Fritz

by Martin Shepard

  Or take this description from Rae Perls, Laura’s daughter-in-law: “Laura is very much upper middle class. She is a queen who sits on a throne, equal in size and height to Fritz’s. When she comes to visit us, she is the queen coming for rest. We serve her, take care of her, and she bestows her favors upon us.”

  “Like Fritz,” I rejoin.

  “That’s right,” Rae laughed, “and then she’d criticize him for it. She always did. That was one of the funny things. He’d come down and make nasty comments about her. And she’d come down and do the same thing. He’d accuse her of not listening and she’d accuse him of not listening. You could just run down the list of mutual complaints.”

  Marriage, for Fritz, failed to provide those elements he was searching for: a sense of an accepting and adoring family that would treasure him. The same, of course, might be said of Laura.

  Why, then, did she endure so many insults, so many meanderings, so little appreciation herself?

  “I asked Laura once,” said Elaine Kempner, “why in hell don’t you divorce this son-of-a-bitch?”

  “Because,” she answered, “he’s the most fascinating man I’ve ever known.”

  Fritz’s fascination with Laura, however, had run its course. The changes that he put himself through during the previous ten years—experiences that made him both more authentic and less acceptable to his wife—had convinced him that it was time to part. At sixty-three years of age, the gypsy was on his own once more.

  6. Miami

  Fritz’s coming to Miami meant not only withdrawing from Laura but also withdrawing, in large part, from his professional scene and accepting, to an extent, the fact of his old age and the likelihood that Gestalt Therapy would never achieve the major impact he intended it to have.

  Physically, he was feeling poorly. In New York, periodic angina pains had led to a diagnosis of heart scarring. He was unable to take the cold winters and tired of being the outsider, fighting for his new therapy to not only survive but also grow. And its growth seemed imperceptible.

  Gestalt Therapy had been in print, now, for five years, but outside of New York, there was little movement in the direction of Gestalt Therapy to show for it. A Cleveland Gestalt Institute had started in 1954, but it was, as far as Fritz was concerned, more under the influence of Laura, Paul Goodman, and Paul Weisz who, along with Fritz, visited and taught there regularly.

  In the cities Fritz visited alone, he met only with lay groups. Although he was willing to pick up any support he could get for his ideas, he was nonetheless disappointed that he could not be more involved in the training of therapists. Every therapist he worked with might carry his message to hundreds of potential patients and colleagues alike. Doing demonstration groups for laymen seemed far less important.

  He fully expected to end his days in Miami, not in any melodramatic way, but, given his poor health and his advanced age, he planned to live in semiretirement until his heart gave out.

  Miami had been one of Fritz’s circuit towns. He looked forward to its warmth and to ocean swimming, about the only sporting pleasure left that he could enjoy. But instead of air and lightness, he frugally opted for a cheap apartment, which he rented from a former patient. It consisted of a very small living room (where he conducted his therapy sessions and listened to music), an even smaller area that doubled as a kitchen, and a dark bedroom that admitted no light either day or night.

  It was a most depressing environment for him to live in. He went out for meals and spent great periods of time alone. His bitterness over being unappreciated—of going nowhere slowly—resulted in his alienating the professional community almost immediately. He expected brickbats and he got them, being seen as a sharp but critical, contemptuous, and arrogant person with an enormous chip on his shoulder. He ran one group a week and had very few private patients, living, for the most part, as a hermit.

  Every six or seven weeks, when his isolation and boredom got the best of him, he would leave for a short circuit to those cities where Gestalt groups had formed: New York, Toronto, Cleveland, Detroit, and back to Miami. He might, on the road, share an intimacy with an old lover, but for the most part, he was even turned off to sex, fearing that the excitement might precipitate a heart attack.

  For nearly two years he lived this way, withdrawing more and more from work, from play, from sex . . . from life And then, in December 1957, he met a thirty-two-year-old woman named Marty Fromm, “the most significant woman in my life,” and he was once again involved. She was to be the spark that reignited his passions, unsettled him with jealousy, and placed him back in motion.

  The following excerpts are part of an open letter that he wrote to Marty in Garbage Pail:

  Big Sur, California

  Dear Marty,

  When I met you, you were beautiful beyond description. A straight strong Greek nose, which you later destroyed to get a “pretty” face. When you did this, when you had your nose baptized, you became a stranger. You had everything in excess—intelligence and vanity, frigidity and passion, cruelty and efficiency, recklessness and depression, promiscuity and loyalty, contempt and enthusiasm. . . .

  When I look back on our years, what comes up first is not our fierce lovemaking and our even more fierce fights, but your gratefulness: “You gave me back my children.”

  I found you despondent, nearly suicidal, disappointed in your marriage, chained down by two children, with whom you had lost touch.

  I was proud to take you up and to mold you to my and your needs. You loved and admired me as therapist and, at the same time, became my therapist, cutting with your cruel honesty through my phoniness, bullshit and manipulations. Never was so much equal give and take between us as then.

  Then came the time when I took you to Europe. Paris, some insane jealousy bouts on my part, some wild orgies, exciting, but not really happy. That happiness came in Italy. I was so proud to show you real beauty, as if I owned it and to help you overcome your mediocre taste in art. Of course we got drunk with Venice and . . .

  That Aida performance in Verona! And ancient Roman amphitheater holding twenty–thirty thousand people. . . . Voices floating with gripping intensity over us and through us. The finale: torches flaming into infinite space and dying voices touching eternity.

  It was not easy to wake up to the hustle and bustle of the leaving crowd. . . .

  Our nights. No pressure to go home, no fear of getting too little sleep. Getting the last drop from our experiencing each other. “Tonight was the best” became a stock phrase, but it was true, an ever-increasing intensity of being there for each other. There is no poetry to describe those weeks, only amateurish stutter.

  In this life you don’t get something for nothing. I had to pay dearly for my happiness. Back in Miami I became more and more possessive. My jealousy reached truly psychotic proportions. Whenever we were separated—and we were most of the day—I got restless, checked up on you, drove several times a day by your house. I could not concentrate on anything except: “Marty, where are you now, with whom are you now?”

  Until Peter came into our life and you fell in love with him. He did not care much about you. For you, he was a respite from me and my torturing. He was easy-going, an entertaining raconteur. It was impossible to be bored in his presence. He was young and beautiful and I was old and vicious. To complicate matters still further: I, too, was, and still am, fond of him.

  The heavens caved in for me. I was left with debasing myself on the outside and nursing wild revenge fantasies on the inside.

  All attempts to break off with you failed. Then I did something which, looking backwards, appears an attempt to commit suicide without the stigma of such a cowardice.

  I survived those operations. I survived our separation. I survived our final fights and reconciliation. I am here and you are there. It feels good and solid whenever we meet again.

  Thank you for being the
most important person in my life.

  Fritz

  I telephoned Marty in October 1972 and asked if I might meet with her. She is willing to do so. A month later, I board a plane and fly to Miami.

  How am I to describe her in a way that would do her justice? Mother, egoist, handsome woman, speaker of truths, it is easy to understand Fritz’s fascination with her.

  She lives alone in a meticulously kept home. Her apartment is simply furnished in contemporary fashion. A lovely Japanese-style drawing adorns the guest room that I occupy. It is a birthday greeting from her daughter and her boyfriend. The following inscription is nestled between delicate tree branches:

  Hi Ma!

  Have a delicious joyful day

  We miss and love you incredibly mucho

  Your biggest fan club (California branch)

  Artfully and painstakingly made up, Marty, at forty-eight, is still a beautiful woman. Her short black hair has not a streak of grey, and her eyes sparkle. When we meet, she is wearing a green African-print mumu-style dress with a long slit up the side that accents a well-turned leg. Later, she put on a diaphanous orange shift that reveals her shapely breasts. And when we go out for dinner, she wears a smartly tailored slacks-and-shirt outfit.

  There is still a lot of Bayonne in this transplanted New Jerseyan. An associate professor of psychology at Miami-Dade Community College, she is street-smart, wise, and tough in the Northern big-city manner. And she is phenomenally outspoken about her desires.

  “What’s in it for me?” is her attitude in speaking about Fritz. Almost everyone I’ve interviewed has undoubtedly considered that question, yet she is the only person to raise it up front.

  Money?

  Well, there is none.

  Recognition?

  That will have to do. After all, the book will be written anyway.

  “Fritz liked what he saw of himself in me,” she says.

  Indeed, when Fritz described her as having “everything in excess—intelligence and vanity, frigidity and passion, cruelty and efficiency, recklessness and depression, promiscuity and loyalty, contempt and enthusiasm”—if you substitute “coldness” for “frigidity,” Fritz might just as well have been describing himself. I am reminded of a line in a poem that a friend once wrote: “I see myself reflected in your gaze and call it love. . . .”

  I see them both as egocentric, sensual, honest about their most self-seeking motivations, and very tough, shrewd businessmen. There is also, in Marty, a warm motherly quality. I am seated in her most comfortable chair, mixed a respectful drink, and am amply fed throughout my weekend visit.

  There are distortions in Fritz’s “open letter” to her, she tells me, and errors in the actual sequence of events. Yet, if that’s the way he experienced the situation, she is willing to accept his attitudes.

  Marty had first met Fritz casually and socially. When he mentioned his group, she decided to see what it was like. Attending one session, she felt moved, emotionally, and decided to continue coming. Her participation was marginal, however, until her daughter began acting “crazy”—showing signs of hyperactivity, nastiness, and untouchability.

  At school, her child screamed, cried, and vomited to the point where Marty felt obliged to keep her home. She brought her daughter to a psychologist and entered individual psychotherapy with Fritz, seeing him anywhere from three to five mornings a week, “and all I did was cry for my $150.”

  Severely agitated and depressed, Fritz initially helped her by giving her a perspective on the psychologist’s treatment of her offspring. Marty felt this man was acting cruelly to her child. Fritz gave her a paper to read, entitled “Support Through Non-Reassurance.” She allowed her daughter to continue with this therapist, and, within a month, she was back in school.

  “As for me, I was my mother’s child. I was really a terrible person in all ways. I was frigid and vicious, ugly, sharp, sarcastic, hateful, turned everyone off and knew I was turning everyone off yet had no way of doing anything other than what I was doing. I was filled with a great deal of personal despair that was never shared with anyone and hugged the fantasy of suicide very close to me—always knowing that I did have an out when I got so hateful that I couldn’t stand myself. For I obviously wasn’t doing anything right but was turning the world off.

  “My daughter’s breakdown brought it all to a head for me. My first reaction was to really hate her, because ‘How could she do this to me? Now the whole world knows that even the surface of this beautiful family and lovely home and my well-organized life and functioning is absolutely based upon quicksand.’ And with all these people about me that I felt superior to, obviously their kids weren’t having breakdowns at the age of six. Mine was, and everyone was shaking their heads. Her breakdown exposed my act. She showed me up.

  “Fritz did a lot for me. I asked him to come to my house, see my daughter, and tell me what he saw. He was never interested in children, but he said, ‘Yes,’ he would. He came for dinner. We weren’t lovers. He came because I asked him to see her. So, there was always contact with my family from the moment I started in therapy. He didn’t like my family scene, but he would come and be part of it from time to time during all the years we were together. Those were the practical things he did with me. Much more long-range was dealing with my mother and my relationship with women—all of which were connected to my relationship with my child.

  “Within a month we were in bed together. That was strange.

  “Fritz kissed everybody. When I left his office, feeling depressed much of the time, and he kissed me good-bye, it gave me a feeling of great warmth, teddy-bear cuddling, and comfort. But suddenly it became very much of a man/male kiss. I got out of there one day and drove home absolutely dazed. I was very nasty when he did that. I looked at him and I said, ‘I need a therapist, not a lover,’ and stomped out of the room. I had a dream that night. A very obvious sexy dream about Fritz and my husband. I came back the next day in therapy and Fritz said, ‘What’s happening? You’re looking everyplace but at me today.’ I would not tell him. Finally, grudgingly, I came out with the dream. He listened to it and we talked a bit about it. I had been very protective of my husband—never talked about him out of a sense of loyalty. You must also understand that I never had a friend. I had a terrible life and never shared it with anyone—partly because none of us talked about our husbands or our sex life but of safe things like children, politics, and the state of the world.

  “Fritz said he knew, afterwards—when we finally got to talking about my husband’s and my sex life—that when he first saw us together, he saw a Queen and a Frog. And how can a Frog fuck a Queen? And the other thing was the seductiveness of my husband . . . how good he was to me. My mother was very cruel to me. It was nice to have somebody who was so kind to me. And the less he functioned sexually, the kinder and kinder and nicer and nicer and softer and gentler and understanding he was toward me. I would do things that I didn’t understand at all, like really beat on him sometimes—really hit him. Just to get any kind of response from him. Now I understand why I did it, but then I was appalled. He’s such a nice man, what am I pummeling him for? But I never acted out any of my aggressiveness and frustration of not getting laid and not having any kind of sex life. Because I didn’t know anything about what I was supposed to have. All I knew was that the image we were making for the world was something like, ‘He’s so nice and Marty’s so terrible, what does he possibly see in her?’ That was what I imagined people saw in the two of us.

  “After I told Fritz the dream, I went home and decided I would take him as a lover I was much sterner then and came in to the next session with my diaphragm. After the session, when Fritz kissed me, he was suddenly over me but we were fully clothed and never fucked. I think he was testing me. A session or two later, we were intimate.

  “Even after we became lovers, I was still very much the patient, seeing him three or four times
a week. My husband was paying for it until much later, when I complained about it. ‘I don’t like it. How come I’m paying for sessions if I’m doing such nice things for you?’ Because at that time I was doing things such as cooking for him, taking care of his laundry—things that were easy for me to do and hard for Fritz to do.

  “What we did for each other sexually was absolute, sheer magic. Fritz came to Miami to die. His heart was bad. So, when he touched me, he was also wary of getting into me. He was worried about his heart pounding. Was he really going to have a heart attack and die? Yet, there was enough sex, attraction, magnetism, excitement, and magic that made it another world–type of sexual existence together. For I was dead and absolutely frigid and not going to let myself get all excited if all I could have were my husband’s twenty-nine-second touches. Fritz was similarly fearful of getting excited. He didn’t know if he wanted to live again. He made his peace and was in Miami to die. He was going to eke out his last few years and live minimally and take care of himself and not get involved in pushing Gestalt or pushing sex or living with zest as he had done all of his life. He was sixty-five when we met. Yet, our sexuality was just amazing.

  “We were together for hours. That was part of Fritz’s Pygmalion act of turning me on to sex. It gave him much pride and joy in melting me. And it melted him, too. However that wasn’t the way we verbalized it or how he thought of it. It was, ‘He’s doing something for me.’ And with his developing me sexually, we also introduced other people into our relationship sexually. It was Fritz’s insistence on turning me on to all the variations on a theme. Everything that existed he wanted me to taste. And he wanted to be the manipulator and puppeteer who was pulling my strings.

  So, he found other women and he found other men and he found combinations and he found drugs. And he was doing this ‘for me.’ He had been through everything before except drugs. The kind of sex life that he had with Laura was always very rich and very varied. I realize now that Fritz didn’t do anything for me. What he was doing was for himself. I was young and beautiful and I provided lots of access to lots of scenes Fritz wanted. So, I did as much for him in producing what he wanted as he did for me in turning me on to the world.