Sol Stein - Other people

One weekend my friend from Radcliffe, Betsy Thorne, stayed over. At two in the morning I was sitting on the edge of my bed, nodding but not enough to sleep, desperate, when Betsy awoke. She came over to sit beside me.

"What's the matter, hon?" she said.

I told her it was nothing new, that it'd been going on for months, that I'd had it for a while in school, but now it was much worse.

"You'll kill yourself fighting it," Betsy said.

"I don't know what to do."

Betsy rummaged around in her bag and came up with the bottle of reds. I knew what they were.

"Try one," she said. "It works for me."

I took it with me to the bathroom, saying I was getting a cup of water, but my intention was really to flush it down and pretend to have taken it. When I saw my face in the mirror, the purple circles under my red eyes, I thought what the hell and swallowed the capsule.

We talked for a bit. Betsy said there was nothing to worry about as long as I didn't drink alcohol before taking them. Twenty minutes later I was yawning, and when I fell asleep I slept straight through. In the morning Betsy was gone but had left me three or four reds on my night table.

I had to scramble to find a steady source. My damn so-called doctor was the family's doctor and I knew he wouldn't approve. I thought of going to another doctor, please can I have some Seconals, and decided I'd rather pay more and skip the hypocrisy. Soon I was into two a night, then two when I went to sleep and one more when I woke up after a few hours, and once I found myself taking two more when I woke up, and I knew I was in trouble.

I was at my parents' house for one of my rare sleepovers when my mother, doing me a favor and unpacking my canvas duffel while I chitchatted with Dad down below, saw the downers and told me, away from Dad's hearing, about the time she was on them. It was as if she was confessing to having been a streetwalker or something. We just can't imagine our parents into drugs a long time ago.

"Your father was away at a convention for a week. When he returned," she said, "he didn't, well, he wasn't loving the way he usually was after a time away. He kept to his side of the bed. I stayed awake longer and longer, unable not to think. The doctor prescribed the Seconal. He cautioned me to take only one. But I'd wake in a few hours and couldn't get back to sleep, so I'd take another. Then one wouldn't get me to sleep, so I took two, and then another one when I woke in the middle of the night, and if I woke toward morning, I couldn't take just lying there in bed with your father asleep, and I'd take another, and then when it was time to get up I was foggy, and then when I told the doctor, he suggested I try Benzedrine in the morning, and it drove me nearly crazy. I decided I had to quit all of it. I had the most awful withdrawal symptoms. Your father was very sympathetic. He used to cradle me in his arms at night. As it turned out, his affection was my cure. The pills camouflaged the problem."

It was a short road from that conversation to Dr. Koch. Those early sessions were like root canal work, except the canal was my memory. Dr. Koch wanted me to see if I could remember the very first time I had awakened and couldn't get back to sleep. Had I been dreaming? I didn't remember. What were you thinking about before you went to sleep? How could I remember, it was so long ago? You will remember, he said. Be patient.

The first time I was really glad to be in therapy was when the rape happened. People don't understand that when something like that hits you, what you want to do is get rid of the disgust by laying it on the table in front of someone. I never expected Koch to be a son of a bitch the way he was that night. He was supposed to be helping me!

When I was a kid I always expected doctors to look like my father. World War II type haircuts, narrow ties, how-do-you-dos every time they saw you. Not that they really looked alike, but they all seemed to have noses that were going to turn into those long thin ones on Modigliani's sculptures, breathing tubes, no bridge, barely visible except as a line down the middle of the face. I'm not exaggerating. If you listened to them talking to my father it sounded like they had all taken speech lessons in the same class. Well, when you get used to doctors looking or acting in one particular way and then you go to see a doctor who looks like Koch, it blows your preconceptions.

Dr. Koch was a big old blob of a man, shaggy hair bushed up, and his nose was more W. C. Fields than Valentino. Maybe that sounds unfair, because all of his pieces fit, and I've got to admit his eyes, with those bushy grey brows growing in all directions, were all soul. I did look him over that first time. He wore a tie as if it was an impediment to free breathing; he kept the knot an inch or two from his neck. He wore sandals. Whoever heard of a doctor wearing sandals?

He stonewalled me the first time, just at the beginning, as if it was a technique, keeping his distance, but he noticed I was looking him over as a person, and before the hour was up he relaxed, smiled, like an instant friend saying okay, let's talk.

It was the second hour when I sensed him looking at me. I don't mean my face. I mean all of me. Do people that age fuck regularly? I guess we always think people stop at some point until we get to that point. Betsy Thorne fucked a much older man when she was a sophomore, some friend of her father's she met in the street when she was in L.A. and he said aren't you Betsy Thorne, what are you doing so far from home, and she said what are you doing so far from home, and then he asked her to dinner, why not, what kind of dinner, she doesn't care, he takes her to a topless place on the strip, and Betsy thinks so that's what Dad's friends do out of town. The food, Betsy said, was yuch, but the drinks were okay, and the show was something else, much better-looking girls than she'd expected to do that kind of thing, and he said some of them go to UCLA, and then she wonders why, when the meal's over, he doesn't put the napkin on the table, has he got an erection, she's thinking, and anyway, they end up in his hotel, and she said it was miles different than the guys at school, slow, you know what I mean, a fantastically long build-up. She got me going just talking about it. Of course it intrigued me, I think it does most girls who aren't cheerleaders chasing jocks. Someone else's old man might satisfy my curiosity. You see, it's Koch looking at me that way that got me thinking about it all again, because with all my previous thinking I never fell into the circumstance, and it didn't seem something I wanted to pursue especially. What we do is try to retailor life. I would have wanted Koch to be just a bit younger, maybe just less round in the middle, I have a strange feeling about a pot, as if it's just a little obscene. And I worry suppose he couldn't get it up, it would be awful. I wouldn't feel it was my fault, but you never can tell how you feel until something like that happens. Anyway, Koch never made a pass at me that whole year. I thought about him from time to time when I was lying there on the couch. I censored at first, I'd tell him what I was thinking, but I'd skip the things I was thinking about him, and then, shit, I told him because he said always tell everything, that's what analysis is, following the meanderings to find out what it's all about. I wish I had seen his face when I told him the first time, but he sits in back of me, you know, and he's just a voice grunting now and again.

The truth is that telling Koch about my thinking about him wasn't as bad as telling him the details when I was having that affair with the French interpreter at the U.N. What I wanted to say was I'm involved with this French person who works where I do and let it go at that, but it doesn't work that way because you talk about yesterday. Yesterday I did this and I did that, and I thought, I'm making Koch jealous, it's cruel to him to tell him about my being in bed with someone else when that's probably where he wants to be, and he just takes it like he takes everything, yes, go on, and then what happened? God you have to be like God to be an analyst sometimes! He wants me to tell him everything that's on my mind, and if nothing's on my mind, he says well yesterday, what did you do, and we're off and soon I'm talking about Bill.