The Devil Tree

by Jerzy Kosiński

Recently, at a supermarket, Richard noticed the fruit and vegetable bins standing right next to the insecticides, bug repellents, and other household and garden poisons. He approached the manager, an older Jewish man, and told him that someone might spray the fresh food with poison. The manager was taken aback.

  “Why would anyone want to poison the fruits?” he said in his heavy Eastern European accent. “What kind of a sick mind do you have that makes you think about such things!”

  He started to move away, but Richard cornered him. “Why would anyone want to kill Jews?” Richard asked him. “Millions of your people went to the gas chambers, and you are no longer able to imagine one nut poisoning your fruit?”

  Richard, a Jew, came to this country from the Ukraine after having survived the Nazi occupation there. He remembers losing everyone in his family on the day when the Nazis staged an elaborate outdoor execution of the local Jews—as well as the lunatics, the infectiously ill, and the badly deformed, who were all classified as racially impure.

  Until the concentration camps and gas chambers became fully operational, the Nazis, like true showmen, often staged such outdoor events, and the local population and military units provided an attentive audience.

  Such persuasive examples of punishment meted out in the name of law and order to those arbitrarily defined as different are part of our collective memory, and the slightest hint of nonconformity still somehow generates anxiety and fear in us.

  In one revealing scientific experiment, Richard told me, several perfectly sane men and women were admitted to a mental hospital, where they were promptly judged mentally ill. In the same experiment, a substantial number of mentally ill persons applied for admission to a psychiatric clinic, and they were all thought to be perfectly sane. No wonder that two out of every five Americans are at some point diagnosed as suffering from psychiatric illness and are subsequently hospitalized. Half of all the hospital beds in the United States are occupied by psychiatric patients.

  These relatively recent developments in our individual as well as our social and political behavior have prompted many psychiatrists to propose that the traditional categories of sanity and insanity no longer suffice. These psychiatrists claim that a new category—neither sane nor insane, but unsane—should be created for cases where environmental circumstances blur the difference between what is sane and insane—and modify assumptions and attitudes concerning sanity and insanity.

  Even though health care is America’s third-largest industry, millions of our mentally ill and retarded are excluded from most national health and medical-aid programs. These people live their lives unseen, routinely drugged, locked away in front of TV sets. Richard told me about one mental hospital where three thousand patients are attended to by no more than thirteen psychiatrists—a ratio of one to about every two hundred and forty. While so many of our mentally ill are left to suffer untreated, even unattended, innumerable normal men and women of our affluent middle class are being treated as mentally disturbed by gurus from some two hundred and fifty schools of psychotherapy, who often consider our natural anxieties as aberrational. Thus, psychoanalysis wants to cure neuroses through the interpretation of dreams, fantasies, and childhood memories; behavioral therapy aims at conquering phobias; cognitive therapy seeks to modify one’s world view through logical reasoning; dynamically oriented psychotherapy claims to resolve the patient’s unconscious conflicts through brief anxiety-provoking sessions; group therapy seminars enforce psychic discomfort as a means to self-management; integrated therapy focuses on moment-to-moment experiences; hypnotherapy induces a state of trance as a prelude to altering self-awareness; and pharmacotherapy uses powerful psychotropic drugs in an attempt to stabilize the pendulum of our inner drives. Countless other therapies aim at stimulating the patient’s imagination, liberating his unconscious, or increasing his energy by monitoring and manipulating his bodily motions; still others use breathing, computers, and even TV soap operas as means to calm down, restrain, and cure the rebellious American psyche.

  Often, Richard feels, the therapy itself creates a climate of mental disturbance, anxiety, and maladjustment in patients by arbitrarily imposing on them mental, emotional, and social straitjackets. As a result, each time the circumstances of ordinary life force them to display or define their true identities, like the docile madmen in Samuel Tuke’s retreat these men and women become terrified by their own inner or outer nonconformity and are no longer willing, or even able, to pursue on their own who they are, to rejoice in their spiritual uniqueness. I know what Richard is talking about: I myself was once a docile madman.

  • • •

  I asked Karen what her life was like when I was away.

  “I remember so many weekends, one just like the next,” she said. “At dinner, whatever man I was with would help himself to the food first and talk too loudly. Then he would suggest that I have champagne with him on his boat. I would smile sweetly and say, Tine, but I’m not going to bed with you.’ I hate slick seduction scenes. In East Hampton, I drank iced mint tea, ate sherbet, and smoked hash. Finally, one summer, I ran into Sean, a handsome son of a bitch whose teeth were so white they seemed to emit light. When Sean smiled, people put on their sunglasses. And everything else about him was just as perfect, just as beautiful—and I fell for that Moby Dick of the bedroom. I’m such a sucker for good looks—they symbolize life and health and love for me. Only in my erotic fantasies am I sodomized by vile old men who do to me what nobody else would dare.

  “On the back of the photograph of himself that he gave me he wrote, ‘Sean, age 27, no makeup, naturally perfect powermaster.’ The naturally perfect powermaster had grown up in a shack in West Virginia. His family didn’t have an indoor toilet until he was eighteen. At nineteen he left home, which broke his father’s heart. When he was twenty-two he had an affair with a fifty-one-year-old nurse. There was nothing about healthy or unhealthy sex that she didn’t know. She was a nympho and a swinger who liked it all, making up in bed for what she lacked otherwise, but eventually she wised up and decided to settle down with a well-to-do man who wanted to marry her. This left Sean with nobody to fuck or live with. Except, that is, his older sister, whom he liked a lot but who was married. He moved in with her and her husband, but after a week or so the sister’s husband threw him out. According to Sean, the husband wanted to make it with him, but Sean refused to betray his sister. The truth was that Sean was too perfect to be just an ordinary heterosexual, and he hoped to draw the husband into an arrangement that would provide him with a home and meals, but the husband didn’t fall for it. That left Sean on his own again, forced to rely on his good looks, even though he was convinced that it was his prick that helped him to survive.

  “He once said to me, ‘Let’s face it. I may not be too smart, but I’m the best goddamn fuck this side of the Mississippi. My prick is above average, and in the sack so am I.”’ Then Karen got down to what she really wanted to tell me: “Not only his looks, but his direct approach really worked with me. I always want to give in when a man convinces me he’ll do whatever he wants with me. I guess I don’t like men who treat me with restraint. They make me feel slowed down, and then I blame myself for slowing them down. Just before you got back I had a date with a guy who was superliberated. He kept moaning about how sad it was that men depersonalize women and make them into playthings. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. I told him, ‘I can’t help it if I don’t turn you on. Just tell me if I don’t, but if I do, for God’s sake don’t give me all this crap. Just take me to bed.’” She paused. “When you first went away, Jonathan, I wondered whether or not I should screw around and if I could actually get myself to do it. I knew I was vulnerable, so I tried to be cautious and rational. I’d heard about women getting fucked over by sex without love. After a few affairs, I tried to avoid having sex altogether because it drained me. I used to worry about being promiscuous, or becoming that poor moron of a woman I once portrayed in a medical advertisement captioned, ‘Can a woma
n who’s unhappy with one contraceptive find happiness with another?’ How many men am I attracted to each year? Ten? Fifteen? Twenty? Eventually I might choose only three or four. When I’m attracted to a man, I say to myself: I like him, I desire him. I imagine getting laid, the touch of his skin and his muscles; I imagine breathing his breath and feeling him inside me. It’s a straightforward desire, with no pretenses beforehand or regrets afterward. What could possibly stand in the way of it?”

  When Karen spoke again her voice was low and husky. “Our knowing each other again, Jonathan, might lead to something good and solid, but I think it’s too soon for me. I ended an intense relationship just before you got back. Things could still develop between us, but if they don’t, at least we won’t have deceived each other. We’ve always promised to be together only as long as it’s good. I’m sick of my girl friends who suck guys off in parked cars or swing in groups of strangers because it’s trendy. I’m tired of sexual fads.”

  She paused. “I like to do grass or take a downer, and I get stoned a lot,” she said, “not only because it kills my inhibitions and makes me freer and funnier at a party, but because it opens me up sexually, lets me make a pass at any man I like; and it makes him braver with me. What’s more, if things go wrong, I’ve something other than myself to blame it on.

  “Last month I went through my first carefully planned threesome. After making reservations weeks in advance, we dressed in rented evening clothes of the thirties and went to the best restaurant in town. Janet was all glamour in her peach satin pants and top, I was in a gold lamé floor-length gown, and Robert wore white tie and tails. While ordering a super dinner—without drinks, wine, or champagne—each of us discreetly swallowed a downer. After coffee, all stoned, we staggered out of the dining room with the aid of our puzzled waiters and captain, who wondered how we had gotten ourselves so obviously sozzled. We went to Robert’s apartment and had a wicked night of perverse but painless fun and frolic. In the morning, Janet rushed off to see her shrink. I had an assignment with a German photographer, and Robert dragged himself to his job at the travel agency. It’s amazing what a good time I have when I can rid myself of that irksome brake known as conscience. Come to think of it, in order to enjoy that expensive food, we should have taken our downers after dinner! But seriously, for me sex is like walking in the hills. Each time you reach the top of one hill, you see another just ahead and you think that’s the top, and then you see still another one, so you keep climbing, never knowing where the last one will be.

  “I often have this nightmare. I hear a man’s voice coaxing and urging me, and I freeze and say, ‘It isn’t fair. You’re taking advantage of me.’ I feel like screaming, but then I think, what the hell, I’m a romantic cynic, I need it and I want it, so why not? Still, there are times when I can’t come. It’s emotional, I know, but what can I do about it? Sometimes when the sex is very good, I feel intense pleasure, but I’ll never reach the highest hill.” Karen got up and wandered around the room, talking on and on as if I weren’t there.

  “’You’re the hottest lay I’ve ever had,’ a man says, and I tense up and think he doesn’t know what he’s saying. Afterward, when he’s no longer high and he repeats the line, I feel less afraid. ‘Your body’s built for sex and you know how to use it; most women just lie there and twitch. I can’t believe-you don’t do it all the time. Tell me, has a guy ever come the minute he got inside you?’ ‘Of course,’ I answer, still detached. ‘I’m not surprised, not at all surprised. You’ve got the tightest box in the world.’

  “In the kitchen, I’m mixing drinks and putting him on about his other women. He says, ‘I know a good thing when I see it, and you’re very, very good. With a body like that, you won’t ever have to work an eight-hour day in an office.’

  “After we make love, another man says, ‘Fuck it, I’m not going to worry about being cool. I want to tell you it’s never been this good for me. With you, it’s like a whole orgy. You don’t mind being told, do you?’ ‘Mind?’ I say. ‘I love it. Who needs that cool body-exchange swinging crap?’”

  Karen looked at me pensively, then continued. “Truth is irresistible. It isn’t a mistake to tell you this, is it, Jonathan? I tell myself that it’s all right, that even if I don’t love you enough, I can’t stand your not loving me. Without your love I don’t have any power over you. I can accept making it with a man I don’t love—but not with one who doesn’t love me. I’m terrified of being taken lightly.”

  Later that night she mentioned a letter I had sent her from Turkey. “You wrote that what excites a Turk most is to satiate his woman, to manipulate her body and mind, to enkindle her desire. Because Turkish men don’t lose themselves in the women they love, they’re supposed to be the best lovers. Why did you write me that?”

  • • •

  “The sect of lovers is distinct from all others; lovers have a religion and a faith all their own,” wrote Indian thinker Jalal-uddin Rumi.

  • • •

  Even so, my impulse is not to respond when Karen says that I will continue to be an important but not an essential part of her life. By letting many men define her, she will avoid smothering and driving any one of us away. Her demand for attention is so great that no one man can fulfill it. Karen seems to choose men with the power to destroy her; unless she feels threatened, she becomes bored and leaves. She vacillates between seeing herself as predator and prey.

  Karen is certain that her fantasies about sodomy with old men are no more terrifying to me than her fantasies of marrying me, having my child, and serving tea in the late afternoon are to her. She has often pointed out that my sense of myself is as fragile as hers: after each date both of us are sure we will never be able to see each other again. With Karen I try to remain cool, yet whenever she decides to hold something back from me, which is often, I find myself hounding her with questions, voicing objections, sulking, and falling into despair. Like her, I prefer to remain oblique, to avoid direct confrontation until a crisis—her open involvement with another man, for instance—compels me to define the true nature of my commitment. Meanwhile, each of us is going a separate way, and there is a danger that we will both lose by default. I keep recalling that ominous remark by Tolstoy: “Man survives earthquakes, epidemics, the horror of illness, and all the agonies of the spirit; but throughout all generations, the tragedy that has tormented him, and will torment him the most, is—and will be—the tragedy of the bedroom.”

  • • •

  Living abroad, where my name did not win me instant acceptance, I was forced to see myself afresh. I noticed, for instance, that I avoided smiling because my smile exposed my unevenly shaped, irregularly set, and discolored teeth. I was reminded of that flaw again recently when Karen—whose own impeccably regular lips and faultless teeth are her professional trademark—studied my face and remarked that because I have beautiful eyes I should stare more at people, and smile less.

  Through the company’s medical research department, I thereupon met with one of the best dental surgeons in the country. I told him I wanted my teeth evened up and capped with a material that would make them look perfectly natural and, far more important, naturally perfect. After the surgeon had examined, X-rayed, and reexamined my mouth, he said that although he saw nothing wrong with my teeth, as long as I was troubled by their shape and color I should by all means have the work done. He then briefly outlined the procedures, as well as the cost, for such extensive orthodontic work, which he told me would take approximately two months.

  “Is there any way of having it done faster?” I asked.

  “Well, yes. We could schedule more appointments per week and speed up the lab work a bit,” he said.

  “I don’t want to wait,” I replied.

  “How fast would you expect to have it all done?”

  “How about in one day?”

  Assuming I was joking, he chuckled politely.

  “I’m serious,” I said. “I want it done that fast, and whatever t
he cost, I’ll pay in advance.”

  Still uncertain, the doctor began to make calculations. “I once capped all the teeth of a starlet in three days so she could make her first movie,” he said, glancing at the result of his calculations. “I guess I could do it for you in a day.” He paused, still calculating. “I will cancel all other patients and put everyone in the lab on alert. But I warn you,” he said, smiling mischievously, “after I’m finished with you, you’ll be much poorer.”

  “And you, much richer,” I said. “When do we start?”

  “Be in my office Monday at dawn,” said the doctor, reaching for the phone. “We’ll try to have you out within twenty-four hours.”

  • • •

  Throughout the surgery, partly anesthetized, I would catch the stare of the doctor and his attractive young nurse. The two of them bent over me as if I were in an accident and they were bystanders.

  At one point I turned cold with fear, thinking, “What if, through some unforeseen reaction to the anesthesia, I were to die right now? Would the surgeon still have to cap my teeth?” I even imagined the headlines: JAWS OF DEATH SNATCH INDUSTRY HEIR. VANITY KILLS AMERICAN SHEIK. “TOOTH FOR TOOTH” TURNS DEADLY FOR YOUNG MILLIONAIRE.

  My father worked himself to death. At the peak of his career, his heart, unable to keep up with his unlimited drive to compete, stopped. Because my drive is limited, I could not even bring myself to go to war—the epitome of competition—since that would have unreasonably increased the chances of my death. My father’s death seemed like destiny’s corporate refusal to extend the loan of time he still needed to accomplish his task; my own would probably appear as an outright refusal to take out such a loan. Quite appropriately, Horace Sumner Whalen had been mourned by all who were in his debt. But if I, Jonathan James Whalen, were to die right now in my dentist’s chair, no one would mourn the loss.