by Sue Miller
I was babbling mindlessly as I followed her in. I sat down in the chair in front of the desk, the same chair I’d occupied twice weekly for all those years in high school and college. I looked around as she made her way—a little awkwardly, I noticed—to her own chair, behind the desk, facing me. The room, tiny anyway, was more crowded now than it had been, and when I turned around I saw the reason. There was another chair behind me, and an analytic couch. Everything else had been pushed toward the window to accommodate them.
“Tell me what you are doing in Chicago,” she said after she sat down. She still pronounced it Chew-caw-go.
I laughed. “Well, as usual, that’s exactly the right question.”
“How do you mean?”
“Oh, nothing,” I said. “There are some good reasons too.” And I explained about my father’s wedding, my state of limbo because of the grant.
She had heard about my parents’ divorce but hadn’t known my father was going to marry again. She asked me to convey her wishes for his great happiness. Then she said she’d seen my photographs from time to time in the Christian Science Monitor. She liked them.
I talked about my career, about what I hoped to do with the foundation money if I got it. I told her a little about my parents, about how strange it felt to be moving back and forth between their homes. Too quickly we fell into the familiar pattern: she was more silent than not, and I talked about myself. From time to time I would jolt to an awareness of this, and then I would make myself ask her a question, to restore the sense of dialogue I was trying to insist on: after all, this was a friendly visit, not a medical one.
Her family, she said in answer to my query, was well. The children were all on their own now, or in college. “No more sounds of playing or disaster drifting up from downstairs. Do you remember?”
I did. When I’d been seeing her, the children were small, and occasionally from somewhere deep in the house you could hear the thud of an accident, or shouts of pleasure or pain muffled by wood and plaster. When this happened I would watch her face carefully for signs of betrayal I could have pounced on, signs that they claimed her attention away from me. And never saw one, not a flicker.
“And I think they are doing well. Though one never truly knows, as a parent, of course. But certainly it is … well … an easier time in the world than when you were that age.” She shook her head. “I strongly feel that you, your parents—everyone who survived that era—should be awarded a medal. Or at least a diploma, a certificate of graduation. Many would disagree with me, of course. In times of order, we yearn again for disorder. And no doubt we will discover, too, the price we are paying for our present peacefulness. But there is always a price. Life is an expensive business, finally.”
I asked about her practice. It was full-time now, as it hadn’t been then, with the children, and “part sitting up, part lying down,” she said. “You understand these complicated distinctions.” When she smiled, her eyes virtually disappeared into the deep wrinkles around them.
“Yes,” I said.
“Mostly women. And what we used to call girls. Now known as women too, of course. Though really, for women, so extraordinarily young. Only one man. Still the men are not so interested in a female shrink. When that changes, the world will truly be a different place, I believe.”
“Yes, that would be some sort of ultimate barometer,” I said.
She let a silence fall, and I looked past her out the window at the trees, the houses beyond. Occasionally in my desperation for a topic early in my reluctant therapy, I’d report on something in the rooftop view. “The leaves are all gone,” I’d say. “Now you can watch your neighbors all you want.” Even this, though, she’d been able to turn to use: “Why would I want to?” she’d ask; and then pursue me into my assumptions about her.
In fact, the leaves were mostly gone now, and the light shone in so brightly behind her that it was hard for me to see exactly what was going on in her face. She seemed to be studying me. Finally she spoke. “Well, Nina,” she said. “And what are the bad reasons?”
“The bad reasons?”
“Yes. You said there were good reasons ‘too’ to being in Chicago—and you told me those. But didn’t you want to tell me the bad reasons?”
“The good news and the bad news,” I said.
“Yes.” She smiled.
“Okay, the real reason I’m in this room …” I grinned. “No, I did want to see you also,” I said. “But beyond that, I thought …” And I knew suddenly the absurdity of my impulse. I wanted to laugh. “I thought maybe, too, you could tell me whether or not I should stay married.” I shrugged.
Slowly a smile changed her face. Then left it. After a moment, looking directly at me, she said, “I don’t think so, my dear.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry there are problems,” she said.
“But there aren’t,” I protested.
“I’m sorry for that, then,” she said, and her eyes disappeared into the folds again.
“It’s just me,” I said. “It is.”
She tilted her chair back and shook her head wearily. “I tell you, this could be the title of a book on doing therapy with female patients. It’s Just Me. In spite of all the political work of feminists trying to teach us to say, ‘It’s just them.’ Neither will really work, you know.”
We talked a little longer. I told her about the miscarriage, about Will. “I think in some measure I married him for what I saw as his stability, you know? Because I’d been in relationships for so long where everyone was free to do what he wanted. She wanted. And we all went crazy and hurt each other and cried. Will was—is—so different. And I suppose I always thought the trade-off would be that he’d be a great family man. A good father. I think in some ways I’m disappointed because he didn’t want the baby.” I leaned forward, put my hand on her desk. “No, I know I am.”
I was thinking of the morning I’d come home after staying overnight in the hospital. Will had called the office to say he’d be late for work. He’d hovered over me. Before he left, he told me he’d pick up Chinese food on his way home, and I could hear a kind of pleased caress of the notion in his voice: our life, returning to normal.
“What do you mean, trade-off?” She was frowning.
“It’s a term, you know, from the business world, I think—”
“No, no, no, no, no.” Her hand swept the air impatiently. “I’m not still fresh off the boat. What I’m suggesting is that surely you meant to say something else. Trade-off is the wrong word. I think you meant that you would get something as a concomitant of his stability. Along with it. Not as a trade-off for it. Not as the negative aspect of it.”
I was silent a moment. “Well,” I said. “The classic lapsus linguae, I guess.”
“Perhaps this is worth pursuing?” she asked. I didn’t answer right away. “Is there something, can you think, that you were—or are—giving up to get Will’s … stability?”
“The usual, I suppose.” I shrugged. “Drama. Excitement. Abuse.”
“Ah, yes. Abuse. So necessary in a relationship.”
I smiled. “Well, I always liked the struggle in all those tempestuous relationships, I must admit. But I felt crummy about them too. Because I knew that they were a way for me to avoid being close.”
“Intimacy.”
“Yes.”
“And now you have intimacy.”
I looked out at the blank sky. “I have something like intimacy anyhow. Peace.” She moved somehow—a protest, I think—and my gaze shifted back to her. “We do get along. We genuinely like each other. We do.”
She looked at me across the desk. Then she pointed at me. “You know,” she said, “I was not only joking”—I heard choking—“when I said earlier that I was sorry there were no problems in your marriage. Because, my dear, you come from such a life, such a background, that problems and conflict have been of central importance for you, and for your family. Always there was drama. But such meaningful
drama. In a way, I think your job in life will be to adjust to the aftermath of that.”
I said nothing.
“Perhaps this is what you’re struggling with in part, with your Will, Hmm?”
We talked awhile more. When she looked once at her watch, I knew she’d allotted me the standard amount of time and that it must be nearly over.
“Well,” I said, starting to stand. “Our time is up, I believe.” I was imitating her accent.
She laughed and stood too. “Famous last words,” she said.
At the door, her hand in mine was warm again. “You look wonderful, Nina. I’m so glad to see it. To say it. It is a great pleasure for me to see you again.”
I could feel a deep blush rise to my face.
“And if you should want to talk again while you are here, you will call me. I will always take time.”
As I went down the stairs, I had to move out of the way of another patient, climbing up. Our eyes met briefly, and then we both looked quickly away, wherever else we could.
On the long walk back to my mother’s, I was remembering my therapy with Dr. Dusek. For the first few years—my senior year of high school, my freshman year of college—I hadn’t wanted to be there. I was forced to go. My father had insisted on it, was paying for it, after I’d had what my parents called “some hard times.” How she must have dreaded my arrival twice a week! A sullen, angry adolescent, full of hostility, of inanities. I always wore a ghostly pale lipstick—in photos I remind myself of Al Jolson—and I circled my eyes with black liner, dark shadow. I smoked then—she did too—and the two of us would sit in her office, often through long silences, filling the air with stale clouds of tobacco. Sometimes when I saw my boyfriend right afterward, he’d pull his head back from my stinky hair and say, “Pew: therapy!”
Usually I tried to concoct a subject for discussion on my way over to my session—something trivial, something that would keep her away from the realities of my life, which consisted then of cutting most of my classes and working on art and political projects like staged happenings. A group of us would stand up in Harkness Common and first read and then slowly eat passages from the New York Times about the Vietnam War. We thought we were very avant-garde.
It was in this mood—evade, distract—that I began one morning to tell her about a game we had invented in my dorm the night before, a game we called The Good News and the Bad News.
We had been sitting around, six or seven of us. Cheryl started it. “Well, the good news is my father finally divorced his cruddy second wife,” she said abruptly.
There was a cheer, halfhearted at first, then gathering force as we realized the absurdity of cheering this news. “But the bad news …” Cheryl paused to suck on the joint, and the bad news was delivered in the constricted, high-pitched tone of someone desperately not breathing out: “His new girlfriend is already pregnant, so he married her right away. A real slut.”
As the moans of sympathy went round the room, she exhaled a thin stream of smoke.
“What fuck-ups they are,” someone said. “What cosmic fuck-ups. I wonder if we’ll fuck up as badly as all that.”
“Well actually, I don’t know if she’s really a slut or not,” Cheryl apologized. “I’ve never even met her, actually.”
After that there was a disorganized kind of turn-taking, and at some point I found myself offering the details of my family’s life. (The good news: after two years they made love, finally. The bad news: she got pregnant again! The good news: she had me. The bad news: she had me.) My turn took longer than anyone else’s: there was so much in our history I could use. As a group we had grown more and more hysterical—stoned, uncontrollable laughter that fed on itself. And I felt high, too, with the success of my long, mean narrative, the triumphant distance I felt from it all as I cast it this way.
I was glibly retelling all this to Dr. Dusek, hoping she would think I was a very clever girl—even if I didn’t want her to know much about me, I cared very much that she think I was clever—when, to my surprise, I began to cry.
Dr. Dusek was very still for a few minutes. Then she leaned forward and pushed the box of tissues on her desk toward me. “You did not weep then, when you were playing this game?” she asked.
“No, just now,” I blubbered.
“So you feel something now, something you were not aware of then,” she said gently. And after a long moment, in which the sound of my strained, irregular breathing was the only noise in the room, she asked, “Why is it so sad now?”
“I think,” I said, “because I see that, in fact, it’s true.”
“It’s true,” she repeated.
“Yes,” I said, and couldn’t go on for a few minutes. But finally I said, “That the good stuff in our family—all of it—was the bad stuff. And all the bad stuff …” She sat with the light glowing from behind her, her face lost in shadow, only listening. “And all the bad things, even Randall, were … were good also.”
I wept for a long time in her office. I wept because I felt so confused by life—I was eighteen—and its strange mixture of beauty and ugliness. Because I was frightened at the idea of giving up what I felt was all I had inside me—my rage at my family, my pain. Because I saw that therapy, the terrible cure my father had forced on me, had brought me to this moment, the moment I thought I was evading even as I began to tell the story that contained it. I wept because it had released me and helped me in a way I never would have chosen, hadn’t in fact consented to.
*
When I met Will, I was involved with what Dr. Dusek had earlier called one of my dangerous men. He was an artist, a kind of sculptor, whose work consisted at that time of tracing the effect of certain conditions on a number of busts he’d had fabricated of Richard Nixon—freezing, being left on an interstate, being submerged for months in the top tank of a toilet. He made his money, though, dealing drugs: grass and speed, some hallucinogens, and various prescriptions—tranquilizers, painkillers, Quaaludes. Will came with a woman my lover knew to a party in his loft. At about four in the morning, the only people left were named either John or Susan. This was more than okay. It was almost necessary, everyone was so stoned. They all said each other’s names and laughed a lot. Only I wasn’t named Susan or John or stoned. I’d had a fair amount to drink, but I was somehow still very aware, very clear about everything that was happening. I saw, for instance, that my lover, also a John, had his hand down the back of some Susan’s jeans, though she was leaning forward and talking animatedly, as though that were someone else’s ass back there.
I’d been through his many times before. The routine from this point on was pretty standard. In a while someone, usually John, would replace the Stones or Marvin Gaye with Pachelbel’s Canon, and everyone would get suddenly serious and start putting the moves on everyone else. In the morning on my way to coffee I’d have to pick my way through the undressed, the partially dressed, the partially coupled, couples. This time I’d know their names. Often I didn’t.
So when one of the Johns headed into the bedroom for his coat, I followed him.
“Are you going?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. I couldn’t believe how straight-looking he was, how preppy. He had a very British thatch of straw-yellow hair, combed floppily to one side. I wanted to leave with someone because I needed to balance the score with my John. For a moment I hesitated, though, not sure that this guy would even carry weight in the scale. But he was just so purely beautiful when he asked if I wanted to share a cab that I decided what the hell.
“Why did you leave?” I asked in the cab.
“My name isn’t John,” he said. “And you?”
“My name isn’t Susan.”
We both laughed, and this seemed reason enough that night, in that crazy world, to invite him up to have a drink, to go to bed with him.
The next morning when I woke he was still there, already awake, alert. He reached over and smoothed my hair back off my forehead with the cool flat of his hand in a g
esture that reminded me of one my father used when I had a fever. “What would you like to do today?” he said gently. Three months later, I asked him to move in.
Will was a lawyer, and he was very straight. At first I couldn’t see what it was that attracted him to me. The women he knew wore stockings, silk blouses, pearls. They made money. At that stage I was still working on and off as a waitress to support myself, and shooting a lot of weddings and bar mitzvahs. I had a whole variety of costumes I’d assembled to go into the world in, but very little of what he might have thought of as clothing.
It was only slowly that I realized my cachet in his world—that it was my very funkiness, my poverty, my art. People from his office would say to me, “I hear you’re working on …” and describe some half-baked idea I’d been toying with out loud. Or, “I understand you’re going to have a show at …” and name a gallery whose owner had once been polite about my photographs.
It was hard to know what to accuse Will of, since clearly he was proud of me, of the life I’d made for myself. It wasn’t until much later, after we were married, that I began to notice that his friends seemed to know also about the kind of personal life I’d been leading—names of former lovers, for example, a few of whom were beginning to have a minor celebrity in New York. Or even some of the circumstances of my growing up: the autistic brother, the psychiatrist father, the troubled adolescence.
There was a period of a year or so when, in response to all this, I tried to behave so badly it would shut Will up. Even at the time, I realized that that’s what I was doing; but I also felt purely out of control, crazy. And I took a kind of pleasurable meanness in everything that happened. Once Will wept so hard after I’d been gone for a few days that he burst a small vessel in his nose, and blood pumped lavishly over his face, over my hands and body, as we held each other. And what I felt, even as I cried too, was a perverse kind of enjoyment of the drama of this.