“No outline,” he said. “And I thought I knew the ending, but I’m not so sure anymore.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “That happens.” I felt oddly like an actual doctor as I rummaged in my head for something else to say, something professional and practical. I remembered the chirpy advice given in writing manuals for overcoming a block, everything from not writing a word to forcing yourself to work for at least one hour every day. “Listen, Michael,” I said. “Writing is like sleeping or breathing, those things you do naturally, and you’re a natural writer. But if you fixate on it, it might become harder and harder to do. You know, the way you get insomnia when you try to sleep, or start to hyperventilate when you think about your breathing.” I was scrambling now, saying anything that came to mind.
“So you think I shouldn’t try to go on?”
Was that what I’d said? “No. No, I just think you shouldn’t become too anxious about it.” Oh, great. Relax, why don’t you, just breathe normally, go to sleep this minute, stop blinking. “But if you want to talk it over, or try things out on me, I’m here.”
“That’s good to know. I probably will want to. Soon. But I’ll let you go to bed now. Sweet dreams, Alice.”
“You, too,” I said, although he seemed to be hours away from sleeping.
Of course, I couldn’t fall asleep after that, either. I wondered why I’d tiptoed so carefully around Michael’s problem, why I wasn’t more direct. Hadn’t I learned anything from Violet? I might have asked him to tell me the ending he’d planned, and why he wasn’t sure about it anymore. Or I could have simply asked what he was afraid of.
And why hadn’t I apologized to Ev? I knew that his feelings were terribly hurt. I’d accused him of being a bad father and reminded him of being a failed writer, all in one argument. But he’d attacked me, too, blaming me for having had a pampered childhood, and he hardly ever apologized for anything. He should have discerned, somehow, that I was struggling with something else, that peculiar burden I couldn’t seem to name or set aside.
The room was dark—I had turned off my lamp again—but the silhouettes of our bedroom furniture were becoming visible, that known landscape I always gazed at just before sleep. Ev was probably out cold by now; he was able to escape that way no matter how troubled he was. I took his pillow and punched it a few times before clutching it to my breast, trying to smother whatever was still smoldering there.
Suzy must have been entwined in sleep with her lover; it gave me a pang of wistful pleasure to imagine them. And down in Philadelphia, Jeremy and Celia were surely sleeping, too, the music in their heads stilled for the night. Scotty, I hoped, with a rush of meanness, was tossing and turning in Alphabet City.
I thought of my father in his crib at the home, with light and voices filtering in from the nurses’ station. Was he restored to his former, sentient self in his dreams? Then, languorously, I conjured up my mother, reading to me in bed. But it wasn’t a children’s story she read; it was her poem in
Leaves,
the one in which “the blade cuts through that maiden blush / to the bloodless radish heart.”
13
Help was on the way or, more accurately, I was on my way to getting help. Andrea Stern had called back to say that indeed she remembered me, as well as her offer to resume treatment whenever I was ready. The only problem was that she was going to be away for all of August, the month New Yorkers had better not be in emotional crisis. She could fit me in for one session before she left, though, giving us a chance to reconnect; and then, in September, we’d be able to pick up where we had left off. Or she could try to find someone else for me who’d be more available.
It was like the condition set before the hero in a fairy tale: you may have only one session, one wish. Dr. Stern’s voice was instantly recognizable, even after all this time, like an old friend’s from school or from work. I thought of her brownstone office with its two worn leather chairs, where we sat facing each other at a civil distance, and the way the blinds were slanted at the tall windows to let in just enough light, and I made an appointment to see her the following Wednesday at noon.
Wednesday turned out to be the kind of day we so rarely had that summer, without either oppressive heat or drowning rains. The office was in the 60s on the West Side, and I decided to walk there, going through Central Park at 66th Street. Everything was green and abundant, fulfilling the promise of that April morning when my sense of something wrong had begun. I’d given myself lots of time to get to Dr. Stern’s, and to think about what I was going to say once I got there.
As I walked along, I went over the issues that concerned me, in chronological order, beginning with that sensation behind my breastbone and ending with my estrangement from Ev. My father’s voice might have been in my head, warning, as he so often had, “Why don’t you
think
before you speak, Alice.” I was sure that Violet would have objected to my careful preparations for therapy. Free association, she’d often told me, was the best way to get to the crux of things. But I felt that my father was right, for once. I’d been guilty too often in the past of blurting out whatever was on my mind. That’s what had escalated the recent hostilities between Ev and me, and I was afraid of what might fly out of my mouth at Dr. Stern’s if I didn’t have a good idea first of what I wanted to say.
It was the middle of a workday, but the park was crowded with people who had abandoned their offices and shops to collapse on the fragrant grass for an alfresco lunch, or to run or bicycle on the paths. Lovers, families, friends. For a while I followed a group of day campers and their counselors on a nature hike, feeling as if I had been away for a long time, but was back now in the current of life. The children, in green camp T-shirts, walked in orderly pairs, holding hands, while their counselors acted as sheepdogs, herding them along. Real dogs ran about the lawns off their leashes, against the law, but true to their own nature.
I crossed the path to lean against a tree and scribble something in my notebook about the scene and about the conflict between rules and desire. Then I skipped a few pages and started to write down the list of concerns I was bringing to Dr. Stern. Was I becoming too compulsive? But it was only going to be a fifty-minute hour, and I wanted to be sure to raise the things that bothered me the most. I had to mention the business of Scott and the paperweight because that was so closely related to my troubles with Ev. But I would feel as if I were playing favorites if I left the other children out, especially Suzy and her new love affair. And I probably had to fill Dr. Stern in briefly on the freelance work I was doing, and, of course, there was my father’s continuing deterioration.
In the middle of the park I veered north for a while, so I could walk alongside the lake where my mother and I used to feed the ducks and geese. Sometimes, after school, instead of boarding the bus, I would wait near the reception desk inside the main entrance for her to fetch me, and we would take a taxi to Rumpelmayer’s for ice cream or hot chocolate before walking into the park. Later, we might go shopping or to the Met, and then up to Mount Sinai Hospital to meet my father, who would drive us home in his Lincoln. Parksie or Miss Snow usually gave me paper and some colored pencils to draw with in the back of the car, and I chose safe little suburban scenes from memory—house, trees, flowers, child— rather than the hard-edged city landscape I glimpsed as it raced by the windows.
It may have been cloudy or chilly on a few of those excursions, but memory is a benevolent editor; all I could envision now were golden afternoons like this one, under a flawless blue sky. Occasionally my mother took Violet along, too, but my sharpest recollections were of just the two of us, strolling hand in hand in the park, like the little day campers I’d just followed.
I sat down on a bench—maybe the same bench where my mother and I had once sat—and swigged some water, while new generations of birds pecked around my feet, looking for the bread crumbs I hadn’t brought. I opened my notebook again and pondered mentioning my “writing” to Dr. Stern. It was still such a tentative, self-conscious endeavor, nothing more than dabbling, really, and I couldn’t bring it up without filling her in about my time at Iowa, the competition with Ev, and our forsaken ambition.
I remembered Phil Santo saying that all experience is useful to a writer—a mild consolation then for every painful or pointless act I’d ever committed—and I could easily imagine Violet’s paraphrase about an analysand. But my efforts weren’t significant in the context of my crowded life, and the little bit of time I had to convey it, so I didn’t add writing and not writing to my list.
I had cried my eyes out during the few previous sessions I’d had with Andrea Stern, with the loss of my job as the ostensible focus of my misery. But she’d suggested that there were probably other, buried grievances causing my tears, and that it was important to try to uncover them. That, of course, was when I balked, when I left. Now I was determined not to waste my time and money by crying that way again, or by refusing to face up to things. Yet another reason to be prepared. There wasn’t anything or anyone on my list, even Ev, I couldn’t talk about now without breaking down.
When I was almost out of the park, I became aware of a couple lying on the lawn to my left, kissing and writhing with passion. The man straddled the woman, who was wearing a hiked-up sundress. The sun highlighted them with an almost theatrical brilliance. It was such a deliberately public act—they hadn’t even bothered to retreat behind a nearby stand of trees—but I felt unaccountably like a trespasser. Everything around them seemed to have gone still and the grass was too green, the sky almost piercingly blue. The whole scene had the surreal, spooky quality of a dreamscape, something in a painting by Magritte or Dalí.
I turned away abruptly and began to run. And I kept on running until I was out of the park, breathing hard and with my heart drumming. By the time I came to 68th and Amsterdam, close to Dr. Stern’s office, my pulse had slowed, and everything around me was reassuringly ordinary again: buildings, traffic, strangers going about their business. It was as if I’d just witnessed a crime I had no intention of reporting.
I rang the doorbell at the brownstone, and after a long beat I was buzzed in. Another patient, a woman about my own age, left as soon as I entered. We were like the husband and wife in a Swiss weather clock, and we didn’t make eye contact as our bodies skimmed past each other. I caught a whiff of a citrusy scent. In the waiting room, I saw the
Time
magazine she must have been reading before she was called in to her session. It was on the coffee table in front of the sofa, set apart from the neat, fanned display of other periodicals, and it was open to an article on the occupation of Iraq.
What could I tell about that unknown woman from these meager clues? That she’d chosen to look at
Time
over
ARTnews
or
People.
A middlebrow, then, with an interest in the larger world, or apprehension about it. And a sentimentalist, who clung to the season with that summery cologne. I sniffed my own arm, which smelled a little like laundry starch and bread. What did that say about me? Out-of-season hausfrau. My hand came up and twirled a strand of hair, and I sniffed at that, too.
Dr. Stern had come quietly to the doorway, and when she said my name I jumped up, poking and patting my hair back into place. She was younger than I remembered, only thirty-eight or forty, and shorter, too. If I wasn’t exactly old enough to be her mother, I might have once been her babysitter. I had a moment of misgiving as I went past her into the office and took my assigned seat.
The room, at least, was the same. Grass cloth on the walls, the green sofa in the background, that Hockney print of irises, instead of the typical swimming pool. As soon as we were facing each other again, I thought of my last visit here, that awful, abject weeping, and of being released, finally, like a homesick child let out of school. I thought, too, of Portnoy and his long complaint.
Now vee may perhaps to begin.
Dr. Stern was looking at me, waiting, and I felt inexplicably shy. “I’m not sure I know how to do this,” I said.
“There’s no particular way,” she said. “What are you thinking about?”
“Your last patient, actually.”
“Why does she interest you?”
“She doesn’t. I mean, I was just trying to figure out who she was. Not her name or anything, just . . . No, that’s not true. I was really thinking about myself—who else?”
“That’s why you’re here.”
I glanced at my watch and saw the second hand flit past the hour. “Is it normal,” I asked, “for a fifty-one-year-old woman to be obsessed with her mother, who’s been dead for many years?”
“Most of us are concerned with our parents all of our lives.”
“Then maybe we should choose them more carefully,” I said, winning a faint smile. And I remembered Dr. Pinch asking if I’d ever imagined I didn’t live with my “real” parents, and that I would be claimed by them someday. Years later, I found out that Freud referred to this fantasy as a “family romance.” But to me the true family romance was the one I lived, as the beloved child of a happy marriage, an essential part of the perfect triumvirate.
I realized that Dr. Stern was waiting for me to say something else. “Do you have a mother?” I asked, quickly adding, “I’m not supposed to ask questions like that, am I?”
“You may ask anything you like,” she said. “I do have a mother. But you really are here to talk about yourself.”
“I had this all planned, what I was going to say. I was afraid to leave it to chance.”
“What did you think might happen if you did ‘leave it to chance,’ as you say?”
I shrugged. “That’s the thing—I didn’t know, but it seemed dangerous, like opening Pandora’s box.”
“You’d release some evils?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Or bore you to death. The last time, I just bawled, remember? I was determined not to do that again, to just stay with the script. And then something happened on my way here.” I sat forward in my chair. “I saw a couple making out in the park.” She waited. “Big deal, I know,” I said, “but it seemed so weird, this time, like a sequence in a dream.”
“How did that make you feel?”
“Kind of helpless, the way you do in dreams. And like an intruder.”
“Helpless and intrusive. Something like a child?”
I nodded and paused, but it was apparently still my turn to speak. I cleared my throat and hastily switched gears. “I’ve been working a little since I was here last. Not a real job. I’m just sort of a freelance book doctor now.” As soon as I said it, it sounded absurd. Physician, heal thyself! I thought, and then I changed the subject again.
The fifty minutes went whizzing by, and I’d barely touched on most of the things on my agenda. Being in therapy, it seemed, was something like writing a book, a novel; you simply made it up as you went along. And there was a plot and a theme, distinct from each other, yet entangled. I’d tell Andrea Stern my story and together we would try to figure out the theme. That would make her sort of the editor of my life. But it was such a convenient and smug correlation. Would a plumber in therapy envision his angst as just a clog of hair and shit in the pipes, something to be snaked out so that the truth could come gushing through?
Later, I waited for the crosstown bus at the corner of 65th Street, suddenly too tired to walk anymore. I hadn’t cried at all during my session, which was a modest triumph, but now I felt close to tears, although I wasn’t sure why. I’d finally gotten around to talking about Ev and me and the children, of the push and clutch of our marriage, and of how lucky we were, really, despite the setbacks we were having, that everyone was healthy, and functioning pretty well in society.
I know I didn’t convey how awful things actually were at home, or even mention that persistent sensation in my chest, the catalyst for my going back into therapy in the first place. Had I come there merely to gloat, or to comfort myself? No, certainly not, and my mind flitted off my family so quickly, they might have been only minor characters in my narrative. I began to tell Dr. Stern about my work with Michael instead, but that seemed like just a subplot of my life, irrelevant to the real matters that had brought me there.
I sat quietly for several seconds before I felt a desperate impulse to break the silence again. “I’ve been writing a little, myself,” I said. I could feel the heat rise in my neck and my face. It was like a great, guilty confession. I opened my bag and took my notebook out and held it up, as validation of my claim, I suppose, although I didn’t open it. “I was going to be a writer once. Like my mother.” Mother!
Then I put my hand to my breast, where the feeling had been patiently crouching, and it leapt at my touch, clamoring to be announced. And I would have done so, but of course my time was up then, in the middle of a thought, of what I belatedly knew should have been my first thought. Another patient rang the doorbell, and Dr. Stern stood and so did I.
“Why don’t we pick up there when you come back?” she said. We shook hands and made another appointment for the first Wednesday after Labor Day. When I stepped outside, the sunlight, the whole busy world, was as astonishing as it is when you leave a darkened movie theater and the story of someone else’s life.