I had learned about what was crucial to being with other people, as the deep-freeze of January was iced over by the cruelty of February, I tried it. How could I not? If I resisted, A.K. told me I was resisting because of my neurotic, unanalyzed resistance. And what alternative was there? Heiler's SELF-psychology? Toshiba's imbe-cilic Diagnostic and Statistical Manual? The druglords, Errol and Win? Which left Malik-Leonard A. Malik with his buddy system and his humble power of example of how to connect. But day by day in the virtual Vienna of Thoreau, Malik seemed to be fading, his voltage dimming down. I loved him and was in awe of his gifts, but I had started to feel a niggling suspicion that he was just that: a gifted man, one of a kind who, despite his scorn for theory of any kind, was able, through sheer bigness of heart, to work magic with the suffering of others.

Compared to him, I wasn't much gifted. It was a relief to stop trying to be Malik and to realize that I, not great at this and maybe not even all that good, had to rely on a theory. Much like my father who, realizing that compared to other golfers he was no pro and would never be, scoured Golf Digest every month for theories-"The Waggle at Address," "Freeing up the Left," "What Not to Think About on the Backswing," "Three Lessons on Bad Lies"-and then bought the latest equipment, the Big Berthas and Miracle Wedges that promised long balls and exquisite touch.

Was my reliance on theory an act of cynicism or idealism? Working my way around the world the year before, I'd met many men and women who at first seemed cynical or idealistic,

but who, as I'd gotten to know them, had confounded categorization, hi July in the Dordogne, the cynical farmer next door turned out to be a Resistance fighter who had held the line against the Germans, the line being the very farmhouse we were getting drunk in as he told me. Eleven months later in Changsha, China, the idealistic young woman working nonstop to rescue the rows of girl babies from the rising floodwaters threatening the orphanage in Social Welfare Center Number One, when asked about the neglect of fifty less hardy newborns in a back room, shrugged and said, "Bad luck." Telling the faithful from the nihilistic was as hard as telling the truthful from the liar. Ike White, who had seemed so authentic and humble, had all the while I knew him" been living the arrogance of a lie.

Just that month Consumer Reports, having surveyed thousands of great Americans about psychotherapy in much the same way they surveyed them about vacuum cleaners, announced that talk therapy worked-worked whether or not drugs also were given, eat your heart out, Win-and the more therapy, the better it worked. Freudian analysis, the most, was by implication the best.

And so, in this, the most vain season-dark when I awoke for work and dark when I left Misery for home-whether from resignation or brave hope, I started the psychoanalysis of my patients. A.K., upon hearing that Cherokee was rich, had worked the entrails and said, "Regress him. Take him up to five sessions a week. Deepen his transference to you, as I'm doing with Oly Joe Olaf." Oly Joe, the teenager who had been carried into Thoreau all curled up in Oral Stage Arrest, under the five-times-a-week onslaught of A.K. had now regressed even further into orality. Sometimes he lay curled up in bed with his "blankie," sucking his thumb, chewing gum, babbling baby talk and sipping a Mountain Dew-all at the same time. While regression didn't seem much like progress to me, I knew that I didn't know enough to know that for sure.

Seeing Cherokee Putnam five times a week was making a profound difference. Suddenly things started happening just as A.K. had predicted. In late January I had bought my first bound ledger with a line down the middle of each page, and a supply of yellow number 2 pencils and an electric pencil sharpener mat honed them to perfect points. This was my ledger entry for the end of a session in early February:

"I dreamed I was lying in Father's arms-ah, forget it."

"Yes, and what comes to mind?"

"He was squeezing the life out of me. That's all I remember."

"And what is your fantasy, hmm?"

"He's fucking her in therapy. I feel horrible."

"And what are your thoughts about her fucking him in therapy?"

"I think it's true."

"Hrummpht!"

"Last night we went out to dinner and afterward hi her purse I-"

O.K., this is the Oedipus Complex. God I'm hungry! Maybe tonight I'll do takeout Chinese?

Technique 1: The Free Association.

Castration anxiety and unconscious resistance to talking about it.

Technique 2: Fantasy. I'm starving!

His Oedipal wish to "fuck" his Mother/wife is being projected onto his "fucking" his Father/Schlomo.

Technique 4: Ask the Opposite: if he talks feeling, you talk thought.

Projective Identification. Hey, could this be the Oscillator?

Technique 5: The Psychoanalytic Grunt. But I feel a little Uke Thai. Hm, wonder why I associated Thai?

Dinner? Now you're talkin'.

"Where'd you go?"

"The Gandhi, but afterward-"

"How was it?"

"It was good, but afterward I found a pack of condoms in her purse. And I've had a vasectomy."

"Yes, and what are your feelings about your thoughts that he's fucking her in therapy?"