I’m convinced that people come together only because of sex—even if it’s just because they
think
you will be a good fit in bed. Because of genetics—you can smell it. And then it does turn out to be a fit as good as a couple of trapeze artists. If you have a good sense of smell and don’t ruin it by smoking, you’ll find the best genetic match—someone with whom you can perform sexual acrobatics. I’m totally convinced of that. I must have smelled it. Everything. His sexuality. His ability as a provider. We never talked about money or sex. Our love was just there, and everything made sense in retrospect. Though nothing did at the start. I read a quote somewhere—I think it was from Goethe, though it could just as easily have been from Yoda—that went something like this: Love is just a romantic philosophical superstructure that permits us to avoid admitting to ourselves that we just want to get into someone’s pants. He put it somewhat more eloquently, but I can’t find the exact quote. Maybe I just dreamed that I read it. But I believe the sentiment nonetheless. It’s the key to all the craziness that happens between fully grown adults.
My husband isn’t physically attractive at all. Obviously love has nothing to do with looks. Fuck all of you with your my-dream-man-should-look-like-this-or-that bullshit, your star signs and height and hair color requirements. That’s not the way love works. The first thing I noticed about him—and that stood out in a negative, though interesting, way—was his fucked-up elbow. The first time I met him he was wearing short sleeves. Strong white arms with hair on them, and then a strange crippled elbow—there was some sort of cyst or tumor sticking out, covered with scars. The Phantom of the Opera, except only at the elbow!
I asked very directly what it was. I always do that in the heat of the moment because I’m worried the person has already noticed I’m staring. It turned out to be an affliction from childhood. He broke his arm once, and all winter long he had to take the bus alone to the clinic where he was doing his physical therapy. And one time after an ice storm he got off the bus and slipped and fell on the newly healed elbow. It had to be operated on several times after that because he’d shattered all the bones. They never managed to reconstruct it properly, and that’s why there’s a piece of bone that sticks out like a shark fin. That made an impression on me straightaway.
After the arm business, I noticed a big scar across his cheekbone. The second thing I asked him was where he got
that
scar. And that one was from cancer. Shortly before we met he’d had skin cancer. Nothing serious. It was discovered early enough that they were able to remove the entire melanoma before it spread, and that was that. Well, except for the fact that in the back of his head he would always remember how death had come knocking. After my very first conversation with him I knew that we belonged together and also that I would end up burying him. I’m going to be a grieving cancer widow. He told me that he comes from a family with a history of cancer. Members of his family either died of cancer or managed to beat various forms of it to earn a brief reprieve. I knew what the story was and what this great love of mine was bringing with him—even if perhaps I understood only subconsciously.
At the front of my consciousness I thought to myself that we would end up working together. What a great gallery owner! What a great guy! But what an odd set of icebreakers. First, childhood injuries. Second, cancer in the family. It pretty much
says everything about our relationship. He also asked me about the car accident in which my three brothers died. Death was intertwined with our love right from the start. One of the first things we did as a couple was to fill out organ donor cards and write and sign living wills and actual wills. For us, that was the height of romance.
Georg sits down at his laptop in the kitchen and scans
Spiegel Online
to see if anything has changed in the world in the last few minutes. Liza wanders around grumbling. She’s bored.
“What should I do now, Mama? I’m bored.”
“See if anything is missing. Drinks, perhaps?”
“Oh yeah, what do you want to drink?”
The same answer we give every day comes from Georg and me in perfect harmony: “Tap water.”
We never drink alcohol in front of the kids—for the sake of setting a good example. And sugary drinks are strictly forbidden at our place—both for the usual anti-American reasons and because of the fact that they are totally unhealthy. Why would you drink something that amounts to candy when you’re thirsty? Sweets exacerbate your thirst. It’s like a form of torture. How can anyone pay good money for drinks that actually make you more thirsty? It’s like giving Jesus vinegar and gall to drink when he was thirsty on the cross. Torture upon torture.
She climbs up onto the counter again to get glasses out of the cabinet. She jumps back down, fills the glasses too full, and carries them to the table while trying to keep them from spilling. I have to stop myself from saying something. Bad, bad to be a mother and want to comment on everything a kid does. You feel it coming on and then the impulse hits you. Terrible, terrible, terrible.
“Can you please put a trivet on the table, too, my child?”
Now that my husband is fully awake, I leave my daughter in his care. I say good-bye. They know the drill. They’re free to do what they wish until I’m back. I’ll be there and back quickly; it’s not far. I turn off the burner under the pan as I walk out—don’t want the two of them to go up in flames in the apartment while I’m unable to keep an eye on them. Gas stoves are dangerous. I won’t let fire take any more of my relatives.
“See you soon, you nut jobs.”
Neither of them answers. That’s the way it is when the routine is so well rehearsed.
I drive to my therapist’s office in another section of town. I go three times a week for an hour-long session—though an hour to a therapist is fifty minutes in normal human time, no more, no less. I go there to work out my everyday life, and I think I’d have died many times over without my therapist. She has often saved my life—psychologically speaking. In my daughter Liza’s mind, it’s just Mama going to see her weird doctor. She’s not interested in what I do there. I hope she waits a long time to ask, too, because the older she is the better I’ll be able to explain to her what it is. “Mama goes there so she doesn’t get on your nerves, my child, and so she doesn’t weigh you down with her own issues. That way you can live more freely.”
The drive is usually a pain. But my therapist, Frau Drescher, says that’s part of the therapy, too. I complain to myself about a therapy that includes such an array of annoyances even before you get there. Because I know the car accident plays a big role in her mind, I feel as if I don’t even have to go to her
office: hey, I’m doing great—what’s the point? I think up all sorts of reasons why I shouldn’t drive, and once I’m in the car I convince myself that Frau Drescher is a bad therapist—that she overestimates the value of her couch and psychoanalysis. What the hell is analysis anyway? I do it, but I still have no idea what it’s about. Will I get some kind of certificate at the end? Like the report you get after a blood test? A psychological report? That would be useful—I could give it to my husband as a sort of instruction manual, and later my daughter could read it, too. It would make all of our lives easier. I’ll ask Frau Drescher. She thinks that my assessments and criticisms of her as I drive to her office are also part of the therapy. Great, that really puts me at ease. I feel better already.
I try to follow every rule of the road—I have to avoid an accident at any cost. Not necessarily because I don’t want to die—in fact sometimes I feel like an old woman who thinks it would be nice to have peace and quiet, the ultimate peace and quiet—but because I have a child. That gives me added worth. I can’t do that to my daughter. Cannot get killed or injured. Which is why I’m such a careful driver. I let everyone in, but especially women. It’s a chance to contradict any accusations of cattiness, even in traffic. I drive very defensively and leave plenty of space between me and the car in front of me. I avoid all mistakes and keep all the things I learned in driving school at age eighteen in the front of my mind—all in order to survive and to avoid killing anyone else. Because of my past, even just driving across town to my therapy session is a life-and-death scenario.
I get out of the car in the parking lot. I take all my valuables with me because, oddly enough, my therapist has her office in a
bad part of town. And her office is on the eleventh floor. Which for me is a catastrophe. I’ve told her a million times that I don’t like it. She needs to get a new ground-floor office somewhere else. That would be much nicer. She laughs at me and says, “You’ll have to get over it, Frau Kiehl, because the practice is staying put.”
And then she wants to sit peacefully and discuss my fear of heights and of elevators, my fear of fire and smoke. I’m also afraid that such a tall building might collapse while I’m in it. When I walk into the high-rise I talk to myself. “I can’t believe I have to get on this elevator because of Frau Drescher. I just can’t believe it.” I usually smell smoke or gas in the lobby. That’s a funny old habit of mine—it’s because my mother found her own mother in front of the oven with the gas on. She had taken sleeping tablets and also drugged her young son, whom she wanted to take with her. But not my mother, who was also just a kid at the time. Who knows why? That was the big drama in our family—at least until the car accident overwhelmed everything else. So I sniff my way around the lobby like an animal, searching for the source of the dangerous odor. For most other people, hearing is the sense that most frequently sets off their alarm bells. In my case, it’s my sense of smell. Because I just know that my family will be snuffed out by fire, smoke, or gas. That’s probably also the reason I avoid smokers like the plague. They trigger a flight instinct in me. Whenever I smell a lit cigarette I think something is on fire and cringe with fear. Just for a second, of course, but it’s still enough to make my heart jump and cause a jolt of adrenaline. Very unpleasant.
When I step into the elevator to go up to my therapist’s office, it really does smell like smoke. Some nicotine-addicted
asshole must have lit up on the way down for a cigarette break. Most smokers just can’t wait. I stand there and think something’s on fire. And before I realize it’s just the remains of cigarette smoke I get so scared that I feel like I’ve aged several years. That’s why I hate all smokers—they spread the smell of death. It clings to their hair and their clothes and hangs in the air wherever they go.
When I look at the digital number panel in the elevator, I can see what floor it’s come down from. It sends another shiver of fear down my spine. The building is
that
high? The eleventh floor is not even the top floor. Often the elevator has come from much higher up than that. And I wonder,
Do I really want to do this to myself?
All the things that can happen on the way up. It could get stuck and catch on fire, and I’d be trapped, burning up in this tin can. The floor would get too hot to stand on, so I’d sit down; but the skin and flesh of my ass would burn, so I’d stand up again and that’s when I’d see the smoke snaking into the elevator carriage. I scream for as long as I can still get air, the smoke stings my throat, burns my vocal chords. I’m coughing and my voice gets thinner. I push the emergency button over and over. Nothing happens. In a mortal panic, I climb onto the top of the elevator carriage to try to get some air—but everything is shrouded in dark smoke. I’m in a smokehouse, unable to escape. Nobody is going to save me, and I can’t even scream any longer. I cry, and then lay myself down to die atop the glowing elevator. I think of my daughter and don’t want to die. Then I black out.
That’s the way it plays out in my head every time I have to ride up those eleven floors to see my fucking therapist, who insists on having her practice all the way up there. And I stare
the whole time at the sign in the elevator that represents all my fears:
IN CASE OF FIRE, DO NOT USE ELEVATOR.
I can definitely agree to that. But what happens if a fire breaks out when I’m already using the elevator? Didn’t anybody think of that? Of course not. When I reach the eleventh floor and, miracle of miracles, the doors open normally, I march out like a survivor. A passerby might think from my demeanor that I’m relaxed and happy. But then comes the next problem. Someone on her floor smokes in his apartment. We’re eleven floors above the earth and he’s playing with our lives! The building seems to sway. I tell my therapist all the time that the foundations aren’t solid. You can tell when it’s windy. When it’s windy I can feel the way we’re all swaying inside the building.
Once in a while I encounter someone in the hallway on the eleventh floor. When that happens I’m immediately diverted from the frightening images swirling in my head. Because I suddenly think,
So that’s what my therapist’s patients look like?
Though of course there’s no guarantee that the person has come from her office. I get upset that she even has other patients. I read in a biography of Brian Wilson that he had his therapist live with him. What a good idea! That would be my dream—to have Frau Drescher at home, all to myself!
I’m totally convinced that I simply couldn’t live without her. But I want to be her only patient. I know only monotheism—from my mother, of course. She never taught me anything else. It’s always mother’s fault. I’m sure someday my child will think I’m to blame for everything, too. That’s just the way it works.
I try to glean as much information as possible in the few seconds during which I can actually see my therapist. She shrouds herself in a mysterious cloud of noninformation. She
says I should know as little as possible about her. All I know about her is what I can see. And what little she divulges. Which is next to fucking nothing. Particularly in comparison to what I divulge about myself. It’s not fair. But I guess that’s the way it’s supposed to be with therapy. I’m not meant to understand—I don’t have a degree in it, after all.