Amor and Psycho: Stories

by Carolyn Cooke

  She’d come to the small town in pursuit of a dancer called Peter Dvorjak, whom she had met when he performed in a festival in San Miguel de Allende: He begged her to become involved with him. She had been moved by his physicality, by his ability to communicate, through dance, complex psychological states. Peter Dvorjak was drawn, in turn, by Dr. Drema’s intensity, intuition, experience and apparent lack of interest in producing a child of her own.

  Peter had a child from a previous marriage, a boy called Mikhail, who preferred to be called Mike. Mike was another reason why Dr. Drema became interested in Peter—and why she kept a corn snake in a terrarium in her consulting room, on a table covered with a Persian rug. The snake represented Dr. Drema’s commitment to Mike. It also caused the first frisson between herself and Peter, who proved squeamish around thawed mice. Dr. Drema responded generously—generosity was easy—and said the snake could live at her place. She kept the tank in her consulting room, the heart of her house; she didn’t mind. Dr. Drema’s chief interest in life lay in the study of symbols—and what animal is more symbolic than a snake?

  She and Mike named the snake Herpatia. Sometimes, between appointments, Dr. Drema removed Herpatia from the tank and let the snake slither between her hands and around her shoulders. Herpatia’s skin felt like fine leather; she was also playful and strong, even headstrong, since this quality expressed itself most strongly in her head. One time, Herpatia slithered down the cleavage of Dr. Drema’s sweater and emerged above the metal button on her jeans. She made a light, dry sound, traveling, and produced an extraordinary sensation; Dr. Drema had never felt anything like it.

  Always, after she had handled the snake, Dr. Drema washed her hands. Someone at the pet store had said, “You must always wash your hands after handling the snake,” plus one other indelible word: ectoparasite. Convincing!

  Herpatia, in her twenty-gallon tank, became a point of focus for Dr. Drema’s patients—a live animal, a mythic presence, but not active enough to distract from the analytic work. The snake also drew Mike naturally into this room of confidences in which anything could be said. Dr. Drema herself found the atmosphere—the live animal, the heavy silence, the glittering bands of dust from old rugs in the air—vicariously liberating. She liked all animals, but especially nonmammals. Before the corn snake—in San Miguel—she used to keep a little yellow bird, which sometimes sat upon her shoulder while she listened to her patients talk.

  Sometimes she sat in the consulting room with Mike and kept him company while he handled Herpatia. In Dr. Drema’s professional opinion, Mike, at ten, was a too-busy child, always studying Greek or Latin, or tennis, or openings in chess, or practicing Wholfheart on the violin. Peter Dvorjak took his responsibilities as a parent seriously. A serious person himself, he rose every morning at 5:00 a.m. to stretch and do his movement exercises. He then spent hours every day rehearsing—living in his body.

  The level of the Dvorjaks’ activity intrigued Dr. Drema. Most days, she sat in her consulting room drinking mugs of weak tea, which she replenished with water from her electric kettle, while patients came to her, or called, at their own expense, on the telephone.

  Although anguished young professionals were her bread and butter, Dr. Drema found most satisfaction working with adolescents. Their relative openness did not draw her, because the open kind of child did not visit Dr. Drema. The children Dr. Drema saw had clouded over. Their eyes had a milky bluish cast, like Herpatia’s eyes before she shed her skin. Some had damaged their surfaces—cut them, or stuffed or shrunk them. Some had no surface at all, only depths, which Dr. Drema tried to plumb in a series of fifty-minute hours. She always had a beautiful career; she intended to write a book on adolescence, the cliff over which one had to persuade oneself to jump. In her dreams she heard the tone she needed; the whole scope of her work revealed itself. But when she woke, she could not hold on to it—sometimes in her dreams this tone was a scent, something wild and animal, and she, Dr. Drema, lay concealed, ready to strike and seize it.

  Dr. Drema’s large house easily embraced Peter and Mike; she’d planned from the start to take them in. Her income, supplemented by the pittance Peter Dvorjak brought in from his grants, could support them all. Such generosity came easily to Dr. Drema, because Peter brought riches of his own: an energy that came from performing, from creating something original—dances, choreography, and the child.

  Dr. Drema and Peter did not understand money in the same way. Dr. Drema maintained a practical relation to the stuff. Money equaled time, energy, power. Peter, on the other hand, claimed not to care. He lived from grant to grant and by teaching. He lived dependently already, as Dr. Drema saw it. And yet he had a charming, stubborn pride, or perhaps just reluctance, when it came to moving permanently into the Customs House. Dr. Drema encouraged Peter to talk about his reluctance so that he might learn to understand and even overcome it.

  One morning, Dr. Drema sat at her kitchen table, sipping tea and watching Mike spread honey on a slice of toast. It pleased her to see the child calmly using the things—the knife, the jar of honey, the toast, the plate—that she had bought for their work (she meant their life!) together. Mike dipped the knife into the honey, and a few crumbs migrated into the jar. For Dr. Drema, in some respects a fastidious person, this seemed like a defining moment, though what it defined, she couldn’t say. Patients generally loved her for her good qualities: her loud, authentic, life-loving laugh, her irreverence, the depth of her understanding and her empathy with the psychic life of others. She was brilliant but not pretentious; she was down-to-earth; her credentials were impeccable and enviable and might have worked against her were it not for the muddle of her actual life, the charming gap between professional and personal practice. Perhaps because of her profession, people assumed that generosity dominated her character.

  The image of crumbs in the honey jar filled Dr. Drema with warmth and longing, sensations followed, as time went by, by a more irritable hunger.

  * * *

  PETER DVORJAK’S RELATION to his dance company was parental. He ran them; he bullied them. He fretted over his dancers’ welfare more than his own, or Mike’s. He was also very like them. The company survived on grants, which Peter Dvorjak wrote the way coal miners go down into the mines. He descended into the writing and emerged hours later, the muscles in his arms shiny, his hair standing up on end, his eyes ringed with gray. All his work depended on these peanuts. Sometimes he used Dr. Drema’s consulting room, spending hours on his laptop computer, writing a grant for a new piece to be performed in the spring. Dr. Drema encouraged him; a night like this was heaven, as far as she was concerned. She made corn fritters for Mike and herself and served them under a blanket of maple syrup. Sometimes they let Herpatia bask on a pizza stone in a slightly warmed oven while they drank tea at the kitchen table and played Battleship or chess. Upstairs, Peter Dvorjak tapped at his keyboard, used his lighter and wound open the casement before he leaned out of the window to smoke. For Dr. Drema, a large source of happiness consisted of creating conditions that allowed others to work, to behave in a higher way. She did not, herself, have this kind of energy or drive. She hoped to write a book about primal dramas in adolescence; it seemed like work she could do in a slow, solitary way, even in bed, if she wanted to. When she realized that she might be able to wake at eight and lie in bed writing all morning in a notebook, Dr. Drema felt a fresh burst of confidence: She could do this.

  She bought a notebook and spent time between her sessions in a state of inspiration. But her notes lost their pungency as they lay dormant. Later, her observations seemed banal, her handwriting indecipherable or unattractive. It was as if the writing had given over its crucial function—to communicate words to herself—and become simply an artifact, a repository of thought. The notebook itself (handsome, leather) seemed more valuable than the words it contained. Eventually, the notebook slipped behind the headboard of Dr. Drema’s bed, swallowed as if into her unconscious mind, along with the Moncrieff translat
ion of The Guermantes Way, an important pair of glasses, a slender digital camera with photographs of Peter Dvorjak in San Miguel de Allende embedded on a chip inside, a slice of whole grain toast, and a postcard from Dr. Drema’s mother, showing the scenic overlook from which, according to Mrs. Drema’s note on the back, a man from Idaho had recently pushed his second wife. The notebook slipped behind the headboard and became another artifact of Dr. Drema’s psychic life. She stopped thinking about it; she forgot what she had written.

  THE TINY THEATER FILLED UP for the first performance of Peter Dvorjak’s new show; some in the audience sat on cracks between the seats. Dr. Drema felt surprised that anyone tolerated the shortage without complaining; she was used to getting what she paid for. She’d taken precautions, arrived early, and nabbed a single seat in the front row.

  A couple of men climbed over her knees. One man asked the other, “Is this the choreographer you said is sublime, or does he work from a rigid computer-generated formula?”

  “Remind me what sublime means. Spontaneous?”

  “It means awesome.”

  Before the show began, stagehands emerged from the rear of the theater and laid staging across the corridor that led to the fire exit. It was as if Dr. Drema’s body sprouted a hundred buttons that someone simultaneously pushed. The sensation of anxiety approached ecstasy simply because it was so intense. Had she created a too-rigid formula for her psyche, wondered Dr. Drema, digging and probing all day so that her patients, as Freud suggested, could learn to be simply unhappy, in ordinary ways? Had she missed the noisy camaraderie, the heady dangers of real life?

  The lights came up. Peter Dvorjak knelt over a suitcase. Dr. Drema relaxed immediately; she understood symbols, baggage. He’d covered his powerful, toned body in loose clothing—work pants and a work shirt in martial green. Peter Dvorjak spoke of a lover, clearly male, who had “gone in” when he was twenty-three. The story immediately drew her in, and Dr. Drema forgot about the discomfort of the too-few seats. Apart from the threat of fire, she felt happy; she loved to listen. Listening was her calling, attention without action, noticing what part of the story was being withheld. She had less sensitivity to movement, though she liked to watch.

  Peter Dvorjak moved fluidly across the stage, communicating in supple or intentionally awkward gestures something human that transcended analysis. Dr. Drema watched, impressed, slightly outside the moment. She enjoyed being part of a full house, watching her young lover move across the stage, curl up into a plastic cube, roll ecstatically across the floor, rise and grind and tango with the imaginary prisoner and move as if he were making love to this other man, although it wasn’t sex: It was tango, hip-hop and ballet. Dr. Drema’s skin pricked up. She felt a chill, in spite of the body-heated air.

  A woman appeared on the stage and began to sing a haunting melody. The company joined her, dancers of various colors, mostly androgynes, very slight. Peter Dvorjak looked like an Amazon, except that he was short, his tragedy—or maybe the source of his machismo—as a dancer. The dancers whirled across the stage into one another’s arms. The smallest ones lifted and tossed the heaviest like Hacky Sacks. Dr. Drema experienced it all intensely. Possibly the glass of wine she’d had with dinner? She rarely drank, because of the health risks, and the loss of self-control. Now every jeté and glissade, all the grands ronds de jambe, planted her more firmly in her chair. The planted feeling was not rootedness; it was a sensation of being nailed down in her role as observer, as audience. The situation became almost immediately unbearable, not because Dr. Drema could not bear it, but because she wanted to be part of the movement. She began, almost mischievously, to rub her hands over and over each other, producing a dry, sandpapery sound. Soon the audience picked up on her friction and began to rub their hands together, too. Dr. Drema had started it, and now everyone joined in, and Peter Dvorjak improvised, moving to the rhythm and sound of the hands.

  “That was weird,” someone said at intermission.

  “She started it,” said someone Dr. Drema couldn’t see.

  Yes, no, thought Dr. Drema. She could argue with equal vigor on one side or the other.

  At the reception afterward, Peter introduced her and announced to his dancers, “The doctor and I are lovers.” The loose, expanding confederation of dancers and acolytes battled with one another to sit next to Dr. Drema on the slippery cushions; they spilled beer on her, offered her cigarettes. They pressed boldly up against her, murmuring, “That’s cool,” and “That’s hot—your being older.”

  Dr. Drema asked them about the performance, what they thought it meant. The prisoner’s crime was not significant, the dancers agreed, because the play wasn’t about guilt or innocence, but about essence, and how the state, in some profound sense, controls the essence of who we are—whether we are “inside” or “outside” the margins of society. A young dancer said, “The prison system is a powerful engine of hegemony; the play’s point is that we operate within that system, whether we agree with it or not.” Another dancer said, “Really, it’s just the story of Peter’s first love, his sexual awakening. That’s what his work is always about.”

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING, Dr. Drema walked downtown to a gift shop and bought three pair of fuzzy lobster slippers for Peter Dvorjak, Mike and herself. Dr. Drema thought the lobster slippers might bind the three of them symbolically while also acknowledging the shell that kept each of them protected and private. (Mike was a Cancer and had a hard shell.) She hoped Mike and Peter would think of her when they wore the slippers.

  She was walking home when her cell phone rang—her mother, who called every Saturday. Mrs. Drema was a vessel for news from the town where Dr. Drema had grown up. Over the course of the week, she filled and then bubbled over with the dramas of her town—the accidents that were not quite accidents, the murders and illnesses. For a town, the numbers were high. There was the man who worked at the boatyard and had encased his ex-wife in fiberglass, the couple in the old apartments behind the Catholic church who drugged tourists and then used them sexually, the man from Idaho who had thrown two consecutive wives from the cliffs into the ocean. Many of these felons or their victims had passed through Mrs. Drema’s third-grade class, and Mrs. Drema remembered significant, retrospectively revealing details about each of them. She saw into their reasons and personal histories with compassion and empathy, and Dr. Drema had been profoundly influenced by her mother’s methods of analysis.

  She listened now out of a complicated sense of duty; talking about the disturbances of strangers was their way of keeping connected and close.

  “You feel the murderer is less guilty of his crime because of his violent history,” Dr. Drema said when Mrs. Drema went quiet.

  “I suppose I do.”

  After three-quarters of an hour, Dr. Drema let the conversation stall. “Well,” she said, “save time next week?”

  “Same time, you mean.”

  “That’s what I said,” said Dr. Drema pleasantly.

  Mrs. Drema would have loved nothing more than to listen to the lives of Dr. Drema’s patients, not out of a frivolous curiosity, but from an earnest interest in humanity. Professional ethics, however, compelled Dr. Drema to keep her analysands’ stories confidential. And so she continued to do what she had done best all her life—to listen, to withhold.

  THAT NIGHT in the Customs House, Dr. Drema slept intensely. She dreamed of the town where she had originated—the town at the root of herself, or, rather, the reservoir underneath the town. Here, on a lake in the dark, she discovered an underground boat, which carried her across the slow black water under no sky, and after she had paddled for a time, she reached a stony island where underground birds made their nests in underground trees covered with pale green lichens. Dr. Drema spread her blanket, unwrapped a meal of bread and cheese and ate, with pleasure, in the company of worms. This rare waterfront property seemed exceedingly valuable and desirable, but also interior, dark and original, like a mind.

  Over
coffee in the morning, Peter smoked in his mournful Eastern European manner. Dr. Drema knew she would miss him when she moved, this carelessly disheveled young man who looked so beautiful smoking in her kitchen, and begged her for love. She felt shy, in a middle-aged way, about her body, and she’d understood from the beginning the toll such a relationship could take on her energy and time and ultimately her amour propre. In spite of what people said about analysts, she had to be sane: Sanity was the sine qua non of her credibility. Also, Peter had his habits of movement, and she had hers. Already she felt the mobilizing signs: an itchiness like the beginning of a cold; her shpilkes.

  SOME OPPORTUNITY PRESENTED itself in California; Dr. Drema sold the Customs House and moved. She gave Peter one of the Persian rugs he’d admired, and put the rest in storage; she offered Herpatia and the tank, as well. Mike registered sadness, even a little wild grief at the loss of Dr. Drema, who promised that they could keep in touch by telephone. He wore almost compulsively the pair of lobster slippers she’d given him. Peter agreed to keep the snake under conditions that Mike tried to meet. He never forgot to feed Herpatia her frozen pinkies until summer, when he went away to a camp devoted to violin instruction and Jewish spirituality.

  By this time, Peter had become interested in the snake, the way it moved and settled and used its body. He liked the way Mike and Herpatia interacted, the dry sound Herpatia made when she slid across Mike’s loosely open hands or wound around his shoulders. He hoped soon to feel comfortable handling the snake himself; he planned to do some choreography around the idea of a man learning to trust a snake.