four
Because she was afraid of self-operating elevators, Coco walked up the four long flights to Dr. Finkelstein’s office. The chipped and peeling green-painted walls of the stairwell were depressingly familiar, and she felt as if she were going backward in life as she ascended the steps. On the fourth floor she pushed open the fire doors and entered the waiting room like an aging alumna returning to the student union for a homecoming weekend. But beyond the oasis of leatherette furniture Coco could see that Dr. Finkelstein’s door was expectantly ajar, so she hurried gratefully toward his office without doing a wait.
“Good afternoon,” Dr. Finkelstein said discreetly from his swivel desk chair.
Coco smiled, closed the door behind her, and marched daintily through the Danish-walnut environment to the exact part of the imported modern area rug, a yellow square in the Mondrian design, from which she could sit down on the couch and then lie back without seeing Dr. Finkelstein’s face again. Once again safe in her customary position—flat on her back—her head on a pillow protectively covered with a fresh paper doily, Coco spoke to the ceiling. “Well, here I am again.”
“Yes. So I see.”
She listened to the sound of Dr. Finkelstein’s chair scraping as he moved away from his rolltop desk—an old-fashioned accent amidst his modern furniture—to the invisible armchair located behind the couch where, Coco lay.
“Well, I bet you thought you’d never see me again,” Coco said flirtatiously to the doctor via the Amazon River cracking its way through the ceiling.
“You thought that, Mrs. Burman,” Dr. Finkelstein corrected her. “I didn’t. Unfortunately, I never arrived at such an optimistic prognosis. I, of course, thought there was still a great deal more work to be done.”
That was silencing. For a man who had barely escaped being a proctologist—his second specialty—Dr. Finkelstein had a very smug style.
“Well … anyway,” Coco continued, magnanimously forgiving Dr. Finkelstein his limitations once again, “You’ll never believe what’s happening to me now.”
“Mrs. Burman, I would believe anything that you told me happened to you.”
Coco began to feel sorry for herself. Now that she was back in Dr. Finkelstein’s office, like an insecure Ph.D. doing postgraduate work, she felt oppressed by his Dr. Marcus Welby rendition of Sigmund Freud. Stifled, yet convinced that she needed psychological support to sustain her through the shoals of Gavin’s love affair and the ordeal of writing an important novel, Coco decided to ignore Dr. Finkelstein’s negligible sensitivities and simply utilize his technical backup skills.
“As a matter of fact, doctor, if it weren’t for what happened last night, I would probably never have come back here again.”
“Oh? What, exactly, happened?” Dr. Finkelstein asked. Lacking any sense of humor or imagination, he disliked vagueness and kept up an insistent demand for details.
“Well, last night Gavin told me that he’s been having an affair, and it sort of sounded a little bit to me like maybe he was falling in love. Oh, I don’t know. I still can hardly believe it. And besides that, he won’t even tell me who she is. And if he won’t tell me who she is, I know I will probably go stark raving mad. Like in Gaslight. Because if he thinks I’m going to go around town not knowing if I’m sitting next to his girlfriend at a dinner party or not, he’s crazy.” Coco began to cry. “But it’s also going to drive me crazy, and I won’t be able to do anything except try to find out who she is all summer, and then I won’t be able to write my book, which is what I’ve decided to do.”
“The fact you feel badly about Gavin having an affair would seem to substantiate my theory that you really do care about him … despite the fact you feel compelled to deny that possibility year after year.”
Coco cried louder, adding a mucus base accompaniment to her treble trills. Dr. Finkelstein’s name and syntax had always bothered her, undermining any hope that his mysterious healing arts could override his cultural and chauvinistic handicaps.
“Oh, God, why did this have to happen?” Coco was weeping steadily now. “Everything was going along just fine. It was almost perfect.”
“Had you stopped having all those screaming fights and threatening to divorce him?”
Pause.
“No.”
“So why do you say things were just fine?”
Pause. “Because we were used to that. It was … part of our relationship.”
“In other words, all the same old stuff was still going on?”
“Yes. But everything really was okay, Dr. Finkelstein. Until this happened,”
“So, in actuality, we’re back where we started from,” Dr. Finkelstein grumbled. “And things are still haaaaappening to you.” He elongated the word indefinitely. “Things are still haaaaappening to you, and you don’t know why. You, of course, are still not accountable for yourself or your own destiny. You, of course, are still not responsible for what haaaaappens. Do you still believe it is fate, Mrs. Burman, that causes these things to haaaaappen to you?”
“But it’s true, Dr. Finkelstein. Nothing’s any different between me and Gavin now than it ever was. So how can it be my fault if some girl latches onto him right at this moment? How can I be to blame?”
“And it just haaaaappens that men fall in love with you.…”
“But they don’t anymore,” Coco sobbed. “Honestly, I haven’t cheated on Gavin since the last time I saw you.”
“Me?” Dr. Finkelstein squealed.
“I don’t mean with you, Dr. Finkelstein, I just meant—”
“Don’t you see, Mrs. Burman, that you are persisting in the same old pattern? Like, it just haaappened that you got married before you meant to get married.”
“But that’s true. That was in 1960. Girls still had to get married then. You know, I had to get married so I wouldn’t waste all my time being afraid that I wouldn’t get married. I mean, you know how it used to be. I told you that before I got married I never finished one whole Russian novel, not one, because I was so anxious I couldn’t remember anyone’s name. I mean, you know I was so anxiety-ridden that I couldn’t memorize the Great Vowel Shift. And there were only five vowels. On account of my anxiety.”
Dr. Finkelstein didn’t respond, but continued his own rap. “It just haaaappens that you have had ten different jobs in ten years, that you’ve lived in a dozen different houses, that your maids quit every few weeks, that you have children you didn’t mean to have.…”
“Nicky was the druggist’s fault, Dr. Finkelstein. You remember that. He gave me the wrong size diaphragm. You remember. I told you how I was really a seventy and that my gynecologist made a sloppy zero that looked like a five.”
“That a four-year-old girl is still wetting the bed …”
“No. No, she’s five and a half now, and she’s stopping. I meant to tell you. I mean, I couldn’t very well drop you a postcard to say that Jessica has definitely slowed down in the enuresis department, but I really wanted to let you know that she’s gotten much better. In fact, she hasn’t done it in several weeks now.”
“Ahhh, Mrs. Burman. It is hard to believe that such things as happen to you could haaaappen to anyone. Unless, of course, the person wanted them to happen.”
Coco munched on her bottom lip. “Do you really think I want Jessica to wet her bed, Dr. Finkelstein? Is that what you really think?”
“I’m not sure what I think, Mrs. Burman, because I haven’t been thinking about it much during the last few years.”
“Well, I didn’t expect you to think about it when I wasn’t coming here, but you should think about it right now,” Coco said in a firm voice she never could have used before her consciousness had been raised. “Because this is obviously a case for some crisis intervention. I’ve come back here for crisis intervention because I’m terribly upset about this crisis I’m having. Believe me, doctor, I wouldn’t start in on this all over again if I wasn’t really very upset. I mean, I’ve got a hundred and seven lousy
final examinations to read before next Tuesday, and not a cent to my name that’s in my own name.”
Dr. Finkelstein didn’t answer. He made no sound at all. Coco captured a small but satisfying piece of dry flaky skin off her bottom lip, pulverized it between her teeth, and decided that Dr. Finkelstein was in a bad mood because it was Friday and he had had a long week. A long profitable week. Coco should have known better than to take a Thursday appointment. It was just more bad luck to have a reunion with her shrink when he was so tired that his inflections, right from the start, had been unguardedly Brooklynese.
Silence.
She decided to wait him out. She twisted her wrist slightly, sneaked a look at her watch over the tip of her left nipple, and wondered if poor Dr. Finkelstein was bitter because he never got to see anything but laid-out-flattened boobs. Thoughtfully Coco crossed her ankles so that the better pedicured toes on her right foot were exposed on top and then leaned slightly to one side so that her left breast ganged up on her right breast producing, for Dr. Finkelstein, what had to be an attractive line of cleavage in the scooped neckline of her navy-blue cotton sundress.
But by 3:18, convinced that crisis-intervention techniques did not entitle a doctor to the reprieves of classical analytic silence, Coco began to feel angry about the money and time Dr. Finkelstein was wasting. She was also distressed at having reverted to the pre-lib-ploy of cleavage production to amuse and cajole Dr. Finkelstein out of his sulk. Coco’s regressive show-of-tits tactic, simply because she felt nervous and uptight, clearly undermined her militant commitment to the sexual revolution. A post-lib lady succumbing to such a pre-lib number clearly demonstrated that her prerevolutionary habits had not been completely purged.
Instantly Coco shifted back into a flat position, magically withdrawing her offer.
“Well,” she prompted impatiently, “what do you think I should do?”
“About what?” Dr. Finkelstein asked in an unmistakably uninterested voice.
“About Gavin’s having an affair. About his doing this now when the issues are clearly different, when it’s no longer a question of getting laid anymore. Now is the time when all decent men are getting involved in the real complexities of family living. No one’s whoring around, or hunting pussy, or chasing skirts anymore. That’s all finished. That shit is old-fashioned. It’s obsolete, and irrelevant because that’s not where it’s at anymore. And the fact that Gavin’s having an affair now … I mean, it’s like buying a Model T Ford. It’s just a fucking counterrevolutionary hostile thing to do. It’s just a dirty male-chauvinist-pig effort to discredit the entire women’s-liberation movement and everything it stands for. Maybe you haven’t noticed lately but nobody talks about men screwing their secretaries anymore. The real question now is how secretaries can stop being exploited by capitalism and chauvinism so they don’t do all the shit-work in the office. And that’s why I don’t know what to do about Gavin’s affair.”
“Well, what do you think you should do?”
Coco dug her fingernails into the palm of her hand. “Dr. Finkelstein, you are giving me my old kind of headache that’s just over the left eye and no place else. If all I’m going to get from you is a headache—I didn’t need to come back here, you know. I can get headaches at home. For free. I mean, coming back here after two years is like getting sent back to kindergarten after high school. I mean, I was finished, remember?”
Silence.
“Wasn’t I?”
“Well. You stopped coming, Mrs. Burman.”
“Yes, but not until after five years, Dr. Finkelstein. Five long years.”
“That’s true.”
“Actually, Dr. Finkelstein,” Coco said, noticing that she had stopped crying during the time she felt angry at him for not talking, “if I could just get Gavin to tell me who this girl is, what her name is, and what she does, then I wouldn’t really care anymore, and I could stop thinking about it and get down to work. Since I won’t be teaching any summer-session sections”—she said the last three words very slowly, so as not to make a slip and say “sex-ion” like she always did—“I’m free to just concentrate on my novel. I’m planning to finish the whole book this summer. And then, after I’m finished with it, I can decide what to do. That’s really why I called you up this morning. I think if we discuss what I should do—while I’m writing my novel—then when it’s finished I’ll know what I should do after that. And, Dr. Finkelstein, this time I’m really going to try to remember everything that you say each session. That is, if you’ll let me come back again. I mean, I won’t forget everything you say the minute I walk out of the office anymore.’
“Hmmmmmmmm.”
“But what we really have to figure out is why Gavin chose this time, this particular time in my life, when I really felt on top of things, to have an affair. It certainly sounds hostile to me. And the other thing that’s flipping me out is why anyone would want to have an affair with Gavin anyway. I mean, anyone who would want to sleep with him must be either very hard up or have some ulterior motive—like wanting to marry him or something. And I think that’s what’s making me upset. I think if we discussed that, I’d be able to get a grip on myself.”
“I seem to remember that you had an affair with your husband, Mrs. Burman,” Dr. Finkelstein said in his cunning voice.
“You mean before we got married?”
“Yes.”
“Well, yes, but I was only twenty then.”
“Well, maybe that’s how old his new girlfriend is.”
“What?” And then Coco started to cry again. “Oh, God. Twenty? These damn young girls … these hippies … what do they know about anything except how to make bread? What do they know?”
“And remember, Mrs. Burman, you married Gavin after you had your affair. He left his wife and married you.”
“Well, for God’s sake, Dr. Finkelstein, I know that,” Coco panted. “Don’t you think I see the pattern? Can’t I see the handwriting on the wall? What do you think I’m so nervous about?”
Dr. Finkelstein cleared his throat.
“If you can remember, Mrs. Burman, at one point we agreed that there must have been some reason you chose Gavin for a husband. Try to remember. If you recall, we tried very hard to find out how your marriage happened to you. And maybe if we clarified that again, right now—today—it would throw a little light on why you feel so anxious about the possibility that someone else might want to marry him.”
Coco stared up at the ceiling and felt her mind go blank and aimless. She studied the course of the Amazon River, tried very hard to concentrate on the question, envisioned a group of American anthropologists in a canoe fighting off crocodiles, but still couldn’t think of the right answer. So she shrugged her shoulders.
“Well, anyway, I’m probably going to have an affair myself, too,” she announced finally.
Silence. Then a short little laugh. “And with whom, may I ask?”
“Anybody,” Coco said. “I don’t know who. I don’t care. I don’t have to be any fussier than Gavin’s girlfriend, do I?”
Dr. Finkelstein laughed again, but with a little more sincerity this time.
“I mean it, Dr. Finkelstein. I’m really going to do it.”
“So … have … have … enjoy … enjoy.”
“Listen, Dr. Finkelstein. To be honest with you, I’m getting the feeling that you’re a little hostile toward me. And since I can probably guess the reason, maybe I should explain to you why I stopped coming here. I mean, I really did feel guilty about it, and I wanted to write you a long letter to explain, but it was so complicated that I couldn’t have gotten it all down on paper.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You see, let’s see, well, that’s funny. I guess it was exactly two years ago this very month. It was June, wasn’t it, when I quit coming? Because I remember it was about two months after I joined the Columbia Road Local Women’s Liberation Consciousness Raising Group. I mean, I joined it, I think, in March, and by June I was prett
y converted.”
“I see.”
“And, well, during a couple of the sessions, I mean the consciousness-raising sessions, we discussed psychiatry and how it was one of the methods used to keep women oppressed. We worked it out—our local has an extraordinary number of very bright, sensitive women in it—that when psychiatrists try to make a female patient feel better, what they’re actually doing is trying to make her adapt and adjust to her own exploited condition. And if the female condition—historically as well as currently—is exploitative, then psychiatrists are in collusion with their own chauvinistic culture.”
“I see,” said Dr. Finkelstein.
“I mean, if you found an enslaved race of people in some far-off continent, you wouldn’t start giving them therapy to make them feel happily adjusted to their slavery, would you, doctor? Wouldn’t you really join with them in their struggle for liberation? And also you have only to look at all the new novels that have been coming out, like Up the Sandbox and Walking Papers. Did you read Up the Sandbox, doctor?”
“Mrs. Burman. Are you sure you want to discuss women’s liberation rather than your own problems?” Dr. Finkelstein asked in a neutral voice.
“But see”—one of Coco’s knees jerked upward in exasperation, just as if she’d been given a Babinsky test—“that’s just what I’m trying to show you. And I’m not trying to be a smart-ass now. But that’s exactly the point. Maybe my problems aren’t peculiar to me. Maybe all women like me have exactly the same problems. Maybe we’re not all neurotic, although maybe some of us are, but maybe we’ve gotten to be this way because of cultural and societal and political reasons. So maybe we’re not really crazy if we feel rebellious.”
“Ummmmmmm.”
Coco had long ago decided that Dr. Finkelstein’s intellectual limitations should not, theoretically, hamper his technical therapeutic services. But she bitterly resented his slowness when she had to pay for the time it took to further his education.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said impatiently. “Haven’t you read any of the literature? I mean, didn’t you even see Germaine Greer on the Dick Cavett Show? Oh, I guess it really doesn’t matter, but please don’t act like I’m paranoid if I mention society. And don’t forget that the reason men oppress women is because they’re oppressed top, by the alienating kinds of jobs they have, which obviously screws them up and also fucks up their other relationships. I mean, that would seem to be true, wouldn’t it?”
Loose Ends Page 5
