Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"You ruined my sex life. All your analysis of Schlomo fucking Lily in therapy has just made it more real. My obsession is worse. And last night Lily said to me, 'I'd almost think you're having an affair, Cherokee, but I figure you can't be, because you're too depressed. You'd be happier if you were.' " He glared at me, his paranoia almost palpable. "I'm starting to think you're in cahoots with Schlomo. You talking about me behind my back?"

I glanced at the Freud on my desk:

The clinging to the condition of a penis in the object as well as the retiring in favor of the father, may be ascribed to the castration complex.

"Are you? Answer me."

The enmity which the persecuted paranoiac sees in others is the reflection of his own hostile impulses against them.

"You have the fantasy that Dr. Dove and I are in cahoots, against you?"

"Yeah! You and Lily and him-all in bed together!" "Yes, and your anger at me is your lost love for Father?" Boom. He wilted. I could almost see his inner vista open up, of Father, hated and loved, and Mother, with no "dick"- or, rather, with a dick so soft as to be invisible. "And," I went on, "your keeping secrets from Mother?" Boom boom. He wept quietly. "I do have a secret. I never told anyone else this." I braced myself, ready for incest, beating, murder, zoophilia. "You remember when I told you that I quit Walt Disney?" "I do."

"I didn't quit, I was fired. Last Christmas in Aspen, I… wasn't even… invited to Eisner's. I'm a failure, a total failure. Nothing I do is ever enough. My severance pay is just about gone. I'm just about broke-a secret I've kept from Lily. I always tried my best, but now, it's like my whole life is spread out before my eyes like a patient on a table or something, and I'm looking down on it and I can see that all the

while I was trying my best at the wrong things." He sighed. "Listen. I love this:

"Get all the gold and silver that you can, Satisfy ambition, animate The trivial days and ram them with the sun, And yet upon these maxims meditate: All women dote upon an idle man Although their children need a rich estate; No man has ever lived that had enough Of children's gratitude or woman's love."

I knew the "poem, and loved it too: "Vacillation," by W. B. Yeats. My impulse was to tell him I loved it too. But A.K. would rip me to shreds if I did.

"Yeats," he said. "Guess you don't know it. I was Class Poet at Groton. Always wanted to be a poet. At Yale my senior year, I was in a poetry seminar-very select-run by a poet who'd been in a seminar with Anne Sexton? My teacher said I had promise. Said he would help me apply to creative writing programs?" He shook his head. "I chose to make money instead. Not even law, Disney. Mickey Mouse was my big rebellion-some rebellion, Disney's more the Dow Jones now than GM or GE. Now, I'm out of money. But in two days, a big note comes due, 'a rich estate.' " He stared at me, a dissonantly calm look hi his eyes, curious, even quizzical, as if wondering how I would respond. Again I felt torn, wanting to respond but fearing A.K.'s critique of both my wanting and my response. There was something chilling here. I compromised.

"You have some feelings, about your 'big note'?"

He got up and walked to the door. There were still ten minutes left. His hand was on the doorknob. "And now," he said, "I've even failed with you."

"You're leaving early?" I said with alarm, feeling that if he walked out and never came back, I too would be a failure. Once again, compared to good therapists like A.K., I was coming up short.

"Do you care?" Cherokee asked, his voice again curious, calmly probing, as if from above his life, probing the body below.

"You mean care if you leave early?" "I mean…" He gave me a sorrowful look. "I mean, just, you know, care."

I did. Despite our differences, at that moment I saw his struggle as much like my own. I too felt that no matter what I did I was a failure. I sensed, then, that he was lonely and desperate and needed me to be with him right there, and that I should simply say that to him, say "Yeah man, I do." But just as the Y of Yeah was pushing off from my silence it was as if a shot of Novocain had hit, freezing my jaw and my tongue and setting my lip atingle. In that instant-what Freud called "the procrastinating mechanism of thought," which cools our libidinal impulses and assures man's superiority to beasts, the beasts out there in nature and the beasts within our skulls- into my head marched A.K., stern, and Freud sterner if not sternest-that enormous uncut beard hiding any sign of his lips, those thick steel-rimmed glasses hiding any real sign of his eyes-and before I could figure out exactly what to say to Cherokee, he was gone.

Sitting there free-associating until time was up-he might come back, might he not? — I felt scared. Was I scared for him or scared for me? His shit or my shit?

I wanted to run after him, chase him down all the way to the tennis court and beyond, hound him to his house, his barn where he kept his horses, his office in the hayloft off limits to Lily and the girls because it was the nerve center of the phone calls and faxes of his doomed thing with Christine, wanted to take him into my arms as Malik had taken Oly Joe in that old yellowed gym that night, as any caring father would a frightened son, yes. But I felt the lead weight of psychoanalysis, the flowering of Western civilization, pressing me down on my chair, as if all the Freudians on earth were a species apart, men and the rare woman of greater gravity and- A knock on my door. My heart did a flip-flop. Hope. "Yes?" "Any dickheads in here?"

Thorny. In a crisp white shirt and bow tie and the kind of suspenders the Generation X bankers were now wearing. He came in as if this were his TV room at home and sat down casually and said, "You're in deep shit, Doc." "How?" "Your head's messed up. I couldn't believe what you did to

Zoe. And then not even lettin' me into Thoreau t'see her? Bad move, Doc, wicked bad. She asked me to deliver this to you. Personally." He handed me a letter.

Dear Dr. Roy G. Basch:

I am firing you as my therapist. You are brainwashed. I can't take it anymore. I had a secret consultation last week with Dr. Schlomo Dove. He said that I was a person with all the warmth of the sun, but that I give my warmth to everyone else and it leaves me feeling cold and empty-like to you. He is taking me on as his own patient. Maybe you should find another profession, one that rewards heartlessness, like law. Have a nice life.

Zoe

P.S. Butler abused me. Really. And there really is a dead child buried in our backyard in the Adirondacks. I could have shown you where to dig.

I was shaken by this and furious at Schlomo, so shaken and furious that it took all my skill to hide it from Thorny.

He scrutinized me. "Anything you want me to tell Zoe, Doc?"

I wanted to say to tell her that I cared about her and wanted her back as a patient and I'd tried my hardest but I said, only, "Like what?"

"Like, 'Hey, all is forgiven come home let's try again, kid'?" He waited, much like a good analyst would. "Tell you a secret, Doc-she'd kill me if she knew I said it: she really wants you, you know, as a therapist. You've helped her a lot this year. She knows you care. All you got to do is ask."

Ask. Malik's main word. Everything in me consciously wanted to ask, but I had seen, through A.K. and Poppa Doc, just how untrustable my conscious mind was, given my monstrous unconscious, and so I knew I'd better not.

"Dickheads Get Shrunk," Thorny said, rising. "It's pathetic."

VFV BEEPED ME that night, when I was on call, for a phone call from Lily Putnam, Cherokee's wife. Lily had never called me before. Something was up.

My instinct was to talk to her but again I heard A.K.'s

voice: "You did whatf So I thought of telling Viv I couldn't talk to her. But that didn't feel right either. Then I thought that, since A.K. was supervising me on Cherokee and was ultimately the person responsible, I'd call her at home. I asked Viv to tell Lily I'd call her back. I called A.K.