Sol Stein - Other people

For my generation, psychoanalysis is a last resort. My friends get involved in things like transcendental meditation. Some of them have gone for weekend retreats at one of these places where you purge your soul in groups, but I can't think of one that took up the couch. Why waste the time and money? I wasn't interested in getting into a maze to find myself. I was into other people from the moment I got to Radcliffe.

My parents' idea of Cambridge and Boston comes from old books. What a difference! With all the colleges up there, including my own, it was a great place to find exotics, by which I mean people who weren't like Mom and Dad. My mother's melting pot consisted of Republican ladies. And my father joined clubs where they didn't let the other kinds in. In a big zoo like Boston, you want to look at what's in the other cages.

When I was a kid, whenever we were someplace my mother used to call "public," like a public swimming pool, and some kid would get up on the high diving board and cross himself before take-off, my mother would look at my father as if she were tolerating somebody who picked his nose. Well, the Cambridge they sent me to was littered with some of these cross-yourself Mediterranean-type Catholics, some of whom went to churches that were decorated on the inside like pinball machines. Our Presbyterian church, even when it's got people in it, looks like it needs dusting. I met Jewish kids at Harvard who kept running off at the mouth with an intensity that scared you till you got used to it. They didn't know that intensity was not nice, that if you had anything to say, you ought to say it quietly, using words that won't upset anybody. I don't mean there weren't Protestants at school who weren't into this and that with feeling, but the Jewish kids, hell, they were into everything as if being into was the thing and not the subject matter. Also in Cambridge I met a lot of et ceteras, Greeks, Irish girls pure enough to have freckles all over and real red hair.

It was exciting being in a big pond full of strange animals. The variety itself kept my adrenaline up through those late-night rap sessions, but late hours and insomnia are a poor mix. It was at Radcliffe that I started envying people who slept all night, or who could sleep in the mornings. I couldn't even sleep into Sunday mornings. I marked a passage in Kafka's Diaries : "Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life."

After graduation, my father gave me a blessed six months in Europe and I didn't miss a single night's sleep. Was that a clue?

I roomed with some girls in New York, drifted from job to job, and the insomnia came galloping back. I needed an anchor. A job or a man or both? My interests had something of an international flavor even then, so I put on a dress, poked around the U.N. and, to my surprise, getting a good job was easier than I thought because I looked so straight, Wasp nose. Ivy League references, accent okay, I was a lady!

With insomnia.

The U.N. wasn't at all like Cambridge. All those exotic types straight out of the National Geographic were actors , I mean they didn't behave the way they must've at home, they all acted like they were trying to be Henry Cabot Lodge. Sure there were real ones here and there, like that Russian sun freak from Moscow who used to take his shirt off in fur-coat weather if the sun was out. He kept complaining that the U.S. wouldn't let him go to Florida when he had a weekend off and wanted to know when we'd become a free country! I once asked him if he was an MVD agent — what the hell, there's no harm in asking — and he said he was the only member of the delegation who wasn't — I mean he had a sense of humor. I was also amused by those bucks from Africa who used polysyllabic English tongue-twisters incorrectly and frequently, you couldn't get a straight, simple sentence out of them. And real Arabs, no American girl should skip the experience of one date with a genuine Arab, especially one who's super polite and is desperate because he hasn't gotten laid since Saudi Arabia, that is an experience. Growing up in Westchester sure doesn't prepare you for living in the world.

I am not cynical. I am trying to nail down for myself what's real. It is one hundred percent true that the guys who make the speeches in the Assembly are Charlie McCarthys who don't believe most of what they move their lips with — listen, I know the guys who write their speeches. What you have in the General Assembly is like a Hollywood cocktail party where everybody knows everybody else is lying but they've got to make believe with each other, it's their thing. What most of my friends' bosses at the U.N. are into — wherever they come from — is having a good time in New York for two or three years, being called Mr. Ambassador by head waiters, having DPL license plates that enable you to park in the middle of traffic and get away with it, where can you get that kind of power back in the jungle where everybody else is like you? It's the fastest race for class mobility I know. The U.N. is packed with monkeys hurrying to get their nuts off, their booze drunk, and some money squirreled away before they are crated up and sent back to Stink, or whatever their country is called.

I was doing fine, enjoying myself, especially after I got myself transferred to X. X is what he was called. His real job was not writing speeches for the American Ambassador to the U.N., but drafting a so-called political memorandum that was used by the speech writer. X was the Mission's contact with the intelligence services, which is why I had to wait all those months for a clearance though I was really working for him in the meantime anyway, unofficially but getting paid. Even the Ambassador called him X sometimes, jokingly of course. I was his assistant, which meant I did his shit work. X said that I didn't have what he called a proper command of the language but since nobody under thirty did according to him and he thought I was smart, he would give me a batch of stuff that had come in and say something like, "Pull out the content." Five thousand words of garbage and he'd trust me to find if there was anything of substance and I'd give him three or four items, one line each, and X would say, "Smart lady" and pat me on the head, the pig. I did the digging, I did the choosing, and he dictated it to his secretary and claimed the credit. Of course I resented him, making three hundred and twenty percent of what I make. Yes, it's my first real job, yes he's older, yes he's got a wife and two kids to support, but why three hundred and twenty percent for what I do? If the crunch came — Washington is always threatening cutbacks in staff — he'd can me politely. But the work would still have to be done. He'd have to hire another me eventually, security clearance and all, so he might as well hang on to the original. That's my job security.

Once after a day of doing X's bidding only to find out he'd forgotten one significant part of his instruction and when he told me, sorry, I'd have to wade through that crap all over again, I let out some expletive and he said, "Why do you resent being a woman?" and I told him wearily, "Because I can't pee standing up." I'll find a way of telling him how I feel about that three hundred and twenty percent and a lot of other things the moment he makes that first pass, and he will, he will.

Well, here I was being X's digestive system — I have to admit I liked the actual work — and everything's going fine except the insomnia I had in Radcliffe comes back in spades. I'd go to sleep and within an hour, sometimes within ten minutes, I'd be awake, tired, blood-eyed. I tried reading things I hated, I tried hot cocoa, I tried some Indian system where you relax one muscle at a time. I began to wear dark glasses indoors to hide my eyes.