Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

The harder I tried, the softer it got. I lay over her, my belly sagging onto hers until my back started to ache. I rolled away, humiliated.

What followed was at every step haunted by Cherokee and Christine. Jill tried everything. Nothing helped. My penis, like his, would occasionally struggle up from its hairy pillow like a drunken sot, only to flop back down.

Lying beside me, staring with me up at the accusatory ceiling, Jill asked, "How are you feeling, Roy?"

I stiffened-all but my penis-and said, "I don't know."

"Come on, Roy, I love you-you can tell me."

"I told you, I don't know," I said, feeling testy.

"You don't have to get angry at me."

"I'm not angry."

Sighing, she slipped her tiny bikini up over her rump and adjusted it so it made a satiny "snap." She slipped the silky whorled bra onto her shoulders, bringing both sides around her boobs like hands around fruits. Her red-lacquered fingernails met at her sternum and latched the bra shut, like closing the store for the night. I got a little hard, but was afraid to try it again and fail.

"I feel sorry for guys. I wouldn't be a guy for anything in the world. Let's just chalk it up to a bad night and a weird rotation."

"Weird rotation?"

"Analysis, babe. Hard on the significant other."

The next morning in supervision with A.K., I told her about Cherokee Putnam's impotence. She read the entrails and sometime after the three-pencil mark her eyes enlarged. I braced myself and she said, "And youT'

My face got hot. How had she known? "Last night I was impotent too."

"Uh-huh. And I notice that you're now scratching your arm."

Mortified, I looked down and noticed that I had in fact been scratching my arm, just inside the elbow, a red patch over the olecranon. "Yes, I am."

"V.D.," she said.

"Venereal Disease?" I cried, thinking, It's already gone from my dick to my arm?

"Vagina Dentata. Classic. You have the fantasy that vaginas have teeth and will bite off your penis."

"I'm a wreck!" I blurted out. "I'm feeling really really down!" And I told her about myself as I never had before. About Berry and Jill and about my family. As she wrote this down there was, again, a kind look on her face.

"You need outside help," she said. "You need to take this to an analyst."

"So you think it's time for me to take the plunge?" The obvious unconscious referent, to my limp penis, made her smile, and I smiled. "Can you suggest someone?" The itch was incredible, and I tried to rub it as nonchalantly as possible on my new suit coat.

"It would pollute the transference. You have to find your own."

"Go to Schlomo?" She said nothing. "Your old analyst, Schlomo Dove?"

But the fourth number 2 was in that big beautiful hand and I was history. I got up and trudged to the door and grasped the doorknob.

"Dr. Basch?"

I was not history? A countertransference doorknobber?

"Yes?"

"Would you like to play tennis sometime, and come over

for dinner?"

I turned, tears of gratitude in my eyes. "Yes!" I said, wanting to add but catching myself, darling.

"Keep it up," she went on, smiling, "and you too may someday be good enough to be a candidate at the institute."

I left, floating on air, feeling that I was very very special.

"YOUR FATHER DIED today," my mother said on the phone that night from Florida.

"What? Grandpa's dead?"

"No, no, your father, your father. He had chest pains last night and I called you but you didn't call back and then today in the hospital suddenly he just died."

My father is dead. No more conjunctions.

'The doctor said it was painless."

"That's good."

It was Friday evening, the twenty-sixth. We talked about the details but I was in shock. The funeral would be on Monday, March 1, at home in Columbia.

I hung up feeling lost and guilty, and needing to talk to someone. But who? Berry? I still hadn't talked to her and felt estranged. A wave of desolation broke over me. She was family, my real family. I needed her with me in this, the first of our four parents to die. Yes. I called, praying to get her, not her machine.

I got her machine. Worse: "… and I'm out of the country until Tuesday."

I felt horrible.

Who else to call? Malik? Jill? I thought about it. With each, right now, there seemed to be too much old baggage, they would be too demanding. Solini? Hannah? Forget it. And then I thought of A.K. She would not be intrusive, no. I called her up at home.

"My father died today, suddenly."

Two seconds. "I am sorry."

"What should I do?"

Two seconds. "Listen for it in the material."

"Material? You mean my cases?"

Two seconds. "Yes and in your own material. At the funeral. You might also try 'Mourning and Melancholia.' " I could have sworn I heard the scritch scritch of a pencil. "Father dies. Son is impotent. Impressive. Good night."

So to prepare for the funeral I read Freud's classic. I hadn't looked at it since the seminar, after which Dee White had shaken my hand, wished me a nice vacation, and gone upstairs to kill himself. Now, reading it, I was impressed. Here was genius. It was absolutely clear: the healthy response to the death of my father would be "mourning," and the pathological response would be "melancholia." The crucial difference seemed to be the matter of ambivalence, where, if you had

mixed feelings about the dead person, or "object," in Freud's words, "The shadow of the lost object falls across the ego." When Dee had quoted that incredible phrase, I hadn't understood; now I did. This falling shadow was big trouble, leading to insomnia, loss of appetite, self-reproach, even suicide:

The tendency toward suicide makes melancholia so interesting-and so dangerous… It is true we have long known that no neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.

Dee had failed to work this out. I certainly had mixed feelings about my father. I'd have to be on guard.

The night before the funeral, as I sat in our living room in Columbia listening to the local rabbi, one Goldfarb, a chubby pink-cheeked young man with bright red hair, recently moved to Columbia from Nebraska, ask my mother and brother and me about my father so as to be able to compose the next day's eulogy, I was on guard. Any ambivalence about my father would have to be nipped in the bud, analyzed out, and kept merely neurotic.

"And what did your husband like to do?" Goldfarb asked my mother.

"Golf. Golf was his first love." She paused. "I mean after the boys."

" 'Golf.' " The rabbi scribbled this down. "And where did he golf?"

"We golfed all over the world." My mother and brother, like me, were numb. Dry-eyed. As my mother talked about golf, the rabbi, feeling he now had enough information about golf, turned to me, the oldest:

"You know, Doctor, Columbia is thepupik of America. You know pupikT

"Pupik?"

"Yiddish for belly button. And you know what a belly button collects?"

"You have some thoughts about what a belly button collects?"

"Schmutz." He stared at me expectantly.

"And you have some feelings about schmutz?'

"Yes, Doctor, I certainly do have some feelings, yes. This congregation is unreal. Schmutz. Now. What else did your loving husband like to do?"

It went on like this, the rabbi writing in a little notebook a little, and then turning to me again and telling me how terrible Columbia was:

"I was in New York not long ago, having a bite at a deli, and the waiter asked where I was from and I said Columbia, New York, and he said, 'Still got the whores up there?' This place was famous for its red-light district!"

"Yes," I said, "everybody knows that."

"/ didn't, when I took this job. Now, Mrs. Basch, what did he belong to-I assume B'nai B'rith, but was he an Elk, a Lion, a Moose?"