Less disturbing was his current new habit of testing his emotional state, asking himself in many different daily situations how he felt. Angry? Happy? Contented? He found himself annoyed not only by the heightened consciousness this imposed on each and every moment of his day—as if he were his own biographer, narrating his life in order to find its point—but by the fact that most often he answered himself with Nothing. The man walked aimlessly, he told himself. The man felt blank. As if sedated. As if that scrim of significance that had previously sheltered him had been lifted, leaving him flat, without affect. As if the backdrop to his drama had disappeared. He'd wakened down in a neighborhood that had always scared him, one that he'd prohibited his sons from even thinking about entering, but, disallowing his anxiety about how he'd gotten there, he discovered himself not very concerned about actually standing there. His fear of getting shot or mugged or even heckled had evaporated.
The man was asking for it, he thought.
"I don't care," Marcus had repeated like a mantra between the ages of three and four, to which Rachel had always responded: "You know what happens to boys who don't care? A lion eats them."
Ev envisioned the open mouth, the big cat's ring of teeth like a sparkling ivory cage. Did the man care?
Was it the fact of his father's death that left the man without meaning? Had he needed the example of his father's unhappiness to see the scale of his own happiness? Had his life been a sort of taunt directed at his father? Or was he imagining his own death, the point at which his sons would be glad to see the man go, would gladly press a pillow over his face? The probability profoundly depressed him. He felt the cycle of the generations, how his own place in the great turning wheel had been nudged that much closer to oblivion. His living was not giving him much pleasure—nor much pain, it had to be granted—and aside from the grief his demise would cause his sons and wife, he had little to keep him from simply lying in the street and letting something large and diesel-powered crush him, put him out of his not-misery.
Was it his father's dark cruelty that had kept Ev a kind person? Had he lost his barometer? Had calibration so surprisingly left his life? And why didn't he want to tell Rachel about it? What preposterous self was he indulging, safeguarding?
Thus Ev entertained himself between clients ail day this late spring Wednesday. Outside it thundered; the electricity kept trying to snuff itself. Lights flickered; the signal buzzer sounded erroneously and halfheartedly, like a misfiring synapse. His office was as familiar to him as his home; it held plenty of amenities for making him comfortable, for padding his behind, for soothing his senses, for bathing him in restful light. He had a stereo and a hotpot, a Persian rug and an ashtray. He took little naps on his sofa. He'd once offered to let Gerry live here, at least stay here on the coldest Chicago nights. But Gerry preferred being outside, preferred camping out on the floors of friends' homes or on roofs or in parks. And to be realistic, Gerry could never have figured out the office alarm system.
Luellen was Ev's last client today. Her problems weren't new, but the peculiar slant on them interested Ev. She hated her father—nothing fresh in that, something decidedly stale, in fact, in that—but hated him because he hadn't abused her. He had molested the other three daughters in the family—prepubescent intercourse—but not her. Why didn't he do it to her? This was her unanswerable question. She wasn't the oldest, she wasn't the youngest, but she was, probably, the least attractive of the children. When she'd begun to trust Ev, she'd brought in a photograph of herself with her siblings. The other daughters were blondes, big-toothed tan girls. Luellen was simply less pretty, a brown-haired girl whose ears stuck out. She most resembled the father, in the photo, and it was her ironic human quandary to feel competitive for abuse.
But her likableness as a client had more to do with her intelligence and quickness, her ardent honesty, than with her unusual spin on her family molestation drama. For example, she had noticed right away when Ev brought in the metal box containing his father's ashes—the only one of his clients who ever commented on its presence. The ashes had been placed discreetly on a bookshelf behind where his clients generally sat, but Luellen had enough curiosity about settings to be always aware of the one she inhabited.
"New box," she'd said.
"Ashes," Ev had answered, coming the nearest to intimacy he would ever achieve with her or any of his clients.
"Your father?"
He nodded. She had begun therapy only a few months before Ev's father had died. Her own father had died recently, too, which may also have explained his liking her, feeling comfortable with her. Ev imagined a club, the Dead Fathers, he and Luellen and Paddy Limbach as three of its charter members. Also, Luellen had the unusual distinction of being someone whose dislike of her father surpassed Ev's. Her darkness was bigger, her father's darkness was bigger, and together they had the charm of subsuming Ev's and his father's.
"Did I tell you what I did with my father's ashes?" she had asked, sitting down and tilting her head at its familiar confidential angle.
"No."
"My sisters and I each got a portion of them, just like in some dumb fairy tale. The first daughter took hers to the lake, on a sailboat, and scattered them to the wind. The second daughter keeps hers in a safe-deposit box. The third daughter buried them in her back yard and planted a tree—which died, by the way. But the fourth daughter took hers into the mortuary bathroom, poured them in the toilet, pissed on them, then flushed." Her eyebrows jumped in the way they did to punctuate statements. "You could do that."
Ev nodded. "I could."
"But you wouldn't?"
"Probably not." In truth, he could imagine doing it if his anger hadn't already been served by his suffocating his father, if the itch hadn't already been scratched. He didn't find Luellen's gesture that of somebody lacking sense or reason, just that of somebody seeking justice. Long ago he'd understood that the crux of his business, the slogan he would have to live by, would be It's not fair.
But Ev was not the kind of therapist who described his own experiences as a way of eliciting client trust or confidence. He did not want to bring more than his intelligence and sensitivity into the relationship. His clients frequently sickened him with their weakness, their victimization, their victimizing, their boring deceptions. He didn't like imagining the enormous normal-looking infrastructure that kept all the grossness hidden. Their secrets occasionally disgusted him, and he didn't want to touch them, or their problems. He didn't want to be so constantly steeped in suicidal or homicidal thinking. He was tired of the sameness of their complaints, the fundamentally flawed basis of his relationship with them. He was a make-believe friend, a paid listener, a bottomless pit, a pet, a basically blind confessional. It disturbed him that his clients might feel genuinely absolved; after all, he was praised for not judging the scrupulousness of their morals. They were safe with him, like harbored criminals; he did not report their corruption, merely took it from them, gave it shelter and them relief.
A real secret, though, must not be spoken, must never be confessed. Must worm its way around inside a person until it meant something. A person could tolerate more secrecy, he thought. A society could benefit from some repression.
He tormented himself on this subject for a minute or two, then welcomed Luellen, who always liked to begin her time with anecdotes from her job. She worked in a photo studio as a lowly set designer, which meant she painted props, moved scenery, sometimes posed as a stand-in for what she jeeringly called the talent. She always had a funny story to entertain him with before they launched into the familiar but abiding enigma of her family. Perhaps this was intended to make her feel less like a client and more like a friend, or perhaps it was merely a part of her character her desire to please him, as if there ought to be something in their sessions for him. Ev liked to hear about other people's jobs—and maybe she'd figured that out about him. He liked to pretend, even to himself, that his clients' jobs had something to do with their problems. And som
etimes they did. Luellen, for example, had wanted to be a photographer. But she'd ended up as an underling, running errands, taking 'roids, sometimes being in modest ways creative. Luellen would oblige Ev's interest in her work; she was very sane at work, very talented and appreciated, something that cheered Ev. Her personal life, however away from the photo studio, both saddened and repelled him. She slept with a lot of men. She had a kind of death-wish sexuality, picking up strangers, allowing them into her home, then not using condoms. It was a practice she kept trying to quit—"Yes, I remember Mr. Goodbar," she'd told him early on, "that old chestnut"—treating herself to just one picked-up man a week, or occasionally agreeing to go out with the same guy more than once, forcing herself to suffer through the motions of standard dating practices.
At first Ev thought her father must have molested her, too. Then he thought the man had probably not abused any of the children. Now he believed Luellen: her father had chosen to have sex with her sisters and not to have sex with Luellen. The father always determines the sex, Ev thought idly as he listened to Luellen, from the X and Y chromosomes right on through to adult preferences and perversions. And what constituted a perversion? he asked himself. It was a question he would never successfully answer. Mightn't the human animal instinctively mate with many? Mightn't Luellen's sex drive be perfectly normal, albeit out of keeping with contemporary prudence and paranoia?
But so much interfered with what was natural or animal. The oversize human brain, for example. The more you could disengage it, the better. Ev himself had never managed to feel comfortable making love in any house where his father slept. It had made his and Rachel's sex life awkward during the months the old man had lived with them, right before dying. Before even considering fucking his wife, Ev had had to tiptoe through his own apartment, an adult man, and listen for the harsh but steady breathing—"Darth Vader," Rachel had nicknamed it—that signified his father's deep sleep. Utterly humiliating. But not unusual, Ev knew. Many of his clients complained of feeling uncomfortable about having sex in the same house as their parents. That was one of the many confessions he'd heard that he could have empathized with. But he didn't—not to the client, not even privately. He might pretend to empathize in order to impress Rachel or friends, practice his miming altruism. But though his clients' troubles resembled his own, he did not consider himself among them, he was not of them, the messed-up humans. He was above them. That was his largest problem, he knew, the fact that he could not see himself as an ordinary man among others. That was his legacy; he considered it his father's curse, the narcissistic confidence in his own specialness, his superiority complex. It was not as imperiling as Luellen's father's curse on her, but Ev knew it had as lasting an impact.
Today Luellen told Ev about an errant generator that had rolled down a hill during an outdoor shoot, the driver who'd tried to stand behind it and gotten run over, which broke his leg and collarbone. She had a talent for storytelling, and instead of tragic, the event was rendered comic. Ev appreciated it. She dressed neither too casually nor too formally for her sessions, so that she appeared to have a healthy relationship with him, her therapist. She did not flirt with him; she did not offer titillating stories of her sexual escapades, though presumably she could have. She was only a few years younger than Ev, so that their frames of reference in the world were identical: they remembered all of the same national assassinations and vanishings; they hummed the same songs. They shared a cynical, passive, left-wing ideology. They both disdained smiling and sentimentality. They scowled at people. They deprecated themselves as a kind of competitive sport. Ev liked Luellen; if she hadn't been his client, he could imagine inviting her to meet Rachel. But even then, even in his own home in the role of friend, he would have felt slightly superior to her, capable of understanding just a shred more of her neuroses than she ever would of his.
His business encouraged this, he thought.
Luellen's mother and oldest sister were coming to visit her. Neither of them believed that Luellen's father had passed her over. The other three sisters had such clear memories—evoked only through therapy within the last few years—that the mother was convinced Luellen, too, would begin to recall. But what Luellen recollected was her father inviting one or another of her sisters to go places with him, to restaurants or movies or even into his study. She could not remember ever having been touched by her father in any context. He had not liked her. She was unattractive. Now she picked up strangers and endangered herself as often as possible, amassing a whole fleet of men who found her worthy. It was a simple equation. Ev understood her, and he didn't mind covering precisely the same ground with her week after week, because she was telling the truth, she was diving for the source of herself, never mind the danger down there. Ev operated on the premise that she was better than she'd been a year ago (he made a mental note to check his file on her, ascertain that she had actually improved).
He did not like to keep clients for much more than a year. He liked to feel that they left his office slightly better after their time with him, slightly more objective about their problems, clear on what they were responsible for and what they weren't. Mostly this happened, with a few exceptions; Dr. Head had remained a client, though only over the telephone, for more than fifteen years. Ev felt his usefulness for Luellen was about to expire. He would soon suggest closure; she would agree, because she was smart enough to know that if he recommended it, even if she didn't feel ready to quit, it would be best if she did.
"I've been working on figuring out exactly how I feel every second of the day," Luellen was saying.
Ev perked up; this was what he'd been doing. The man felt kinship with his client. "And?"
"Well, in the morning I have a lot of willpower, but in the evening I'm a disaster."
Ev sighed, recognizing his own tendency to lose enthusiasm during the day. Perhaps he would start canceling his afternoon sessions, going home and taking a nap with Rachel. He remembered to ask Luellen if the nights she had class were better.
"Well, until class is over, they are. Then I stop at Friendly's. And I don't think avoiding the bar is the best idea, although I know that's what you recommended."
"I asked you if you would recommend it to yourself."
"Right, well, I don't. I recommend to myself that I just straighten up, for God's sake, and stop fucking strangers. Stop feeling like I have to." She sighed pleasantly. Her frustration with the gap between what she knew and what she felt was large but familiar to her. She had a partner to call when she was feeling especially bad, another woman obsessed with sex. This woman was in deeper trouble than Luellen; she was a woman with two children she'd sexually abused, though she was now trying to stop. It was good for Luellen to have a partner in worse straits, good for her to feel not that bad. Like Ev's father, whose badness kept Ev's in perspective, Luellen's partner could be counted on to offend more gloriously.
Luellen said, "Isn't that what you'd like to tell all of us, your fucked-up clients— straighten up? When Meredith calls me, that's what I want to say. Just don't do it. What could be so difficult? And she could say to me, Physician, heal thyself, or something like that. We talk and talk and talk, and then we go out and do and do and do, as if the two things weren't related."
"It's very human."
"Like that's a good reason?"
"No." Ev nodded; she was smart, and she made him feel less bland. If she was lucky, Luellen would survive. And perhaps something about the men she chose illustrated her own self-protectiveness in operation. Perhaps they were nice men, or at least healthy and with some moral sense intact. But he doubted it. Luellen had told him she was afraid of being tested for AIDS.
"It's funny, but I'm realizing how angry I am at my mother all of a sudden. This visit makes me furious. I don't want to see her. I don't want to hear her tell me how bad she feels about our past. I'd like to have been born without her. Why can't I just live like I never knew them, either parent?"
"Same problem as before—head a
nd heart in opposition. But simply naming the discrepancy is useful, don't you think?"
"What discrepancy?"
"Between what you want intellectually and what you feel emotionally."
"Intellectually, I'm fine. Emotionally, I suck. And I'm a big coward, too, because I won't just tell her how miserable she makes me, she and my sisters, all chatting long-distance on the phone about how I still haven't broken through, haven't unrepressed. They probably think you're a lousy therapist."
Ev agreed. They probably did. He wouldn't have exactly denied it, today.
"But," she continued, "you should be grateful not to deal with my sisters or mother."
He shared with Luellen a big skepticism about the literature her mother and sisters continued to send her, bestselling books that simplified matters to the point of pablum, that encouraged wallowing in victimization, the whining manuals of crybabies. Ev didn't want to talk about Luellen's sisters or mother; it was unfortunate she was at the mercy of clods, but why dedicate time to them? He had conflicting feelings about family, similar to his outlook on organized religion: had it done more harm than good, historically speaking? Had blind faith more sustained lives or crushed them? Was coping with bad family a test of character or an unnecessary expenditure of energy? In Luellen's case, Ev couldn't help thinking reconciliation with the family was a nearly hopeless prospect. There were too many of them; they seemed allied unfairly against her. He didn't want to talk about them today.
He said instead, "Tell me about the last man you picked up. Describe him to me."
Luellen cleared her throat. "Well, actually, it's kind of interesting, because he's also in the modeling biz, though I've never worked with him except this last catalogue cover. I picked him up at the bar near the studio, and he told me he knew who I was, that he'd seen me at the shoot."
"Did you worry about meeting him again at your job?"
Talking in Bed Page 6
