Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"What are you going to do?" I asked.

"Wyoming." She looked around. "Now where did I put my cowboy boots?"

"Wyoming, babe?"

"Wyoming, yes!" Full of fire, full of life, she suddenly seemed bigger, more beautiful, even incandescent. "My old college roommate Gilda lives there. On a sweet little ranch. No men. Gilda's a musician too-viola-we used to play in a chamber group. She did law school, for a while she was a criminal lawyer. Now she's mostly a rancher. She's always wanted me to come out there. I'm gonna do my music in Wyoming!"

She swore us to secrecy about her suicide attempt. As the sun pulled itself up out of its cloud cover, she wondered why she hadn't died.

"The Wonder bread bag lets air in," I said.

"I thought it was airtight, to keep the bread fresh."

"In the bread section of the supermarket," I said, "what do you smell?"

"Fresh bread."

"So how can you smell it if the smell can't get out?"

"Christ. Another be. That's been it, hasn't it, here, I mean right from the start, with that sonofabitch Ike White! But then what keeps it fresh?"

"Chemicals, babe," Henry said, "killing us all, just like Malik says?"

Before we left, Hannah thanked us. Looking us each, in turn, directly in the eye-no more eye roll-ups now-she said, "Guys, you better get out while you still can."

"Of Misery?" I asked.

"That too," she said. "I was thinking of your psychoanalyses."

I stared at Hannah. Despite her near disaster, I was not feeling much really. For a second, I worried about that. Yet wasn't my not feeling much a proof of my deep repressed feeling, of the severe psychopathology in me, which in fact demanded my going into psychoanalysis? So I said to her, "I'm not hi it, yet."

But Hannah was staring at Solini now. She took his hands, and, eye-to-eye, in a high, Joan Baez voice, she sang to him from Bob Marley's "Trenchtown Rock."

Henry used to lead off his act with it.

"I hear you, H-babe? I'll be thinkin' of you in Wyoming, and we'll see which way it goes?"

LIKE THOUSANDS OF others before me, I went to Schlomo Dove the next day to make a match for me with the right psychoanalyst

We met in his office in Misery, just down the hall from the office of Lloyal von Nott. Seeing him in person, so runty and ugly, dressed in a rumpled old suit and stale shirt and no tie and wearing a big button that read, TRUST ME I'M A DOCTOR, I felt more certain about what I realized I'd finally settled on in the Cherokee matter: there was no way that Lily Putnam, the tall, auburn-haired, and beautiful WASP princess, could have allowed herself to be fucked even once by Schlomo, in therapy or anywhere else, the confirmation of this being the way that Cherokee's paranoid obsession was playing out exactly as Freudian theory dictated, at its deepest level being simply the repression of homosexual desires for the penis of Father and the fantasied penis of Mother and of the screen memory of catching Aunt Vic and Uncle Hap going at it on a tattered rug in the servants' quarters of the Putnam chalet in St. Moritz at age six, which happened to be the exact same age as little Kissy, when Cherokee first wandered into

Misery last July. It was like in golf when, once in the middle of a miserable round, you hit a shot dead-solid perfect.

"It's about time!" Schlomo said, putting down the watering can. 'Ww, Schlomo is putting down the watering can, and Schlomo is not smoking the cigar. Place your money nice on the desk and let's kazatsky\"

I plunked down $150 cash for the twenty-minute session, sat across from him and told him about myself, my impotence, and my father's death.

"And what do you feel, Roy G. Basch?" Schlomo asked, picking up a rather black-skinned banana and starting to peel it.

Rather than feeling what I was feeling and telling Schlomo, I found myself watching him peeling and then looking away at all the other bananas in the room, bananas at all stages of ripeness, from a green bunch on the windowsill to perfect yellows on his couch to some yucky black-splotched babies on the floor under his desk like the one he was messing with.

'Tell Schlomo Dove what you feel, hmmm?" He took a bite. It was obscene.

'To tell you the truth, I feel scared you're gonna throw that banana in my lap."

"Ho ho," he said, "ho ho. No, no, Roy Basch, for to build the therapeutic alliance, Schlomo will now put his banana on his desk. See?" He did so. "Nu, so let's do some feelings?"

I tried to come up with feelings but came up dry. "I'm coming up dry."

"Not even Roy Basch sad and lonely? Tell Schlomo, about sad and lonely? You can tell Schlomo."

"Nope."

"You're like the sun, giving out your warmth to other people, leaving yourself cold."

This sounded good, but I remembered that it was word for word what he had told Hannah at her consultation with him.

"For this," I said, "I'm forking out a hundred and fifty bucks?"

"0y, do you have Oedipal!" Schlomo said. "You got early infantile up the wazoo! And does Schlomo Dove have the guy for you!"

"Please, not Ed Slapadek. I can't take the Slapper!"

"No, better."

'Tougher?"

'Tenderer. Adolf Zement Shaper. Former head of the Boston Institute. You'll love him. Then hate him. Then love him maturely and terminate. Have fun. And watch that erotic transference! Here's his number. Bye-bye now!"

Despite everything revolting about Schlomo, I left feeling a little sad. Unlike Arnie Bozer, unlike Lily Putnam, Schlomo had not offered to keep me for himself. Compared to Arnie Bozer, I'm a reject? It was surprisingly hard to take.

A few days later I found myself on the couch on the top floor of the institute in Boston, talking about my dick and my father-my not having feelings hi one, or about the other.

Adolf Zement Shaper was a roly-poly old man with a round face and hair so white it looked like a photo negative of what he must have looked like as a young man. He greeted me warmly with a dynamite silence and motioned me to a couch. I lay down and started free-associating. Suddenly I heard him clear his throat. My eyes hit my watch: only fifteen seconds left? Where had time gone?

"You come in with seams," he said, "and you go out seamless."

Thirteen

CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS presents a bleak vision of human life. Freud says that we humans are beasts, driven by sex and aggression. These bestial libidinal drives are barely and poorly sublimated to "civilized" life. Bestiality is the best we can do. Bleak, yes, but accurate. Read the newspaper, see what birds of prey we are. I now understood the depression I saw on the faces of those in psychoanalysis. Bleakness demanded it.

Henry took Hannah's departure hard. He was completing his rotation on Toshiba, the Admissions Unit, and he was deeply depressed. He walked around with the kind of trudge that I'd noticed in the schizophrenics medicated to their eyeballs in the Heidelbergs. He now had tics in both eyes.

"Isn't Ed Slapadek helping?" I asked one day.

"The Slapper's digging into my gay-latent, but I don't feel gay-don't feel nothin' below the waist? I'm digging into gay-latent with all my patients?"

"What? You think they're all gay-latent too?"

"Why not? They're all very terrified of gays, having me as their therapist?"

Was Henry going crazy or just going through a normal psychoanalysis?

One day he exploded. He assigned each of his twelve Toshiba admissions a DSM diagnosis from the section on "Psychosexual Disorders," starting with 302.50, Transsexu-alism, through 302.10, Zoophilia, and 302.90, Atypical Para-phelia ("Telephone Scatologia-lewdness"), ending with 302.00, Ego-Dystonic Homosexuality. Nash Michaels and Jessica Tunaba found him diagnosing a Saudi prince, reading back to him as he copied out from the DSM:

"There is a sustained pattern of homosexual arousal that the individual explicitly states has been unwanted and a persistent source of distress…"