Therapy

by David Lodge

  That last thought threw me into a panic. How many years did I have left to make up for lost opportunities in the past? I recalled what I had written in my journal a few weeks earlier: “You won’t know it is your last fuck while you’re having it, and by the time you find out you probably won’t be able to remember what it was like.” I tried to remember when Sally and I last made love, and couldn’t. I looked back through the journal and found it logged under Saturday, 27th February. There wasn’t any detail, except that Sally had seemed surprised when I took the initiative, and complied rather listlessly. Reading that fuelled my suspicions. I leafed back further to the conversation with the boys at the tennis club: “You want to watch your Missus, Tubby … Good at other games, too, I’m told … He’s certainly got the tackle …” The solution to the mystery burst inside my head like a flare. Brett Sutton, of course! The tennis lessons, the new sports clothes, the sudden decision to dye her hair … It all fitted together. My head became a blue-movie house, flickering with lurid images of Sally naked on the couch in the Club’s First Aid room, throwing back her head in ecstasy as Brett Sutton shafted her with his enormous cock.

  I discovered I was mistaken about Brett Sutton. But the need to have sex myself, as soon as possible – for revenge, for compensation, for reassurance – became an all-consuming preoccupation. Naturally I thought first of Amy. For some years our relationship had had all the marks of an affair – the secrecy and regularity of our meetings, the discreet restaurant meals, the covert telephone calls, the exchange of confidences – everything except the act of intercourse. I had refrained from crossing that threshold out of misplaced loyalty to Sally. Now there was no moral reason to hold back. So I argued to myself at the time, the immediate post-bombshell time. What I didn’t consider was (a) whether I really desired Amy and (b) whether she desired me. We discovered in Tenerife that the answer to both questions was “no”.

  Wednesday 26th May. Letters from Jane and Adam this morning. I didn’t feel like opening them – just recognizing the handwriting on the envelopes turned my stomach over – but I couldn’t settle to anything until I did. Both were short notes asking how I am and inviting me to visit. I suspect some kindly collusion: the coincidence of receiving them on the same day is too blatant.

  I saw each of them separately after Sally walked out of the house, but before she moved back. Adam and I had lunch in London one day, and then I went down to spend a weekend in Swanage with Jane and Gus. Both were uncomfortable occasions. For the lunch with Adam I chose a restaurant I’d never been to before, so I wouldn’t be recognized. It turned out to be full, with tables much too close together, so Adam and I couldn’t speak freely even if we’d wanted to, and had to communicate in a kind of elliptical code. If anyone was eavesdropping they probably thought we were discussing a rather unsuccessful dinner party rather than the break-up of a thirty-year-old marriage. I preferred that, though, to the weekend in Swanage, when Gus kept tactfully leaving Jane and me on our own to have the kind of heart-to-heart conversation neither of us really wanted, because we’d never had one before and didn’t know how to do it. Jane’s relationship to me has always been a humorously scolding one, getting at me for environmentally unsound forms of consumption, like bottled mineral water, coloured paperclips, and hardwood bookshelves, or for sexist jokes in The People Next Door. It was a game we played, partly for the entertainment of others. We didn’t seem to have a routine for talking intimately.

  On the Sunday afternoon Jane and I took their dog for a walk along the crescent-shaped beach, exchanging desultory observations about the weather, the tide, the windsurfers in the bay. The baby is due in October, apparently. I asked her how she was feeling as regards the pregnancy, and she said she was over the morning-sickness period thank God; but that topic fizzled out too, perhaps because it was uncomfortably connected in both our minds with the terminal row between Sally and me. Then on the way back, when we were nearly at the cottage, Jane said abruptly, “Why don’t you just give Mummy what she wants? You’d still have plenty to live on, wouldn’t you?” I said it was a matter of principle. I didn’t accept that Sally could walk out on me just because she found me difficult to live with, and still expect me to support her in the style of life to which she’d become accustomed. Jane said, “You mean, she was being paid to put up with your moods?” I said, “No, of course not.” But in a way I suppose Jane was right, though I wouldn’t have put it quite like that. She’s a shrewd girl, Jane. She said, “I think your making all that money from The People Next Door had a bad effect on both of you. You seemed to worry more than when you were hard up. And Mummy became jealous.” I had never thought before that Sally might be jealous of my success.

  Although both Jane and Adam tried to be impartial, I felt that privately they were both on Sally’s “side”, so I didn’t seek them out again after those two meetings. Also I was plotting to take Amy to Tenerife and afraid they might find out and tell Sally.

  Tenerife was certainly a disastrous choice, but really the whole enterprise was doomed before it began. While I had kept Amy under wraps, as it were, never attempting any contact more intimate than a friendly kiss or cuddle, I invested her with a certain glamour, the glamour of the forbidden, the self-denied. Once I had her naked on a bed she was just a plump little lady with rather hairy legs which I hadn’t noticed before because she always wore stockings or tights. She also had a body distinctly lacking in muscle tone. I couldn’t help comparing her physique unfavourably with Sally’s, and reflecting that something seemed to have gone seriously wrong with my strategy. What on earth was I doing in this shitty hotel room in this godawful resort with a woman considerably less desirable than the estranged wife I was trying to get even with? It was hardly surprising that Tenerife was an erotic disaster. As soon as I got back – indeed, even before – I began to thumb through my mental backlist of female acquaintance in search of a likely partner younger and more attractive than Amy. I came up with Louise.

  Within days I was airborne again, en route for Los Angeles. Another fiasco. Indeed, a double fiasco, if you count the blind date with Stella which Louise fixed up for me after she shattered my hopes. Some hopes. I knew, really, even as I booked my flight to L.A. (open ticket, Business Class; it cost the earth but I wanted to arrive in good shape) that the likelihood of Louise still being unattached and available after all those years was remote in the extreme, and simply suppressed the knowledge because I couldn’t bear the thought of failure. It was like Kierkegaard going back to Copenhagen a year after breaking off his engagement, fondly imagining Regine would still be unattached and grieving for him, and then discovering that she was engaged to Schlegel. The attraction of Louise was precisely that she was someone I could have had in the past, and had foolishly, perversely, denied myself. It was the lure of Repetition, the idea of having Louise offer herself to me again, making possession doubly sweet, that impelled me to travel all those thousands of miles.

  Stella, on the other hand, was just a potential one-night stand as far as I was concerned. I had a day and a night to kill before the next available flight back to London, so when Louise called me the morning after our outing to Venice to say that she had a friend who was dying to meet me, I agreed. I met her in the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire and took her to dinner in the hotel’s ludicrously expensive restaurant. She seemed quite attractive at first sight, blonde and slim and groomed to a high polish. I blinked in the glitter and dazzle of her teeth, hair-lacquer, nail-varnish and costume jewellery. But her smiles lasted just a fraction of a second longer than seemed quite natural, and her facial skin had a tightness under the pancake make-up that suggested it had been lifted. She didn’t beat about the bush, saying over our pre-dinner Margaritas, “Louise tells me we have a lot in common: we’ve both been betrayed and we both want to get laid, right?” I laughed uneasily, and asked her what she did for a living. It turned out that she owns a boutique on Rodeo Drive where Louise shops sometimes. When we were seated she startled me by asking
if I had been tested for HIV. I said no, it hadn’t seemed necessary, because I had always been faithful to my wife. “So Louise told me,” Stella said. “What about your wife? Has she been faithful to you?” I said I now believed that she had been, and asked her what she would like to eat. “I’ll have a Caesar salad and fiilet mignon, very rare. You don’t mind my asking you these questions, Tubby?” “Oh no,” I said politely. “Only in my experience it’s best to get these things outa the way at the beginning. Then we can both relax. How about since your wife walked out? You been with anybody else?” “Just once,” I said. “A very old friend.” “You used a condom, of course?” “Oh yes, of course,” I lied. Actually Amy had used a diaphragm. I think Stella could tell I was lying. “You have some with you?” she said, when they had brought us the Caesar salad. “Well, not on me,” I said. “I meant, in your room.” “Well, there may be some in the minibar,” I quipped, “it seems to have everything else.” “It doesn’t matter, I have some in my purse,” Stella said without cracking a smile. When she started talking about latex gloves and dental dams over the fiilet mignon, I panicked. If she was so concerned about safe sex, I thought to myself, she must have reason to be. For the first time in my life I simulated acute internal derangement of the knee, writhing about in my seat in, though I says it myself, a very convincing impression of unbearable pain. The guests at neighbouring tables were quite concerned. The maître d’ flashed a signal to the waiters and two of them carried me out into the lobby. I apologized to Stella, excused myself and retired to bed alone. Stella asked me to call her the next day, but the next day I was on the first plane out of LAX to Heathrow.

  It was somewhere over the polar icecap that Samantha rose before my inward eye like a vision of sexual promise. Why hadn’t I thought of her before? She was young, desirable, and had gone out of her way to cultivate my acquaintance. Furthermore she exuded health and hygiene, and was extremely smart. You couldn’t imagine Samantha taking any risks with unsafe sex. Yes, she was obviously my best chance of proving to myself I was still a man. I could hardly wait to land in Heathrow. Red-eyed, soiled and unshaven, I jumped into a cab and went straight to the studio, where I knew I would find Samantha at rehearsal.

  It wasn’t surprising that my first clumsy attempt at seduction failed, especially with Signora Gabrielli doing her best to fuck it up. But when, a few days later, Ollie suggested assigning a script editor to work with me I saw my opportunity and insisted on Samantha. She understood very well what a favour I had done her, and was clearly prepared to pay for it in time-honoured showbiz style. My fatal mistake, fatal from the philandering point of view I mean, was to stage the seduction in Copenhagen, trying to kill two birds with one stone: combining a little Kierkegaard research with the long-desired, long-frustrated illicit fuck, in a luxury hotel far, but not inconveniently far, from anywhere we were likely to be recognized. I should have known that the two missions wouldn’t mix. I should have reckoned with the effect of walking the pavements that Kierkegaard walked a century and a half ago, seeing the actual streets, squares and buildings that were just names in print before, Nytorv, Nørregade, the Borgerdydskole, and examining the poignant, homely mementos of S.K. in the Bymuseum: his pipes, his purse, his magnifying glass and the case Regine made for it; the cruel caricature in the Corsair; and the portrait of Regine, bonny, buxom and with a smile just about to part her full lips, obviously painted in her happy days before Kierkegaard broke off their engagement. And then to stand at Kierkegaard’s very desk and write on it! I had the most extraordinary feeling that he was present somehow in the room, hovering at my shoulder.

  In consequence I found myself curiously and embarrassingly reluctant to pursue the amorous objective of the trip, and when the beautiful Samantha shamelessly offered me all the delights of her sumptuous body, I couldn’t take advantage of it. Something held me back, and it wasn’t the fear of impotence, or of aggravating my knee injury. Call it conscience. Call it Kierkegaard. They have become one and the same thing. I think Kierkegaard is the thin man inside me that has been struggling to get out, and in Copenhagen he finally did.

  Kierkegaard says somewhere in the Journals that when he discovered that Regine was engaged to Schlegel, and realized that he had lost her irrevocably, “my feeling was this: either you throw yourself into wild dissipation, or into religiousness absolute.” My frantic, idiotic sexual odyssey after Sally walked out, trying desperately to get laid in turn by Amy, Louise, Stella and Samantha, was my attempt at wild dissipation. But when it failed, religion wasn’t a viable alternative for me. All I could do by way of relief was wank, and write. Actually, it was all Kierkegaard could do for quite a time – write. (Perhaps he wanked too, it wouldn’t entirely surprise me.) It’s only the late books, the ones he published under his own name, that can be described as “absolutely religious”, and frankly I find them a turn-off. The titles alone are a turn-off: most of them are called Edifying Discourses. The so-called pseudonymous works, especially the ones he wrote immediately after the break-up with Regine, under the names of Victor Eremitus, Constantine Constantius, Johannes de Silentio and other quaint aliases, are very different, and much more interesting: a kind of effort to come to terms with his experience, to accept the consequences of his own choices, by approaching the material obliquely, indirectly, though fictions, concealed behind masks. It was the same impulse that made me write the monologues, I suppose. Dramatic monologues, I think they’re called, because they’re addressed to somebody whose lines are just implied. I remember that much from Fifth-Form English. We had to learn one by Browning, off by heart. “My Last Duchess”:

  That’s my last duchess, painted on the wall

  Looking as if she were alive. I call

  That piece a wonder now …

  The Duke is a crazy jealous husband who, it turns out, has murdered his wife. I would never have murdered Sally, of course, but there were times when I came close to hitting her.

  It was Alexandra’s idea, in a way, though she had no notion of the torrent of words her suggestion would release, or the form they would take. I went to see her in a state of dull despair about a week after I got back from Copenhagen. I had renounced dissipation, but I still felt depressed. It was like the economy. The day I returned from Denmark (on the last plane – it took me hours to find Regine’s grave, a flat tombstone rather pathetically overgrown with vegetation, but after all her true monument is Kierkegaard’s works) the Government announced that the recession was officially over, but nobody could tell the difference. Production might be rising at the rate of 0.2 per cent, but there were still millions of people unemployed and hundreds of thousands trapped in negative equity.

  I holed up in my flat. I didn’t want to go out in case I was recognized. I lived in terror of meeting someone I knew. (Anyone except Grahame, of course. When I feel unbearably lonely I invite him in for a cup of tea or cocoa and a chat. He’s always there in the evenings from about nine o’clock onwards, and sometimes during the day too. He’s become a kind of sitting tenant.) I felt sure that all my friends and acquaintances were thinking and talking about me all the time, laughing and sniggering over the cartoon in Public Interest. When I went up to Rummidge to see Alexandra I travelled standard class and wore my Ray-Bans, hoping the ticket collectors wouldn’t recognize me. I was sure they read Public Interest too.

  I asked Alexandra about Prozac. She looked surprised. “I thought you were opposed to drug therapy,” she said. “This is supposed to be something entirely new,” I said. “Non-addictive. No side-effects. In the States even people who aren’t depressed take it, because it makes them feel so good.” Alexandra knew all about Prozac, of course, and gave me a technical explanation of how it’s supposed to work, all about neurotransmitters and seriotin re-uptake inhibitors. I couldn’t really follow it. I said I was already a bit slow on the re-uptake, and hardly needed any more inhibiting in that line, but apparently that wasn’t what it meant at all. Alexandra views Prozac with some suspicion. “It’s n
ot true that there are no side-effects,” she said. “Even advocates admit that it inhibits the patient’s capacity to achieve orgasm.” “Well, I’m already suffering the side-effect,” I said, “so I might as well take the drug.” Alexandra laughed, baring her big teeth in the widest grin I have ever drawn from her. She hastily straightened her features. “There are unconfirmed reports of more serious side-effects,” she said. “Patients hallucinating, trying to mutilate themselves. There’s even a murderer who’s claiming that he killed under the influence of Prozac.” “My friend didn’t mention anything like that,” I said. “She told me it makes you feel better than well.” Alexandra looked at me in silence for a moment with her big brown gentle eyes. “I’ll put you on Prozac if you really want me to,” she said. “But you must understand what’s entailed. I’m not talking about side-effects, now, I’m talking about effects. These new SRI drugs change people’s personalities. They act on the mind like plastic surgery acts on the body. Prozac may give you back your self-esteem, but it won’t be the same self.” I thought for a moment. “What else do you suggest?” I said.

  Alexandra suggested that I should write down exactly what I thought other people were saying and thinking about me, privately or to each other. I recognized the strategy, of course. She believed that it was not the actuality of other people’s opinions, but my fear of what these opinions might be, that was making me wretched. Once I focused on the question – what do other people really think of me?– and made myself answer it explicitly, then instead of projecting my lack of self-esteem onto others, and allowing it to rebound upon myself, I would be forced to acknowledge that other people didn’t really loathe and despise me, but respected and sympathized with and even liked me. It didn’t quite work out like that, though.