She turned her chair halfway around. “You want to be rid of me,” she said.
“I’m your therapist not your lover,” I said.
I had a dream about Melinda, a seemingly literal dream, not all of which I remembered. I wrote it down as soon as I awoke in a notebook I used to keep at bedside for just that purpose.
There is, I discover, only one chair in my office. The other chair, the patient’s chair, is at some shop being reuphol-stered. Why hasn’t it been returned? Melinda comes in conspicuously late, and asks indignantly where she is supposed to sit.
I offer her my seat. She remarks that I am still in it. It surprises me to discover that what she says is true. I am sitting in the very seat I offer her. It is wide enough for two, I say. At this moment, I’m not sure whether the ostensible patient is Melinda or Adrienne. She shakes her head coyly. I beckon to her with a finger. We are both standing. The chair is between us. It is not my office any longer but a bedroom, a room I had as a child. I point out the view from the window. The overgrown garden, the porcelain Cupids, the huge cherry tree just coming into blossom.
She says she admires the tree, though she is unable to believe that it actually produces cherries. Her breasts press against my back as she makes this announcement.
She says that the nipples of her breasts are real cherry buds.
I am leaning out the window trying to find a bud on the cherry tree to prove the tree’s identity. There are no buds, only faded blossoms.
I bring in a handful of crushed petals. These are cherry blossoms, I say. Melinda giggles, says not really.
Just take my word for it, I say. This is a cherry tree. It produces sour cherries. I take a bud from the tree and hold it out to her.
She puts my fingers to her lips, says poor man. I notice that there is a red stain on the back of my hand.
I’ve always wanted to taste your blood, she says.
You’re a liar, I rage. That’s your blood. That’s female blood.
Today was the fist time Melinda talked about her boyfriend, Phillip, by name.
She valued Phillip most when he ceased to be available. It was the pattern of their relationship. Melinda would mistreat Phillip, would reject and torment him until, provoked beyond endurance, he would stop seeing her. At that point she would decide that she was in love with him and plot obsessively to get him back.
When Phillip would return to her, as he did, she would feel contempt for him again as if such yielding were a failure of character. Any man foolish enough to love her was unworthy of her love.
I pointed this out to her, but for the longest time she refused to acknowledge it.
I tended to respond to Melinda’s complaints about Phillip as if they were complaints about me.
As an aspect of this identification, I found myself intensely attracted to her. Was this counter-transference or something else?
Melinda told me of a dream in which I appeared in the guise of a teddy bear named Swoosh whom she held in her arms while she slept. That’s all she offered of the dream.
I said the best way to remember dreams is to write them down as soon as she woke.
She pouted, said that most of her dreams were crazy and that it embarrassed her to think about them. The first three buttons of her gauzy blouse were open and I could see the lacy top of her pink undershirt. My impulse was to look away, but I didn’t. I was almost certain she wasn’t wearing a bra.
“I don’t have to tell you my dreams if I don’t want to,” she said. “I have a right to privacy. Do you tell everything? I don’t know anything about you, do I?” She turned her chair halfway around to offer me a view of only half her face.
Her gesture enraged me out of all proportion. “I’m not going to let you do that,” I said, getting to my feet.
“Don’t you dare touch me,” she said.
When I stood up she gasped as if in fright and shifted her chair part of the way back toward its original position.
“Put the chair back where it was or I’m going to discontinue the session,” I said.
She grudgingly moved her chair back into position, sulked.
I returned to my seat with an assumption of dignity, felt relieved that she hadn’t tested me further.
“Though I don’t like it, Yuri, it’s good for me to be treated that way.”
“How do you feel I treated you?”
“Your face is flushed,” she said. “Are you blushing?”
I repeated my question, had to repeat it several times to get a response.
“I don’t understand what you’re asking,” she said.
“Tell me what’s so funny,” I said.
“I can’t,” she whispered, lowering her eyes. “I’ll tell you when I know you better.”
Our sessions had the quality on occasion of lovers’ quarrels.
When I finally went to see Leo Pizzicati after several months of procrastination, I was in a state of intractable depression.
I sat down, somewhat disoriented, thinking myself in the wrong seat.
“Adrienne won’t sleep with me,” was the first thing I said, which was interesting because it was not what I had planned to say.
Leo seemed pained on my account, profoundly sad, which I immediately recognized as a projection.
I have the sense that I am making this up, recreating a scene out of a mix of memory and imagination. The ugly paintings on the wall, the tacky plastic furniture, the refusal to lay claim to style. There are a few inconsequential changes in his office (or maybe it’s just a lapse of memory) but in matters that count nothing has changed.
I talk about Adrienne despite my intention to avoid that subject, get lost in a maze of evasion.
“I came to talk to you about a counter-transference problem I’m having with a woman patient,” I say with about ten minutes left in the session.
“Are you fucking this patient?” he asks.
I laugh nervously at this abrupt perception, feel exposed and defensive. “I’m not fucking anyone,” I say.
“Are you feeling sorry for yourself?”
I am close to tears, though unaware of feeling sad. “She wants me to fuck her,” I say.
“And you can’t turn her down?” he asks. “Does she have a name, this patient? Yuri, you look as if you want to cry.”
I deny it, but the tears come in the wake of my denial. I refuse to cry, cover my face with my left hand, feel the tears prick my fingers. “Just a minute,” I hear myself say.
I’ve never fully worked through the feeling that it is unmanly to cry so suffer embarrassment at breaking down. I remove my hand as if to say it’s really nothing, a momentary aberration, but the crying continues and I am unable to speak.
When the fit is over, when I come back to myself, I begin to talk to Leo about my mother, though I have no new insights into that relationship. “What’s the point of my telling you this?” I ask him.
He removes his pipe, says nothing, puffs coded messages in smoke.
I know the answer. My relationship with my mother is a paradigm of my relationship with all women. “My mother thinks I’m perfect,” I say.
I should say something about that, not so much what I said to Leo, which is in a certain context, within a shared realm of assumptions, but say something about my mother, what she’s like, how I experience her. Last week I lost her at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, couldn’t find her for almost two hours. It is symptomatic. She had ways when I was a child of being there and not there. When she was missing we split up to search for her — Adrienne and Rebecca taking the first floor while I went upstairs. It was as if she had been claimed by some black hole. When she finally made herself available — she just seemed to appear — my mother refused to acknowledge that she had been lost. What I didn’t mention to Leo was that while I was searching for her, I had the urge to take off and leave her to her disappearance. I felt — how should I put it — burdened by the pressure of her absence.