Mount Misery

by Samuel Shem

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, it’s strange – and this is really crazy: his being so ugly, and his being, well, so damn human with me in the face of that ugliness, made him appealing, you know what I mean?’

  ‘I do. Like an underdog is appealing.’

  ‘Exactly. But then I start thinking that if I, given all the reasons to hate him, if I can like him, doesn’t that mean that there’s something there that she could like, even love? I mean if he’s human, she could fall for him, right?’ I nodded, having gone through these same thought processes myself, about Schlomo. ‘But then again, he’s so goddamn human, so up front about who he is and what he’s like, it’s like … like looking at a hot pastrami sandwich or something – what you see is what you get – the meat, those little specks of spices, the mustard, the kaiser roll – you look in those ink-dot little eyes in that wide-open mess of a face, with no trace, not the slightest trace of duplicity – and believe me, I’ve spent my life in my family and in lawyering dealing with duplicity – and you figure there’s no way he can be lying to … especially about sticking his pitiful little pecker into your wife! But then, that thought brings up the opposite – what a perfect body and face and demeanor for a lie! It’s mind-boggling! I don’t know what to think now. But the guy’s a charmer, I’ll give him that.’

  A charmer he was. Schlomo had done his number on Cherokee, as he’d recently been doing on me. After our meeting when he’d thrown the cigar into my crotch, and before I’d had a chance to send him the bill, his tailor had shown up at my office door. Reginald was his name and gaiety was his game, not only in terms of homosexuality but also in terms of manner. He was as neat and perfumed as Schlomo was sloppy, as glancingly funny as Schlomo was blunt. Caricaturing a gay tailor measuring a straight man for a suit, he measured me for a suit – the tape-touch on the inner thigh first a challenge of denial and then a hoopla of giggles, reminding me of my parents dragging me down to a cousin in the garment district for a wholesale bar mitzvah straitjacket in dark wool – and then brought out thick books carpeted with swatches of fabric in a myriad of textures, patterns, and hues, telling me his life story and then assuring me with fond farewells that I would receive the finished product in no more than one week and that it would fit ‘perfetto.’ Sure enough one week later there it was at my office door and I tried it on and it fit perfetto.

  Since then Schlomo had been on his best behavior with me, helloing cheerfully from various sectors of the Misery campus, oily schmoozing with me when we chanced to cross paths on a path or a quad or in a tunnel or a hallway, and flattering me to high heaven through third parties, letting me know in various ways that ‘Schlomo’s door is always open.’ I’d even attended a few seminars where he’d performed, brilliantly and yet earthily – like a college professor somehow not mummified by academe – up on his tippy-toes in that sloppy grand opera without music or slides or notes or overhead projections or computer printouts, seeming to be telling everyone the down and dirty about psychiatry, including his outrage about the ones neglected by Misery, ‘the Great Unwashed.’ He was fascinating, and brilliant – and funny. You had to laugh, first at him, and then, since he was laughing at himself, with him in laughing at himself, and then at a world that had created him and you laughing. Laughing with him, it was hard not to like him. Liking him, it was hard not to believe him. I didn’t know what to think anymore.

  ‘So now, I don’t know what to think,’ Cherokee was saying as we were ending the session. ‘I feel better for having confronted him, and I feel that sex between her and him is absolutely absurd, but his making me feel better worries me more, about him and her.’

  ‘You and Lily have to talk about this. But you may not be able to do it alone. I’d be glad to see the two of you together, to try and help.’

  ‘Good point,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘I’d do it, but I doubt she would. Anyway, it’s impossible for a while. We always do Thanksgiving with her family in Philadelphia, and then we always do December in the Alps – Gstaad – and then the Rockies – Aspen. I won’t be back until after New Year’s.’ I was disappointed, and must have shown it, for he said, ‘Hey, don’t feel bad, when I come back we’ll really get down to work. That little fart opened up some damn good stuff, about Father and me. “Oedipal,” Schlomo said, “even for a goy, you got major Oedipal. Go deep. Tell Roy G. Basch I said to go deep, poppa and momma and boychik Cherokee the American Indian prince.”’ Cherokee shook his head. ‘You gotta laugh, right?’

  ‘Gotta. But you wouldn’t want to try to meet, even talk on the phone?’

  ‘Hey – you suggested I try “different” once, and it was disaster. Why do a different different, and double the disaster?’

  ‘But how can you go on vacation with Lily for six weeks with this hanging over you and she not willing to talk about it? Won’t it be unbearable?’

  ‘It’s called “normal.” Father and Mother did it for fifty-one years. In their generation – and all the ones before it – men and women never talked to each other, right? Unless, maybe, it’s different with Jews?’

  I smiled. ‘A lotta screaming and crying,’ I said. ‘Not much talk.’

  ‘So, hotshot, have a fun holiday. See you in the New.’

  ‘Why don’t you keep in touch by phone, or fax or e-mail.’

  ‘Keep in touch?’

  ‘Check in. I think it would be a good idea. Like weekly?’

  He thought this over and smiled. ‘If you need me to, sure.’

  We shook hands. This time my grip was stronger than his. He winced. ‘Oh,’ he said at the door. ‘When I went back downstairs, that moron, that Future Farmer of America, was still waiting, whistling something from Man of La Mancha. Where do they find these guys anyway?’

  ‘Disneyland.’

  ‘Ha! Haha! Yes!’ We laughed hard, together – that ‘click.’ ‘And you know something, Basch? When I worked there, I did my best to create them! God! Ciao ciao.’

  He left, leaving a smile still on my face, but as it too left, I was surprised that his afterimage was, for all that wealth and determined good cheer, unpressed, rough-textured, faded from pink, and sad.

  * * *

  Burning green beans filled the air, and then, when Berry rushed to the pan and threw it in the sink and turned on the tap, the sizzle of steam.

  We were at Berry’s apartment. She’d decided to cook us dinner, a green bean and tofu stir-fry. Ever since we’d gotten back to America, we’d mostly eaten out or done takeout, cultivating a kind of United Nations of restaurants, each of which reminded us of a place we’d been. We’d started the evening guardedly loving, but everything seemed intent on going wrong, much in the way that, when things start to break in a house, the reign of breakage continues until most major fix-it men have been called. Little things were irritating me: the knot and tangle in the curly phone cord, which, when I picked up the receiver to answer a page from Viv, sent the whole phone crashing to the floor; the piled dishes in the sink and jungle of makeup, tops off, in the bathroom; and finally her cat, a pedigree Russian Blue named Keejer. Berry’s family had always had cats and dogs; my family, owing to my father’s fear of unanesthetized animals, had had no pets but guppies. The smell of stale cat food and the pieces of cat litter between my bare toes had always been irritating, and now even the cat himself, sitting like a fake cat staring at the kitchen cupboard where Berry said there must have been a loose mouse, the castrated cat himself turning to stare at me with a terrorizing disdain, bothered me. I stared back at him, suddenly understanding that if our sizes were reversed, he would long ago have killed me and eaten me.

  Tonight he seemed even more disdainful than usual, and I couldn’t help wondering who else he was disdaining, when I wasn’t around. Cherokee’s suspicion, and my thing with Jill, had made me more suspicious of Berry. I’d said nothing about Jill, nor had Berry about anyone else. I felt torn and in torment, keeping a secret from the woman who’d always been the one to whom I told my secrets. As the ev
ening went on I’d felt – like when you’re swimming off the cold coast of New England and suddenly you’re embraced by a warm thread unraveling from the sensual weave of the Gulfstream – the twin currents of rising joy and rising sadness, dreams done and dreams deferred. Things between us felt as fragile as nostalgia. Fragile not only from our other hidden lives, but from the gap between her healthy work with kids and my warped work of becoming a shrink.

  ‘Shit!’ Berry said, staring at the burnt tofu and beans in the pan balancing on the pile of dishes in the sink. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK. Let’s go out to dinner.’

  ‘Fine. Where shall we go?’

  ‘Let’s go to Miguel’s.’

  ‘How about Pentimento?’

  ‘OK,’ I said, not really caring, ‘let’s go to Pentimento.’

  She paused, studying me. ‘But it sounded like you wanted to go to Miguel’s.’

  ‘No, no, it’s OK – let’s go where you want to go.’

  ‘But I want to go where you want to go too.’ She considered this, and asked, ‘Why don’t you want to go to Pentimento?’

  Feeling more tense, I said, ‘I just want to decide.’

  ‘We are deciding.’

  ‘We’re not getting anywhere. Let’s just make a decision.’

  The phone began ringing.

  ‘Why are you yelling at me?’

  ‘I’m not yelling!’

  We stared at each other. The answering machine picked up.

  ‘“Hi, Berr, it’s Chandra, just checking in. Are we on for tomorrow night? Call me. ’Bye now.”’

  Berry and I stared harder and longer at each other.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘A friend. She’s a divinity student, working part-time at the nursery school.’

  ‘A friend?’

  ‘Yes, a good friend. Someone who really understands. You know what it’s like when you meet someone like that?’

  ‘A woman?’ The specter of gender floated across the room, cutting through the acrid scent of beans ruined, beans deferred. Our eyes met, did a little dance of unspeakable loss, and then disengaged.

  ‘Doesn’t have to be. We’re going to the movies tomorrow. C’mon.’

  ‘What a world!’ I said. ‘Men like women, and women like women too. We’re doomed!’

  We fought our way through the slicing cold wind and got into her car. The heater was broken and we shivered the whole way to the Hunan Haven, a good choice because it was so plain and bad it reminded us of the Xiangxiang Hotel restaurant in Changsha, China. We’d worked together in Changsha during a flood of the Xiangjiang River the past spring, the last stop before we’d come back to the States. Now we parked in back of a car whose bumper sticker read:

  MY KID BEAT UP YOUR HONOR STUDENT

  Back from the trip we’d been startled at how America had become a nation of bumper stickers, and by now we were desensitized, but this seemed particularly ominous.

  The bare tables and the waiters speaking a dialect of Chinese that sounded like nothing so much as a bunch of spoons jangling together in a bag, and the food-memory – simple, fresh, with scary spices that made our tear ducts well up like ripe lichees – lifted us back to our time in China, before these Chandras and Jills and shrinks and the thug who bought the bumper sticker, and I felt a dreadful burden of guilt. The owner’s daughter, a three-year-old girl of meticulous and dazzling beauty, brought us our check. We both stared at her in awe, caught suddenly in the trap of our infertility.

  ‘Hey, buddy,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry.’ I reached out my hand, palm up.

  ‘Me too. Everything in the world seems so precarious right now.’

  My love for her rushed in. I squeezed her hand, meaning it. She squeezed mine.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, her eyes tearing up. ‘Are you thinking about Changsha too?’

  ‘Yeah. Working together at the orphanage during the flood – was it only last May? Seems years ago now, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Ages ago, yes.’

  ‘Seeing the rows of cribs with the newborns,’ I said, ‘all girls – and then realizing what it meant. It was the closest I ever felt to you.’

  ‘And I you,’ she answered softly. ‘All those abandoned baby girls, five to a crib, with just a date of birth tacked up over each head, in a little plastic packet. Five to a crib, all five under the same red and gold quilt. The parched light. Coal smoke.’

  ‘We fed them bottles of soy milk and rice.’

  ‘And when they cried,’ she said, ‘no-one came to comfort them.’

  ‘Except us.’

  ‘Yes, we did,’ she said, almost whispering.

  Now tears came to my own eyes. Hand in hand, we left.

  Out on the street we were struck by a blast of icy air and stinging sleet that knocked us both back a step. We had to clutch each other to keep from falling. It was the first real hit of the cold that every November clenched its fist around the heart of New England.

  ‘I hate this climate!’ I shouted, leaning into the gale.

  ‘Me too!’ she shouted back.

  ‘Let’s move to China!’ I shouted, thinking palm trees and dim sum. ‘We’ve got enough money to live out our lives like kings!’

  ‘And queens! Deal!’

  We stayed the night together, feeling like together we’d survived a grave threat. Jill was in my mind, but in a different compartment. I slept restlessly, Berry soundly. I awoke at three in the morning to find her cat had placed the bloody head of a mouse neatly in front of my face.

  The next morning Berry was off to Child Place Cooperative School and I off to my first day of my new rotation – Toshiba, Admissions. As we were leaving, just before opening the front door and facing the howling snowy wind, Berry asked, ‘Remember what I said about the holidays?’

  ‘They’re the worst.’

  ‘The absolute worst. Holidays are hell for people. Admissions to mental hospitals go way up. Brace yourself. Thanksgiving to New Year’s is the worst time of year.’

  ‘Our best time, the whole fiscal year!’ said Nash Michaels, M.D., J.D., Director of Admissions at Misery. ‘Admissions go up severalfold. In parallel with the holiday boom in retail stores. Thirty percent of our gross profit per annum arises in this single five-week period.’

  It was later that morning, and I was sitting in the luxurious Toshiba boardroom. Nash Michaels was a real ‘maybe’ kind of guy. Maybe he was more a doctor than a lawyer and maybe he was more a lawyer than a doctor; maybe an honest lawyer who’d help you out of your jam, maybe a smiler who’d wind up owning your house; maybe fifty, maybe forty; maybe those turtle-lidded eyes hid something smart, maybe something unalterably stupid; maybe his first name was a sign that he was from the proud lineage of Schlomo’s first analyst the pitiful Nash, or maybe he was named by a kooky mother after an extinct automobile; maybe that dark wavy hair and five-o’clock shadow were sinister, maybe dextrous; maybe he’d lost that forearm now replaced by a hook in a terrific war, maybe in a suburban wood pulper; maybe he’d gotten a good education, maybe not – when I’d asked where he’d gone to college, he had put a hand over his mouth and slurred it so that maybe he said ‘Harvard’ and maybe he said ‘Harpur’; maybe all in all he was a Brahmin from Boston, or maybe just as all in all a little pisher from Brooklyn. The one thing he was not maybe about was the future. As clearly as seeing a razor in a mirror, Nash Michaels had seen the future of American psychiatry. It lay between his legs, in his laptop computer.

  Yet maybe not, for he was not the only director of Toshiba. With us was Jennifer Tunaba, a tall young Japanese woman whose English was peppered with techno-cybertalk. Jennifer was an M.B.A. Her father, a wealthy industrialist, was said to have told von Nott, ‘You hire my daughter, I promote Misery in Japan.’ So Mount Misery had become the mental hospital in the world for those rich Japanese whose minds had been crushed by the same culture they had been taught to revere. Once admitted, they were spirited away to a bili
ngual ward upstairs called The Golden Path.

  I soon learned that this arrangement, cochiefs of Toshiba, was a stroke of genius on Lloyal’s part. In the flowchart on the wall before my eyes, both Nash Michaels, M.D., J.D., and Jennifer Tunaba, M.B.A., were trapped in little rectangular boxes connected by a line and then, like a mobile, the line suspended from other boxes and lines suspended from Lloyal. The suspension was done with immaculate equality, so that, given both Michaels’s and Tunaba’s blasting desire to advance upward, their frantic contortions to get ahead only caused their little boxes to bang into each other and carom back to an uneasy distance. Nash hated Tunaba for her lack of medical knowledge; she hated him for his lack of business knowledge. Each constantly tried to knife the other in the back, though given the flowchart, it had to be clear to each that if one box were emptied, the other, like a seesaw suddenly unbalanced, would throw its occupant up into the no-man’s-land below Lloyal, to dangle. And not dangle neatly, no. The dangle would be at an angle, and for a flowchart, ruled and balanced, an angle was cancer. The empty box would soon be filled. If the body filling it was not of the same weight, appropriate weight would be added, to balance again, like when you buy and balance new tires. Aligned, the chart would flow along to nowhere once again.

  These thoughts were prompted by the chart lying open before me, of a patient who was to be admitted that day:

  This is the 4th Misery, 7th psychiatric admission for this 22 y.o. [year old] s. [single] w. [white] C. [Catholic] m. [male] with a CC [Chief Complaint]: ‘The angle of the dangle equals the heat of the meat if the mass of the ass remains constant.’