By Blood (3 page)

So this was the mystery the patient wished to keep hidden: She was adopted! Improbable as this may seem, it was her adopted status, not her lesbianism, that produced in me the keener excitement. For my best friend while growing up, Paul Beleiter, had been adopted, a fact he had worn as a badge of identity. I was overjoyed to think of him! When we were fifteen, Paul escaped from our meager town. His parents had threatened to withdraw financial support if he did not prepare for a course of engineering; he shrugged them off as one would shed so many ill-fitting clothes. He moved into the rooming house of an old widower, then on to an existence all his own: Manhattan, a scholarship to a special high school of art, Greenwich Village, friends who smoked Gitanes, Jewish girlfriends with haloes of frizzy hair.

How I had longed to follow him! It was the time in my life when my ancestors had already put their damp hands on me. Any hope that I would not emulate my father was dashed (or nearly so) when I followed not his example (alcohol and pills) but the more elegant method of Virginia Woolf: into the river with stones in my pockets. I was appointed with my first mental health practitioner (she of the ivy trembling at the window). And there was Paul, already a man on his own terms, graceful and full of laughter, freed from the strict, brittle people who had raised him.

I was certain it was the adoption that had given him the courage. Paul was not adopted as one would say “I am Protestant” or “I am from Michigan,” but as a quiddity, an indwelling trait that set him apart from we poor, owned, claimed children of our mothers’ wombs. His alien genes had blessed him; they had given him the knowledge of his difference, his singularity. Now it thrilled me to think that I, sitting quietly behind a thin door, could follow the psychological turns whereby my dear friend had extricated himself from the engulfment of family; whereby he, like the patient, had come to the realization: These are not my parents.

If Paul—and now the patient—could extricate themselves, why not I? Why could I not learn the art of being parentless from these adoptees: these very models of self-creation?

At that moment, it seemed to me that my relocation to San Francisco had not been a stumbling error after all. The sudden leave, the dismal house by the beach I had rented, the ad in the newspaper that had led me to this strange office building in a rough neighborhood—each of these steps now seemed a requisite stage in a propitious process designed to bring me to Room 807, to the adopted patient, and, through her, to a possible release from the clammy hand of ancestry. Such a release had been the quest of my many psychological explorations; and to think that now I sat so close—physically and psychically—to the nub of this matter filled my heart with the first true joy I had experienced in decades.

Yet my happiness alarmed me. I was drawn to the patient, excited by the thought of an intimacy such as the one I had had with Paul, but a deeper intimacy for my being hidden and therefore more liable to know her secrets. But I was simultaneously ashamed of that excitement. My crouch behind the wall was too familiar, a stance too close to the postures of my darker nature; to impulses I had pledged to resist.

I ached as I considered it—to lose this grand opportunity of escaping my progenitors!—yet my pledge was made. Not to honor it could lead me farther into the shadows. How clever were the crows of my nervous condition: to thus show me a path to freedom but one that led directly through their realm, so to speak.

I therefore resolved, steadfastly, to avoid the patient’s sessions. But here I faced another difficulty: I had no idea when the patient’s next therapy hour might be. Did she come once a week, twice, daily? For that matter, what other patients, coming at any time of any day, might similarly want Dr. Schussler to turn off the sound machine and whose privacy I might therefore also breach, behind whose lives I would crouch in silence?

I could not decide on a plan of action; the office was to be a refuge for me, as I have said, a place where I might pierce the isolation that had so exacerbated my current nervous spell. Nonetheless, before Dr. Schussler’s next client could arrive, I left the building and made my way to Market Street, there to begin the long, rumbling ride on the N Judah streetcar out to its terminus at Ocean Beach.

The car rocked westward, and by degrees the fog closed in on us. At first, there were only small puffs of low-lying clouds blowing across the sky, which caused the sun to blink on and off disagreeably, glare one moment, sun-blindness the next. The intervals of darkness grew gradually longer, until the drifts finally coalesced into a bank of cloud; so that by the time I alighted at my stop by the Great Highway, with the ocean just beyond, the insatiable fog had completely swallowed up the sun. There was a stiff wind. My teeth were gritted with sand as I walked the three short blocks to the small house with peeling paint I had rented, sight unseen, during my hasty departure from the university. The idea of living by the sea had seemed recuperative. Never having visited San Francisco, I had had no idea that the Sunset District, through which I now walked, was a treeless neighborhood of cheerless houses, where the fog swirled relentlessly and the wind blew without cease. I arrived home and tried to calm myself by reprising my expansive moment at the office—the joyful certainty that I had come to San Francisco and Ocean Beach for a purpose—but all night long the wind rattled the windows, and I found no peace.

The next evening, a Thursday night, I tried to return to the office at a time when Dr. Schussler’s hours would certainly be over, eleven o’clock. But the moment I approached the building, I was on my guard. Bordering the office building was a great expanse of vacant lots, twelve square blocks of weeds and trash, the remains of a blighted neighborhood that had been demolished years earlier in a wave of so-called urban renewal. During the day, I had often come upon a bedroll or a tent or the remains of a cook fire. But now, by night, the site looked like the campground of a defeated army, as indeed it was. Desperate veterans of the Vietnam War had joined the ranks of the usual beggars and alcoholics—many veterans still wearing bits of their uniforms, a shirt, a jacket, insignia attached, all filthy now. Here they squatted in threes and fours by small fires, cooking their dinners among the ruined foundations of vanished buildings. Many eyed me, there being no one else about, and I hurried past. But at the entrance to the office, I found two drunken men sprawled in the doorway. As I reached across them to let myself into the building with my key, one of them abruptly turned over and grabbed the hem of my coat. I tried to pull away, but the man held his grip, growling at me, Hey, mister! Gimme your money! Gimme your money! Then he flopped on his side and passed out again, too drunk even to rob me. I stepped back, shaken. In an empty streetcar, I took the long ride home, resolving I would never again go to the office by night.

I next tried the weekend. The hubbub from the nearby shopping streets was reassuring, providing the general social context I had sought at the office. But the empty building was disquieting. The lobby stank of stale cigarette smoke, as it never had during the week, the sort of
ghost-smoke
that lingers in bars and badly aired hotel rooms, although the small bar-and-grill on the ground floor had been shuttered for a decade. The creaky elevators were often out of order, and I was afraid of becoming trapped between floors with no one there to hear me. As I worked, I kept hearing the ding of the elevators but never the tread of anyone getting on or off. Now and then, doors would slam up and down the corridors, yet I never saw anyone in the halls. I looked out to find only the empty, block-long hallways that, at their distant ends, disappeared into an odd, hazy, indoor twilight.

The next morning, Sunday, I rode up in the elevator with great apprehension. Rising floor by floor, I became more comically distressed. For I suddenly saw myself as a big, circus-decorated balloon that was designed to expand as it rose and then spectacularly explode. I knew this image was ridiculous, yet I simultaneously could not shake its efficacy. It was the same problem I had faced throughout all the long years of my therapies, when I had learned to be aware of my own thoughts and feelings, even to the extent of understanding why I was having those thoughts and feelings—their root causes, the curious emotional subterfuges through which certain emotional propensities install themselves in the psyche—yet, withal, finding myself powerless to change them. The dark emotions seemed to be part of my body, instinctual, issuing from the cells as surely as saliva or blood or urine, and with as little conscious opportunity to intervene in their production. By the time I reached the eighth floor, all I could do was step out into the corridor, look up and down the empty twilit halls, press the elevator button once again, and ride my way back down.

I spent Monday in the house, avoiding Dr. Schussler and her patients, and by Tuesday, while the wind and sand still knocked at the windows, the reasons that had prompted me to lease the office reannounced themselves with renewed urgency—indeed, I felt there was a grave risk in my staying home for another day. I had been in my nightclothes since Sunday afternoon; I hadn’t washed; I hadn’t shaved. On Tuesday night, in a nameless rage, I had smashed all the cheap glassware the owner of the house had left for me. I knew that Wednesday morning, whatever else I might do, I had to go back to the office.

As the N Judah carried me away from the beach, I awaited that moment when the fog would drift, thin, lift, and clear. Finally in sunlight, I thought of the cool white lobby that awaited me, the benign cherubs gazing down from elevator lintels, the man-high wainscoting standing marble-hard outside my office door. And above any other anticipation was my desire to hear the analysand’s voice once again; for she was, after all, the only person in all of San Francisco I could say with any truth that I knew.

So it was that at eleven o’clock on Wednesday morning, which last week had been the patient’s appointed hour, I sat very still in my office, sipping air in the smallest quantities respiration would allow, awaiting the next installment of her therapy. The sound machine gave off its torrent; the patient walked past my office; the door to Dr. Schussler’s office slammed shut. And then, after the sound machine ceased its roar, came the sudden, exciting silence.

I’m tired today, the patient began. I don’t know why I’m here. I shouldn’t have come. I didn’t sleep well. My stomach hurts. I have a headache.

Are you ill? asked Dr. Schussler.

No. A hangover.

Silence.

I went to the bar last night. A Little More. I hate that place. I don’t know why I go there. I think I just want to look at the old-style girls, with their makeup and their breasts out to here. Next to the so-called politico lesbians, they’re so sexy. Not a flannel shirt in the crowd last night. God, I’m so tired of women who don’t look like women.

After a long pause, Dr. Schussler asked, Doesn’t Charlotte look like a woman?

The patient sighed. Have I been talking to a wall? She’s a politico. Short hair. Flannel shirts. Jeans. Sturdy shoes.
Struggling
.

But you said … Her legs …

Muscular. Dyke’s legs. In Doc Marten’s stomping boots. I told you, she loves it when I call her a dyke, but she squirms if I call her a woman. For godsakes, the whole idea for me was to be with a woman. Like Colette said, If I wanted to be with a man, I’d be with someone who could do a pee-pee against a wall.

The therapist said nothing.

What’s the point, the patient went on. What’s the point of talking about this anymore. We’ve talked about it ad nauseam. The entire lesbian community talks about it ad nauseam. Butch, femme. Sexy or sex object. I’m so tired of this. I don’t belong in this so-called community. I want a regular life. I don’t want to change the world, I just want to go to bed with a woman! But I’ve told you this, I’ve told you this.

Yes, said the doctor. You have told me. But sometimes we must go over and over things before their meaning is clear.

I told you. I told you. Over and over. Two years of coming here just to say the same things again and again. I don’t even know why I come to therapy. What a waste of time. A waste of money. I’m not getting anywhere. I should get out of here, not waste my time today. I should go.

After a pause, Dr. Schussler said: Naturally, I would like you to stay, if only to work through this mood, this anger and impatience that takes you over. But of course you can leave anytime you like. As we have discussed, this is all for your sake, not mine.

The patient blew out a breath. Sorry. I’m sorry. Like I said, I’m in a bad mood. I shouldn’t have come. I’m just going to bitch at you, so I should probably get out of here before I get abusive.

But why would you get abusive toward me?

Oh, don’t play that therapist game with me. You know very well what I mean. We’ve discussed it a million times, like everything else. I’m about to tell you to fuck off, so I’d better go before I do.

The therapist gasped softly (this profanity evidently had crossed some prior limit). But immediately the doctor righted herself. She took a long breath, then said in an even tone: All right. Perhaps. If you think that is best. You can go. But before you do, let me ask you one thing. Do you think this anger, this feeling of getting nowhere, of not belonging, has anything to do with the last session, with my bringing up the subject of adoption?

The patient breathed in and out several times.

Fuck no! Why do therapists think everything is about therapy? I went to a bar and wanted to make love to a woman in high heels, all very wrong in the world I live in for some stupid reason. That’s what it’s about. But hey, you’re so hyped up on this adoption thing, I’m not sure you’re even hearing me.

Perhaps you are right, said Dr. Schussler.

Then I’m leaving, said the patient.

If you must, said Dr. Schussler.

I guess I have to pay for the session anyway.

(Ah, money, I thought. The patient’s revenge: reminding the therapist we’ve paid for her, like a whore.)

Yes, you must, the doctor said.