Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  “You’re acting as though you believe what my mother is saying,” Carla spoke accusingly to Hal. Things were not going quite the way she had planned. Hal appeared to be encouraging Jessie, as if she had tapped into some delusion of his own about being William Shakespeare.

  “It’s not a question of believing,” responded Hal gently. “The fact is that her story casts interesting light on the composition of the sonnets and of The Merchant of Venice, a play always viewed as problematic. Whether I believe in reincarnation or not isn’t the issue. What matters are the ideas. As a scholar and critic of Shakespeare, they interest me enormously.”

  “But that’s ridiculous,” said Margot. “If you take what she says seriously, you’re encouraging her in her craziness.”

  “I don’t think she’s going to be persuaded one way or the other by anyone,” said Hal, “so I don’t think it’s fair to blame me for encouraging her. I’m just what you could call a good listener. It’s what critics do. They listen. They don’t discount anything. They try to learn from the text.”

  “But our mother is not a text,” objected Carla. “She’s a human being.”

  “Everything is a text,” said Hal. “And I don’t mean to be dehumanizing in saying that. We read whatever we see. As soon as I walk in the door, I read your living room for what it tells me about your taste and your interests. Same with a person. I don’t have access to your inner thoughts and feelings, but I can see the outside and hear what you say. Based on that, I draw conclusions about who you are.”

  “And the conclusion to be drawn from my mother,” said Margot, “is that she’s nuts.”

  “I won’t disagree that her ideas are highly eccentric and, according to our notions of logic, irrational. But I’m not prepared to dismiss everything she says out of hand. Especially since her words have a curious coherence based on what I know of Shakespeare during that period.”

  “So what do you intend to do?” asked Carla. “Are you going to have the Shakespeare Association do tests on her?”

  “I don’t know what I’ll do,” said Hal, “but I can’t deny that I find her remarks intriguing. I’ve always had a special interest in The Merchant of Venice—in the way it incorporates so much contradiction and so many shifts in tone. It may be that having seen or read the play at some past time in her life she now finds herself able to see it more clearly than the rest of us. The notion of a former life is the scaffold she has erected to hang her interpretation.”

  “That makes sense,” said Carla, nodding—she was relieved to see that he was at least trying to explain her mother’s statements logically.

  “Or it may be that she met someone in the course of her life who had great insight into the play and the period and relayed this to her. And that now, for some reason, it’s come back to consciousness.”

  “That makes sense too,” said Carla.

  “Or maybe she saw the recent Michael Rubbo documentary on Christopher Marlowe—I think it was on public television a year or so ago—that dealt with the idea that Marlowe staged his own death and escaped to Venice, where he actually wrote the plays that were then attributed to Shakespeare as a kind of cover for him. Maybe she unconsciously incorporated elements of that documentary into an elaborate fantasy.”

  “I’ll buy that,” said Carla, feeling increasingly relieved.

  “Or maybe she really was Shakespeare’s girlfriend,” said Jeffrey, finishing off the chopped liver on his sister’s plate and belching loudly.

  “And that’s a possibility too,” said Hal.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  “So?” said CARLA TO MARK AFTER EVERYONE HAD LEFT AND the kids had presumably gone to sleep (though Jeffrey was in fact playing the superviolent Nintendo game he had borrowed from a friend, and Stephanie was picking out her outfit for the next day, a time-consuming task that generally involved trying on a dozen tops and leaving them inside-out on the floor).

  “I think the evening went well,” said Mark. “I liked Stephanie’s teacher a lot.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” said Carla irritably. “What happened at work that put you in such a good mood?”

  “Oh, that,” said Mark with mock indifference. He had obviously been dying to tell her all evening. He now sat down on the stool in front of her vanity table, began taking off his shoes, and embarked on the story with relish.

  “Well, you know how skeptical I was about your wanting me to promote the practice and so forth? I’m no PR maven, and doctors, after all, are a dime a dozen. But I have to amend my view and admit you were right. First of all, Yvette’s been a godsend. The girl’s a marketing genius, and I don’t just mean the haircut, which I must say was a wise packaging move.” He patted his head proudly. “I can’t tell you the number of compliments I’ve gotten from my female patients—and the nurses are much more helpful; the word in the hospital is that I’m very sexy.” He moved his eyebrows in a seductive manner à la Groucho Marx.

  “I suppose I better watch out,” Carla laughed. “But then, I always thought you were very sexy.”

  “But you’re exceptional,” said Mark. “We’re talking man—or rather woman-on-the-street sexy. Yvette is an expert on that. But more to the point, she really knows how to reach the media. She interviewed me and read some background articles, then drafted a press kit that only required minor tinkering. Then, she got her boyfriend, a very creative, savvy guy, to make a video in which I remind all fifty-year-olds to make a colonoscopy appointment. Yvette and I came up with a really great closing line: ‘Those polyps may be growing as we speak; do it now!’”

  “Snappy,” agreed Carla.

  “So we sent out the print material and the video about two weeks ago,” Mark continued, “and today, someone called from the Courier Post. They said they thought the piece on warning signs for colon cancer was important and want me to write a column for the paper, maybe a monthly or bimonthly piece on digestive health—from soup to nuts: nutrition to bowel function. Yvette says I could give her the main points, she’ll draft the columns, and I can polish them. It would look good on her résumé when she applies to Columbia Journalism School next year.”

  “That’s great!” exclaimed Carla. “Think of the visibility you’ll get with a column in the Courier Post!”

  “And that’s not all,” said Mark ebulliently. “After the Courier Post guy called, Yvette picked up the phone and called the special features editor at Action News. She told them I’d be writing the column and would they maybe like a segment some week encapsulating my main points? They said sure. They’d been impressed by my video: I had good on-air presence—which I suppose meant the haircut—and with a print byline, I’d have credibility as an expert. Yvette says that’s called synergy. So I’m set to go on a week from today. The topic is spastic colon, one of my specialties.”

  “This is fantastic!” Carla exclaimed again. “Next thing you know you can write a book on How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love My Colon—and they’ll want you on Oprah!”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Mark modestly, “but I do think that being in the paper and on TV is bound to help the practice. Who knows, but if things work out I might finally be able to hire a partner.”

  “That would be great,” agreed Carla. “You’d have less night call, and maybe you could find someone who’d be right for Margot—and kill two birds with one stone.”

  “Carla!” said Mark with amusement. “Stop trying to set up your sister; she can take care of herself.”

  “You know she can’t, so don’t say that,” protested Carla.

  “You have a point there,” agreed Mark.

  “I just want her to find a man as sexy, smart, and caring as you.”

  “Well, I thought that Hal Pearson was a nice fellow. I liked him a lot.”

  “Hal Pearson? Don’t be silly. Margot hated him!”

  “She did?” said Mark, surprised. “I didn’t realize that.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  As Dr. Samuels HAD
SUGGESTED, CARLA BOOKED BACK-TO-BACK appointments for Jeffrey and Jessie as soon as his schedule permitted. She had greatly anticipated the visit, though now that the day had finally arrived, she felt nervous. She was worried that Jeffrey would squirm in his chair and fail to answer questions, and that Jessie would ramble on incoherently about Shakespeare. She knew she was being foolish. Wanting her son and her mother to behave sanely for the psychiatrist was like wanting to clean the house before the cleaning woman arrived.

  When Carla told her mother she had made an appointment for her to see a psychiatrist, Jessie did not protest. If her daughter felt a psychiatrist was worth seeing, then she would see him. Although she remained firmly entrenched in her story, she was perfectly willing to recount it to anyone who was interested. Indeed, it seemed to Carla that her mother relished telling the story, and gained in spirits and confidence the more she did so.

  Jeffrey, on the other hand, was not so accommodating. He objected to going to a “shrink,” as he put it—a term he had learned from his friend Sean who went to one “so my parents won’t feel so guilty about getting divorced” and who said it was “really boring.” He was also concerned that the appointment, scheduled directly after school, would prevent him from going home for a snack. Jeffrey’s appetite was enormous, and snacks were to him second in importance only to meals. Fortunately, Jessie put his mind at rest on this score when she promised that she would bring a surprise snack when they picked him up—the idea of a surprise allowing his imagination to range freely over a vast array of culinary delicacies.

  On the afternoon of the appointment, Carla and Jessie pulled up in front of the elementary school to pick up Jeffrey. He was standing near the flagpole being chastised by the vice principal (still sporting a large gauze bandage on the left side of his head) for throwing his backpack, in the manner of a shot put, at the third-graders.

  As soon as Jeffrey entered the car, he demanded his snack, and Jessie passed him a large paper bag that contained a bologna sandwich, a dill pickle, and an assortment of ruggelach. These were some of Jeffrey’s favorite foods (then again, most everything was) and assuaged him for the time being.

  Once they arrived at the office, however, he began to grow restless, especially since they were obliged to wait to see the doctor.

  As with much else from which Samuels deviated, he did not hold to the conventional fifty-minute psychiatric session. “It’s ridiculous,” he declared to his workshop students. “The problems aren’t the same; the time shouldn’t be the same. It’s common sense.” Samuels was, as already noted, a great proponent of common sense.

  Superficially, Samuels’s approach might appear to resemble the clinical technique employed by the famed French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Lacan was known to alter the length of his sessions in order to throw patients into a state of psychic confusion and thereby achieve greater access to their unconscious. But any resemblance to the Lacanian method was, in Samuels’s case, purely accidental. “I don’t have any fancy ideas about the length of my sessions,” he protested, when the idea was raised by one of his more theoretically inclined workshop students, “and God forbid I would take advice from the French about anything, except maybe a good cassoulet.” (One of Samuels’s hobbies was gourmet cooking.) “I see people for as long or as short as they need—end of story.”

  Since Samuels’s patients often had their appointments delayed while he concentrated on a particularly knotty case, he had tried to make arrangements to relieve the tedium of waiting. To this end, he provided an extensive assortment of reading matter in his outer office. Besides his own book, of which several copies were scattered about, there were multiple other options, since he recognized that his clientele, despite a certain superficial homogeneity, had diverse tastes.

  One shelf of the bookcase contained an impressive collection of sports books, including a glossy tome, not very thick but much thumbed through by male patients, entitled Great Jewish Athletes. Another shelf contained art books, specializing in some of the more unconventional modern artists favored by Sylvia Samuels, who considered herself an authority in this area. A third shelf contained an extensive collection of cookbooks, chosen by himself. Sylvia, as Samuels often explained, was devoted to her canvases and brushes but had no interest in the culinary arts, and so he did all the cooking. This revelation made his older female patients wonder what kind of wife this Sylvia was, talent or no talent, to make her husband cook her meals. With these patients, Samuels traded recipes and cooking tips—but the women would always pause at some point in the discussion, shake their heads, and mumble under their breaths: “Such a good man, and a doctor no less, saddled with the cooking; it’s a shanda”—before launching into the fine points of making schav.

  Samuels also kept a nice stock of comic books and Mad magazines for his younger clientele and those, as he put it, who were young at heart. Mad, he liked to say, had been his psychic lifeline as a boy, teaching him the fine art of ridiculing authority. He often expounded on how he feared for modern youth, who seemed to prefer mindless gross-out humor to character-building, nose-thumbing parody.

  During the first fifteen minutes in the waiting room, Jeffrey was extremely restless, jumping up again and again to pull comic books from the shelves and complaining loudly that he was thirsty and wanted a glass of chocolate milk. But after a certain interval had elapsed, he began to settle down. By the time a woman in a powder blue jogging outfit, large diamond stud earrings, and a vast quantity of smeared mascara exited Samuels’s office, clutching a wad of tissues, Jeffrey had been quietly reading a Mad magazine for almost half an hour.

  It had been decided that Carla would sit in on Jeffrey’s session, Jessie being content to remain in the waiting room, looking through the cookbooks. She had found one that particularly interested her entitled A Font of Fressing: Traditional Jewish Cookery, and was engrossed in a recipe for knaidlach.

  When Jeffrey and Carla entered the office, Samuels was seated magisterially behind his desk. He motioned for Jeffrey to take the seat opposite and for Carla to retire to the small folding chair in the back of the room.

  “So,” said Samuels, surveying Jeffrey over his bifocals, “I hear that you’re an energetic young man.” The statement was strangely belied by Jeffrey’s present state. He sat quietly slumped in the chair and was not, as was usual in such circumstances, swinging his leg back and forth or playing with his yo-yo. “You seem rather subdued today, if I may say so,” continued Samuels. “May I ask if you are under the weather? Perhaps you had a demanding gym class this afternoon or are coming down with a bug?”

  “No,” said Jeffrey, “I’m fine.”

  “I don’t understand it,” intervened Carla. “Normally, he’d be climbing the walls. This isn’t his usual style at all.” She felt vaguely apologetic, given that she had billed Jeffrey as hyperactive and now appeared to have misrepresented him.

  “Perhaps he’s nervous,” suggested Samuels. “Are you nervous, young man?”

  Jeffrey said he wasn’t nervous.

  “Well, let’s get started, shall we?” said Samuels, rubbing his hands together. “Would you mind if I ask you some questions?”

  “Sure,” shrugged Jeffrey.

  “I’d like to hear about your diet—what, if you don’t mind telling me, do you like to eat?”

  Jeffrey brightened perceptibly. This was a subject dear to his heart. “I like almost everything,” he proclaimed proudly, “but I really like Grandma’s chopped liver and her pot roast. Also, her venison stew,” he added as an afterthought.

  “I see,” said Samuels, “an adventurous eater. Very good. But what’s your usual fare? For breakfast, for example, give me the rundown.”

  “For breakfast,” said Jeffrey, embarking on the subject with relish, “I’ll have Grandma’s challah french toast and two Pop Tarts. And sometimes a bagel with lox spread and some Bob Evans sausage.”

  “A hearty breakfast. Very ecumenical,” noted Samuels. “And for lunch?”

 
“For lunch,” continued Jeffrey, pleased that someone was finally asking him to expound on something he liked and knew well, “I’ll have a bag lunch that Grandma makes—maybe a bologna sandwich, a few chocolate-chip cookies, and an apple. I usually leave the apple, but sometimes, if I’m hungry, I eat it. I also have a slice of pizza and some chicken nuggets from the school cafeteria.” He looked across at Dr. Samuels proudly. He had taken care to be accurate about the apple, since he felt he owed it to Samuels for having asked him to talk on such an interesting subject.

  “Snack?” queried Samuels, writing something on a pad with a flourish.

  Jeffrey cocked his head as if reviewing a very large panoply of items.

  “Never mind,” said Samuels before he could begin. “I think I get the idea. And what do you have to drink?”

  “Jeffrey likes chocolate milk,” interjected Carla from the back of the room. “I let him have it, since I think it’s important to have as much calcium as possible at his age, and he won’t drink the milk plain.”

  Samuels put up his hand, as though he were directing traffic and Carla was about to make an illegal turn. “Please, Mom, we want Jeffrey to tell us.”

  “Chocolate milk,” said Jeffrey, pleased that his words carried so much weight.

  “And how much chocolate milk do you drink?” asked Samuels.

  Jeffrey furrowed his brow as he worked out the calculation. “I’d say—ten glasses a day—maybe eight or nine. It depends. I usually have three of those little cartons at lunch that they sell in the cafeteria, but sometimes they run out,” he clarified.

  “So you have chocolate milk whenever you can?” queried Samuels. “When you come home from school, for example?”

  “Yeah,” said Jeffrey. “I usually have two or three glasses when I come home. Grandma says it’s too much, but I do anyway.”

  “Smart woman, your grandma,” said Samuels.

  “I wish I had some now,” said Jeffrey.

  “I bet you do,” said Samuels. “But notice how quiet you’ve been without it.”