I dreaded seeing him at my regular session the next day, but he never brought it up. Nor the following session. Maybe the nurses had lost the envelope? Then finally, at the third session, I asked, “Did you get the letter I sent to you?”
“Yes,” he said. I studied his face but there was nothing. “I thought I’d wait for you to bring it up when you felt comfortable talking about it.”
I welled up. “I hate myself,” I whispered. “I’d rather die than be one.”
“I see,” he said. “Is that why you tried to kill yourself?”
“I guess so.” Okay, I finally admitted it to someone. But no great weight was lifted from my shoulders. To the contrary, there had been a kind of nobility in not telling that was now lost.
“Can you tell me why you think you’re a homosexual?”
“I have feelings toward men.”
“What kind of feelings?”
“Sex feelings.”
“Have you ever acted on these feelings?”
“No.”
“How long have you had these feelings?”
“I don’t know. I think I always had them, before I knew what they were, but they turned different a couple of years ago.”
“Different how?” he asked.
“The feelings got stronger.”
“Did the feelings get stronger about the time you started counting and taking things?”
I thought of Camp Lokanda and wanting to go chest to chest with Brucie Cohen.
“Is it possible that in trying to repress those new sexual feelings, the only way for you to cope was to invent magic rituals like touching things, and saving things, which would momentarily alleviate the anxiety? You were probably like a pressure cooker trying to keep your feelings in. It was like trying to plug up a volcano. And it manifested itself in obsessive behavior.”
He let that sink in for a moment.
“But why am I a homo?”
“Do you know anybody who’s homosexual?”
“You mean like Christine Jorgensen?”
“Who?”
“Christine Jorgensen. He’s a homo, isn’t he?”
“I don’t think so,” Dr. Myers said.
“So why did they change him into a woman, if he wasn’t a homo?”
“Christopher Jorgensen wasn’t homosexual. He wanted to become a woman for another reason—because he didn’t feel right being in a man’s body. Is that how you feel? That you’ve been born in the wrong body?”
“No,” I said, feeling insulted. “I feel like I’ve been born into the wrong world.”
“Homosexual men don’t usually become women.”
“Yes they do,” I insisted. “Or dress in women’s clothing.”
“No, they don’t. Most live as men,” he said. “Why do you say ‘homo’?” he asked.
“That’s what they’re called, isn’t it?”
“No, not really. It sounds mean the way you say it. I prefer to say ‘homosexual,’ which means ‘same sex.’ ”
“I thought it meant ‘men sex.’”
“No, it doesn’t.” He considered me as if he was trying to make a decision, and then, like he was confiding in me, sharing a great secret, he leaned forward and said, “You know, homosexuals can change. They can become heterosexual.”
I was bewildered. “How?”
“I know men who were once homosexual, and now they’re married and have children,” he said.
“You?”
“No, not me. But other doctors.”
“Does that mean they stopped being attracted to men?” I couldn’t imagine.
“Absolutely,” he said. “Homosexuality can be cured, like many other disorders. The key thing is, it’s a tough row to hoe, and you have to really want to change.”
Of course I really wanted to change. If it was possible for me to become normal, then why not? The world wouldn’t be inside out, my whole life wouldn’t be a sham. I could hold my head up. I could marry and have children, and nobody would be ashamed of me. I could listen to love songs on the radio and understand what it meant to be in love with a woman. I would jump through hoops of fire if I could be normal.
“Yes, yes,” I said. “I really want to change.”
“Then we’ll begin next session.”
Later that afternoon, when I went to work on the puzzle with Mr. Halliday, I was grinning like the Cheshire cat. “Okay. Spit it out,” he said. “You look like you’re bursting to tell me something.”
“I told Dr. Myers that I was a homosexual,” I said, hoping to shock him.
“Good for you!” he cheered, not seeming surprised at all. He pretended to busy himself with his jigsaw while he waited for me to say more.
“Aren’t you surprised?” I asked.
“At what?”
“That I’m a homosexual.”
He looked at me for a moment and said, “Yes. I’m shocked.”
“Did you know that homosexual means ‘same sex,’ and not ‘man sex’?” I asked.
“How fascinating,” Mr. Halliday said. “And what did your doctor say when you told him?”
“He said he was going to fix it.”
“Fix it?” Mr. Halliday asked, his voice rising. “How is he going to fix it? Does fixing it take longer than cooking a cassoulet?”
I said I didn’t know what a cassoulet was, and it didn’t matter how long it took. I was hurt by his skepticism. Although, he did raise an interesting question. How long was it going to take to become heterosexual? I promised myself I was going to look up cassoulet in the dictionary as soon as I could.
Cassoulet
Once we got down to work it turned out that Dr. Myers believed a whole lot of confusing things. Sometimes he said that homosexuality was an arrested state of infantile development, and sometimes he said that I was trapped in an oedipal stage. Like Oedipus, he pointed out, I hated my father and wanted him dead, and unconsciously I equated having sex with women with having sex with my mother, which is why I was so adverse and fearful of heterosexuality. Yet he maintained I secretly wished my mother dead too. He said I unconsciously feared my repressed anger would kill her, which is why I counted and exhibited obsessive behavior. But I loved her, so why would I want her dead? And what did that have to do with making me desire men? And why didn’t I desire women? I just didn’t get it.
“Is that Freud?” I used to ask Dr. Myers skeptically, when he told me what sounded like some fantastic theory. Was it Freud that homosexuality can be cured? In fact, no. Freud held that homosexuality was a part of human nature, and not an illness. But I never asked Dr. Myers if curing homosexuality was Freud.
Dr. Myers said that the way I would get better was by knowing things about my life and why I held certain misbeliefs. Understanding the root of my problems would make them disappear. If you know your blindness is hysterical, you’ll be able to see. If we discovered what made me homosexual, I wouldn’t be one anymore. In addition, we were going to deny sustenance to the homosexual part of me while nourishing the heterosexual man that Dr. Myers assured me lurked within, a man who I had displaced, but who could be found and reanimated. To start, Dr. Myers said, I had to stop thinking about boys when I masturbated. Every time I masturbated thinking about a boy it was “another brick in the wall” to my heterosexuality, he said. He suggested that I should masturbate thinking about women, a chore harder for me than he probably imagined. I didn’t tell him about the lawnmower boy; it would have been a betrayal.
Dr. Myers wrote notes on the yellow pad, furiously scribbling away no matter what I said. Occasionally something would really pique his interest. When I told him about pulling open the curtains in the dressing rooms of the store to expose the unfortunate women being fitted for undergarments, he posited it might easily have given me a misimpression about the sensuousness of the female form. No doubt. He fo
und it significant that in the store I usually heard of female organs described as “plumbing,” as in, “Mrs. Brodsky had plumbing problems.” The word “vagina” was never spoken. He wrote that down.
Dr. Myers thought it was especially significant that I witnessed the incident when the assistant principal of my junior high school dropped menstrual blood on the floor of the store, which he proclaimed the formative moment in my aversion to vaginas. He talked about the possibility I perceived the vagina as a castrated male dripping blood, or as a device for castration—if I put my penis inside a vagina, it might not come out. I thought none of this but it didn’t seem to matter. When I told him about my father’s pornography collection hidden in a torn brown paper bag at the back of the top drawer of his dresser he scribbled furiously. When I told him how shocked I was to see Little Rich’s penis, and how insecure it made me feel, he said that I shouldn’t use Little Rich’s penis as a reference.
I made no epiphanic connections with the perplexing Freudian explanations until one day, during one of my rambling, free-association monologues, I mentioned that when I was a toddler, before we moved above the store, we lived in a one-bedroom apartment in an ugly red brick apartment building on Foster Avenue. I didn’t get my own bedroom until we moved to the apartment above the store when I was six years old.
At this Dr. Myers’s presence changed, like a German shepherd catching the scent of a bitch in heat. “Where did you sleep before you got your own room?” he asked.
“I slept in the same room as my parents.”
“In the same room for six years? How far away from your parents did you sleep?”
It was a small room, probably smaller than I even remembered. It was painted tan, like oatmeal mottled with a sponge, and the decorative moldings on the walls looked like empty picture frames. The dresser was too small for all our clothes and there were cardboard boxes of clothing stacked waist-high in the corners. I slept in a children’s bed with a red vinyl headboard imprinted with a Japanese pagoda and a geisha standing by a stream, probably only four or five feet from my parents’ bed.
“Four or five feet?” Dr. Myers asked. “And where did your parents have sex?”
I never thought about my parents having sex. “I don’t know where they had sex,” I said.
“They probably had sex only four or five feet away from you,” he said. “About as close as you’re sitting now to the door.”
I glanced at the door to my room uncomfortably. “No, they wouldn’t have,” I said.
“How can you be so certain? In all those years you slept in the same room, don’t you think your parents had intercourse?”
“Well, not in the same room as me,” I said.
“But where then?” he persisted.
“Probably in the living room,” I suggested. But then I remembered we had that peculiarly shaped arced sofa in the living room, like a slice of cantaloupe. They’d had to have been acrobats to have sex on that sofa. Where then? On the floor? I tried to picture my parents having sex on the floor of the living room with me asleep in the bedroom. “If they had sex in front of me, wouldn’t I have remembered it?” I asked.
“Of course you wouldn’t have remembered it,” Dr. Myers said. “You were a child. You would’ve blocked it out. Watching your parents have intercourse would have been a terrifying experience for you. Depending on what you saw them doing, you could’ve thought your mother was being hurt by your father, or even killed. Groans of pleasure are very easily interpreted as pain by an infant. Oral sex can be seen as cannibalistic. An infant has no way to understand what the most important people in the world are doing to each other. It’s extremely traumatizing.”
“It never happened,” I said.
“Think about it for a minute. If you slept in the same bedroom with your parents for six years—that’s over two thousand nights—don’t you think they had sex at least once while you were in your bed? The odds are they had intercourse in front of you many times.”
“It never happened,” I repeated.
“Look, if you could remember one time, just one incident, it would be a step in the right direction to understanding your homosexuality.”
But I refused to believe it, and I argued with him about it session after session, until, at an impasse, I was determined to refute it.
The Contessa
“My darling Richard,” said a young woman of noble bearing standing in the doorway of the card room. She posed there briefly, dressed in black slacks and gray cashmere sweater, her hands on her hips, looking as though she had been lolling about in a ski chalet in Gstaad instead of locked up in Payne Whitney. Before she said another word I had a crush on her. She was my first fag hag.
“Congratulations!” Mr. Halliday cheered. “It’s about time they moved you down.” He extended his arms and they embraced and kissed cheeks and patted each other on the back.
“The patients on six were either absolute nutters or brain dead from electroshock therapy,” she said in an accent that was neither French nor Italian nor British. “Not exactly stimulating conversationalists.” She turned to me, smiling warmly, and she reminded me of Tina Mastriano. “And who is this?” she asked.
“This is my friend Steven who helps me with my jigsaw puzzles,” Mr. Halliday said. “Steven, this is Alessandra, who was my only pal on the sixth floor.”
“You’re a little cutie,” she said, taking me in. “How old are you?”
“Fifteen,” I said shyly.
“Fifteen? Are you a virgin?”
I was too stunned to speak.
“You don’t have to answer that,” Mr. Halliday jumped in when he saw how flustered I was.
“No matter if you are or aren’t,” Alessandra continued, reaching out and tugging on the sleeve of my sweater. “Nothing to be embarrassed about. Or that can’t be fixed. Where are you from?”
“Brooklyn.”
“Brooklyn! The home of the Dodgers!” she said.
“And Coney Island,” I added, trying to be interesting.
“I hear all the boys in Brooklyn have big cocks,” she said offhandedly.
“You don’t have to respond to that, either.” Mr. Halliday said.
“It wasn’t a question,” Alessandra scolded.
I was shocked when she said all the boys had big cocks in Brooklyn, but it sounded really terrific with her sexy accent, which she told me was “mid-continent ennui.” Alessandra’s pastiche of an accent made everything she said sound charming, including “cunt,” “suck,” and “fuck,” which she said often. She was a handful. She was twenty-five, the person closest in age to me on the floor. Her mother was a British glue heiress—whatever that meant, I never asked, I just acted impressed—and her late father was of obscure Italian nobility who made his money in cashmere in Piacenza, the cashmere capital of Italy. That officially made her Alessandra, the contessa de Piacenza.
“Are you sure?” I asked Mr. Halliday in confidence. “Is she a real contessa?”
“Oh yes,” he said. “And notorious.” Mr. Halliday knew about her because when she was eighteen years old she caused a scandal in Great Britain by having an affair with a movie star thirty years her senior. She was photographed topless with him on the balcony of a hotel in Sitges, and the photo was published in all the tabloids. She wound up in Payne Whitney because on her way back to Paris from getting a nifty bias-cut hairdo at Sassoon in London, she was caught at Heathrow Airport with fifty bucks’ worth of heroin in her purse, which she occasionally sniffed, she said, for fun. After her arrest, her drug dealer sold his story to the Daily Mail and she was tabloid fodder for another week. The tabloids quoted one of her French boyfriends as saying she was a nymphomaniac and sexually insatiable. She had a choice of either jail or a psychiatric hospital—there were no rehabs back then—and she opted for Payne Whitney.
Alessandra was pals with a certain sullen, darkly h
andsome actor with honey-brown eyes, who had been nominated for a supporting actor Oscar a few years before. Within days of meeting her I heard in detail what every single part of his body looked like, which she spoke of with unseemly delight. When she realized what a prude I was, she delighted in embarrassing me. One day she took my breath away by walking too close to me in a doorway, the back of her hand brushing the front of my pants. She did it again, a few days later, but it was so casual I could never be certain if it was intentional.
I developed another adolescent crush, this time on a melancholic woman in her thirties named Deedee Conklin, who made sadness seem chic. Even her depression was elegant; it lingered like her Joy perfume when she left a room. She was the art director of an architecture magazine, and although her bangs and wispy forelocks made her look French, she was a Boston Brahmin and spoke with a Beacon Hill accent. Deedee was delusional, the other patients decided, because she claimed she had been the girlfriend of the newly elected president, John F. Kennedy. Deedee said that the affair started back in Hyannis Port and went on for years, but when J.F.K. decided to run for president he cut off all contact with her. She took it pretty hard, swallowed too many pills, accidentally she said, and that’s how she ended up in Payne Whitney. At the time nobody knew anything about Kennedy’s relationship with Marilyn Monroe, nor the dozens of other women who had yet to come forward to say they were also his conquests, so we took Deedee’s claim that she slept with the president with a grain of salt. It was a mental hospital after all, and if someone tells you they’re Marie of Romania, you just say, “Sure.”
At dinner one night Deedee suggested that instead of holding my knife and fork clenched in my fists like a caveman, I hold them in the European style. She showed me how to eat with the fork turned down and to cut my food with the knife in my right hand, and it immediately felt comfortable to me. Next she suggested that I put the knife and fork down on the plate while I was chewing. She also told me to take my napkin off the table, and to put my cotton hopsacking hip-huggers in the garbage. She said that well-dressed boys my age wore chinos. With cordovan penny loafers. From Brooks Brothers on Madison Avenue.
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