I listen to her in an analytic way, try to pick up the real issue of the monologue. She is putting me in an intricate double bind. If I admit to feeling jealous, I lack the appropriate distance to deal with her problems, disqualify myself as her therapist. If I am not jealous, it indicates that I don’t care for her sufficiently. My impulse is to pull down my pants and take her on the floor while she babbles on about Phillip’s fear of making commitments.
“Why are you telling me this?” I ask.
She blinks her eyes in mock innocence. “What do you mean, Yuri? I don’t understand what you’re asking.”
“You know very well what I’m asking,” I say. “Something is going on with us that you’re conspicuously avoiding.”
She pouts childishly, flutters her hands. “Are you saying that all I can talk about here is you?”
“Melinda, why did you miss your last session?”
“I was sick,” she says. “You’ll say it’s hysterical, I know, but the fact is I had a splitting headache. I almost didn’t come today. I had to drag myself here. I just don’t know what I’m doing here.”
“Why did you come today?”
She shrugs, starts to say something and doesn’t. “Because I’m in love with you,” she whispers.
Leo has no answers for me, refuses to give advice, though I can tell from his face that he’s worried about me. I can tell from the sorrowful pinch at the corner of his eyes that he suspects I am lost. I grieve for the person he sees.
“Another therapist couldn’t have helped her as much as I have,” I say.
His mouth moves into a smile that is gone the moment I perceive it. “You see the sex, do you, as part of a therapeutic program?”
“I no longer believe in therapy,” I shout at him. “If I had any courage, I’d give it up and do something more honorable.”
“Yes? What would you do? What is this honorable profession you have in mind for yourself?”
“If I gave up therapy,” I say, “I think I’d give up psychology altogether.”
“If you do, you do,” he says, as if my defection from the science of the soul were not a serious issue.
Leo is unimpressed with my threat to give up the faith, and I am disappointed that he has no solace for me, come away from the session unimproved.
He doesn’t tell me, as he might, that I am making a serious mistake. It is what I want from him and what he refuses to give me.
UPTOWN SHRINK CAUGHT WITH PANTS DOWN (Headline in The New York Post)
I was having difficulty sleeping through the night. I would wake periodically and look at Adrienne asleep or pretending to be asleep, turning in her sleep. I would move from back to side, from side to back, hoping to send tremors of my presence to her, to wake her to affection after this long sleep of rejection and denial. “When I moved she also moved. When I turned toward her she would turn away as if there were some mechanism between us that had gone awry.
I looked at her sleeping form — her feigned sleep perhaps — and thought of the things I might do to her, was unable to separate the sexual from the violent. Pain short-circuited awareness. The moment I got in touch I was out of touch, lost to feeling, dead to myself. I imagined Adrienne in a fatal car crash, or crushed by the wheels of a train, or snuffed by a sniper’s bullet, or falling from a high window. I suffered her loss, mourned her death as she slept next to me (or pretended to sleep) blissfully unaware. I was in a fever of madness.
I feel myself in some kind of helpless limbo, some deadly inertia. I talk to myself as though I were a robot. Move, I say. Sit. Eat. Stand. Right. Left. Turn. Move. Do something. Why aren’t you moving? The answer is: I am. From outside and only from an exterior vantage is there the illusion of paralysis.
I go alone to the Virgin Islands for a week, a way of getting myself together, lie impatiently in the sun. I read detective stories and psychology journals, keep a fragmented record of my thoughts and feelings, interior dialogues, the story of my soul. It worries me that for seven days not once do I concern myself with the well-being of my patients. Melinda barely touches my consciousness. I consider at times not returning, going somewhere else, starting over. The truth is, I am homesick.
When I get back, Adrienne and Rebecca embrace me like a returning hero.
I feel a constant buzz of irritation in her presence as if faced by unwanted news. We talk only to transact the business of the house, act as if the other were a moving shadow, a false image.
Melinda comes for another week, for two weeks, for three, seems eager to please, talks of the improvements in her life. I suggest that she see another therapist and, to my surprise and disappointment, she agrees without further discussion.
It is the same thing, the same experience, the same silent presence, the same oppressive house, the same feeling of hopelessness. Despite appearances, despite the extent of our dislocation, I am convinced that the deepest ties of feeling between us remain unbroken.
I decided to put down the story of my marriage as a means of investigating its peculiarly contemporary neurotic pattern. For months after Melinda leaves treatment with me, I feel the pull of her attraction — a tug on the sleeve of feelings from an invisible hand.
I made arrangements for her to see someone else, a therapist I knew only by reputation. She refused my choice.
After that she isn’t available when I want her, except on rare occasions when she is, Melinda choosing the occasions. And then not at all. My need for her when she is not available is twice (is ten times) what it was when she was there for me.
She tells me in a letter that I was the best therapist she ever had. I am both amused and made anxious by the implications of the pun.
Eight
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Routine helped me deceive pain. I took on new patients, reentered therapy with my old therapist, read novels, did my drawings, took a painting class one night a week, did things with Rebecca. I seemed calm around the house. I don’t think anyone knew what was going on with me. Certainly not Yuri. His face tortured with grievance.
Sometimes I took his face as a reflection of my own condition. It was as if we were sharing the same sadness. (The same office and the same feeling of loss.) That couldn’t be true.
When Carroway and I broke up I felt (what?) nothing. I was broken up. I thought: it is all for the best. It is all for the worst. I felt hurt, but didn’t feel the pain. When I thought about it calmly, I believed he would come back to me. He loved me, didn’t he? He valued me. There was a lesson to Carroway’s betrayal. There’s always a lesson, isn’t there? Men are more emotionally frail than women. That’s the moral of all relationships between men and women. After all, we take our houses with us.
Thomas was someone to talk to. He knew Carroway (he had taught Carroway drawing at Pratt), he knew of our relationship. He was one of the very few people either of us had confided in. I don’t think anyone else knew at the time except Carroway’s wife. Anna Marie. But that was something else. God, yes.
Carroway loves only himself, Thomas said. He helped me to understand what I already knew but refused to believe. That it was Carroway’s pattern to evade intimacy. Thomas made himself available whenever I needed him. He never seemed to want anything for himself. (Eventually the bill will arrive, I thought.) How kind Thomas was. He was a good friend.