by David Adjmi
I rented a lot of movies during this period. The public library had lots of old movies and semi-obscure foreign ones I had trouble getting ahold of, like the ultra-rare Martha by the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Weinberger used to talk about him all the time, so I’d watched a few of Fassbinder’s films and loved them.
In this one Margit Carstensen (I knew her from Fear of Fear) played Martha, a woman driven to greater and greater extremes to please her impossibly sadistic husband. Helmut (the husband) is a substitute for Martha’s recently deceased father,* who treats her like garbage, but rather than escape this abusive dynamic with the father, Martha feels the irresistible compulsion to reinvent it with Helmut. There’s something destined about their horrible relationship, and how the past informs the present—it’s like Greek tragedy. In the famous 360-degree tracking shot where the two lock eyes for the first time, the camera encircles the couple, laminating them in an optic seal. The visuals encode it right at the outset: Martha is trapped. Not long into their marriage Helmut becomes insanely controlling. He controls her eating, her phone use, her social activity. She is forced by Helmut to listen to music she hates, to memorize a technical manual on building dams. Helmut is a completely over-the-top asshole, and the film plays as bone-dry comedy, but at the same time it was sickening to watch. Martha works endlessly to make herself into the psychic void Helmut wants her to be, and Margit plays this to the hilt, with her waxwork expressions and doll-like movements. Martha had resonances with Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (which Fassbinder filmed for television as Nora Helmer), a play I was teaching* that year, but it was more extreme, and not quite so humanistic a vision. Seeing the main character contort herself into a psychic pretzel to appease the very man who objectified and tormented her reminded me of, well, myself.
My own father infantilized me the way Helmut did Martha, and—like her—I ended up in a relationship with a control freak (Kurt) and became involuted and self-loathing. I felt magnetized to this film, the way Martha feels magnetized to Helmut in that famous tracking shot. Martha wasn’t entertaining, exactly—it was perverse, and depicted perversity—but the perversity felt true, and the truth of it felt cleansing to me. It took emotions I felt, and lived with, and hid from the world because they filled me with inexpressible shame, and made them the center of a film. Fassbinder was brave enough in Martha to depict a kind of human ugliness I could never depict in my own writing, even though I was afflicted by it in life.
I’d given up any hope of having a relationship with my father. We hadn’t spoken in over a year. My pilferage of his roll of quarters had genuinely upset him, it turned out. (I’d learned this from conversations with my sister, with whom he registered his many complaints about me.) And one day, just before I left for grad school, he called—not drunk, but in a foul mood. His voice sounded lower and tougher than usual—but the toughness sounded fake, a stencil of the bravado fathers were supposed to have with sons. He started on one of his persecuted rants about how no one called him or loved him enough. “I haven’t heard from you,” he sniffled. “I’m sure you’ve been too busy to call me.” But this time, instead of playacting the guilt and shame and helpless passivity he seemed to always want, I fought against it. I asked why he didn’t call me—was he too busy for me? My father then hastened to say that the reason for his call was to let me know the onus for our relationship would, from here on in, lie exclusively with me; that if I wanted a relationship with him, I’d need to call him, and that he would not be calling me ever again. “Thanks for letting me know,” I replied coolly, instantly determined not to lose any ground to him.
“You’re very welcome,” he said, without missing a beat.
The sarcasm in his tone was new, and it bordered on contempt. He’d been angry with me before, but he’d never spoken to me with actual disdain. “And those credit cards,” he continued, gaining momentum, “you can rip those up.”
“Okay—I will.”
“You’re a man. You’re old enough to support yourself.”
“You’re right,” I said, maintaining my benign indifference, to show him he lacked the power to punish me—but this only made him more contemptuous, only lent further support to his supposition that I was snide and ungrateful.
“And there’s your analysis, too,” he pressed ahead, his voice getting lower and meaner. “It’s too damn expensive. You’re a man now—you can pay for your own analysis from now on!”
At the mention of my analysis I felt myself instantly weaken, but I was too proud to let him know he’d hurt me. “That’s fine,” I said over and over against his repeated postulations that I was a man and had these manly duties and responsibilities, but the way he said the word “man” was like an unsheathed knife—it was dripping with locker room sweat, and Aramis, and liquor and curse words. The subtext was that men worked jobs they hated. Men were people who were unfulfilled. Being a man was a kind of punishment: he’d been punished by it and now it was my turn, and my father seemed to take a malicious pleasure in passing the poison-dipped baton. And though everything he was saying to me was in fact perfectly reasonable, and any neutral observer would agree that, yes, a twenty-five-year-old man should be responsible for his own life, the sanity of what he was saying to me belied the insanity of everything that preceded it—the endless skein of emotional bribes, the decades of hobbling promises that he would take care of me forever—so that I could only experience his divestiture as a punishment. I felt it not as a divestment of money, but love, which was what he wanted. He was cutting every cord that bound us now to intensify the effects of his punishment, to prove the ruinous effects of his absence.
Not a week after seeing Martha, I got a voice mail from my uncle Meyer, whom I barely knew—I met him I think a total of three times. He sounded exactly like my father; they had the same booming, masculine baritone; and when I heard his voice my heart stopped. “David?” said the frightening voice, “I don’t know if you remembah me. It’s ya Uncle Meyeah.” I could hear a sucking candy intermittently clicking against his teeth as he spoke, probably a Tic Tac or a Sucret. “Ya fatha had me call you,” he continued. “VERY IMPOHTANT. He wants you to send in these forms. VERY. IMPOHTANT. You heeh me? Make sure you do it. And take care a that registration!” He rattled off bureaucratic details of forms I had to fill out for my car, addresses to which I must send checks right away. And he repeated over and over how important it all was, as though I’d been entrusted with government secrets. The message was so coldly delivered, so openly antagonistic. Even his casual remarks sounded freighted with minor threats. The very gesture of him leaving this message felt like an act of violence—like something out of The Godfather. When I hung up the phone I broke out in a sweat; I was soaked. It wasn’t merely his tone, it was the whole aggregate of passive aggression compacted in the message—the fact that my father was so sickened by me he had to send his consigliere to leave me voice mails. Though I wasn’t on speaking terms with him, my sense of entrapment was no less pronounced. I felt extreme terror about sending away the checks. I was like Margit Carstensen, hysterical about making sure all the forms were mailed off right away so Helmut wouldn’t chastise or abuse me. I was trapped forever in the maw of this sadistic, cold relationship, and I would never be free.
The very next morning I started looking for a new shrink—a nearly impossible task in Iowa, where people didn’t require analysts because they were so sensible and well adjusted and went to malls and church. I, however, was not in that privileged majority, and there were no licensed analysts anywhere near Iowa City.
I called Catherine for advice—that was what Cathy called herself now.* She was living in Chicago. She’d been released from the mental hospital (the combination of therapy and medication seemed to have helped, she was like a different person) and was getting her MFA in creative writing. Catherine was seeing a great analyst in Chicago, and thought he might be able to help me. I called her shrink, who said I was in luck: that there was one licensed analyst he knew o
f who’d just moved to town; she’d relocated from Stockholm. I made an appointment for the following week.
Karin’s office was a forty-minute drive from campus, at the back of her home, which resided up a winding pathway in a wooded area not far from the main highway. To the side there was a tiny garden bisected by a stone path and little stone statues of Buddhas. There were chimes, even a koi pond. Everything seemed designed to prompt sylvan reflections and quiet epiphanies. I stepped into the waiting room, which felt like an Agnes Martin canvas, all pleasantly muted monochromes and dimmed lighting. For someone who just moved from Sweden, she worked fast. In a matter of seconds, Karin appeared. “I am Karin,” she said, rather bluntly. She sounded like she’d just learned English from a Berlitz tape. Was she even fluent in the language? Her hair was so straight and blond it looked like blanched needles. Her face was framed by thick black glasses; her body was wrapped in a sort of stylish Iroquois quilt. She wore lapis lazuli earrings, and a necklace made from round amber lozenges that swung heavily from her neck when she moved. “Come,” she said, ushering me into the office. There were quilts and macramé hanging on the wall. There were hanging crystal pendants. She led me to the now exceedingly familiar leather chair with armrests. “So,” she said, “tell me what I can do for you.”
As I recounted my life story it had the worn familiarity of an old Irish yarn, a tale parents told young children on a stormy night. I cranked it out as if by rotogravure, having told it more times than I could remember to God knows who: friends, other therapists. The plots were streamlined: the climaxes had a bravura quality. There were a few new details but the story of my life otherwise felt set in immovable typeface.
For a psychoanalyst, Karin’s responses were startlingly human. When I joked, she smiled. When I was upset, her face shone with fluid empathy. I noticed the subtle heave of her chest as she exhaled in frustration on my behalf, her thin lips tilting into a frown. She was distressed when it was normal to be distressed, she laughed when she felt like laughing. She made supportive comments like “That must have been painful for you” and “You didn’t deserve to be treated that way”—comments that for me bordered on unprofessionalism, for I was by then inured to the masculine seriousness and harshness of Boris Fischer. I initially found her humanness unnerving, but the registration of her caring satisfied some desire I had, a deep need for nontransactional caring from another human being. I didn’t have to reciprocate or do anything for her, but she had to sympathize with me—and not just had to, but wanted to, was nourished by the experience of sympathy. And even though all of this frightened me (it was so foreign and, as I said, bordered on the unprofessional), a part of me was starved for love and caring: an eye pleading for a gaze.
Over the next two weeks, I learned more about Karin than I learned about Boris Fischer in two years. I learned about her hometown, and these gross-sounding native licorice candies that obsessed her. I learned about her husband, who was American and transferred to Iowa for work. I learned her theories about America, how fast food and malls made us all paunchy and junky and stupid. Though she was disdainful and blunt, she possessed a strong Swedish maternal warmth, a stark contrast to all those Bergman and Strindberg women I knew from plays and films. Karin was kind to me. It felt so strange to be treated with kindness—without qualifiers or conditions. I was used to people like my parents, who made nonnegotiable demands, and who, if you rejected any of the demands, berated you or stopped speaking to you altogether. Though I started to relax into the feeling of someone I didn’t know caring about me, I sometimes wondered if I wasn’t being intellectually lazy, if the postures were unearned. Could you just love someone without knowing them? Was love just extending oneself in a gesture of love? I decided for the time being it was: that there was a kind of intimacy you could have without history, a connection you could make with a stranger that was profound in its own right.
Karin’s Swedish training felt more holistic and, for lack of a better term, Eastern, than what I was used to. She seemed to have a Jungian bent, which I found sort of cheesy. When she impelled me to journey into my “inner world”—which involved my being shepherded to a chaise where I had to lie down while she attempted, despite my lack of auto-suggestibility, to hypnotize me—I always cringed and resisted it. But no matter how many times I petitioned her, she insisted it was therapeutic. “Come now,” she’d say, extending her arm like a vicomtesse in some eighteenth-century novel, as though inviting me to waltz or do a quadrille. “Let’s go into your inner world.” And then she’d lead me over to the chaise where I’d lie perfectly supine while she counted backward. If I giggled, which I sometimes did out of discomfort, she did what any good therapist would do: she looked at me with a warm gravity that meant nothing was funny and that inner worlds needed tending. But my inner world was either absent or somehow beyond reach. She asked me questions about what I saw or felt when I accessed this putative inner landscape, but I didn’t have anything to report back. There was something dead and fallow inside me—the same dead feeling I had in the Irene Fornés workshop when I ran out of the St. Mark’s Church.
Maybe it was in the sheer repetition of Karin trying to coax out my supposed inner reality session after session, but now I felt its absence outside her office. I started to notice it in my writing, which felt increasingly thin and one-dimensional. I was working on something finally—a dark comedy with deadpan one-liners—but it was slow going, and the writing was very self-conscious. I was parroting things that seemed to contain intelligence and wit, but the pages felt rote and empty. The deadline for the Playwrights Festival came and went; I was the only person in the program not to have submitted anything, but I still had to turn in a draft of something for the workshop. I’d signed up for the last slot of the semester, just before Christmas break.
When I brought up my neurotic terror of writing to Karin midsession, she slowly rose from her Eames chair, the satiny fabric of her kimono dress shifting in stiff fulgent squares, and extended her arm toward me. “Ugh,” I thought silently—but it wasn’t silent, because she’d heard me. “Come on,” she said, somewhere between a nudge and a direct order. I reluctantly shuffled to the chaise and lay flat on my back. “Now we will go into your inner world,” she said in one of her arch Berlitz language school moments.
Too weak to fight her, I shut my eyes and waited for the countdown.
“What do you see in your mind’s eye?” she asked.
I told her I saw a series of symmetrical bowers that reminded me of something in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, which I’d been reading in this medieval literature class I’d been auditing. I wasn’t sure if I really was visualizing this or if it was something I made up because she was prompting me and I felt the need to propitiate people so as not to lose their affection.
“Is there someone in the bowers?”
“Yes,” I said, “there is someone here.”
“What does he look like?”
“He looks like me,” I said. “He’s like my twin.”
“A twin,” echoed Karin, and I saw this piqued her Jungian interests. Karin asked me about my twin: what was he doing and saying, could I approach him and give him a hug? I said yes yes yes. I would do anything she asked, but I sensed it was all false and made up.
That evening I came home and tried working on my play, but as I crafted my clever boutades and witty little sayings I found myself feeling incredibly sad. Out of nowhere I began to sob. When I finished sobbing, I went back to my lapidary little comedy and wrote a few lines, but then I started sobbing again. I tried to write more of my comedy as I sobbed, polishing the clever one-liners. I tried to push through it, tried to be efficient, be a good worker, but my nervous system was shot; I could feel my hand shaking as I typed, I couldn’t catch my breath. I lifted my shaking hand and stared at it, almost through it, with its sheath of tendons flexed and straining. The veins and little hairs, the half-moon cuticles and tiny wrinkles around the knuckles. I felt my own body as an object, almost a kind
of puppet or marionette. What was this thing attached to me? Who was I? What was I writing, and why was I doing it? Why was I even alive? I shut off my computer, got under the covers, and sobbed in mourning for the inner world I would never have, never know. I sobbed for the uselessness and emptiness of my whole shitty unrewarding life.
In November, I got a call from my sister.
“So,” she began—and I could already tell I was going to hate this phone call—“did you hear the news?” Her voice had that curdled half-amusement against the battering disappointments of life I knew well by then. “What news?” I asked.
“Your fathah got married to Cookie.”
“What?”
“Isn’t that lovely?!”
“When?”
“You know how I heard about it? From my freakin manicurist.”
“Did they elope?”
“No, they didn’t elope, they got married. In an actual wedding ceremony that we were not invited to!” She exhaled. “Oh well . . . I guess we’re not sharp or high-line enough for him.”
Arlene was teetering on that hysterical cusp where squelched resentment could turn at any moment to voluble rage. I didn’t care if my father got married or not, he wasn’t part of my life, but I didn’t want to disappoint or inflame my sister with my indifference, so I peppered her with arbitrary questions as a way of showing I cared: Where was the wedding held, who was there? Was Richie invited? My sister took a single exasperated breath: “Are you not listening to me? Richie wasn’t invited, you weren’t invited. The only one of his kids he invited was Stevie. He made Stevie his best man. They’re both full of shit, and now they’re best friends, and good for them!”
Once I hung up, I instantly forgot the details of the conversation. It didn’t distress me, it was a nonissue. I nearly forgot to mention it in therapy that week, but near the end of the session it slipped out. Karin was aghast. “He didn’t mention his wedding to anyone?” I shook my head.
