Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You: A Novel

by Peter Cameron

  “Stop it, James,” my mother said. “People are happy. Sometimes. Or they are not unhappy in the way that you are unhappy.”

  “In what way am I unhappy?” I asked.

  “In a way that concerns us,” said my mother. “A way that frightens us.”

  “Oh,” I said. I couldn’t really think of what to say.

  “And so we had lunch,” my mother continued, her voice sounding a bit more normal. “And we had a talk about you. And we thought that perhaps you might like to talk to someone.”

  “Talk to someone? You just mentioned my disinclination to talk. Why would I want to talk to someone?”

  “I don’t mean someone someone,” my mother said. “I mean someone a doctor. A therapist. A psychiatrist. A someone like that. Will you do this, James? For me? And your father. Just—just stop rejecting everything for a moment and go and talk to this woman.”

  “She’s a woman?”

  “Yes, she’s a woman.”

  “Who picked her?”

  “Your father did. I knew you would reject out of hand anybody I suggested.”

  “Well, you have to admit your record with therapists isn’t very good.”

  My mother said nothing.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Rowena Adler,” my mother said. “Dr. Rowena Adler. She’s a psychiatrist.”

  “Rowena? You’re sending me to a shrink named Rowena?”

  “What’s wrong with Rowena? It’s a perfectly fine name.”

  “I suppose if you’re a character in a Wagnerian opera. But don’t you think it’s a tad Teutonic?”

  “You’re being ridiculous, James. You cannot reject this doctor because of her heritage. Your father talked to several people and she is apparently very good.”

  “Well, that’s reassuring. A shrink vetted by Dad’s insane colleagues.”

  “Your father has connections. He can find the best divorce lawyer, so why shouldn’t he be able to find the best shrink? He put a lot of time and effort into this, and you know how unlike him that is. Dr. Adler comes highly recommended by people who know about these things. In fact, her specialty is …”

  “What? What’s her specialty? Silent, unhappy eighteen-year-olds?”

  “Yes,” said my mother. “In fact that is precisely her specialty. She works with disturbed adolescents.”

  “Oh, so that’s what I am? It doesn’t sound very PC. Can’t they come up with something better? Can’t I be a special adolescent? Or a differently abled adolescent? Can’t—”

  My mother reached out and put her hand over my mouth. “Stop,” she said. “Just stop.”

  Her hand felt odd against my face. It felt weirdly intimate—I couldn’t remember when she had last touched me. She kept her hand there, covering my mouth, for a long moment. And then she took it away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have—it’s just that—”

  “No,” I said. “You’re right. It’s true.”

  “What’s true?” my mother asked.

  “I am disturbed,” I said. I thought about what the word meant, what it really means to be disturbed, like how a pond is disturbed when you throw a rock into it or how you disturb the peace. Or how you can be disturbed by a book or movie or the burning rain forest or the melting ice caps. Or the war in Iraq. It was one of those moments when you feel you have never heard the word before, and you cannot believe it means what it means, and you think how did this word come to mean that? It seemed like a bell or something, shining and pure, disturbed, disturbed, disturbed, I could hear it pealing with its true meaning, and I said, as if I had just realized it, “I am disturbed.”

  I was disappointed with Rowena Adler’s office. I had imagined it would be in a Village brownstone, facing the garden perhaps, with Danish modern furniture and kilims on the parquet floor and tasteful abstract paintings on the walls, and she would sit in a big swively chair and I would sit across from her, or perhaps recline on a divan at her side, and maybe she would have a dog or a cat, an old dog or cat, quiet and tired, who slept at her feet, but I first met her in an office in a New York University Medical Center building on a godforsaken stretch of First Avenue. I had to wait in a windowless room lined with the rows of interconnected molded plastic seats you often see in bus terminals. There was also a watercooler, but it was empty. There is something inherently depressing about an empty watercooler—none of that is it half-full or half-empty, just empty—and I thought if I were a shrink and had a watercooler in my waiting room I would make sure it was always filled. This room obviously served as the waiting room for several other health practitioners, and I was a little alarmed to think that Dr. Adler couldn’t afford her own office, with a private entrance and a private waiting room. This was like going to the dentist, if you went to a dentist in a public health clinic in the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

  A woman sat across from me eating a grossly overstuffed tuna salad sandwich. There was so much tuna salad in this woman’s sandwich that it was oozing out of the roll onto the waxed paper she had spread on her lap, and she reached down and picked up clumps of it with her fingers and fed them to herself. I could tell she was trying to do this daintily, but of course the inherent piggishness of the activity made that impossible.

  A woman appeared in the doorway. Although there was only me and the tuna sandwich lady, she looked around the room as if it were full of people and said, “James? James Sveck?”

  “Yes,” I said. I stood up and approached her.

  She held out her hand and I shook it. It felt very cool and slender. “I’m Dr. Adler,” she said. “Why don’t you come with me?”

  I followed her down a depressing hallway into a tiny windowless office that might have housed an accountant. In fact it reminded me a bit of Myron Axel’s closet, filled with piles of paper waiting to be filed, week-old cups of coffee turned into science experiments, and a litter of broken umbrellas nesting beneath the desk.

  I must have looked as surprised as I felt when I entered her office, for Rowena Adler looked at the utilitarian clutter about her and said, “I’m sorry about this mess. I’m so used to it. I forget how it looks.” Then she sat down and said, “It’s nice to meet you, James.”

  I said, “Thank you,” as if she had paid me a compliment. I wasn’t about to say it was nice to meet her, too. I hate saying anything expected like that, that kind of dead, meaningless language.

  “Why don’t you sit down there,” she said, indicating an uncomfortable-looking metal folding chair. It was the only other chair in the room, but she said it as if there were many and she had selected this one especially for me. She was sitting in a tweed-covered office chair on casters that was turned away from her desk. The room was so small our knees almost touched. She leaned back, ostensibly to be more comfortable, but I could tell it was really to move away from me. “I usually see patients in my office downtown, but on Thursdays I can’t get away from here, and I wanted to see you as soon as I could.”

  I didn’t like the way she called me a patient, or implied I was a patient, although since she was a doctor and I was consulting her I’m not sure what else I could be. A client sounded too businesslike, but she could have just said “people,” but then I thought I was wrong to be offended: there is nothing shameful about being a patient, one does not bring sickness upon oneself, it is an unelected characteristic—cancer and tuberculosis are not indications of people’s character (I had read Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor in my modern morals class last spring), but then I thought, Well, maybe with psychiatry it’s different, because if you’re manic-depressive or paranoid or sexually compulsive it is rather indicative of your character, or at least inextricably linked with your character, and these things must be bad, otherwise they would not be treated, so being a patient in these circumstances was an indication of some sort of personal failure or—

  “So, James,” I suddenly heard her saying, “what brings you here?”

  This seemed a stupid question to me. If you go to a
dentist you can say “I have a toothache,” or you go into a jeweler’s and ask to have a new battery installed in your watch, but what could you possibly say to a psychiatrist?

  “What brings me here?” I repeated the question, hoping she would rephrase it more intelligibly.

  “Yes.” She smiled, pointedly ignoring my tone. “What brings you here?”

  “I suppose if I knew what brought me here, I wouldn’t be here,” I said.

  “Where would you be?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know,” I said.

  “You’re afraid?”

  I realized that she was one of those annoying people who take everything you say literally. “I misspoke,” I said. “I’m not afraid. I just don’t know.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure of what? That I don’t know or that I’m not afraid?”

  “Which do you think I mean?”

  “Please don’t do that,” I said.

  “Please don’t do what?”

  I thought that at the rate we were repeating each other’s words we wouldn’t get very far in forty-five minutes. “Please don’t answer a question with a question in that therapy way.”

  Without any reaction or hesitation she said, “What do you think about therapy?”

  I felt like we were in some contest to see who could unnerve the other first. This did not seem very therapeutic to me, but I was intent upon winning. “I think therapy is a rather misguided notion of capitalist societies whereby the self-indulgent examination of one’s life supersedes the actual living of said life.” I had no idea where this came from—perhaps I had read it or heard it in a movie?

  “Sad life?” she said.

  “No. Said life.”

  “Oh, I thought you said ‘sad.’”

  “No, I said ‘said.’”

  “I was just saying I misunderstood what you said. I didn’t mean to imply you hadn’t said it.”

  “Well, I’m glad that’s been cleared up,” I said.

  She peered at me intently for a moment, and then said, “So why are you here?”

  “Isn’t that just another way of asking what brought me here?”

  “Yes,” she said. She just barely smiled.

  “But I told you I don’t know what brought me here.”

  “So you don’t know why you’re here?”

  “It would follow,” I said.

  “You have absolutely no idea, in any sense, why you are here?”

  “I’m here because my parents wanted me to come here.”

  “So you do know why you’re here?” she asked.

  I didn’t say anything. It just seemed pointless, like trying to have a conversation with a parrot or someone who’s been lobotomized. And then I wondered if Dr. Adler might perform lobotomies. She was, after all, a medical doctor. But I supposed brain surgeons, not psychiatrists, performed lobotomies. If they are still performed. I’m fascinated with the idea of lobotomies, the idea of opening up the brain and snipping around a bit and then closing it up again, like fixing a car or something. And the person wakes up and is a little stupid but stupid in a happy, untroubled way. I’m also fascinated by shock therapy—all these things that are done to alter people’s brains. When we were young, Gillian and I used to play a game called Mental Asylum. Gillian was the doctor and I was the patient and she would administer shock treatment to me. She’d anoint my temples with a cotton ball dabbed with Listerine, shove her field hockey mouth guard into my mouth, and then clamp the stereo headphones on me. When she plugged the cord into the stereo I would go stiff and cross my eyes and tremble epileptically and Gillian would hold me down and say “ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.” It’s odd what facets of life children incorporate into their play. I started to think about this, about how we wanted to assume the dreariest aspects of adult life: playing office, playing store, playing mental asylum, when I once again became aware that Dr. Adler was saying something.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Our time is up,” she said. “I’ll see—how about Tuesday? Are you free on Tuesdays?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Fine. We’ll meet at the same time, but at my downtown office. Here’s the address.” She handed me a business card.

  I was trying to figure out how our session could be over so quickly. I wanted to look at my watch, but I couldn’t bring myself to do this in front of her. I could tell she was acting all normal, as if all psychiatric sessions lasted ten minutes and most of the time was spent repeating each other or in silence.

  “Does that work for you?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Fine,” she said. “See you then.” She smiled brightly at me, as if we had had a very pleasant chat, and then swiveled around in her chair, turning her back on me in a way that was clearly dismissive.

  6

  Saturday, July 26, 2003

  I TOOK THE 10:23 HARLEM LINE TRAIN FROM GRAND CENTRAL, which arrived in Hartsdale at 11:03. It was about a twenty-minute walk to my grandmother’s house at 16 Wyncote Lane. She lives in a Tudor-style house that was built in the 1920s and miraculously still has all of its original Arts and Crafts features. No one’s torn out the mahogany wainscoting or carpeted the mosaic tile floors or put aluminum siding over the brick and stucco and stone façade. The house is not air-conditioned, but because it is surrounded by very old shade trees and has thick stone walls, it stays fairly cool. What I like best about it is that every doorway in the house is rounded at the top, and every door is correspondingly shaped, beautiful paneled wooden doors that fit perfectly into their arched lintels. You get this nice (and rare) feeling that whoever built the house loved building it, and was not in a hurry.

  When I arrived the front door was open and I peered through the screen door. The house looked dark and cool and quiet; there was a vase of dahlias on the table in the front hall, next to a stack of three library books. I leaned my face closer and called Nanette! through the screen. After a moment I heard her coming down the stairs, and then I could see her: first her feet, then her legs, and then the rest of her slowly appeared. My grandmother always walks down stairs slowly, turned sideways, leading with her hip, with one hand on the banister and her feet placed horizontally on the treads. She says a lady should never proceed down a staircase facing forward unless she wants to look like a charging bull. My grandmother is a firm believer in proper deportment; it is the closest she comes to any sort of religion.

  “James,” she said when she’d reached the bottom (another thing she believes is that it’s impolite to talk when you’re going up or down stairs). “I had a feeling I’d see you today. I woke up this morning and the first thing I thought was, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if James comes visiting today.” She opened the door. “Come in but be careful on this floor. I just washed it, so it may be slippery.”

  I stepped into the front hall. “What are you doing washing floors on Saturday morning?”

  “It’s just as good as any other day. Isn’t it funny I knew you would come? I must be clairvoyant.”

  “Well, I did mention to you Wednesday that I might come visit you today,” I said.

  “Did you? Really? I don’t remember that at all. Well, so much for my clairvoyance. Next time that happens, though, be a lamb and don’t tell me. Humor an old lady. Do you want some juice or some coffee? Or some eggs and bacon? Have you had breakfast?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but some coffee would be nice.”

  “Well, let me brew a fresh pot, then.” She walked down the hallway into her kitchen which was spotless, the pink Formica countertops bare except for her FLOUR SUGAR COFFEE tin canisters. Everything is always in its place in my grandmother’s kitchen, including the things in the refrigerator and cupboards. She has one of those old refrigerators with only one door that you pull open with a crank.

  “Sit down,” she said. “The paper is there if you’re interested.” She opened the coffee tin and began to make coffee. I looked through the paper, which, being Saturday’s, was r
ather thin. I did notice, however, that my grandmother had finished the crossword puzzle, which even my mother can rarely do on Saturdays. (It gets progressively more difficult throughout the week.)

  My grandmother turned around as she filled the percolator at the sink. “When does your mother come home?”

  “She’s already home,” I said.

  “I thought they were going for a week.”

  “They were. But she came home early. On Thursday.”

  “Well, that shows good sense. Has Mr. Rogers moved in with you yet?”

  Mr. Rogers had, in fact, moved in with us about two months ago, when my mother agreed to marry him, which was about six months after she met him. Fortunately he had not yet sold his apartment; he was waiting for the market to “pick up.”

  “Yes, he’s moved in,” I said. I couldn’t believe I had honestly answered this many questions and still not divulged the real news.

  “Well, I feel sorry for you, James,” my grandmother said. “I wouldn’t want to live in a house with that man. But then you’ll be out of there soon enough, won’t you?”

  Instead of answering her question, I said, “What’s your opinion of college?”

  “Which college? Brown?”

  “No—college in general.”

  “Well, I really don’t have much of one, seeing as how I haven’t been in college for—let me think—sixty years. No, what am I saying; I’m eighty-one—so fifty-seven.”

  “But are you glad you went to college? Was it a good experience?”

  “I suppose it was. Although I can’t remember a single thing I learned. Except for Latin, and that’s only because the nuns literally beat it into us and I use it sometimes for the crossword.”

  “There were nuns at Radcliffe?”

  “Yes, it was all nuns.”

  “Are you sure? At Radcliffe?”

  “Maybe it was high school.”

  “But you aren’t Catholic,” I said. “I don’t think you ever went to a parochial school.”

  “Well, I distinctly remember nuns with sticks walking up and down the aisles as we recited Latin. Maybe it was a show I was in, but I doubt it because nuns don’t beat children in musicals.”