About—I named the painter I was having an on-again, off-again thing with. The analyst said neutrally About, and I said About waiting for him. Neediness, how I keep letting it show even though it repels him. The other women. His contempt. How he says “I hate people like you” and I don’t care, the only part of his saying he hates “people like you” that bothers me is his thinking there are people like me, to him I’m a kind of person, there’s a professor pigeonhole I belong in, in with the other abject failures at leading what he sees as real life, which because he was born here and has never gone anywhere he insists is possible only within Mendocino County, he hates it that I have money—not a lot but a lot compared to him: one night my son and I ate supper at his house, he didn’t seem sure he wanted us to stay and I was afraid maybe another woman was going to turn up but he got out this huge wheel of cheese from the food bank and sawed down through it with a guitar string and it was as if he wanted the ingeniousness of his using a guitar string admired, so I admired it, which turned out to be a mistake, he heard condescension, he said if my son and I wanted to stay we couldn’t eat any cheese, he threw a fork at the cat. He threw the fork, he said, “You bitch.” But the cat was ahead of him, it did this dodge thing and crouched back down right where it was, and, no, I told it wrong, that’s when he said, “You bitch,” not when he threw the fork, but when the cat crouched back down, just, you know, melted back into place and stayed there. Staring. Which of course is me. And I don’t want any of this in my kid’s head, and sitting here telling you this I’m incredibly ashamed that I can’t stay away from him, I’m afraid of losing you, like you’re sitting there thinking, Get the fuck out of my room, like you’d throw a fork when I know you’d never, it’s you who matters, you I’m in love with, you who are good for me, because I don’t know how this ends, any of it—
Tomorrow I was going to have to drive back down to Stanford, I wasn’t going to get back to Mendocino for two weeks, the analyst and I were going to miss a session. Maybe that’s why I’d told so much all at once, why I’d said, as if it were only another item carried along in the torrent, I love you.
Bachelor pathos of his argyle sweater vests.
Bachelor at, what, sixty-something.
No wedding ring.
He waited.
Was I done?
I seemed to be done.
He said This is good.
Pleated khakis, neatly shod feet embarrassingly resting on the embroidery of the bedouin saddle serving as a stool.
What it would be like to shelter under such wise solicitude, not merely for an hour at a time, but down through one’s life.
How is it good?
What would it be like to get one’s fill?
He said This is a case of your beginning to see things clearly. However painful it is. And it is.
After two weeks I came back to find his door closed—often, he let sessions run over, and I would spend twenty minutes or so in the waiting room’s Victorian brocade settee, opening Jude the Obscure to the page bookmarked by a Polaroid of two sunburned kids bareback on an Appaloosa, but this afternoon was different, his light was off, the white noise machine absent from its customary station just outside his door. After as much silence as I could handle, I closed Jude, braced my notebook against the mahogany armrest, and turned to a clean page. My handwriting sloped and slewed, it wasn’t pretty, but experience had taught me how sticky perfectionism is: to tear up that first try would dictate the tearing up of every subsequent attempt, I’d be left with nothing to slip under his closed door. The note that had started out honest devolved into compensatory feminine apology, had I made a mistake, gotten the time wrong? I had waited for him—my watch confirmed—three-quarters of an hour, the darkness of his office, the silence of the old building began to scare me, as I was writing I hope nothing is wrong, the outside door at the bottom of the narrow old stairwell slammed and the century-old risers cried out like the notes of scales plinked key after key, the concussions of his ascent slowing near the top, where, for him, there must have been a Schrödinger’s-cat instant I was both there and already gone, the landing was reached, he turned the corner. I’d barely ever seen him outside his office, but here he came, breathless, baseball cap and old jeans and muddied wellington boots, halting just short of the settee with an air of distraught recklessness. You’re still here, he said, my god I’m glad you’re still here, his my god rang handsomely, part of his vitality lay in liking to wrench good lines from the mess of utterance. I was gardening, he said, and I lost track of time. Not a car wreck, not a heart attack, a garden. Another habitat of his own making, quite elsewhere. Thriving green order, of course he’d be into that, the office ficus could have told me as much, his having a garden needn’t have come as a surprise and, at this bad moment for heightened attraction to him, a fresh allurement, but it did, I was on the brink of being the person who could say Let’s go there now, but as he had come to a halt a second ago, so did I, internally, wanting to prolong the sanctimonious eros of having the upper hand, the exclusive property of injured parties, not that he was particularly conceding I was one. He gestured toward the door we could now go through, him first, me hanging back to witness gestures and movements, when we were apart I was given to imagining the details of his sessions with other clients, his manner of unlocking the door, how he turned the lights on were revealed—I’d spent hundreds of hours in that room without the least clue where its light switches were—his habit, it must be, of correcting the angle of his chair before sitting, and I sat, and without taking off his baseball cap he nodded, he said Well, and I thought Really—it’s up to me? and started talking, now that we were in the room he was not going to continue to apologize—a decision calculatedly therapeutic, it could be, since more soulful apologizing might come across as defensive, possibly what was being granted to me was the freedom to accuse him of having done harm, to find my vehemence absorbed without retaliation was the experience offered by his benign reticence, but as so often freedom was wasted on me, I busied myself with unrealities, chief among them the determined presentation of empathy: under his sheltering cap-bill he was real, therefore bound to make mistakes, in D. W. Winnicott’s Holding and Interpretation: Fragment of an Analysis Winnicott quotes himself telling a self-absorbed analysand, “It seems a funny thing to say, but I think at this moment you are forgetting that in fact I am alive,” a remark that charged me with the responsibility for cherishing the aliveness of my own, oddly baseball-capped analyst. For twenty minutes I talked without saying You can’t do this to me, talked with dodgy formality, it’s how I stupidly compensate for awkwardness, I’m never more awkward than when ruled by outrage—he had injured me, he whose role was good-object steadiness, wasn’t it blindingly clear I needed all the help I could get, and not another straw’s weight of harm? Finally I said, with a sort of controlled childishness, I thought you forgot about me, and he answered gravely Oh no—the opposite.
A little more than a year later, in a clapboard shanty whose hand-carved wooden sign reads Mendocino Vintage, above a strewn and cluttered maze of display cases, on a hanger hooked over a low rafter, the uniform of a drum majorette awaits the return of 1959, its bodice of closely sewn sequins, whenever the door opens, flaring from the dark like the breast of a penguin in an arctic dawn, the door closing, the uniform drained of hope, whoever’s come in must reach up to tug its kick-pleated hem and say Where did you get this, it’s a law the shop’s interior instantly communicates to customers, it gives the owner the chance to look up from whatever she’s doing and say From a dead drum majorette, a joke she’ll work variations on throughout the store’s successive reconstitution in bigger, handsomer, better-lit spaces until one winter afternoon she finds herself answering a customer who’s asked Where did you get this about the Edwardian ring the customer has skivered over her knuckle, Took it from the finger of a dead woman, and the customer can’t get the ring off fast enough, is almost in tears trying to wrench it back over her knuckle, and ends up
getting a sizable discount when she decides she has to have it after all, but more often the dealer’s boyishness alchemizes her taunts, intended primarily to amuse herself, into a sharp and original charm lost on exactly no one, and why butch nonchalance gets to carry off this trick of mischief’s seeming cool remains a mystery, she’s got a business partner and I time my appearances for days when I’m likely to find her alone, tinkering, repairing, polishing, so busy it feels like an honor when she looks up, a lick of blond hair in one bandit eye, and asks, “Didn’t find the dress?,” waiting amused for my answer, my explanation, which has entertained us both before, of how the right wedding dress eludes me, and I would like to get into it with her, I could use a dose of her amusement, except my son comes to the counter and asks politely about a knife whose handle is the antler of a spike buck, he can barely see over the counter, nine and as obsessed with knives as I am with wedding dresses, and she says, “Sure,” laying it on the rectangular pad whose black velvet is meant to set off glimmering bracelets and winking jewels—against that velvet, the knife has a homemade brutality—and I’m interested in the discretion of her nudging toward him not the knife itself, but the velvet pad, and then I understand her doing so affords him the pleasure of picking it up, all this accomplished without her needing to glance at me, the mother, as most adults would when the child is about to pick up a knife, already secure in the conviction that if I don’t like something I will let her know, with casual regard for the independence so dear to him, somehow simply—it will turn out to be one of her great gifts—knowing the right thing to say, she says, “Tell me you’ll be careful,” he takes promises seriously and says, “I will”—as aware of her not having checked with me as I am; he feels honored, I can tell. Surprised, too. And so am I. Her getting him exactly, effortlessly right is sexy; also cute; done with such nonchalance, as if she caters to knife-crazed nine-year-olds every day and has it down. Lightly, her attention is on him. She can tell he is careful. The blade has a honed nakedness, small but serious, what my son calls a real knife. (My response: “If it can cut you, it is real.”) Enough color and ducks: he wants knives. For carrying around, this one’s useless. Its purpose has always been to be admired. Above the relative narrowness of its shank, its honed edge mimics the bulge of a swallow’s breast; the niceness of the contour is the same, the same graceful receding to the long tail. The impression of intelligent balancing that swallows give, and objects almost never. Plainly the knife has had a fortunate history of ownership. My son’s carefulness shows his comprehension of the care others before him have taken. Lustered by its hundred years’ cohabitation with the oils and unguents of skin, the antler has been saved from the aridity of dead bone. It’s never been underground.
“How much?”
She tells him.
He’s gazing downward, but we both catch his frown.
Now she checks with me—a glance—before saying to him, “Some things, you can just tell belong to a person.”
He’s hopeful. And hides it.
“I guess you have to have it?”
“I don’t have enough money for it.”
“Oh,” she says, “I think we can work that out. You’re coming back, right—next time you’re in Mendocino?”
He turns to me. “In two weeks,” I tell him. “We’re back in two weeks.”
To him she says, “Here’s the deal. Five bucks down holds the knife for you. Second payment next time you’re in Mendocino.”
To me she says, “Don’t worry. It’ll find you”—the dress.
The opposite, the analyst said. I’m in love with you.
He wrote down the name of an acquaintance in Palo Alto, a colleague whose approach should be compatible with his own. By the stiltedness of his phrasing he deserted me, the notion of someone sharing his approach to me left me incredulous, was that what he’d had, an approach, was that who I was, a person he had an approach to, from which I’m in love with you was an unfortunate deviation, a glitch to be compensated for by this display of professionalism I found transfixing, surreal; since I’m in love with you he had not addressed a word to me as me, possibly I had already heard the last genuine words he was ever going to speak to me, in my stead he was addressing an imaginary creature capable of enduring the loss of him, he talked to her as if she existed, in effect summoning her into existence, this person it was my responsibility to become, who was going to be able to stand up and walk out of this room for good, who was capable of recognizing the slips and imperfections of an overall useful and rewarding analysis, as he hoped ours had been; even as I tried to take in what he was saying I was aware of another conversation streaming along below our surface rectitude, in this underground conversation I was raging No, no, this can’t happen, I can’t lose you, aboveground he was commending this colleague held in high regard within the community, oh as if, the under-rant continued, as if the lonesome, floundering man before me had any use for community—how long had he had this referral up his sleeve? At what point had he guessed he was going to blow it? The acquaintance might be willing to take me on as a patient on an emergency basis—the tone of willing to take you on was, to my ear, delicately competitive, as if this replacement for him was also, immediately, a rival. But also: emergency basis. Yes, okay: emergency. Was he already wondering what I was going to say about him to this other analyst? As long as I related it accurately—that I wasn’t always accurate, he was all too aware, but if I recounted this conversation accurately his confession would come across as the raw, spontaneous revelation of emotion—it happened—he would be understood as honorably seeking to devise, for me, the best, most therapeutic of aftermaths. He needed to be plain. We could not go on as before, it would be an injustice to me to continue and could jeopardize the work we’d done so far. On a winter street corner, violin case weighing down my gloved hand, I froze. It rushed back, the incredulity of abandonment. Outward paralysis, internal questing, as if since bodily movement was unwise, the awaited had to be whirled after, inwardly. The Scottish psychoanalyst John Bowlby had gone as far as postulating the ancient origin of immobilizing depression lay in the lost child’s having a better chance of survival if she crouched and stayed put. Down through the millennia as, lost child by lost child, those who kept moving disappeared for good, the species’s DNA was recast to favor paralysis, the sinking wretchedness of being left valuable because it drained the initiative to move, pinning the child to the last place she had been seen, thus giving the searchers a chance of backtracking and finding her. But anguish flung through my mind, with cries flying from it. Images, too, a sort of movie of myself sliding from the couch to my knees, of walking to him on my knees. None of which he was privy to, since I was sitting there in my usual place, saying sanely I can’t believe this is the last time I’ll be in this room. Saying I’m going to remember this room as—you’re going to think I’m exaggerating, but—as heaven.
Heaven was my last-minute try at thanking him for the room’s impeccable curation, its museum aloofness, the cautious situating of every object in its trance of light, with the fastidiousness I knew to be his, so that to love the room was to love him as he wished to be seen. The three harlequins in their poled-along gondola moped for the last time over my head. I was going to mourn for the power of the room’s listening silence to amplify the least disturbance of its perfection, like my habit of stroking the couch’s velvet, into meaningfulness, was going to miss his calmly absorbing my stories, who would they matter to now, would he open my file and leaf through my dreams, should I ask for them back? Briefly, because I wanted to hurt him for costing me himself, I considered demanding every page he’d ever scribbled about me. He’d sat in his chair recording my erasures, deletions, obliterations, inhibitions, in the pages he’d written lay the most eloquent account I could give of the despair I was in, and I would like to read it, myself, if I could no longer read its reality in his eyes, to read of perfectionism’s pursuit of the next numinous object of desire, of how my desertion of work-in-progre
ss left a trail of stories crouched tightly down into themselves, hiding in the last place they’d been seen, his notes a map of their whereabouts, tucked in a folder to be filed in a drawer with other folders belonging to other sufferers, once he’d filed the folder away those crouched stories would be forever beyond finding, as in some sense would I, the prospect of telling my story over again to any other listener approximately as disgusting as if he’d suggested my giving a blow job to the person whose name he’d written on the slip of paper, a repudiation of the depth of my attachment—of what was, to me, holy. And hard-won: I was amazed to have gotten so far. I had believed there could be, not exactly an end to perfectionism, but a slackening of its hold.
That new pages could be written and allowed to exist.
If he was there.
If he was listening.
Committing to separation was more black-and-white, then, before the technological facilitation of stalking, which I’m fairly sure would have sucked us both in. As it was a year went by without our being in contact—no letters, no phone calls. During that year either of us could have fallen in love with someone else and embarked on—I was about to say embarked on a less complicated relationship, but how can that be known?
The enchantment of transference love easily survived the year’s separation.
Only once I moved into his house did our happiness in each other begin to wear off, little by little, the degrees of its fading perceptible in sex. Our first fucks were illicit mutual congratulation, a matter of bodies catching up to souls already as-if transparent to each other. We burned through that co-conspiratorial grace in weeks, deflated by the realization that our being together offended no one. I was superstitious about his age, and considered his libido touchier than it was. But I was straightforwardly into his pot-bellied bandy-legged nakedness, whorls of soft white hair enclosing sepia nipples, big crude rib cage, the fat-veined loll of his penis, his whole testy, distracted, mischievous, ruefully age-tainted maleness, hidden for years in shrink garb. In short he was a revelation, this contradictory, shambling, bald-headed, touching—Da!—man, waiting on the leather-and-chrome Corbusier couch meant for the male companions of women who’d disappeared into dressing rooms where they were trying on wedding dresses. As I was—for him, to be married to him! Tucked in a softly illumined boîte, behind curtains that had the power to shush reality itself, I had been mesmerized by a garment composed of shambolic layers of voile, the ravages of deconstruction contested by the prim faux-Victorian ascent of mother-of-pearl buttons up its bodice to the high neck. By contrast with this uptightness, the insincerity of my small-boned face was recast as limpid provocation. The artful infliction of ruin holds perverse appeal for perfectionists, or maybe I should speak only for myself: by its wit, by its excesses, deconstruction ejects my monotonous perfectionist dread of error and seats playfulness in its place; surely if your seams are exposed, your ruching disheveled, your every edge fraying, the self within has flown perfectionism’s cage. This dress as good as shouted The witch is dead, the wicked witch is dead!, and when, through the silencing velvet, the salesclerk’s arm thrust a lesser garment, I said Hey, and he made eye contact with my reflection and I said What do you think— and he studied us, me and the dress, whose gloriousness drained away as he gazed. To apologize for his inability to say what I’d hoped he would say (It’s you) I offered Punk Miss Havisham? and he laughed a confused laugh that made it impossible for me to wander out to the semipublic cove where dresses were displayed to fiancés. That changeling in skinny leather britches, that Barneys Ariel spirited away the exalted dress before it could suffer my crude attempts at fitting it back onto its hanger. The analyst never even saw it.
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