We were silent for a long while. And then the woman said, “I’m going home.” Perhaps I began to say something. Hard to know because before the words could properly form, I saw pale skin flash: the sole of her foot, the back of her hand. She was swimming to shore.
I did not, in fact, think she was a monster. Or, rather, I was not thinking of her, as she swam to shore, at all. I was thinking, as all people who are honest with themselves know they do, after an intimate revelation of this kind, of myself. Of how this reflected on me. I was thinking about the last time I had been as sure of a decision as she had been of hers. Of a decision other than Yes, in fact I will have this next drink. I thought about the day I drove to San Francisco. I thought about checking into a hotel there, about sitting down at another hotel’s bar. I thought about fucking a stranger and I thought about finding out that I was pregnant by that stranger, and I thought about deciding to keep the child. And I thought, for a long time, of how being in the water, there were so few decisions to make. All of them, in fact—swim left or swim right; swim in or swim out—circling the single, central decision: keep swimming or stop. I paddled for a while, pondering this. Pondering also how tired I was. Of the discrete—as in distinct, as in finite—pleasure I might take in making one last decision and then no more. But I am, as I have said, a practical woman. Which is to say that the pleasures others take in the extremes of both indulgence and renunciation, these luxuries I have never quite been able—though damn I was trying—to access. I swam out and I swam out and I swam out, and just before I knew I would be too tired to swim back in, I swam back in. My wallet and my cell phone were gone, but my clothes and my keys, which I’d plunged beneath a mound of sand, were still there. I walked to my car. The sun was coming up. I felt sure I was sober enough to drive.
Los Angeles, 2017
My mother and I were in her kitchen and she was fixing herself a gin and tonic. Four ice cubes in a highball glass, pouring gin for one count, two counts, two and a half. Pouring tonic for one count. More of a splash. I watched her slice a lime, squeeze a wedge over the glass. The windows above her sink, the windows before which she stood, faced west. Saturday, three o’clock, the sun falling to meet the ocean. What filtered in through the windows: light cut with smog, the result the color of Macallan single malt, neat. The glass I was turning in tight circles on the table held nothing stronger than lemonade, but these were still the comparisons that compelled me: sky the color of scotch; bark the syrup-brown of bourbon; cheeks the raw pink of summer’s first rosé. I’d driven down for lunch, which she and I had eaten. I had made conversation and refused several plants. Soon I would drive back up.
“So,” my mother said, “have you thought about starting to—”
“Mom.”
“Honey, there’s no need to snap at me.”
“I didn’t snap.”
“And you didn’t even let me finish, you don’t even know—”
“I do know.”
“Well. It’s been five years,” she said.
“So?”
“So, don’t you think it’s time to, you know”—she turned and smiled—“get back out there?”
“Mom.”
“I ran into—do you remember Barb from book club? Because I had lunch with her at the Americana last Saturday, and it turns out her son is in L.A. now—you remember he was back East for a while after college, working in—advertising I think it was? Well then he decided he wanted to be a doctor so first he had to get a postbac and then there were four years of medical school and—anyway: he just finished his residency at USC—or maybe it was UCLA?—obstetrics I think, obstetrics and gynecology, and of course Barb asked about you and I was telling her, you know, this and that, and then she asked about—”
“Are you trying to set me up with a male gynecologist?”
“Honey, really, there’s no need to take that tone with me, I don’t see—”
“You don’t see what’s wrong with male gynecologists.”
“No, honey, honestly I don’t. But he’s not the point, of course you don’t have to date him, though I did get his number in case—”
“I don’t even live in L.A. This is that William Morris job all over—” Do I need to mention that I did not get that job? I did not get that job.
“The point is I don’t see what’s wrong with encouraging you to date.” Backlit, my mother was a silhouette in motion, her hips narrow, the edges of her—cheekbones, collarbones, hips, elbows—high and sharp and rapid. You’d have to get closer to see how puffy the skin was under her eyes, how rosy the nose.
“Nothing, Mom. Nothing’s wrong with encouraging me to date. And nothing’s wrong with me not wanting to.” This was not exactly true. Not that there was something wrong with me not wanting to date, just that I did want to.
“Look, I know what you’re going through.”
“Do you.” Only there was a problem.
“You know I was married once, before I met your father.” My mother was nodding vigorously and pulling out a chair and settling in at the table for a nice long chat.
A problem that was preventing me from dating.
“Well. After that marriage ended of course it took me forever to, well, get back on the old horse, so to speak”—my mother was, I believe, winking—“so long in fact that I went into therapy to figure out what was wrong with me, if I was blocked or, I don’t know”—in a sort of whisper—“frigid or something.” For the record, I don’t believe in meditation. I don’t believe in crystals or cleanses or cosmic dusts.
“Was there?” I do believe in playing dead.
“Was there what?”
“Was there something wrong with you?” Playing dead was what I was doing in this conversation with my mother. Also what I was doing with respect to dating.
My mother laughed and took a sip of her gin and tonic and beaked her head in my direction, her neck extending confidentially. “Of course not! And even if there had been they never would have told—the point isn’t blame, it’s understanding, it’s self-knowledge, you know that, you’ve been in therapy, haven’t you?”
“Okay, so”—trying to work with her—“what did you learn about yourself?”
“Well first we had to talk about my childhood, which, you can imagine how long that took, and then for a while he just asked me about my dreams, told me to keep a dream journal, made me read him the entries—he was a Freudian, and Freudians are big into dreams—so even though I was going three times a week it was actually months before we even started talking in any really direct way about dating—or, well, about sex. Because that was the problem, really, it wasn’t that I didn’t want to date. Or, see, that’s what I figured out, it wasn’t dating I was afraid of it was the exposure, the emotional exposure of sex. That’s what I was worried about. Which actually made a lot of sense because I loved flirting”—that flutter of eyelashes again—“and of course it didn’t hurt that I was great at it, bantering, that back-and-forth”—is it possible that at some point my mother was capable of listening—“and I loved going to bars with my girlfriends, giving a guy my number, only after—after, when he called, I could never quite say yes to dinner, to drinks, I was just terrified of what would happen. And it wasn’t just—it turned out it wasn’t just my first marriage, the fact that I’d married so young and trusted my first husband so completely and been—”
“So he was helpful?” Not helpful: the reminder this monologue is furnishing. The reminder of the fact that my mother and I, surface presentation, ability to recognize one’s own drinking problem, these things aside, my mother and I, we’re quite similar.
“Oh enormously.” That she went to a Freudian, this makes sense. Put my dating problem, temporarily, to the side. Know about my mother that she doesn’t think much of the middle ground. Very little imagination, great follow-through. “Though not quite in the way you might think.” She drained her gin and tonic and stood, went to the counter to fix herself another, shot me, on the way, a sly grin. I knew
what I should do. I knew I should sit quietly and sip my lemonade and hope my mother’s pride prevented her from going on. But fine, I’ll admit it. I was curious.
“All right, Mom.” She was back at the table now, and she’d found a straw for her drink, metal, congratulations, Mom. “All right, I’ll bite. How did he help you?”
“Well.” With the metal straw my mother was working quickly. Already a third of her drink had disappeared. “The thing is. So in Freudian therapy you lay on a couch and the therapist sits behind you. I think he explained to me, early on, the point of the tradition, though I can’t quite remember now—and anyway, I liked it, not looking at him while he listened to me, it meant I wasn’t also trying to figure out what he was thinking of me, trying to read his facial expressions; it can be, you know, very inhibiting.”
“I’m sure.” My face quiet, eyes blinking.
“But so what this also meant was that I only saw him twice the whole session, once when I came in and then again when I left. So for the whole hour, well, for the whole fifty minutes, he was watching me. It was”—there was an inch of liquid left in her glass, less—“well, frankly it was—”
“Mom, you don’t have to—”
“What? It was erotic. You asked.” She rolled her eyes, finished her drink, got up to fix herself a third. “This was”—her back was to me now—“right around the time your grandmother got sick. And then when she died, well, without her working there was no more money for extravagances, and your grandfather considered therapy—analysis—an extravagance. So I told Robert—Rob—my analyst, I told him I would have to stop going to therapy. To analysis. He offered me a reduced rate, but I was barely working, picking up boom work on little films here and there, even at the fee he was suggesting, I just couldn’t afford it. Did I tell you—I didn’t, I should”—her head whipped around, her eyes, could they possibly have been twinkling—“how attractive he was? Square jaw, broad shoulders, thick, black hair, a mustache, I thought maybe he’d been in the army, gone to grad school on the GI bill, though I guess he could have just been”—she shrugged, turned back to her drink, squeezed a wedge of lime, carried the glass back to the table—“I mean it was all pretty standard issue, but it was his looks—how different he looked from what I assumed a therapist, an analyst, would look like, back then I thought all Freudians looked like, well, Freud, a thousand years old and pipe-smoking and bearded—plus the watching, how I’d held, sure, for a fee, but how I’d held his attention. And the fact that it was wrong, of course that helped, plus the power he had, I mean the power he had over me. He already knew all my secrets, the things you keep from boyfriends at first, and besides I knew he liked me, a woman always does, which always makes a man more attractive. So our last session, I get up off the couch, I turn around, and we shake hands, and he holds my hand maybe a second too long. And I look up at him and I ask him if we can, now that, you know, he’s no longer my therapist, my analyst”—she twirled the ice in her glass with the straw, took a long sip—“I ask him whether I can take him out for a drink. And he says no. Well, at first he says no. He puts his hands in his pockets and he says that while yes, of course he’d love to, he can’t. It just wouldn’t be—he says something about medical ethics. But I’m—you know at this point I’m twenty-three, and I have these long legs and I’m wearing a dress that’s maybe a little too low—”
“Mom.”
“What, I was wearing a low-cut dress, what’s wrong with that?” Another long sip. “And I say, I ask him if he couldn’t make, just this once, an exception.”
“You slept with him didn’t you.”
“Right there, on the couch. He missed his next appointment.”
“You’re—”
“Of course I’m kidding.” My mother’s tone was highest dudgeon. “Though honestly the fact that you might have thought we actually did—I mean what do you think of me, that you think I would—”
“But you did sleep with him.”
My mother smiled. “So, I ask him if he would consider, just this once, making an exception, and he, well, he makes this face, this face like he wants to say yes but he knows he shouldn’t and I take a step in and my breasts are just”—she drew out the word just, enjoying herself—“brushing the lapels of his suit jacket, and I say, One drink, and he says, Okay, one drink.”
“You slept with him.”
“I slept with him.” The smile triumphant. “And it was—I thought it then and I think it now. It was very therapeutic. One of the most helpful things about therapy, or analysis—they say one of the most helpful things is how the therapeutic relationship mirrors relationships in the real world, only it has these boundaries, in other words it’s kind of a”—her fingers sketched canted quotes—“safe space.”
“But he violated those boundaries.”
“No, I violated those boundaries. And it proved a larger point, that I could be totally emotionally open with someone, totally vulnerable, and he would still want to sleep with me.”
“I hope you reported him.”
“Of course I didn’t report him, god, you’re such a prude.” My mother rolled her eyes. “I mean it was my idea to—”
“And it was his responsibility.”
“The point is it worked. We went out for a drink and he took me back to his apartment and after that”—my mother’s hand sliced the air—“just like that. Cured. I was cured. I met your father a week later, and I would never have been open to him if I hadn’t had this experience with Rob, so whatever you think of it, you should also”—another long sip and her third gin and tonic was gone—“be grateful I did because if I hadn’t I would never have dated your father and if I hadn’t dated your father, well, where would you be?” My mother stood. “Whether or not you believe it was appropriate, whether or not you think it helped—the point is I think it helped. And if I think it helped, well then”—she waved the hand that wasn’t holding the glass—“it did. If only because I believe it did.”
My mother and father are still together. Point for the analyst, I suppose. They live together in a house, in the very house in whose kitchen I was then sitting. Occasionally, they can still be glimpsed passing, both of them, through the same room at the same time. Say it’s the living room: she likely heading to the kitchen, he likely to his studio. The studio is where my father spends most of his time. He paints. On commission mostly: cheerful seaside scenes; the portraits my parents’ richer friends request of their trust-funded daughters. He was, I’m almost certain, painting one of those daughters while my mother and I talked. For the record, my parents are very much in love. No one, for example, has ever seen them fight. Often they attend parties together. My father knows how to make my mother a perfect gin martini, is in fact the only one allowed to mix them for her, she doesn’t even trust herself. So then does it matter that my mother’s father, long dead, was a cinematographer, by his own account very talented, so talented he wouldn’t deign to work on any but the very best pictures. The very best pictures: over the course of forty years, a total of six came his way. Does it matter that even the most predatory therapist, analyst, could see, in my mother’s choice of husband, an artist who welcomes compromise, a rejection of her father, an artist who refused it? That he, my father, makes, regardless, not nearly enough money? That my mother met my father when she agreed to be a live model for the figure-drawing class he was teaching at a community college? Nude live model, I should say. Her long legs, the breasts she showed off in that low-cut dress, here, too, they served her well.
But the dating problem. My mother, it should by now be clear, chooses men poorly, and so do I, and this is why I was not dating, do not date. What was happening to me then, at the time when I sat in my mother’s kitchen and turned my sweating glass of lemonade on a damp coaster, was not unlike the problem that had driven my mother to analysis, to her analyst. I’ve said that I did want to date and that there was a problem preventing me, but this, too, is not quite accurate. The truth is I wanted to date and for
a time I did, I went on dates with lovely men, men with advanced degrees and wit to spare and working definitions of the word feminism and shoulders just as broad as my mother’s GI turned analyst. And when they bent down to kiss me my entire body recoiled. Their lips fell on mine and it was as if every cell in my body began immediately trying to pull away. I could feel my pores shrink, the little hairs on my arms retract, anything my body could do to put even a negligible, an imaginary distance between itself, between myself, and these men. I mean, anything besides actually pulling away. Meanwhile at work, alone in an office with the oldest, the sweatiest, the baldest of our lawyers, I found myself blushing, found my knees growing weak, found myself backing toward the door, trying again to put as much distance between me and the decaying specimen before me—but this time it was to stop myself from jumping him. It was like I was being reminded that I could feel desire. But then also that desire was purposely being misdirected so that I wouldn’t have sex. And I didn’t know what to do with that. With my body telling me, You don’t want to fuck these men that you are—that you should be—attracted to. With my body telling me, You do want to fuck this eighty-five-year-old lawyer who thinks corporations should have the same rights as individuals and whose youngest granddaughter is just about your age. I didn’t know what to do with my body telling me You don’t want what you want.
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