By Blood A Novel

10.


The elevator bell dinged out in the hallway.

It’s time, isn’t it? the patient said.

The doctor hummed softly. I am afraid so, she said.

What bad timing, said the patient.

You can call me, said Dr. Schussler. You know you can always call.

The doctor stood, then her client.

I have that—

I remember, said the therapist.

Bad timing!

Yes, the doctor said. Certainly not the best.

You can call, said the analyst. Please. Do not hesitate to call.

The moment the door closed behind the patient, Dr. Schussler lit a cigarette and dragged on it deeply, three times. Before the curl of her smoke could reach under our communicating door, she picked up her phone and dialed. The rotary phone ticked off the numbers: two? eight? five? The rest of the pulses went by too quickly to count, and I soon heard the therapist say:

Dr. Gurevitch? Dr. Schussler. Yes. Thank you. I am so happy to have caught you in. You received my— Of course. Yes. In particular I am hoping we can … three. The patient coded as three. You see— Aha! Yes. Eight o’clock? Until then. Yes!

She hung up the phone, then threw open the window—airing out the office, I thought. Moments later she closed the window, opened her door, and said “come in” to her twelve o’clock. Their voices disappeared behind the rush of the sound machine.





11.


I sat stunned. Born unhappy. Built in. Original, like sin. These words kept reciting themselves in my mind until I thought I must have said them myself. The sound machine was on; I might move about, but I did not, could not. The patient and I were kin, I suddenly knew, spawn of the same cursed line: the tribe of the inherently unhappy. How early one knows this! Too early, too young; she at thirteen, I at twelve. All unexpectedly the realization comes; that damned day; that indelible sight; that unreachable, shiny little happiness.

The nearby church bell tolled the slow strokes of noon. At the twelfth, my heart began to race. Sweat sprang out upon my neck and back. The weather had turned unaccountably hot; one day the late summer’s fog chilled the city as usual; the next came a dry, hot wind from the east, sending temperatures above ninety degrees under merciless skies. Even the cold breath of the old building’s soul had been vanquished by the heat. Yet the sweat that clung to me was chillingly cold. There was nothing I could do. I could only watch as my black mood descended upon me the crows, so delighted, flapping down for their meal of carrion. They pecked at my wishes, as they did always; sucked the world empty of hope. I thought of the weight of inheritance that had fallen upon the patient—so heavy, so like my own—and my dreams for her self-creation seemed doomed, a small, flapping bird chained to a stake at the foot.

The clock sounded one, then two. And only then, after Dr. Schussler left for her luncheon break, did I stand and try to calm myself. I took a turn about the office, visited the men’s room, then walked the length of the corridors: two long, perpendicular hallways—the building was shaped like a carpenter’s rule—where at the far end of each hall there gathered a dim, perpetual twilight. I could not return to my cottage by the ocean—the hot weather had beckoned hordes to the beach; their loud radios plagued me; motorcycles raced up and down the Great Highway without cease. I could only stay at the office, which I did, lying down as best I could upon the small settee, settling in before the therapist returned for her three o’clock patient.

The afternoon wore away. The sound machine kept up its empty breathing; Dr. Schussler spat out her Ts, hard-hushed her Ss. A faint current of hot air stirred the venetian blind, setting it to knock softly against the casement. Spears of light hit the walls, then vanished, then speared again in the uneven rhythm of the bare breeze. It seemed to me that I had seen and heard all this before: the stabs of light, the knock of the blind, the rush of Ss. A voice sounded in my head. When you’re adopted, said the voice, you don’t look like anyone. The sound machine took up the rhythm of the breeze, playing a deceptive melody. And all at once I knew how this moment had come to be, where it had happened, long ago.

I did not want to go there in my mind. I looked out the window—a statue on the roofline of the Palace, a naked man, loins draped—then looked away.





12.


The weather turned on us again. The heat subsided; there was one clear and temperate day; and then it began to rain. I had no idea that rain could fall with such steady determination, hour by hour, day after day. What kind of devilish place had I come to, I wondered, where humid fog could turn to sere heat and then to monsoon rains all within the space of a few weeks? A wet gloom now seemed to have settled over the city, and while San Franciscans went about their business as usual (the N Judah rumbled by; passengers ascended and descended; cars dashed by on the Great Highway), the fifth deluged day found me still in bed, in dirty pajamas, watching rainwater seep under my door. Out on the beach, no one appeared but a single haunted soul in a black hooded jacket: a suicide, I thought, surveying the sea for riptides.

Only the thought of the patient’s return enabled me to rise from my bed, dress, make my way under the drenched gargoyles, through the white lobby, past the black, circling eyes of the cherubs, to my office, there to await the rich cream of the patient’s voice.

In my absence, the radiators evidently had come aboil, for now they chuffed and clanged as steam surged through the building’s aged pipes. The dry heat was almost unbearable. I envied the man in the Hotel Palace across the way, who, as I watched, threw open his window and, heedless of the rain, stood naked to the street.

I doubted that the man could see me—I kept my light off, lest Dr. Schussler look up and see the glow at her neighbor’s window—yet I could see him clearly. His body protruded past the plane of the window directly opposite mine, and the gray light of the sky cast an even, silvery tone upon his skin, so that he appeared to be made of marble, one of the statues that lined the hotel’s venerable roof. He was tall and well made, muscular yet not overly so: the sort of body that would neither repulse nor intimidate if encountered in the locker room. A look of pleasure passed over the man’s face, which he lifted up to the sky and rain. Then, his face still uplifted, he took his genitals in both hands.

Not since boyhood—since Paul, my best friend—had I seen another male touch himself. I gaped as the man fondled his testicles and stroked his penis softly, almost absently. After some moments, he encircled the base of his penis with the thumb and forefinger of one hand and began to pull upon it with the other. He gave himself long, full, strong pulls, and his member responded by steadily growing in length and girth. He continued in that full, slow rhythm until his penis achieved an impressive size, protruding some inches into the narrow width of New Montgomery Street, so that he seemed very near to me, almost at a touching distance, the eye of his penis looking directly at me, as it were. All the while, he kept his face uplifted to the sky, blinking with delight as drops played upon his eyelids, his mouth opening and closing as if to taste the rain. My own member begin to stir—it was normal, I told myself; I was responding to the memory of my boyhood games; also sex begets sex; the sight of the man’s penis, of his pleasure, his delight, merely made me think of my own.

But then, suddenly, without ever quickening his rhythm as I would have done near the end, the man closed his eyes, arched his back, gave one great thrust, and ejaculated forcefully into the air.

His seed dripped from the ledge.

I shut my eyes in disgust.





13.


When you’re adopted, you don’t look like anyone.

It was Paul, Paul Beleiter. We were in his bedroom. The light that pressed against his venetian blinds was the hot sun of an August day. From down the hall came the static of a drifting radio station, a melody now surfacing, now fading, then a stern voice: talk of war in Europe. Paul and I did not listen. We were boys, twelve years old, indolent in the last days of summer.

When you’re adopted, Paul was saying, you don’t look like anyone.

We were sprawled across his wide bed. I looked at Paul: sculpted lips, curls of near-black hair, smooth skin—swarthy, a shade too dark for the liking of his adoptive parents. His nose was pointed, his eyes too close together, fortunate imperfections that gave him a ferocious gaze. No, he didn’t look like anyone, not even the other boys. He towered over us; his beard was beginning to show; his voice was already lowering—he was years beyond us, it seemed. His father was pale and slight; his mother pallid, tight. Why would he want to look like them?

He was angry. Something about some art classes in New York; a scholarship he’d won; his parents forbidding him to go. We were stranded in Ovid, our town named for the poet. But the artists who had settled and named the place were long gone. Now only fields and dairy cows stretched out in the heat beyond the window; farmers and the people who sold them things. Paul’s father sold tractors, mine insurance. At least we didn’t have cow shit on our shoes, we said.

They don’t know anything about art, I said to Paul.

I’m never going to be like my parents, said Paul. Never.

He leaned down, reached under the bed, and came up holding a box, the sort that once might have held a pair of boots.

Look at this, he said.

He held a stack of clippings. Then one by one he laid them on the bedspread. They were photographs, no story attached, no caption. Here and there, the newspaper name was printed on a clipping’s border: the Ithaca Journal, the Cortland Standard, the Elmira Star-Gazette, the Finger Lakes Times, the Olean Times-Herald. Some clippings were white, some faded, some yellowed—Paul had clearly been collecting these for years. We were very best friends; why hadn’t he shown these to me before?

Horrible, isn’t it? Paul said.

I don’t—

What happens to people when they grow up.

Now I saw it: an adult and child in each picture, the child remarkably like the adult who was clearly the parent. Uncanny resemblances. Faces captured at two distant moments in time.

Amazing, I said.

Keep looking, said Paul.

For what?

Here. Look what happens to a dimple.

It was a picture of a cute little boy of about five. His happy, dimpled face relaxed on his father’s shoulder. The father, too, had dimples, but the formerly endearing little dots had deepened, were now surrounded by desiccated skin, hanging sacs of flesh.

And look what happens to that adorable pudgy cheek, said Paul.

A sagging jowl, I saw.

And look at that little girl’s pretty fair hair.

Her mother’s was thinned, dyed, dry.

And this one, he said.

A holiday picnic. A mother holding a little girl on her lap. Beside her, the grandmother, holding a little boy. Three generations, one face. The curve of a tender cheek, softened, then sunken. Wrinkles slowly etching themselves into the skin above the mouth. The girl’s round little eye, hopeful; the mother’s eye, drooping at the edges; the grandmother’s, disappearing into a sea of folds.

And on it went: A little roly-poly boy sat upon his father’s fat gut of a lap. A girl with twinkling eyes looked into the crow-marked eyes of her mother. A beanpole of a boy in the embrace of a father whose wrinkled skin hung from bony arms. A tiny puff in a cheek become a sorry fold. Small lips now a mean line. Cute buck teeth grown into embarrassments. Tiny flaws, invisible in the freshness of youth, now magnified, exaggerated, dominant in the parent: the terrible work of time that awaited the child.

Paul picked up this first set of clippings and replaced it with another—another catalogue of the decay, desiccation, bloating, wrinkling, graying, fading, and shrinking that awaited the poor innocent spawn of his parents’ blood.

How can anyone stand it? said Paul. I mean, how can you look into the face of your parent and know you’re going to turn into that?

I leapt away from the bed and went to the window, where I drew back the blind and stood squinting into the brilliance of the yard. I watched birds peck at the grass, leaves ruffle in the breeze, a cat dive into a patch of underbush, as I tried not to think about my mother, who just two months before had tried to “do some harm to herself,” as my aunt had put it. While at the hospital, sitting among my relatives and listening to their talk, I had learned things about my grandmother—that she had locked herself in a running car in a closed garage. And about my great-uncle on my father’s side, who had jumped off a roof; about my mother’s grandfather, who had given away all his money one day in a manic fit; about another great-aunt, who had thrown herself in front of a car. While waiting to hear about my mother’s condition, my aunts and uncles and adult cousins had gone on describing manias, depressions, obsessions, compulsions—it seemed our family had long bloodlines of mad people stretching back in time, suicides running in our veins the way blue eyes were passed down in saner clans. Throughout, my father sat there without speaking, closed, withdrawn, as he had been for the past year. I looked around this circle of my relatives. I saw my eyes here, my chin there, my cowlick rising from the crown of Uncle John’s head. My aunt Selma once said I had the temperament of Uncle Harry: Did this include whatever bad thing he had done with his gun?

I said to Paul: Everyone says I look exactly like my mother.

He started, sat back on the bed, put down his clippings. He knew—he had to have known—how I longed to be like him, how dearly I wished not to know that what had happened to my family—to my mother, to my unspeaking father—could also happen to me. I longed for him to walk over to me, embrace me, at least pat me on the shoulder, and say, Don’t worry, you’re your own man, you never know.

But of course we were just boys, twelve years old, and so what, really, could he do or say? Paul quietly retrieved the clippings, put them in the box, and slid it back under the bed.

Let’s play our game, said Paul.

I don’t feel like it.

He reached for me. Sure you do, he said.





14.


I came back to myself. I heard truck engines idling in the street below, horns honking, a squeal of brakes, the airy breath of Dr. Schussler’s sound machine. I looked down at my watch: ten past eleven. I had not heard the church carillon chime the hour; the sound machine still whirred; the patient was not there. I looked across the street at the hotel: The man was gone. The window opposite was shut, the curtains drawn, no glow showing from within. From the roofline, the statue looked back at me: the naked man, the cloth about his loins.

I waited all through the day; the patient did not come. Then through the night. I returned the next day and waited, and then the next. And still the patient did not come.

All the while, I thought of her, and of the analyst who had enticed her into exploring the actual situation of her birth. And suddenly I thought the patient should flee, quit this therapy, return to the calming shadow of her mysterious origins. There she could imagine her parents to be anyone—brilliant mathematicians; fierce-minded analysts; dark-souled bisexuals, perhaps, who had passed on to her a woman’s love for women—ancestors who would understand implicitly the person she felt herself to be.

She should be more like Paul, I thought, reveling in the unknown possibilities of her future. Everyone has his own genetic fate written inside him—his own complement of mental predispositions, weaker organs waiting to fail, more or less likely routes upon which he will encounter death. But what good does it do to know it? Knowledge is not a relief. The burden is not lessened by the sense of its not being one’s own fault, not a failure of will, of intent, of virtue. One is just as subject to this fate, the fate of this body, its Furies.





15.


The week was gone. The rain went on, intermittently now; the black-hooded man daily haunted the beach; the sound machine never ceased its empty breathing. I sat in the office in the dark of the raining days and nights, and did not look out the window, afraid that I might see again the apparition of the naked man, since apparition I believed him to have been, a conjuring out of the absurd black stew of my mind.

Another week, and I began to believe that I had conjured up Dr. Schussler as well, that the hiss that came from the adjoining office was merely a sound produced by my own ears; that I had even conjured up the patient, that there had never been an adopted lesbian woman struggling to understand herself on the other side of our common wall—how else could my mere wish that she flee make her disappear?

Only some compulsion brought me back, day by day, to sit at that desk in the office. For this, at least, I thanked my blood, all the ancestors who could not see a carpet without arranging the fringe, a sofa without aligning the cushions, a shoulder without picking lint. I watched the rain, avoided looking toward the windows of the Palace, pretended to work on my lectures, whose words now seemed worthless to my eyes. How much time had passed? I didn’t care. I merely sat. What day was it? I had no idea.

When suddenly, one mid-morning, the sound machine stopped.

I did not trust the silence. Had I dreamed it?

But there was Dr. Schussler’s German-accented voice clearly saying, Welcome back! How was the trip?

And then came the young, deep, watchful voice—so rich! so lovely!—for which my whole being had been yearning.





16.


I don’t know how to begin, the patient said.

Perhaps, said Dr. Schussler, you might tell me about the trip—

The convention. Great. Granger spoke, the god of econometrics. A speech about time series data, stationary and nonstationary series—oh, it’s too complicated to explain. But it made me wish I’d studied with him at U.C. San Diego instead of going to Wharton.

The patient paused.

And from there we went to our prospective client. The Brighton Fund. Which went well. Very well, actually. They were impressed with our models and immediately subscribed.

Wonderful! You must be so pleased, after all the arguments about …

The function on the third derivative.

The doctor laughed. Yes, that was it.

The patient shifted about her chair, then fell silent.

And there is something else? asked the therapist.

The patient took a breath, released it. A lot more happened on this trip.

Yes?

Well … since our business was finished so quickly, I decided not to come back right away. I … went to see my family.

The doctor hummed but said nothing.

You know how rarely I see them, said the patient. I talk to them on the phone maybe three times a year. Like I’ve told you. When they call, I figure someone must have died. So I don’t know what got into me. All I know is, I was free, not far away, and I went.

And? asked the doctor when the patient did not immediately go on.

And I asked my mother about my adoption.

Oh, my!

(Dr. Schussler must have jumped in her seat; her chair produced a squall of creaking leather; I myself could barely hold still.)

The patient said nothing more for several seconds.

And? the doctor prompted once more.

I can’t tell you what a bitch my mother was, said the patient.





17.


It was Sunday evening, said the voice I loved, a windy day, she went on. The patient was sitting with her mother in a room they called the den, a small addition whose walls were pierced on three sides by windows (“pierced by windows”: my patient’s lovely phrase). The trees had begun to turn. Fingers of drying leaves kept scratching at the window glass (“fingers of leaves”: also the patient’s beautiful words). Her mother sat on a recliner that faced the television; the patient across from her on a small sofa. Between them was a glass coffee table covered with delicate glass figurines and ceramics: a ballerina, an old woman selling balloons, a clown, a breaching whale, an owl, a rose, a ballet slipper.

Her mother had just come into the room and was still fussing with her skirt, trying not to wrinkle it as she settled into her recliner. When she was satisfied with her efforts, she said to her daughter:

You know, you’ll get me a glass of ice water.

It was her future imperative tense, the patient explained to Dr. Schussler. My mother foresees something that will occur in the future, and you have no choice but to enact it.

Her mother had come home from the beauty salon, where they had created for her a hard, round, fiercely yellow helmet that was supposed to be beautiful hair.

What do you think of it? asked her mother, gently patting her helmet with one hand as she received her daughter’s proffered ice water with the other.

Not too big? she asked.

Well, maybe a little, answered the patient.

Oh, I don’t think so. You know, we women don’t wear our hair loose and tousled like you girls.

We’re women, Mother.

Well, I think of you as girls. I can’t change the way I think. You’re my girl.

Your hair is fine, Mother.

Not too sprayed?

Your hair is fine, Mother.

Her mother said while lighting a cigarette: Today the dry cleaner told me I always look so nice. Not like the other women in their housedresses and curlers. I don’t understand how women can let themselves be seen like that.

Her mother was wearing a pearl-gray wool suit, lapis lazuli beads, a peacock brooch pinned to her shoulder: gold, inset with gemstones. The skirt was tight, to show off her trim figure.

You always look lovely, Mother.

There’s a certain illusion a woman has to maintain, dear. A little powder and paint goes a long way. Don’t forget that, darling. Remember that when you get married.

I’m never going to get married, Mother. You know that I—

Dammit! her mother said. We are not going to discuss that in this house! How many times do I have to tell you?

I wanted to kill her, the patient told her therapist. Really I did. At that moment I thought I would jump up and strangle her. The weight of all those lies, all those silences—I thought there was no way out but to kill her. I suppose I wanted a kind of revenge. How many years had I spent telling her she was beautiful, trying to fill that black-hole need in her—unquenchable, endless—meanwhile sparing her any little upset about me, about who I really was. Bringing up the adoption would hurt her back—that’s what I’m thinking now. But at the time I only knew how blind angry I was. Her refusal to see me, know me. I just felt, I’m not going to let you get away with it anymore. And I said:

So. Tell me what you know about my adoption.

I said it just like that, the patient told Dr. Schussler. Right out. Nothing to prepare her.

But then we both froze, as if we’d been caught in a spotlight doing something wrong. Her cigarette stopped in midair. Dead stop. I confess I enjoyed seeing her freeze up like that. Then, oh so slowly, Mother reached down and put her ice water on the glass coffee table, placing it carefully among the delicate figurines.

What makes you bring that up, dear?

Didn’t you think I’d be curious? I asked her. That I would ask sometime?

The cigarette went back into motion. She inhaled, coughed once, then blew out a line of smoke. Funny, she said at last. I don’t suppose I’ve thought much about it in years. I mean, it all happened so long ago. I don’t even think of you as …

Adopted.

Yes. Adopted.

I watched her deepening lip lines, the patient told her doctor. You know, the wrinkles on the top lip, hard lines straight up and down from nose to mouth.

Mother, you told me never to make that expression. Lip—

Lip lines! Ugly! She laughed. Thank you, dear.

But you’ve got to tell me, the patient persisted. Tell me what you know.

Her mother’s mouth contracted again. I’ll have to discuss this with Father.

Why with Father?

I just do.

Why? He doesn’t own this story.

Her mother looked up at her with an expression the patient had never before seen on that carefully made-up face. Was it fear?

Or does he? the patient went on.

Her mother crushed her half-smoked cigarette, stood up, straightened her dress, patted her hair.

It isn’t too big, is it?

No, Mother. It’s not too big.

And the color?

Perfect.

Her mother stepped one way, then another, then picked up her glass of water. You know, she said, you’ll take this and put this in the dishwasher. She gave the glass to her daughter and started out of the room. But she abruptly paused at the threshold.

We went through an adoption agency, her mother said from the doorway.

She was looking down as she spoke, at her skirt.

But what adoption agency? the patient asked her.

Oh … Let’s not … She was still concentrating on the skirt, brushing it with her hand.

Oh, darling, it was so long ago, she went on. I really don’t remember. Something connected with a Catholic charity.

Catholic! said the patient. But what do you mean—Catholic?

Oh, you know. After the war there were so many little babies needing homes—

Orphans?

Well. Yes. Or, you know. Men would come home on furloughs.

Bastards.

Darling! What a thing to say!

Well, what else?

Her mother kept brushing her skirt.

And why a Catholic agency? the patient asked her mother. Father hates Catholics. He’s practically pathological on the subject.

Her mother looked up briefly. Sweetheart! Do you think something like the religion of the agency would keep us from adopting you? It doesn’t necessarily mean that you were born Catholic. Do I have a stain here?

Where?

Here.

Her mother indicated a spot on her left thigh.

I don’t see anything, the patient said. And you didn’t ask?

What?

If I’d been born a Catholic.

Something passed over her face, said the patient. A little squint. A tightness in her mouth. So brief and subtle that, if I’d blinked, I would have missed it.

Heavens, no! she said. We so wanted a child. We were so happy to have you!

But Father hates Catholics. Rabidly!

Really, there’s nothing to say. We didn’t care, darling!

She sang it out, the patient said. We didn’t care, dahling!—playing Nora Charles in The Thin Man.

And at that she left the room, calling out over her shoulder:

You ought to pack, dear. Early flight tomorrow.





18.


The bitch—she wouldn’t say another word about it, said the patient. Until the moment I got into the taxi, she wouldn’t even look me square in the face. So isn’t this great, just great. Look what I found out for all my troubles: Now I’m a goddamn Catholic!

Not necessarily Catholic, said the therapist in a calming voice, just as your mother said. In any case, what would it matter?

What would it matter? Matter! You know I was brought up hating Catholics! You know that. My father’s hatred is irrational, relentless. It’s not like a normal person’s prejudice. It’s a … racial hatred. My whole upbringing. All the times I told you about. When I couldn’t stay at Mary’s. And the summer with a “preponderance of them.” And the fight we had over the “papist cultists.”

The patient continued in this light—the man named O’Reilly, the Irish mafia, the summer camp across the lake, that “Danny Boy” song—butterflying from one reference to the next. She and the doctor had evidently dissected these incidents many times before, so no clarifying information was forthcoming, and I therefore tried to listen as I had done in the past: letting the unexplained names and events go by without heed, allowing myself to be soothed by the sound of the patient’s voice.

But as the references went on—that girl in school, the professor, the people on the next block, the wedding, the sweet-sixteen party, that shop lady—I grew increasingly annoyed at the cryptic turn this session was taking. The patient had gone away without explanation—tortured me with her absence—only to return and make it clear she had a life I could not comprehend. She owed me an explanation! How dare she simply run on—the summer in Utah, the couple at the hotel, my friend’s best friend—with all these trinkets, these little pebbles of life! I understood: Yes, her father hated Catholics. She has proven her point. Must she keep going on? Why wouldn’t Dr. Schussler stop her? What pettiness the patient was displaying! She was supposed to be my champion, my athlete in the arena, strong in her battle against the mere situation of birth. But she would not get far if she did not move on from this pitiful evidence-gathering!

Then all at once I was frightened. How quickly I could come to hate her—she who was moments ago my icon of self-creation. I must be careful, I thought. I have traveled this path before. I must not go there. I therefore forced down my anger; sat still as my annoyance ebbed. It took all my self-control, but I succeeded, congratulating myself that I had changed, that I could be otherwise than I’d been. I tuned my ear to the lovely pitch of the patient’s voice, her beautiful whiskey alto, and once again let it play above me as music, staccato now, legato then, piano and forte. My dear patient, I thought, forgive me! And how my heart contracted when she suddenly sobbed and cried out:

I don’t understand! How could they get me from a place they hate? How could they? I know it sounds crazy, but I feel I’m tainted. That Father looks at me and sees this mark: Catholic.

But you are not changed, said the therapist. Your being, your self, is the same, whether you came from a reed basket, a Protestant church, or a Catholic agency.

This has nothing to do with who I am! shouted the patient. It’s a mark on me before I was anyone. No matter what I am!

She was breathing forcefully, and I thought she would finally cry. But she contained herself and fell silent.

Seconds passed. Traffic noise rose as if to fill the gap.

She was lying, of course, said the patient at last.

Your mother, said the doctor.

Yes. Mother. I could tell she knew a lot more than she was saying. But I couldn’t get anything more out of her. She just did her dahling thing and brushed me off—ha! Like the skirt.

The patient paused.

And why did she tell me just that one detail, she continued, the Catholic agency, and nothing more? To get back at me. Get back at me for bringing up the forbidden subject of adoption.

It’s not allowed, you see. Adoption. Forbidden. I’m not to remind her of something—I don’t know what it is, but the adoption brings up something she hates too. Something bad happened. Something bad she wants to forget. So she had to hurt me. For bringing it up. Hurt me.

The patient stopped, breathing very hard now, nearly crying, but again containing herself. Five seconds went by. Then she burst out:

Why did I ever get into this? I told you I didn’t want to! I knew it would be bad—knew it. Why did you—you!—get me into this?

The therapist said nothing.

Is the hour over? asked the patient.

If you wish, said the doctor. We only have a minute or two.

Then it’s over, said the patient, who strode out the door and slammed it shut.

Even before the elevator arrived, Dr. Schussler was on the phone, trying to reach that Dr. Gurevitch.





19.


Oh, my poor patient! What a force of anger thundered in her steps as she passed my door! I could hear her breathing—steaming with the tears she would not shed—coming toward me then receding as she circled before the elevator. It was all I could do to keep myself still. I wanted to throw my arms about her, comfort her, provide her with shelter. My avatar, doing battle for me. And who could help her? That damned therapist! That Dora Schussler, analyst or psychologist or therapist—whatever she wished to call herself—and again I wondered, Was she up to the noble task of guiding my dear patient?

Or would there be a task at all? The seven days seemed twenty. I could do nothing but worry about the patient’s return—I feared once more that she might break off the therapy, abandoning me to my loneliness in that terrible cottage by the sea. As the days went by, I kept hearing the hot anger in the patient’s breath, which somehow mingled in my mind with the shushing of steam from the office radiators, the hiss of tires on the wet pavement below, the whisper of rain at the windows, the rush of Dr. Schussler’s machine—all around me the sounds of the patient’s broken heart.

Wednesday came at last. The doctor smoked. The sound machine went silent. Again came the slish of stockings, the exhalations of smoke, the window raised and lowered as if a semaphore telling the patient: Come. Come now. Once more the church bell played the carillon. Then the strokes of the hours: each seeming to say, no, no, no.

The minutes passed: one, two, five, fifteen. Would she never come?

Then: ding, elevator door, thud of steps, rattle of the door handle, and—slam!—the sound I had so resented but six weeks ago (could it be only that recently?), now so thrilling.

She burbled on about work—but no matter. She was here. Stochastic models and secular trends, Bayesian logic and probabilities, time horizons and intermediate “tops”—fine, anything she wished to discuss, I don’t need to understand (I sternly told myself), only let me hear the sound of her voice. As the talk of work went on, the doctor tried all her therapist’s tricks to return to the land of “last time”—as we were saying; we really should discuss; do you want to talk about?—yapping all about her client like a sheepdog. Finally she herded her charge into the desired fold, there to find the patient’s resistance as fierce as ever.

What’s there to talk about? Father hates Catholics! So he will always hate me. I’m marked—marked indelibly as something he cannot love.

Let us try to look at this another way, said the doctor. Perhaps he’ll love you all the more for “rescuing” you.

Huh! the patient replied. Absurd. How many times do I have to tell you the story about the “papist cultists,” or my friend Mary?

But—

But nothing. I’m certain about this. I might as well have a tattoo of the pope on my forehead!

The conversation went on in this vein, but the therapist could not budge the patient from her syllogism: Father hates Catholics; I’m branded as Catholic; therefore Father hates me. She replayed it throughout the hour, “stuck in a single organization of events,” as several of my own mental health professionals had put it when confronted with my own stubbornness. Seeing it from the other side (from behind the wall, as an observer), I understood the obsessive quality of such an attachment, something comforting in holding on to a smug, all-seeing knowledge, even a sad or hurtful one; something that let the patient control the precise amount of pain she administered to herself—playing her own executioner, as it were.

So the session wore itself away, as did the next, which began with the repeated trope, the therapist attempting to challenge it, the patient resisting, and so on, until the therapist gave in. She let the patient turn to other subjects, in this case her girlfriend, Charlotte, their arguments, the complicated social alignments among their friends. And another hour was gone.

The following week reprised the pattern: the broken-record recitation of her father’s hatred for her, then a jump to more quotidian matters.

Finally nudged away from this recital at one session, the patient turned to economics. The great difficulties our country was facing. Rising prices at the same time as stagnating business activity. A combination so new it required the creation of a new word: stagflation. She wondered how she could adapt her models to this “anomalous macro situation” (if I am transcribing all this correctly). She worried about the new Japanese imports—the word “econobox” had just entered the lexicon with the arrival of the first Datsuns; about high oil prices, lines at gas stations, the fear, the sense of the economic world as we know it coming to an end.

And what do you feel about all this? asked the therapist.

Come on. What do you think I feel?

Tell me.

Despair!

Do you think this has anything to do with what you learned from your mother?

A snort. Silence. Another run for the door.

Still she returned. Week after week she made her way to Room 804, the lodging of her psyche, where she successfully avoided any surgery to remove the knife she herself had thrust into her heart. At the next session she instead turned back to her problems with Charlotte, who kept calling the patient “a bourgeois” each time she tried to talk about her work, its difficulties, its challenging appeal.

(At least say “bourgeoise,” I thought, the female form, hating this Charlotte all the more by the second, if only for her ignorance of foreign languages.)

Do you ask yourself, interjected the therapist, why you stay with someone who so clearly does not accept who you are?

Yes, yes, the patient said with sighs. All the time.

But yet you stay.

Yes. I stay.

So I must bring this up again. Do you see how this mirrors your relationship with your mother? Did you not say that you brought up the subject of adoption—wanted to hurt her—because she will not accept who you are?

Right, said the patient. I did. Mother.

Suddenly an ambulance came wailing, its cry echoing between the buildings on our narrow street. Patient and doctor waited while the siren quavered away toward a distant corner.

Wonder what’s going on out there, said the patient.

Hmm, said the doctor. And in here?

You mean this room?

No. (A rustle of fabric.) Here.

Ah! The patient laughed. You mean inside.

She paused.

Inside me.

Once again she fell silent.

Horns blared in the street. The last seconds drifted away.

Until next week, the doctor softly said.





20.


But next week, the patient was late yet again. And as before, the minutes crept by, my anxiety rising all the while. Silence reigned in Dr. Schussler’s office. She had turned off the sound machine, then sat, waiting for her patient.

At exactly twenty past eleven (according to my watch), Dr. Schussler lit a cigarette and turned on the sound machine. What was she doing—giving up on the patient? Was she just sitting there with her Viceroys, enjoying a smoke, glad to have a free hour on the day before Thanksgiving?

For we had arrived at that time of year, the last week in November, and I longed to hear my dear patient’s voice one more time before the assault of the holiday. She had mentioned, buried amidst the evasions of the past weeks, that she was doing something she never did: going home for Thanksgiving. Surely, then, she would need fortification from her therapist before facing the question of her origins—for how could she not raise the issue, there, in the presence of her adoptive family, of her father, the man at the head of the table with the carving knives who will think “Catholic!” (she believes) each time he looks at her?

Why did she not come? And what time signature was Dr. Schussler following that twenty-after should signal the end of the patient’s allotted period? Would she be turned away if she should come now, or in ten minutes? I dared not leave the office for fear that Dr. Schussler might do the same at any moment, and I had not given up entirely my hopes for the patient’s arrival. So I was forced into a simmering uncertainty and sat immobile in my chair, afraid for myself and for the patient, for I felt we should not be cast alone into the madness of the holidays.

I am not certain what came upon me, but I was suddenly racked by what seemed to be hiccups, silent hiccups; tears welled up in my eyes; I began to shake all over, as if in the grip of a seizure. I panicked—was I ill? I looked at my wet hands and could barely comprehend why they should be so—such was my long divorce from the experience of crying. My nervous condition had always draped the world in too bleak a bunting to allow for tears, since true sorrow is impossible without the hope of happiness. And here I was—crying! I was so glad at the return of this simple human expression that my eyes immediately dried and my sobs vanished; and then I was desperate for the tears to come again!

In the midst of such comedy—I’m happy I’m crying! Now I’m miserable that I’m too happy to cry!—there came a knock on the therapist’s door. Then another, and a series of impatient raps. I could not hear the doctor’s response—the sound machine still played—but several seconds later I heard the door open. There was a discussion at the door—the machine blew fog through their voices—and all I could distinguish was something about drinks and a party. Were they talking about an office party? Was that the patient’s excuse for coming late?

I was not to know, for that horrid Dora Schussler, forgetting her client’s wishes, let the sound machine play on after she had closed the door behind the patient. All I yearned to hear was reduced to sibilance and dentalization, the tongue and teeth of the therapist piercing the whir, and the occasional bass hum, like the sound of a television heard late at night through a hotel wall. And beyond all that was my dear patient! Her needs, her fears, her emotional preparations for the family visit—all was smothered by the machine.

When suddenly came silence.

Then the therapist’s Germanic voice:

We must end early, she said.

Yes, I remember, said the patient.

Then more silence; then a faint sound of breathing, growing stronger; then:

Oh, why did I waste this session! the patient cried out. I needed to figure out what I’m doing. What I’ll say, if I’ll say anything. Oh, God! I wasted it.

She said no more, only kept breathing deeply without coming to tears.

I am so sorry, dear, said the doctor. We have to stop now.

Yes.

You have the emergency number. If you are overwhelmed, please call. You know you can always call.

I know.

I will be here for you, said Dr. Schussler.

The therapist stood, then the patient.

Oh, God! exclaimed the patient. Why did I blow this session? What am I going to do?

There was a rustle of fabric.

Please don’t try to hug me, said the patient. I don’t want to be touched right now.