Lights On, Rats Out

by Cree LeFavour

  On the make for a pâtisserie or boulangerie in every French town, I hid in my hotel room with a bag and a book, crumbs cluttering my chest. Stuffed on contempt, I cruelly traveled on, devastating countless palmiers, mille-feuilles, éclairs au chocolat, friands noisette, crêpes au sucre, gâteaux au chocolat, petits fours, tuiles, financiers, Paris-Brests, religieuses, and pains au raisin. My gleeful body, stunned by its luck, sucked in superior French butter, taxing the seams of my pants and the lace-trimmed confines of the bras I rapidly outgrew. Even my underpants stretched, the elastic weary of containing more than its fair share of flesh. Impressively steady in my consumption, over the course of four weeks I packed on fifteen pounds to add to the imaginary twenty I already carried in excess.

  In bed after strange bed I hid, read, and ate while listening for the phone. The longing I felt then for a reunion with my father reminds me now of the endless wait for the next appointment with Dr. Kohl. Then as now, my self-loathing carried on, impressively resilient. When I am free of the spell of a book it litters my writing with a litany of earnestly scribbled resolutions. In my journal and even out loud to myself in empty hotel rooms I called myself fat in the third person: “Cree is fat, fat, fat and getting fatter, fatter, fatter.”

  As I finally discovered through a phone call to London several weeks in, my father and “C” had found it rainy and chilly in France. They had traded up two weeks ago without leaving word: France’s wine, pâté, and damp hotels for Mexico’s tacos, tequila, and arid heat. I fell out of myself, slogging on, despondent but relieved the wait was over. I scribbled in my notebook, “I feel painfully alone—maybe a hard case of disappointment. Shit. I will not, however, cry.”

  In daylight I sat in cafés reading the Herald Tribune, soaking up tall beers with my omelette jambon fromage, adding in my schoolgirl French, “Encore une bière pression, s’il vous plaît.” I’d figured out how to stay warm and liquid, relieved by the way the alcohol shaved the edge off anxiety. Biding the time until I could return home—I had to finish at least one month of the two I’d planned or admit terrible defeat—I beat back the darkness by decaying in a familiar sugary daze, empty bag crumpled, pages turning, journal filling. Defenseless against the onslaught of fresh promises, my vows turned to lies as fast as I wrote them down.

  Then as now, I fertilize the cycle of self-loathing, prohibition, and abjection with small doses of manic happiness that come on loan, swiftly returning to where they came from as fast as they arrived. It’s just enough; these bursts of stubborn optimism, the determination to force it, keep me going.

  Halfway through my trip I rented a boat on Lake Geneva, rowing out under the bright sky punched in by high peaks, their image doubled in the lake’s surface. The water glittered and in that travel poster–worthy flash I’m aware that the world is extraordinary, but seeing my abstract self there from afar, I think to slide in, taking the dusk for a swim in the glacial melt before ebbing beneath the mirror, the wooden boat set adrift in the meager Alpine air.

  CHAPTER 37

  Sexual History

  “Did you masturbate as a child?” Dr. Kohl asks me.

  “Sort of …” is the beginning of the explanation.

  As a girl I put myself to sleep with dark fantasies of boys taking me to the woods, tying me up, and doing what? Something. It was an unspeakable live-action film starring me, only I watched myself play the role of the desirable starlet. The images titillated me night after night. Maybe it was the humiliation that excited me, my part in it unwilling even if I couldn’t stop playing it in my mind again and again as my body became light and strange. This routine bedtime fantasy was my normal. The image lulled me to sleep as I floated just outside my body, but its content was deadly secret. Who would I tell? Why would I tell? Impossible. It was all too, too far outside any language I knew. I don’t know if it lasted a year or five years. Memory holds only repetition.

  Now I wonder if the fantasies reveal a deep-seated masochism. Explaining the memory to Dr. Kohl, saying it out loud, made what was normal seem bizarre and disturbing, turning it from an inchoate memory into an aberration. Was I sexually abused? Was the fantasy planted in my preverbal subconscious or buried in memory just beneath the images?

  We hash these possibilities over more than once but I have only the fantasy and Dr. Kohl does not encourage speculation. He listens and does what he can to make sense of the shameful confession, but he’s not there to generate a sorry story to excuse past and present misdeeds. I wish it were that simple.

  These girlhood fantasies shape my connections between sexual pleasure, shame, and humiliation. This helps explain why I’ve been “sexually attracted to remote, tragic, addicted, abusive men,” as Dr. Kohl points out. (He doesn’t mean physically abusive.) My first boyfriend, Rob, and Matt reinforced my isolation by caring so little. Each confirmed my ultimate undesirability. With damaged men I could hold on to the shame of being broken, unknowable, and ultimately unlovable. Conversely, the unavailability of the powerful men I fell for, including our ranch foreman Hester, my cross-country coach Kevin, and Dr. Kohl, offered the ultimate safety. With them there was no danger of consummating my desire. And yet by making them my objects I managed to subject myself to the humiliation of repeated sexual rejection.

  The oedipal desire to sleep with the father is a therapeutic cliché. Like Hester and Kevin, Dr. Kohl doesn’t desire me. After all, in my mind he’s perfect. That means he remains neutral toward me. He’s my psychiatrist, there for my benefit, not in service of his needs, whether they be for friendship, connection, or sexual gratification. Fantasizing about him shames and humiliates me—he’s forbidden. No surprise, the excitement I feel neatly echoes my formative experience of arousal.

  I lost my virginity sophomore year at Middlebury when I fucked the first and only guy who offered me his coat. I was cold and we were drunk and the gray, black, and forest-green British wool weave he draped over my shoulders charmed me as we walked in the dark, our path illuminated by the white snowbanks lining the sidewalk. Closing time at the late-night Middlebury bar. We began by walking home together up the hill.

  My few forays into sexual contact had been no more than inexpert, usually drunken, self-conscious teenage fumbling doomed to failure. David was not a stranger but a friend I had a crush on that I never considered could be reciprocated. I didn’t consider myself attractive. I lacked the flirty ease of more popular friends. He was out of my league: handsome, funny, smart, and kind, with plenty of girlfriends.

  So when he kissed me in the dark of his off-campus house I kissed him back, warmed by his coat, surprised and pleased by the unexpected development. Into his room, onto a mattress placed ingloriously on the floor, we made our way, his charm in overcoming the awkwardness of what we were about to do a splendid gift, necessary despite the haze alcohol lent the scene. The shock was the unexpected violence of the act. He was a man, not one of the teenage boys I’d fooled around with a handful of times. Sex with him didn’t involve fumbling; it was decisive. I hadn’t imagined it could be like that. By the time he finished I was shaking. It was not a romantic response. He suggested we shower together to calm and warm me. Damp and steamy from the hot water, back under the blankets, we lay together until sleep won out. A few hours later, after fumbling for my clothes in the dark, I slipped away without a word, sorry to leave David behind but too afraid of being spurned in the light of the morning not to.

  My sexual history didn’t prosper. My avoidance of being seen in public with my first real boyfriend, Rob, junior year at Middlebury should have been warning enough. I fell hard for him—an alcoholic misfit I chose because he was uncool and unguarded. He was sweet to me but a hopeless drunk, so I was safe from the possibility of real closeness. I’d chosen him so it would be in my power to determine how long to keep him and what to do with him when I’d had enough. I believed that, until I wanted him more than he wanted me. Little did I know just how sordid the whole thing could be, until the last time we fucked during my po
stgraduation stint at the family newspaper in the autumn of 1988. Again, it involved the great dignity of a mattress on the floor, this time at his apartment in New Haven, Connecticut. It was one time too many.

  The pregnancy that resulted was an alien occupation. The cells growing in my uterus were uninvited. For as long as I’d wanted a piece of Rob, once I had it—really, really had it—it felt as though the worst of him had taken up residence under my skin.

  I scrubbed myself clean and pretended the abortion never happened. Dr. Kohl thought part of my sadness was mourning the loss of a version of my neglected, baby self. This not-baby represented a chance to undo my own messy childhood. When I thought of it this way I couldn’t help feeling sorry and wondering if getting rid of it was a mistake. I was twenty-three on 11/11/88. I flew to Vermont with my loyal friend Karen for the procedure because that state allowed earlier termination than New York.

  When I was home alone on my futon in Schenectady a quick binge and purge left me emptied out and calmer. For some reason, as I lay there, it occurred to me to masturbate. Yes, I was twenty-three, but I’d never had an orgasm and I did not masturbate—not counting the girl fantasies that involved no touching. But I’d been pregnant—and suddenly I was not. The primal reality of the violation gave permission or necessity as my hand wandered between my legs, pushing the elastic on my underwear down around my thighs, relaxing enough to feel what happened when I spread my legs and rubbed that dainty protuberance until the warmth wasn’t just on that one spot but all over down there and my muscles tightened in a spectacular effort to hold back the pleasure until I couldn’t and it went beyond me, happening most intensely in my brain, where the release of tension ventilated layers and layers of fury and confusion.

  It was the bottomless sense of abandon that finally got me there—the fuck-it attitude that split my prim, scared, prissy, too-good shell open long enough to let me experience sexual desire. My body had again betrayed me but I’d discovered a way to tamper with it for my own purposes, definitely one worth pursuing. When I tell Dr. Kohl about my first orgasm and that it occurred that night, postabortion, he calls it an “indulgent punishment.”

  It’s true. I’m grateful for the release of an orgasm, and the closer I get to wanting to burn myself the more I find myself lying on my back somewhere just private enough, fingers moving me toward that momentary transcendence. It’s a half valve that draws me back into a missing center. What Dr. Kohl calls an indulgence applies equally to the act of burning myself. The shame about my body’s responses to bad thoughts that began when I was a very young child with visions of sexual humiliation has been supplanted by fantasies of Dr. Kohl masturbating me or of me simply masturbating in front of him. He tells me what to do and I imagine him in charge. It tops me off every time.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  “Maybe you’re burning to close off sexual feelings,” Dr. Kohl suggested at the height of the pre-hospital crisis in the summer of 1991.

  My evasive reply was, “I’m not very sexual and unless I’m with someone … well, let’s just say I don’t masturbate a lot.” Sometimes I masturbate what might be called a lot—say every day for a week—then I won’t go near it for weeks on end, as if somehow I’ve forgotten that I can, if briefly, go elsewhere that way.

  “Burning is a way of defiling herself, was defiled before in images of boys, sexual fantasies,” he writes in my chart. It’s true. I can’t resist the furtive, the dirty, the forbidden, the salacious. He has no interest in my body other than when I destroy it by smoking, bingeing, vomiting, drinking, or burning my skin. Maybe he’s my perfect man—my ultimate object of fantasy, not because of who he is or how he sees me, but precisely because I know he doesn’t want me sexually. This is a man who can be trusted to talk to me, not fuck me.

  CHAPTER 38

  Borderline

  Dr. Kohl’s high-wire act is to manage the demands of the paternal and sexual feelings I have for him while fostering independence. Before I went into the hospital we were revealing and dislodging the sludge of thoughts, memories, and emotions. He thought his work then was getting me to connect to him. A lot of the pre-hospital talk circled around my anger at not having more of him, even if no quantity could ever be enough. It was as if back then the rebus of my erotic transference hadn’t yet been fully assembled in my mind or his. Rather, it skimmed through the air in fractions, lodging next to every word, look, and gesture.

  I know it’s sick and wrong, but sometimes I find myself half wishing for some ghastly event in childhood, something that would make all this bad behavior comprehensible, even excuse it. Of course it’s a mercy my half efforts are never to any avail. My history as this sort of victim or survivor is lost in fantasies of boys and penises, wrapped up tightly in all that shame. If there was a transgression, a taboo act, or use of my body I couldn’t consent to it’s gone now, perhaps having left behind an invisible imprint on my preverbal mind or a physiological trace that’s part of me.

  It’s not that truth doesn’t matter; it does. But I already know enough about my loose childhood. The work I have to do doesn’t involve focusing on some ur-moment of violation that would magically explain who I am. That an “event” or “pattern” could explain everything is a fantasy. Believing in such an “event” reduces the loss of safety I felt as a child to a sideshow. This lack of protection constitutes the central damage I withstood. I’ve spent so long convinced that if I were just better, more worthy in a thousand different ways, I could back then have earned the full attention and undiluted love I yearn for from Dr. Kohl now. Had I earned that regard from my parents, had I been secure and tended, I wouldn’t need to wonder if a dreadful violation occurred.

  Genetics has likely stuck me with a biological vulnerability to emotional instability and depression. My mother can’t be counted as happy and her father was wildly erratic, moody, violent, and difficult. That I struggled as a child to form a solid, resilient sense of self in an environment in which my emotional responses were devalued, questioned, oversimplified, mocked, or, most likely, ignored didn’t help. The persecution I felt, the idea that I was in a set-up universe that could come crashing down at any moment, was a way of structuring chaos. I am important in this twisted universe of special objects and 11s.

  Now I’m stuck like a dervish in a whirl of transference and countertransference with the single object I’ve elected to rescue me. I’m good at sucking Dr. Kohl in by compelling him to take care of me. I’m not above seduction through pleasing him. I’m as playful, smart, funny, hardworking, and attractive as I can be, even if none of it gets me the ultimate prize—him.

  Dr. Kohl has never been oblivious to what might be called “boundary seductions,” moments when the limits of the psychotherapeutic relationship blur. He made a decision early on to expand our relationship beyond the confines of 112 Church Street. Phone calls at all hours, a prescription for Silvadene burn ointment, rules about how to live, examining my wounds and bandaging my arm, sending his receptionist with me to the dentist—these were all on the edge, but he offered them to me as a way of trying to parent me, gain my trust, and connect. And yet my “libidinal demands”—such a sexy phrase—must be exhausting. Whatever he thought he was doing pre-hospital to nurture me is now, in the posthospital environment, up for grabs. Now he knows precisely who and what he’s dealing with. He knows what I’m capable of; now his job is to sort out the symptoms and their origins.

  Framing me as “borderline” seems useful to him. A diagnosis may begin with a DSM checklist but it doesn’t end there. In fact, the psychoanalytic model uses no such list except when practitioners are forced to engage with insurance companies or are conducting clinical studies. For a psychiatrist trained as an analyst, as Dr. Kohl is, diagnosis begins with three basic categories: neurotic, borderline, and psychotic. Each term, terrible as it sounds, comes with symptoms that correlate with developmental deficits at various ages. These complexities of breast-feeding, egos, superegos, good and bad objects, sex and death dr
ives, oral and anal phases, bonding, fantasy, reality, individuation, splitting, projection, repression, mirroring, reflection, and deflection are beyond me.

  Dr. Kohl knows that intense transference, testing, and acting out often occur in cases with patients on what I’m going to call the “spectrum of borderline personality disorders.” He does see me on this spectrum. On 12/2/91, he tries to separate the behaviors that go with the diagnosis from what he sees as my experience of it as a condition: “PTSD and BORDERLINE feelings: intense affect, apperceptual difficulties, social adaptiveness, extreme over-idealization and dramatization, affect instability, identity disturbance, frantic attempts to avoid abandonment.”

  PTSD is relevant as a secondary diagnosis. Some who experience heightened emotions as children—fear, sadness, longing—without any way to control or escape these emotions perceive feeling itself as dangerous. This dual diagnostic lens paired with symptoms of depression organizes my treatment. The clincher is that the symptoms hide behind my famously intact social facade. Oh, and I idealize the hell out of him.

  I’m not sure how much it matters that by the end of treatment Dr. Kohl slaps a “BPD without sexual abuse” label on my file. (He adds the caveat because bulimia combined with BPD is considered by some in the field as prima facie evidence of sexual abuse.) Dr. Kohl dances continually around the question of my diagnosis when we talk about it, never fully pronouncing me as a person with BPD, as if “having” such a thing were like having diabetes or scoliosis. To treat this particular psychiatric diagnosis this way would bind me to it, making the work we do less meaningful and the central goal of changing my behavior pointless. Even if I meet the DSM-III criteria for BPD, even if I neatly fit the description an analyst of the object-relations persuasion might call “Depressive-Masochistic Character Structure Operating at a Borderline Level,” these labels aren’t a cover or an excuse. (Oh, that they were!)