Other people

by Sol Stein

  How many patients have I seen in my lifetime, a thousand, and at the center of how many, most, yes most, it is the urgency of the testicles, the hungry labia that we come to. They say they have come to therapy because they have difficulty communicating with people, they have trouble keeping jobs, they have trouble keeping wives and husbands, they have nightmares, they take pills too much, and when we peel the onion away, we are left God's clever little motor for forcing us to procreate, a penis looking for a home, a home looking for a penis. The rest is culture.

  "You have insomnia?" I ask.

  "Very bad, I'm afraid."

  "We must probe for the cause," I say.

  Probe. Another word invested with meaning. What is this?

  I have friends among analysts who talked seriously for a while that the sexual revolution was going to put us out of business. I laughed at them! The open ambiguity of our sexual natures now gives us more cases to deal with, the closet doors are opening up not to admit a minority into the light, we are finding out that almost all of humanity was packed in there, behind some door. What is our own Freud become, a blind genius who thought women envied him his penis! We are always beginning all over again.

  I, at sixty, must take time for a new patient, myself, to find out why for the years since Marta died I have pretended to be a eunuch, my sexual life over, why it took this other new patient, Francine Widmer, to in one minute make God's little motor in my groin start humming? We are the physicians, the patients trust us, they put themselves into our power for therapy, we cannot abuse our power, we cannot involve ourselves in their sexual lives! Yet that is a lie, we do, we do!

  Comment by Francine Widmer

  For my generation, psychoanalysis is a last resort. My friends get involved in things like transcendental meditation. Some of them have gone for weekend retreats at one of these places where you purge your soul in groups, but I can't think of one that took up the couch. Why waste the time and money? I wasn't interested in getting into a maze to find myself. I was into other people from the moment I got to Radcliffe.

  My parents' idea of Cambridge and Boston comes from old books. What a difference! With all the colleges up there, including my own, it was a great place to find exotics, by which I mean people who weren't like Mom and Dad. My mother's melting pot consisted of Republican ladies. And my father joined clubs where they didn't let the other kinds in. In a big zoo like Boston, you want to look at what's in the other cages.

  When I was a kid, whenever we were someplace my mother used to call "public," like a public swimming pool, and some kid would get up on the high diving board and cross himself before take-off, my mother would look at my father as if she were tolerating somebody who picked his nose. Well, the Cambridge they sent me to was littered with some of these cross-yourself Mediterranean-type Catholics, some of whom went to churches that were decorated on the inside like pinball machines. Our Presbyterian church, even when it's got people in it, looks like it needs dusting. I met Jewish kids at Harvard who kept running off at the mouth with an intensity that scared you till you got used to it. They didn't know that intensity was not nice, that if you had anything to say, you ought to say it quietly, using words that won't upset anybody. I don't mean there weren't Protestants at school who weren't into this and that with feeling, but the Jewish kids, hell, they were into everything as if being into was the thing and not the subject matter. Also in Cambridge I met a lot of et ceteras, Greeks, Irish girls pure enough to have freckles all over and real red hair.

  It was exciting being in a big pond full of strange animals. The variety itself kept my adrenaline up through those late-night rap sessions, but late hours and insomnia are a poor mix. It was at Radcliffe that I started envying people who slept all night, or who could sleep in the mornings. I couldn't even sleep into Sunday mornings. I marked a passage in Kafka's Diaries: "Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life."

  After graduation, my father gave me a blessed six months in Europe and I didn't miss a single night's sleep. Was that a clue?

  I roomed with some girls in New York, drifted from job to job, and the insomnia came galloping back. I needed an anchor. A job or a man or both? My interests had something of an international flavor even then, so I put on a dress, poked around the U.N. and, to my surprise, getting a good job was easier than I thought because I looked so straight, Wasp nose. Ivy League references, accent okay, I was a lady!

  With insomnia.

  The U.N. wasn't at all like Cambridge. All those exotic types straight out of the National Geographic were actors, I mean they didn't behave the way they must've at home, they all acted like they were trying to be Henry Cabot Lodge. Sure there were real ones here and there, like that Russian sun freak from Moscow who used to take his shirt off in fur-coat weather if the sun was out. He kept complaining that the U.S. wouldn't let him go to Florida when he had a weekend off and wanted to know when we'd become a free country! I once asked him if he was an MVD agent — what the hell, there's no harm in asking — and he said he was the only member of the delegation who wasn't — I mean he had a sense of humor. I was also amused by those bucks from Africa who used polysyllabic English tongue-twisters incorrectly and frequently, you couldn't get a straight, simple sentence out of them. And real Arabs, no American girl should skip the experience of one date with a genuine Arab, especially one who's super polite and is desperate because he hasn't gotten laid since Saudi Arabia, that is an experience. Growing up in Westchester sure doesn't prepare you for living in the world.

  I am not cynical. I am trying to nail down for myself what's real. It is one hundred percent true that the guys who make the speeches in the Assembly are Charlie McCarthys who don't believe most of what they move their lips with — listen, I know the guys who write their speeches. What you have in the General Assembly is like a Hollywood cocktail party where everybody knows everybody else is lying but they've got to make believe with each other, it's their thing. What most of my friends' bosses at the U.N. are into — wherever they come from — is having a good time in New York for two or three years, being called Mr. Ambassador by head waiters, having DPL license plates that enable you to park in the middle of traffic and get away with it, where can you get that kind of power back in the jungle where everybody else is like you? It's the fastest race for class mobility I know. The U.N. is packed with monkeys hurrying to get their nuts off, their booze drunk, and some money squirreled away before they are crated up and sent back to Stink, or whatever their country is called.

  I was doing fine, enjoying myself, especially after I got myself transferred to X. X is what he was called. His real job was not writing speeches for the American Ambassador to the U.N., but drafting a so-called political memorandum that was used by the speech writer. X was the Mission's contact with the intelligence services, which is why I had to wait all those months for a clearance though I was really working for him in the meantime anyway, unofficially but getting paid. Even the Ambassador called him X sometimes, jokingly of course. I was his assistant, which meant I did his shit work. X said that I didn't have what he called a proper command of the language but since nobody under thirty did according to him and he thought I was smart, he would give me a batch of stuff that had come in and say something like, "Pull out the content." Five thousand words of garbage and he'd trust me to find if there was anything of substance and I'd give him three or four items, one line each, and X would say, "Smart lady" and pat me on the head, the pig. I did the digging, I did the choosing, and he dictated it to his secretary and claimed the credit. Of course I resented him, making three hundred and twenty percent of what I make. Yes, it's my first real job, yes he's older, yes he's got a wife and two kids to support, but why three hundred and twenty percent for what I do? If the crunch came — Washington is always threatening cutbacks in staff — he'd can me politely. But the work would still have to be done. He'd have to hire another me eventually, security clearance and all, so he might as well hang on to the original. That's my job security
.

  Once after a day of doing X's bidding only to find out he'd forgotten one significant part of his instruction and when he told me, sorry, I'd have to wade through that crap all over again, I let out some expletive and he said, "Why do you resent being a woman?" and I told him wearily, "Because I can't pee standing up." I'll find a way of telling him how I feel about that three hundred and twenty percent and a lot of other things the moment he makes that first pass, and he will, he will.

  Well, here I was being X's digestive system — I have to admit I liked the actual work — and everything's going fine except the insomnia I had in Radcliffe comes back in spades. I'd go to sleep and within an hour, sometimes within ten minutes, I'd be awake, tired, blood-eyed. I tried reading things I hated, I tried hot cocoa, I tried some Indian system where you relax one muscle at a time. I began to wear dark glasses indoors to hide my eyes.

  One weekend my friend from Radcliffe, Betsy Thorne, stayed over. At two in the morning I was sitting on the edge of my bed, nodding but not enough to sleep, desperate, when Betsy awoke. She came over to sit beside me.

  "What's the matter, hon?" she said.

  I told her it was nothing new, that it'd been going on for months, that I'd had it for a while in school, but now it was much worse.

  "You'll kill yourself fighting it," Betsy said.

  "I don't know what to do."

  Betsy rummaged around in her bag and came up with the bottle of reds. I knew what they were.

  "Try one," she said. "It works for me."

  I took it with me to the bathroom, saying I was getting a cup of water, but my intention was really to flush it down and pretend to have taken it. When I saw my face in the mirror, the purple circles under my red eyes, I thought what the hell and swallowed the capsule.

  We talked for a bit. Betsy said there was nothing to worry about as long as I didn't drink alcohol before taking them. Twenty minutes later I was yawning, and when I fell asleep I slept straight through. In the morning Betsy was gone but had left me three or four reds on my night table.

  I had to scramble to find a steady source. My damn so-called doctor was the family's doctor and I knew he wouldn't approve. I thought of going to another doctor, please can I have some Seconals, and decided I'd rather pay more and skip the hypocrisy. Soon I was into two a night, then two when I went to sleep and one more when I woke up after a few hours, and once I found myself taking two more when I woke up, and I knew I was in trouble.

  I was at my parents' house for one of my rare sleepovers when my mother, doing me a favor and unpacking my canvas duffel while I chitchatted with Dad down below, saw the downers and told me, away from Dad's hearing, about the time she was on them. It was as if she was confessing to having been a streetwalker or something. We just can't imagine our parents into drugs a long time ago.

  "Your father was away at a convention for a week. When he returned," she said, "he didn't, well, he wasn't loving the way he usually was after a time away. He kept to his side of the bed. I stayed awake longer and longer, unable not to think. The doctor prescribed the Seconal. He cautioned me to take only one. But I'd wake in a few hours and couldn't get back to sleep, so I'd take another. Then one wouldn't get me to sleep, so I took two, and then another one when I woke in the middle of the night, and if I woke toward morning, I couldn't take just lying there in bed with your father asleep, and I'd take another, and then when it was time to get up I was foggy, and then when I told the doctor, he suggested I try Benzedrine in the morning, and it drove me nearly crazy. I decided I had to quit all of it. I had the most awful withdrawal symptoms. Your father was very sympathetic. He used to cradle me in his arms at night. As it turned out, his affection was my cure. The pills camouflaged the problem."

  It was a short road from that conversation to Dr. Koch. Those early sessions were like root canal work, except the canal was my memory. Dr. Koch wanted me to see if I could remember the very first time I had awakened and couldn't get back to sleep. Had I been dreaming? I didn't remember. What were you thinking about before you went to sleep? How could I remember, it was so long ago? You will remember, he said. Be patient.

  The first time I was really glad to be in therapy was when the rape happened. People don't understand that when something like that hits you, what you want to do is get rid of the disgust by laying it on the table in front of someone. I never expected Koch to be a son of a bitch the way he was that night. He was supposed to be helping me!

  When I was a kid I always expected doctors to look like my father. World War II type haircuts, narrow ties, how-do-you-dos every time they saw you. Not that they really looked alike, but they all seemed to have noses that were going to turn into those long thin ones on Modigliani's sculptures, breathing tubes, no bridge, barely visible except as a line down the middle of the face. I'm not exaggerating. If you listened to them talking to my father it sounded like they had all taken speech lessons in the same class. Well, when you get used to doctors looking or acting in one particular way and then you go to see a doctor who looks like Koch, it blows your preconceptions.

  Dr. Koch was a big old blob of a man, shaggy hair bushed up, and his nose was more W. C. Fields than Valentino. Maybe that sounds unfair, because all of his pieces fit, and I've got to admit his eyes, with those bushy grey brows growing in all directions, were all soul. I did look him over that first time. He wore a tie as if it was an impediment to free breathing; he kept the knot an inch or two from his neck. He wore sandals. Whoever heard of a doctor wearing sandals?

  He stonewalled me the first time, just at the beginning, as if it was a technique, keeping his distance, but he noticed I was looking him over as a person, and before the hour was up he relaxed, smiled, like an instant friend saying okay, let's talk.

  It was the second hour when I sensed him looking at me. I don't mean my face. I mean all of me. Do people that age fuck regularly? I guess we always think people stop at some point until we get to that point. Betsy Thorne fucked a much older man when she was a sophomore, some friend of her father's she met in the street when she was in L.A. and he said aren't you Betsy Thorne, what are you doing so far from home, and she said what are you doing so far from home, and then he asked her to dinner, why not, what kind of dinner, she doesn't care, he takes her to a topless place on the strip, and Betsy thinks so that's what Dad's friends do out of town. The food, Betsy said, was yuch, but the drinks were okay, and the show was something else, much better-looking girls than she'd expected to do that kind of thing, and he said some of them go to UCLA, and then she wonders why, when the meal's over, he doesn't put the napkin on the table, has he got an erection, she's thinking, and anyway, they end up in his hotel, and she said it was miles different than the guys at school, slow, you know what I mean, a fantastically long build-up. She got me going just talking about it. Of course it intrigued me, I think it does most girls who aren't cheerleaders chasing jocks. Someone else's old man might satisfy my curiosity. You see, it's Koch looking at me that way that got me thinking about it all again, because with all my previous thinking I never fell into the circumstance, and it didn't seem something I wanted to pursue especially. What we do is try to retailor life. I would have wanted Koch to be just a bit younger, maybe just less round in the middle, I have a strange feeling about a pot, as if it's just a little obscene. And I worry suppose he couldn't get it up, it would be awful. I wouldn't feel it was my fault, but you never can tell how you feel until something like that happens. Anyway, Koch never made a pass at me that whole year. I thought about him from time to time when I was lying there on the couch. I censored at first, I'd tell him what I was thinking, but I'd skip the things I was thinking about him, and then, shit, I told him because he said always tell everything, that's what analysis is, following the meanderings to find out what it's all about. I wish I had seen his face when I told him the first time, but he sits in back of me, you know, and he's just a voice grunting now and again.

  The truth is that telling Koch about my thinking about him
wasn't as bad as telling him the details when I was having that affair with the French interpreter at the U.N. What I wanted to say was I'm involved with this French person who works where I do and let it go at that, but it doesn't work that way because you talk about yesterday. Yesterday I did this and I did that, and I thought, I'm making Koch jealous, it's cruel to him to tell him about my being in bed with someone else when that's probably where he wants to be, and he just takes it like he takes everything, yes, go on, and then what happened? God you have to be like God to be an analyst sometimes! He wants me to tell him everything that's on my mind, and if nothing's on my mind, he says well yesterday, what did you do, and we're off and soon I'm talking about Bill.

  Bill Acton, I regret to report, is the son of an old friend of my father's from Yale. We met under the worst of circumstances, my parents were throwing a between-Christmas-and-New-Year's party at the house and it's their idea of conviviality to have young people — that's what they call us, young people — invited also, so it's a familylike party. Only what happens is that the parents congregate together getting sloshed and the young people, if they can stand each other, smoke dope in an upstairs room. What struck me about Bill was his shyness. The other fellows who were about my age were all coming on the same way they used to in college, jocks-with-cocks looking for an opening, and Bill just sat there. I don't like wallflowers, female or male, but I happened to ask Bill something and his answer was a quote from Auden. I mean he didn't say it pretentiously, just as if it was the right answer. I guess I was also flattered by the fact that he assumed I'd know, that I wasn't just an opening for his oil rig, I was a person with a brain.