Missy loved my mother. My mother loved Missy. Both of them loved Daniel but they were getting along okay. And that is where, if this were a film of her life, I would slowly close the iris, a sepia-tone vignette fading with a little grace into an ending for her. Her life wasn’t over, but my part in it was, because I finally had an answer as to how I felt about my mother. Two different truths at once: I wished her well. I no longer loved her.
* * *
—
That happened in part because of Dr. Franklin D. Baum, MD. He has hovered invisibly over this story in that I was his patient in psychoanalysis from the age of four and a half until I was nine. He was a pioneer of child psychiatry. He had a kind, wide face with inquisitive eyes behind enormous black-framed glasses. He had the wavy chunk of white hair common to geniuses and philosophers. When I was a child there was a book on his shelf called The Wolf Man that I was disappointed to learn from him wasn’t about a real wolf man.
I saw him four times a week (later three times a week) for reasons that do not entirely make sense. My parents had each been helped in their late twenties by psychiatry. I was, as I have described, a sensitive child. Insomnia, a weird imagination, encopresis, temper tantrums, getting bullied in school, rage, and a lot of churning anxiety. My parents regarded my brain like the control center of a nuclear reactor with some alarming dials and switches and they hoped Dr. Baum might have the operator’s manual.
Those all sound like reasons for therapy, but they’re only why I thought I was there. The real reason I was in psychoanalysis at the age of four and a half is that something was wrong. There was a tension in our house, invisible and dangerous, like a wire stretched across a hallway.
I benefited from those sessions, in that I liked knowing how a mind worked. At six and seven and eight years old, I talked to adults about the conflict I had between id and superego in a way that was disturbing but a little cute. I learned about repression and transference and projection, perhaps with more expertise than you’d think, because I had a partner to talk to. My mother was also Dr. Baum’s patient. She went in the morning and I went in the afternoon.
Her therapy, I was told, was to help her deal with her migraines. Even at the time, my mother joked about this. She was a woman in Southern California with migraines and a therapist and a Mercedes and a house with a swimming pool. She was a type. It was ironic, she said, because that was so obviously not her.
Even at the time, I was suspicious of her therapy. I asked if they had candlelit breakfast sessions. When Dad took longer trips to Chicago, Dr. Baum asked me if I felt I had to be the man of the house with my father gone.
I said, “No, why, do you?”
“You have a way with zingers,” Dr. Baum said to me.
This was how I learned about the Oedipus complex, and I was annoyed to learn that I was unnerved by their relationship because I secretly wanted to sleep with her.
I didn’t resist this, because I had just recently found out there were bones in my hand. In other words, there were certain things common to all hands, including my own, and so there had to be things common to all psyches. If science insisted on it, and boxed me in by saying that to deny it was, well, denial, then I wouldn’t deny it but embrace it. I asked him if I just admitted that my developing self wanted to sleep with my mother, would all those queasy-making feelings about him go away?
I didn’t trust him. As my parents’ marriage dissolved, my mother did what she called “breaking” with Dr. Baum, in anger at what she felt was manipulative behavior (he told her that if I ended therapy, I would become a drug addict). She stopped seeing him, I stopped seeing him, and shortly after, we moved to San Francisco.
For years I rarely thought of Dr. Baum. I had a vague feeling that therapy wasn’t a real science. If I told someone that I’d been in psychoanalysis until I was nine years old, people assumed I misremembered, and if I added that my mother was also his patient, I was told I had to be wrong about that, too. It made no sense.
* * *
—
When my mother was living with me and Lindsay, I asked her about her odd choices, and she told me, as I have mentioned, of her terrible upbringing by a father who didn’t want her, of the many ways the world treated her poorly.
“When your father was traveling, I took a lover,” she said, and I knew who it was. “He opened me up as a woman,” she continued, and I think she said more in that vein but everything after the involuntary visuals that accompanied “he opened me up as a woman” was lost in the resulting riptide of my stomach trying to turn itself inside out. As soon as I was able to hear more, my mother was saying that my father was inept, but this man gave her her first orgasm.
“It was Dr. Baum,” I said.
“Oh, no,” she said. “No, no, no.” Startled I would even think that. And she named instead a friend of my father’s whose marriage had been over in every way but actual divorce. “They were swingers,” she explained. “Or I thought it was both of them. He was, at least. He gave me herpes,” and then there was more again, but I heard it like the static you hear in between the frequencies of radio stations.
How I reacted to hearing all at once about her first orgasm, her herpes, and how she cheated on my father reminded me of World War I movie footage of a strong man showing how he could withstand being hit by cannon balls. I knew what his grimace meant as he was mouthing the silent words, “I’m fine.”
Then, years later, I had a long conversation with a friend of hers whose relationship with her had fallen apart. She wanted me to know one thing specifically. “Your mother was never the same after her affair with that psychiatrist.”
I interrupted her, “Which psychiatrist?” She’d known several, socially, in San Francisco.
“Her psychiatrist.”
I couldn’t remember if my mother had continued therapy in San Francisco. “Someone she knew?”
“The one in Newport Beach. Your psychiatrist. Whatever his name was.”
I need to be specific here. After the conversation was over I lay down on the floor and I hissed: You bastard, you bastard, you bastard, so many times the syllables lost their literal meaning and became instead much older than myself, a chant maybe or a Greek tragedy’s strophe, without translation. Then I wrote down everything I could remember of what she had said. My mother had absolutely, positively told her that she’d slept with Dr. Baum.
It should have been settled for me. My mother had slept with my psychiatrist—her psychiatrist. But I was reminded of how patting down a cowlick only works for so long, and before much time had passed it was like the hair was beginning to stand up again. My mother was lying. Either to me or to her old friend.
It could have stayed there, open-ended. You can make a life with unanswered questions.
During my second semester at UC Irvine, I enrolled in a memoir-writing class with Geoffrey Wolff, whose book The Duke of Deception unraveled the past of his con man father. Wolff encouraged us to go deep, and so one evening while my girlfriend took a shower, I wrote the beginning pages of this volume, and, as I’ve mentioned, I tried to throw them away.
After Alice told me to keep going, I wrote without much effort or emotion. I managed about ten thousand words. It read like I was presenting a diorama of horrors whose victims screamed through thick museum glass. But it was beautiful in a cold, mechanical way, so I was satisfied with it.
But I kept coming back to Alice’s initial question: how did it make me feel? It annoyed me that I didn’t know the answer.
* * *
—
Being a graduate student meant I was entitled to eight free therapy sessions with a graduate student in psychology, in my case a woman slightly younger than me. Carrie was fresh to her profession, smart, alert, and fascinated by why I was there.
I didn’t come in presenting my question about the memoir. Instead, I explained that I wanted to talk
about my heart. Was it a problem that I was in love?
I’m not sure Carrie had ever wondered if this could be a problem for someone, but I explained that I had once been in love with Darcy, and that had winked out instantly. And before that, I had been in love with Lindsay, and before that Melanie (I hadn’t had time to fall in love with Jess or Cindy, but eventually I would have tried). And before that Noelle, and Heidi. Further, I went from relationship to relationship without a gap in between. And now I was in love with Alice. Was I setting myself up to repeat my old problems?
Carrie asked about how it had ended with Darcy. I explained that right after the first semester had started, she was walking down the staircase of my father’s house, and she tripped. She was holding a bottle, and when she fell, she drove a piece of glass through the meat of her palm. At the emergency room we learned she had almost severed a tendon.
Darcy decided to convalesce back at her parents’ house for a few weeks. This left me and Alice to start getting to know each other.
Carrie asked if it was like letting go of one hand, panicking, and then grabbing at another, which I thought was a smart and familiar question. I explained that no, I’d fallen out of love with Darcy long before, but was so terrified of her anger that I hadn’t broken up with her. Without her around, it was like having white noise removed from my life. I could hear myself think again.
Then why was I with Alice, she asked.
I asked her if she’d ever noticed the piped-in music in Irvine? It seemed to come through invisible speakers, and you could barely hear it. Carrie wasn’t sure if she had, so I explained.
Corona del Mar, where I’d grown up, was near Irvine. I knew some secrets about the place. Irvine was a planned community, and since it was planned in 1965, the idea behind every decision was to prevent riots and insurrection. So the campus and community were made to be containable, predictable, safe, and boring.
On my first day back in town since I’d left Setting Sun Drive twenty years before, I asked my classmates if they’d noticed you couldn’t walk directly into any of the university’s buildings—you had to go up or down stairs, and around corners, and all the windows were slits, to deter rioters from storming the buildings. The design had worked better than they could have imagined in that the students here were famous for being docile. They were the children of Asian immigrants, born-again Christians whose most rebellious streak was skateboarding, but only in the officially sanctioned skating zones. The students I taught freshman composition to were so polite I felt that forcing them to answer questions was like ripening fruit by hitting it with a brick.
In short, no one had noticed how odd the building entryways were, except Alice. Of all the graduate students I talked to, only she had taught college before. Ten years in New York City, freshman composition, just like we were teaching now. Only she’d been doing it with students who were slightly less docile, you might say. She had a New York knowingness, like Leonard Michaels, but without the attitude. This was why the staff here already deferred to her, and she deferred right back to them, because she didn’t want to stick out more than she already did.
So that, I explained to my therapist, was one reason I liked her. She had experience and authority on her side. But there was something deeper than that, and it had to do with the imbecilic food court that had arisen in place of a student center.
The first time I had lunch with my classmates at the food court, I was showing off how much I knew about the area. There was no student center because they didn’t want a place where rioters could congregate. So instead, this tame series of courtyards contained retail shops. Alice had already noticed how it was different from New York. She didn’t mean the obvious stuff. Not just how clean it was here. Nor how pleasant the weather. Nor how hard it was to read someone’s economic or class status. No, this place was really different, disturbingly.
“Like what?”
“We’re outside. Why is there music?”
I almost said, “What music?” But I knew what she meant—it was just so obvious that I wasn’t paying attention. There were hidden speakers playing safe, no-lyrics jazzy arrangements of songs that had never even had much of an identity when they were in vogue twenty years ago. I couldn’t explain why. This was, now that she’d pointed it out, weird.
I wanted to read Alice’s fiction because I suspected it was probably smart. I read her first submissions a few weeks later, and her work was annoyingly good. It was funny and cynical and forgiving of characters’ weaknesses. This admiration didn’t go the other way: when she first read my work, she thought it was too clever. I hated not being able to impress her easily.
Most of our classmates were in their twenties. Alice and I were in our thirties, and each of us had failed novels hidden in boxes. We’d each gotten handwritten rejection notes and been finalists in contests, and felt success was tantalizingly close often enough that we were, if not cynical, informed. When I looked across the workshop table, I saw a fellow commando who wasn’t going to let a moment of training go to waste.
Alice said, “I like you because you seem calm, but inside you have this tension and anxiety.”
“You mean I remind you of you.”
“Yup.”
We tried not to get involved with each other, in part because I was still technically with Darcy, but also because we were both cautious. Alice was especially cautious.
Breaking up with Darcy was messy. She and I had rented an apartment together but she’d never quite moved in. One afternoon, Alice volunteered to help me segregate Darcy’s stuff, which she turned out to be proficient at. “I’m good in a crisis,” she said, which wasn’t exactly an explanation of her past. In two hours, all of Darcy’s belongings were in a neat, squared-off stack in the living room, all of my stuff was elsewhere (“You don’t want her to fuck with it,” Alice explained), and I kept asking, “Why are you so good in a crisis?”
She just shook her head. “I’m not ready to tell you my thing.”
Like I’ve said, you aren’t an adult until it takes more than one date to tell your life story. Alice and I had a few trips to Starbucks, a few sakes at sushi bars, before she’d caught up on the tales of what made me. Not told in any particular order, but in a serpentine way that I hoped would encourage her to talk about herself. She responded to many anecdotes with a quiet, “You have an eight-hundred-pound mother to deal with.”
For over a month, regardless of how many openings I gave her, she didn’t talk about her own past, beyond, “New York. Teaching. Ten years.” She said that it was a relief to be in a new place where no one knew “her thing.” What thing? She still wasn’t ready to tell me.
When she did, finally, at a touristy diner in Long Beach, she said it without amendments: beaten and raped at knifepoint, on a mound of broken glass. She testified against the guy at trial and then her roommate was raped.
So there we sat, a man with an eight-hundred-pound mother, and a woman who’d been raped. We were like a couple of U.S. marshals who’d just shown each other their trauma badges. I said what she’d just laid out was so much more intense than anything I’d been through. She said it wasn’t a contest.
“Sometimes,” she said a little later, “you find someone you realize you can share—”
“Oh, shut up!” I yelled, and then after a second, she burst out laughing as hard as I’d ever heard anyone laugh.
A few weeks later, she and I were having lunch in the student center area. It was packed with students again, fresh-faced, obedient kids buying ramen bowls in this clean, safe, temperate place. The music was playing, as ever.
Alice looked beyond me. “It’s the whore.” She was too subtle to gesture, but she directed me with her eyes. She knew how to indicate without anyone else noticing, but I tended to wear big muddy boots when I was trying to see.
Here were five hundred students churning around in white shorts
and clean expensive T-shirts, sunglasses and TUMI book bags. It could not have been a more prosperous or naive environment. But there, walking in the crowd, was a whore.
I can’t guess how old she was. Her skin was sun-damaged and dehydrated. Her jaw jutted unnaturally. She was slinging a heavy purse over her shoulder. She wore a red, spangly top and a distressing amount of makeup. She was somewhere between hobbling and marching on her heels toward the ladies’ room.
No one else saw her. But Alice and I were there long enough for the woman to come out and walk again unnoticed through the crowd. No one reacted. She didn’t draw a single student’s glance. It was like she was invisible to most people.
I couldn’t account for this. What was a whore doing in Irvine? Of course—she was doing what she would be doing anywhere. Apparently it wasn’t all about obeying rules here. But why wasn’t anyone else able to see her? Alice was in that moment my inspiration for noticing what was right in front of my eyes.
This was a long story to tell in therapy. But at the end, my therapist nodded. Alice saw things. Which I needed help with. It wasn’t bad, was it, Carrie asked, falling in love with someone who heard the music and asked why it was there? Someone who saw the whore and didn’t need to ask why the whore was there?
I said it was like having a guide to the secrets of all the world and what monstrous text lay underneath. Also, I said, Alice had amazing green eyes and was a great kisser.
Relationships can be the easiest place to freely make the same damned mistake over and over. Or to break free. I felt like I was asking the right questions now. I had shit to deal with. So did Alice. We were doing it separately, but it was helpful to have a friend who understood the mission.
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