Sol Stein - Other people

He saw me to the door. Then he said something odd.

"The unexpected can be interesting."

What did he mean by that?

As I pressed the button of the elevator I glanced at my watch and noticed that he had given me only forty minutes, not fifty! I caught the absurdity of this reaction instantly, as if I had been shortchanged in a meat market. He hadn't given me short shrift. He had opened my head with a cleaver. Did I dare put Francine in the hands of a man like that?

A first meeting is for me always a difficult acting role. I spend so many of my working hours being passively sympathetic. As the patient explores his thoughts, I grunt neutral sounds. I listen the way a neighbor or a friend does, forming my own perceptions. I remember the Baumgarten woman telling me I sounded like a big teddy bear, a larger version of the stuffed animal of her childhood to whom she talked for comfort. We are so lonely in our anguish that talking to a willing listener is itself therapeutic, and if the listener is a priest or a doctor, who knows, perhaps his experience of listening to so many private torments that are, at heart, so similar, perhaps the listener will have something useful to say in the end.

Yet if the person I am seeing for the first time is another doctor's patient upset at his transference, ready to switch allegiances, interviewing me to see if I am acceptable, I must seem to be harsh, cold, uncaring, a stone wall that talks back. And if the person who has come to see me is not the patient, but a father like Mr. Widmer who acts as if he knows his own high place in the world and has come to deliver his daughter over to the psychological zookeeper, I am an actor again. He is used to businessmen who smile when they feel derision, but he is not used to the idea of a doctor who sees through his great surface calm. A Jew, a Greek, an Italian would have wailed about the plight of his daughter. Widmer speaks calmly — I would like to know what his pulse was, I would like to have seen his electroencephalogram. He flatters me, he says he comes to me by reading a piece of my work, am I to believe that? Somewhere in his mind, when he comes to visit me, he is trading down. His child has fallen from grace. She has terrible insomnia. She has betrayed the Wasp ethic of control. Am I to do some Freudian hocus-pocus so that she will become acceptable again to her mother and father?

In three minutes Widmer reveals that he is a lawyer who is not a lawyer. He is not a Clarence Darrow spellbinding a jury, he is a businessman who takes money for writing the same contracts over and over again, changing the names of the parties, the terms, it doesn't matter, he will never shake the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution, yet he lusts after that excitement in the law and hangs on to it by a vicarious thread to an Armenian who is a real lawyer! Then, in the next few minutes, he betrays that in his mind — where else does man fornicate except in his mind?! — he is a lover to his daughter and a pastor to his wife. Is this none of my business except that it arms me now to deal with the girl?

I come out to the waiting room for my first look at Francine Widmer.

"How do you do?" she says, standing.

She is as tall as I am, blond, with unusual bone structure in her face. I wonder what her father thinks of the touch of oriental in her eyes. A distant ancestor? A mutation?

"I am pleased to meet you," I say, shaking her hand. "Please come in."

She has looked directly at me. Good.

We are standing in my study at the moment of greatest discomfort. "We will have a talk first," I say.

"Shall I sit here?" she says, pointing to the chair in which her father sat during our interview.

"Yes, please."

Am I imagining she slides her body into the chair as if it is an intimate act? I notice the naturalness of the shape of her breasts. Marta wore a brassiere always, a girdle always. It was the times.

She crosses her legs in defense of the flower. Better than the subway-riding women, sitting legs apart, unwanted. She tosses her hair. I expect it is lovely to touch.

"Our actual sessions," I explain, "will be with you lying down."

I have said this so often, and yet this time the words lying down simmer with an expectation that sounds sexual. What is this, Gunther?

I know of an actual case, a father who was himself a doctor, who had a heart attack at his beautiful daughter's wedding reception. Everyone thought of him as the happy father giving her hand in marriage, but he was in the darkness of his mind the dismissed suitor, haunted by the guilt of his illegitimate claim, now seeing his daughter's body claimed forever by a legitimate lover. What a heart it takes to adjust to that! But that was long ago. Marta and I thought of ourselves as brave revolutionaries, having intercourse four months before marriage, mingling in a sweat of excitement that would have brought apoplexy to our parents. Now Widmer and I live in a world where children — why do we still think of them as children?! — openly fornicate, shocking even those of us who were trained to think that our lusts are natural and the restrictions of society unnatural.

If I think poor Widmer am I not also thinking poor Koch ? Isn't Widmer a warning to myself? I, too, walk around in camouflage, showing the world what? a passive teddy bear listening?

I am older than Widmer by three years at least, a widower who sees no one, who rolls on the screen of his mind nostalgic movies about his dead wife, who sublimates by immersing himself in helping other people realize themselves, and who has talked himself into believing he no longer lusts, this man, Koch, sees a twenty-seven-year-old girl and feels his loins tingle for the first time in how long? How can I say of Widmer that he confuses his wife and his daughter when his daughter has the same effect on me? With less cause. Widmer has seen this Francine since a baby, watched her naked body grow lean, her legs lengthen, her breasts develop into pearls, her hips widen, her childhood lope become that walk she had when she walked into this office. I accuse Widmer's accuser of carnality! Of being human still at sixty!

How many patients have I seen in my lifetime, a thousand, and at the center of how many, most, yes most, it is the urgency of the testicles, the hungry labia that we come to. They say they have come to therapy because they have difficulty communicating with people, they have trouble keeping jobs, they have trouble keeping wives and husbands, they have nightmares, they take pills too much, and when we peel the onion away, we are left God's clever little motor for forcing us to procreate, a penis looking for a home, a home looking for a penis. The rest is culture.

"You have insomnia?" I ask.

"Very bad, I'm afraid."

"We must probe for the cause," I say.

Probe . Another word invested with meaning. What is this?

I have friends among analysts who talked seriously for a while that the sexual revolution was going to put us out of business. I laughed at them! The open ambiguity of our sexual natures now gives us more cases to deal with, the closet doors are opening up not to admit a minority into the light, we are finding out that almost all of humanity was packed in there, behind some door. What is our own Freud become, a blind genius who thought women envied him his penis! We are always beginning all over again.

I, at sixty, must take time for a new patient, myself, to find out why for the years since Marta died I have pretended to be a eunuch, my sexual life over, why it took this other new patient, Francine Widmer, to in one minute make God's little motor in my groin start humming? We are the physicians, the patients trust us, they put themselves into our power for therapy, we cannot abuse our power, we cannot involve ourselves in their sexual lives! Yet that is a lie, we do, we do!