Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

denly there was a high fly ball to right and with everybody yelling "Catch it catch it!" watching it sail over my head for an inside-the-park home r-

"Fuck is Oedipal," A.K. was saying, "Genital Stage. Suck is pre-Oedipal, Oral Stage. 'Guck' is Anal Stage. We won't get into that, yet. Penis Equals Breast. Deep down-when she talked about your 'big black Beemer'?"

"She wanted to suck my penis, yes."

"No," A.K. said, dismayed, and blew out a lump of smoke which before my eyes seemed to go from penis to turd to long nipple, recapitulating nicely the Freudian regression A.K. said was the Holy Grail of analysis. "She wants to suck your breast. Suck Penis, Suck Breast. Bite Penis, Bite Breast. She's regressing down through the Genital Stage to the Oral Stage. The transference will soon turn maternal: She will see you as Mother, engulfing and intrusive, and will want to suck you and bite you. Take her up to five times a week. Regress her more."

And so I did. But I must have been doing something wrong because rather than talking about her mother, she talked about her older brother, Butler:

"When I was about twelve-I'd just gotten my period, and my boobies-I loved my boobies so much! Anyway it was summer. We were at our camp in the Adirondack^-we own like four hundred acres-it was really really hot and I was swimming under our dock in the lake. And my brother Butler swam over to me under the dock, I think my mother was up on the dock, and he said, 'Let me stick it in there' and I said, 'No way Jose,' and he said 'Just once' and he kind of trapped me up against a slick piling and the sunlight was coming down in slits and he pulled down my bikini bottom and he said 'Here feel this,' and he took my hand and his penis was hard as a rock and so big! And I said, 'Hard as a rock,' and he said again, 'Just let me stick it in to feel it a second' and I felt this huge thing splitting me open and screamed but his hand was on my mouth so I just let it happen and he came and then I bobbed under and wanted to drown myself and he hoisted me up and said, 'You tell on me I'll kill you.' "

She sat there, one leg curled under her, the heel rocking back and forth in her genital zone, breathing hard. I said, "Your mother was overhead?"

"Yeah, and it hurt, but it was exciting too. All that night I

cried to myself, but… my hands were between my legs- God I'm so embarrassed to tell you this-I never told anyone this before. And it went on from there. We did it a lot, under the dock, in the boathouse, in his room, his bed…"

I found myself feeling enraged at this brother, this nicest. I burst into my next session with A.K. and said, "I'm going to get that sonofabitch Butler to come to Family Analysis and confront him in front of everybody!"

"Fantasy," A.K. said.

"Fantasy?"

"She wasn't abused in reality; she has the fantasy of being abused. Freud's greatest discovery was to see reality as less important than fantasy, to see that the so-called reality of the 'real' world is in fact fantasy."

"But Freud said"-I quoted, from my notebook-" 'Their symptoms are the remnants and memory symbols of certain (traumatic) experiences.' "

"First he said that, but then he took his step of genius: these memories were fantasy." She quoted, from memory:

"Analysis had led back to these infantile sexual traumas and yet they were not true… Hysterical subjects create such scenes in fantasy… to cover up the autocratic activity of the first years of childhood, to… raise it to a higher plane… When their mothers gave them enemas or rectal douches they used to react with fear and screams of rage… This is why, in fantasies of later years, father so regularly appears as the sexual seducer… but the seducer is regularly the mother."

"Freud moved the world," A.K. went on, "from out there"-she pointed number 2 number one directly at me, at a point between my eyes-"to in here." Number 2 number one swiveled so that it was pointing directly between her eyes, above her beautifully done nose. "The world is not the world out there," she said. "The world is within us."

"Like Christ? As in 'the Kingdom of God is within you'?"

"Spare me," she said coldly. "God is sublimation. God!"

"What should I do about it?"

"Do nothing. It's Oral. If she talks fucking, you talk sucking."

"And if she talks sucking, I talk fucking?" A.K. stared at me as if I were mentally challenged. 'The goal of regression-analysis is to regress her," she said. "If she talks sucking, you talk more sucking."

Which I did. But my technique must have been off, because it didn't work. The more I talked sucking, the more she talked fucking. She seemed to blossom, appearing in the office renewed and glowing, popping with sexual energy. She got a flashy haircut-light brown hair cut even shorter-and wore tasteful makeup and tenacious perfume. Her clothing seemed to be having trouble staying buttoned or snapped or hooked or down over skin or up over skin. She'd come in with a blouse unbuttoned down past Thursday, revealing a red satin bra, and sit with her legs crossed high up, a long length of thigh whooshing up into a bulging triangle of red satin. She would smile at me and ask: "Do I turn you on?"

She did. Stiffening my face so that it had all the responsiveness of a stone, I used the Three Techniques to try to shift her from Genital to Oral. She revved up, filling our sessions with her erotic history: from childhood masturbation to rubbing nipples and "matching snatches" with girls at Miss Schader's Boarding School, through first sex with a waiter in Grand Cayman and dozens of sordid drunken affairs with both sexes and group sex on boats in trains crossing Austria under tables or over oceans embellished one day with a dream of "flying in a big pink balloon over the Matterhorn and through a dark dirty tunnel to Germany and diving into a river of beer"- clearly a regression from Genital to Anal to Oral-and on up to the disastrous affair at Dartmouth College that had led her to that edge called suicide and then back a step, into Misery.

Once, leaving my office, she slipped and fell into me. By reflex I grabbed her around the waist, and my palm, I swear unintentionally, found a breast. As she straightened up she turned to me and suddenly we were a man and a woman and there was a jolt of sex between us.

The erotic flew between us, like a confused bird.

I turned brick red and backed away clumsily, pushing her gently toward the door. I locked it and sat there sweating, seeing just how easy it would be to seduce her in my office. The door would be locked. No one would know but us. Neither

of us would dare tell. That night I couldn't get her out of my mind.

I called up Henry Solini, told him about Zoe, and asked what I should do.

"Don't do anything?" he said. "At times like that I hear my old man's voice, the one time he told me about the birds and the bees? 'Remember, Henry,' he goes, 'flies cause disease. Keep yours zipped.'?"

"Thanks."

"Don't thank me, man, thank your analyst? He's doing a great job?"

When Zoe came into the office the next day she brushed against me. As she crossed hi front of the low-angled February sunlight slipping in through the window, I saw she was wearing nothing under her flimsy shirt. When she sat, I saw she wore no panties either. If ever I wanted to do it, now was the time.

No way. Something in me, something like what you feel when a child is with you, a sense of her vulnerability, her waif-like fragility, filled the space between us. I felt a wave of revulsion. It would not only be wrong, it would be evil. Her offering herself to me was offering me a chance to groove on myself. It wouldn't be sex, it would be power. Like rape. It would be rape. I the therapist had the power. I could use it. If I were desperate or empty or into power, I might just use her to fill me up. What did this say about Schlomo Dove? If anything, he seemed full-too full. Cherokee was the empty one, the thin dusk of moneyed twilight as opposed to ten shouting Jews. And while Schlomo was ultra-analyzed-President of the Freudian Institute-Cherokee, so far, was just getting a handle on his paranoia.