by Mona Simpson
BACK IN MANHATTAN, as I walked up from the subway, the sky was already feathering, coming to dark. At a cash machine, I took out my last forty dollars. I’d have to call the bank at home again in the morning. Now the street was falling under the spell of late afternoon, silence and ending. Beyond this block, the space between trees filled gray-blue, and a dark haze smudged the tips of bushes.
I was walking to the Pleiades Palace. I thought of Venise King, her “see a therapist.” Timothy was not exactly a therapist, he was a movie usher, but we were trying. He was trying to analyze me.
I believed it was my father. I didn’t love right. Sometimes it seemed I only loved people who would be better off without me.
I’d always had a type. But the type changed. At one time, they were all very stumbling-young blonds, fair-haired. Virgins. The sort of boy you found yourself baking cookies with. Then for a long time they had to be dark. Dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes—everything a certain way.
Timothy—it wasn’t my first time at this either. It seemed I had already tried and failed at everything. In college once, I went to a therapist. He was cheap almost to the point of free. It was probably my mistake. I had gone to the Community Counseling Center, because they had sliding fee scales, but then I demanded a man. I wanted an MD and a man. That was the way I was then. The woman I said this to frowned. Apparently the vast majority of Community Counseling Center therapists were women. UnMDed. “Are you sure?” she asked.
“I know,” I said. “I need a man.”
And so they found me Garth. I told Garth I was there because I kept ending up with guys who weren’t my type, and then, when I was with them, I fell for other ones who were. Garth nodded too sympathetically. The next week he had a whole theory worked out about my father and my stepfather and their hair colors. Except he got Ted’s hair wrong.
I stopped going. Garth wrote me two notes and then called me on the phone once to ask why. I never could give him an answer.
On Amsterdam Avenue I passed Haitian shops that sold love potions and hexes, either one the same price, five dollars.
Timothy and I had started six months ago. This was our experiment. For five years, he had been teaching himself to be an analyst, with books, and so he was ready to try. And I needed help. I figured we had as good a chance as anybody.
He hadn’t finished college. He didn’t like school. That was something I never really understood. Teachers to me always seemed slow and kind. School was outside and apart from the dangers in the world. For me it was always so much simpler than home. Once out, Timothy felt disinclined to go back for so long that it became a decision made in sleep—that his education would be private, unwatched and tested only by life.
I met Timothy at the Pleiades Palace. Nights when I was lonely I either went to the Piggly Wiggly and walked down the bright aisles looking at food or I went to the Pleiades Palace. All I needed was the darkness and close other bodies and the tick of reel-to-reel film. I liked to let my head sink back while the big pictures overwhelmed me. Timothy managed the theater, sometimes he ran the projector, and every month he programmed and ordered the films. He had a taste for dark glamorous movies, with an undercurrent of violence. He had a long black ponytail which pendulumed on his back. He always wore the same brown bomber jacket and boxy shirts. He moved with grace. All over the neighborhood, people knew Timothy as the charity usher. When he collected tickets, a minute before the film started, if there were seats left, he’d let in anybody who wanted from the street; there were regulars, a woman who was suing the government and carried her voluminous documents everywhere, a woman who lived in her car. Most of the homeless in our neighborhood were women.
I met Timothy there my first year in New York when I applied for a job as an usher. I lasted three weeks. I couldn’t keep with the hours. But it was a nice place to work. You picked up your schedule for the week every Sunday night. If you wanted to change shifts, you asked someone else to switch or just cover for you. And this was the thing: everybody always said yes. Timothy never said no and so everyone else kind of followed the example. And then, because you knew whoever you asked would say yes, even at a cost, you tried not to ask. The bakeries nearby and one cheese shop sometimes brought us leftover food at closing time.
Timothy was always studying some hard-bound, large-printed book. He didn’t read randomly, the way I did, according to craving or whim, but methodically. When he read an author he worked through the novels, the letters and the diaries concurrently. His life was the opposite of most people’s college, where students immersed themselves in desperate scholarship, frenzied before tests, they would never again equal in their lives. Timothy’s education started once he’d left the university classroom, moved in a slow, thorough manner and showed no signs of ever stopping.
Timothy had read every book of Freud’s, most more than once—he’d learned German at night from send-away books and tapes and from Fassbinder movies—and many of the subsequent textbooks of psychoanalysis. He came to his belief in it slowly and, I think, profoundly, and if anyone owned the gift of reception, he did. He was a listener, and his remarks were scarce but dense. You always stopped and listened to what he said. Even at the Pleiades people did. The woman who screamed all day about the government spying on her through her blender raved to him in a lower voice. With him, she was almost talking.
He had a natural authority. My grandmother was like that. Still, but with a dignity so we hung on to whatever little she said. And we fought over her bitterly. We all wanted her preference and no one seemed to have it. She loved us all, we knew, but she could be truly impartial. That made her unlike the rest of us.
You instinctively looked to Timothy when you wanted a referee. He could be easily fair. Something like goodness seemed to hold him the way he was, the same as my grandmother. My grandmother or Timothy if they had a plan with a friend, any friend, and something else came up, some sweet, high temptation, they would right away say no, it wouldn’t even make them waver. It was as if they decided on rules to govern themselves long ago. I will never be like that. Conduct, in that way, is not determined by the depth or nature of your attachment to other people. It has to do with your fundamental notion of yourself. The way a certain man knows himself would make it almost impossible to endure a secret love affair. It would destroy his own and deepest familiarities to the world. Both my grandmother and Timothy were loners. And they held a certain mystery, a rectitude. Those of us who didn’t have that, and there were so many, sensed this and felt the lure of it, despite any apparent advantages we may have had. Timothy was a person you went to for absolution because there was something contained and steady about his life. I had so many ragged edges, so many desires.
But what could Timothy do? His talent was invisible and would never be recognized by the psychoanalytic channels which were as elaborate as the Ivy League college system with its specific initiation rites and requirements.
Whenever possible he hired graduate students in clinical psych to usher at the Pleiades. There was the tall girl who was doing her dissertation on anorexia. She wore flower pins and long skirts, blouses with pleats in them. You could see she ran herself thin over selfish, too handsome men. In this group, everyone was too much what happened to them. The girl who had been raped in a fraternity at college I associate with long curly hair and something uneven about the lip. There was a shy tall man, just venturing, it seemed, into the world of friends. He was apparently some kind of star at school. The ones who seemed like they’d be the best therapists were also the ones blocked on their dissertations.
Timothy and I decided to go ahead and try analysis. Why not? We had to believe in a way outside the regular. I couldn’t afford the regular. He didn’t qualify. Not to believe in each other was not to trust ourselves. But there are a lot of people like that, who, the first moment they can, abandon their whole past for better names.
Emily Briggs taxied across the park to see an analyst five times a week. His name was Dr. Bach. She to
ld me she was always late. She left from the Met or from her apartment a few minutes late, but that didn’t stop her from running into a place for a four-dollar cappuccino to go. For two years I heard about it, how unfair it was that he wouldn’t let her take her beverage inside. This is not a restaurant, he’d said. But recently they had a breakthrough. She’d discovered a type of spill-proof top and once she had demonstrated its infallibility, he allowed her to enter with her drink. It’s not even like he had any great rugs or anything, she said. Every time I’d seen Emily in New York, she’d been wearing a different hat. I imagined those hats waiting on a hatstand, in an empty room.
I walked into Timothy’s apartment, which had once been a garage. There were two small rooms with high ceilings, first a kitchen which always looked neat and dry, clear-surfaced, the mugs with their railroad line logo hanging on hooks over the sink. The second room was bigger and beautiful. Light slanted down from the high garage windows. Books lined the walls. He had an old leather and wicker chaise longue and he showed me to it that day. He pulled a small footstool out from under his desk, setting his sneakered feet upon it, the way he always did. I’d seen a wedge of his closet once—white sneakers, many times washed, and three pairs of loafers, worn to the shape of his feet, unmistakably polished.
Once we’d arranged ourselves, a still, hushed quality held the room. I felt apart from the world and for a moment I just stared at the most peculiar life in the room. On the opposite wall, tropical fish moved in a large tank. Since the room held a dim diffused light, the visceral equivalent of air kept in ajar, as if all time were old, caught and held here, the bright fish with their occasional, accusing flashes and tail turns worked as clocks, reminding that colors lived, there was light, other places than here, there was a now. But no matter how propulsive the turn, they only hit the other glass wall, they hung in a futile drama of motion.
“So hi,” I said. “I went to the detective today. That’s all I did. All day. But this morning before I got up, I had a dream. First there was this square of cement with a handprint on it, a man’s handprint. And then a stern woman in glasses led me up some official stairs. And we walked down corridors and corridors, first her footsteps and then mine. Finally she opened a door and we were in one brown room. The walls were corrugated like the inside of a lung. I guess a bad lung. There was a food line but it wasn’t moving. ‘There,’ the woman pointed. And I saw my father, he was near the front, thin still, good in clothes. He’s talking to another guy, looking down at his shoes. I didn’t want to bother him. I sucked in my breath. It was hard to move, I had on a suit, not anything I really have, but a tight suit, with shoulders and a double row of gold buttons, a short skirt. And I had on silk stockings. Do they even still make silk stockings? I never owned a suit like that. For that matter, I’ve never owned a body like that either, but I walked with a kind of purpose and padding over to where he was. I threw my shoulders back, it didn’t work, I felt like an idiot, I looked down at the flecked linoleum floor and the corners of the tiles were curling up like the toes of old shoes. ‘I’m your daughter,’ I said to him. ‘I know who you are,’ he said, as if nothing were even strange. ‘Can I talk to you?’ I said. And then his voice went a way I knew the answer. ‘Well, this is not a good time right now, Mayan, I’m in the middle of a meeting with Mr. Harold here and it’s very important.’ I said, ‘Oh, okay.’ ‘Be good, Mayan,’ he said, with his smile flashing. I kind of remember his smile. Not the way it looks really, but I’d recognize it. I turned around. I had to walk a long length of gym to the door with the feel of all those brown eyes following me. Then he called my name, it hooked in over my shoulder. And I got really excited. The rest I’d been prepared for. But now I let go and I turned around and said, ‘Yes, Dad? I’m still here.’ And he shouted, ‘Are you first in your class at school?’ ”
“Mmm,” Timothy said. But he didn’t say much in regular life either. I was supposed to say what I thought about the parts of the dream, whatever it was—that was a rule from one of the old books.
“I don’t know what the handprint means, or the suit. The suit I guess makes me think of Emily. I’m going to a party tonight for them. Some friend of her dad’s is giving them an engagement party in the Met. The Egyptian Wing. Like they have any connection to Egypt. I just feel funny at those things. I feel like I look wrong. I don’t even feel like a grown-up. Tad, that guy she’s marrying, you know, he never even looks at me. I don’t mean looks at me like flirts with me, I mean, literally, he never looks at me.”
I was propped up on an arm and I twisted around to look at Timothy. I saw his profile and each time I did that I was surprised how close up he was.
“I guess I’m just jealous of them. She says Tad cuts out of work sometimes in the middle of the afternoon and they have sex with the windows open. And after, they get up and put new clothes on and go and eat in restaurants. Did I tell you she has an antique beaded dress collection? Well she does. From the twenties. And what am I doing? I’m taking the subway to Brooklyn and spending my last money on a detective to find my father. I should be falling in love and having sex and buying clothes.”
There was fight in the air and the fish turned and jetted forward like fists in the lighted green aquarium.
I really was too alone. I said those things but I was even worse than I knew. And I blamed it all on money. I thought money was why I didn’t feel yet like an adult, money was why I didn’t fall in love right.
But other people my age with no more were helping each other, living together in their lives. None of them had any money, really, just Emily. Some people were even married. On the other side of my building a guy hung out of his window at seven o’clock every Friday night, waiting for his wife, who commuted. She’d pull the car in front and toot and then he ran down and she’d slide over and he drove until they found a parking place. My other friend from childhood, Mai linn, was in music school in Philadelphia, and she was just figuring out she was gay. That was something definite, a permanence.
I didn’t know if I should be finding my father or making a life with other people, going to parties, spreading out and feeling the medium of being young.
“But you’re not wasting your time. You’ve said often that finding your father would be very important to you. Would help you.”
“Yeah, I know. It is. But I’m tired of it being so hard. I hate that I have to do it.”
“Well, I know,” he said. We let that settle a minute. “I think the dream is also about being a woman.”
I turned my head to the side and so my long cheek was against the smooth leather, the way some people go to sleep.
“What do you make of the stockings?” Timothy said.
“I don’t know, I hate stockings, I’m so bad at all that. I mean, I never paid enough attention when it was the time you were supposed to learn those things. I thought I could save it for later. I remember saying once to Mai linn, while all these girls are fussing around with eye shadow we’ll learn things and then later when we’re grown up we can go to some department store like Briggs’s and pay an expert a hundred dollars and they’ll teach us everything in one day. I felt sorry for the girls with their makeup sessions and hair problems and dress catastrophes. It seemed so futile. All that time wasted. That’s why I think of Emily I guess, too, because she has men, she’s living a life in the physical world, and the truth is she’s smart. She’s just as smart as I am. She doesn’t get credit because of the way she looks. Mai linn doesn’t dress up either. She doesn’t shave. She hasn’t put on fingernail polish in her life.” I remembered Mai linn’s hands and feet. She has Asian skin and fingernails that looked a certain way over skin, like a washed-out white transparent shell. “We both have to wear this bridesmaid’s dress for Emily’s wedding.”
“What’s it like?”
“I haven’t seen it yet but all I know is it’s knee length and pink. And I have to wear it with green shoes.”
Timothy just muttered.
“ ‘Like
a flower,’ she says, you know, stem and petals. She’s going to have pink tulip centerpieces. I hate wearing short dresses. I don’t look right in them. And pink, too.”
“What comes to mind?”
“I just don’t want to look like a fool at Emily’s wedding.”
“You seem to feel Emily is a woman in a way you’re not,” Timothy said.
“She is.”
“Well, what about your mother?”
I readjusted on the couch and thought I hadn’t talked to her once since I was back. This father business, I was getting behind with everyone. Emily wasn’t looking for anybody. And people lived around her every day. When we were roommates, we planned we’d work together in the end. We’d be architects or something. I’d design the buildings and she’d decorate them.
“My mother. Oh, well, she’s glamorous all right. She did that, she spent her life chasing dresses and little purses and manicures. All that money.”
What is being a woman anyway? Buying dresses and making parties, I thought. Not being president. The way a foot curves in a formal shoe, tucked up on a chair.
Timothy and I kept tinkering in the intricate, remote way you do when you’re playing but playing seriously, using what we knew from the old books when it worked. In the stillness, the dim soft light punctured with the flashing tail-socked turn of a striped fish, I imagined us shipwrecked on a Pacific island with only our broken boat, a trunk of books.
“Maybe that’s why I think of Mai linn. ’Cause she’s not like that. She doesn’t worry about clothes and hair and all that stuff.”
“Mai linn is from a very different background.” That was true. Mai linn was an orphan. But her parents had been intellectuals. Her mother was a pianist. She remembered her parents sitting, thigh to thigh, on the balcony of their apartment at night, their gray-white heads together, two cigarettes ribboning smoke up from an ashtray. They would talk on and on, in French, until Mai linn and her sister fell asleep, a smell of burnt sugar in the air.
