Mount Misery

by Samuel Shem

  Everyone was there, from the olive-green-clad Buildings and Grounds clustering around the vodka punch, through the red-clad and broad-beamed nurses and secretaries and social workers grazing on the jumbo shrimp and prime rib, to the black-suited shrinks and administrators huddling in the corners as if their lives would be in danger if they actually talked to these lesser ones adangle in the flowchart below them.

  The class division was obliterated only in the receiving line, where you got to balance your crumpet and jumbo shrimp and bloodied rib and drink in one hand and have the other clasped damply by Lloyal von and the sycophantic Nash and Jennifer T. and Blair ‘the Handsome’ Heiler and the drug brownshirt Errol Cabot and then the Doves – ah, those Doves! – the world’s most charming analyst-astrophysicist tag team, these Doves trying hard, at least at this party, to put a little oy back in goy.

  After a few quick glasses of the vodka punch, things got rosy, and rosier still when Jill appeared in a dark pink jumpsuit unbuttoned a touch too far, showing the edge of a lighter pink brassiere. Her underwear never ceased to amaze me. Like a good therapist, in every meeting she gave you something, in terms of glimpses of her underwear. I poured her a punch. Jill was the kind of woman who, when she enters a room, everyone stares, as if she had sparkly dust sprinkled over her like that glitter at parties, a dust of fame, so that you felt that, by being with her, some of the glitter couldn’t help but sprinkle off onto you, and even the morning after, rising from your tired bed and getting dressed for work, you’d find little pieces of glitter on your wrist or your neck, and all during the day come across more pieces stuck in weird places – behind your ear, in the webbing between your fingers, on your thigh.

  ‘I’ve got a clinical question for you,’ Jill said. ‘I’m feeling—’

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘First, I’ve got a clinical question for you.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘What’s your insurance coverage?’

  ‘No, really. I’m feeling kind of blue, you know, with the holidays and all, with no family. So just tell me, is it like going to go away?’

  ‘What else is it going to do?’ I asked, thinking 309.00, Adjustment Disorder with Depressed Mood. She thought for a second.

  ‘That’s just what I wanted to hear,’ she said. ‘Do you take Visa?’

  We went through the receiving line. The Chiefs of Misery gawked at her, especially Lloyal and Nash and Errol and Blair Heiler, who took Jill’s hand with the somber lasciviousness of a world-expert lecher, and then confronted her by raising it to his lips as if she were a DD with RHS – Dissociative Disorder with Really Hyper Sexuality.

  Things started to have that fluid feel where you think you’re being witty but you have a niggling sense that you’re not being as witty as you think. Hannah and Henry appeared in dark suits like twins dressed exactly alike by an oafish mother. With them was a tall woman with chiseled features, cropped hair, and walled-off eyes, also dressed in a dark suit and wrapped in a demonic silence. This was the woman who had replaced Bob Marley as Henry’s hero, the classic Freudian psychoanalyst, A. K. Lowell. With each of my attempts to engage any of the three of them, Dr A.K. would pull her haunted silence more tightly around her, and Hannah would roll her eyes up to her Great Analyst in the Sky and talk about her latest workshop, a Jungian Rodeo Quest in Boulder, and Henry would peer inward, his face twisting in terror at what he saw.

  Malik swam in, wearing a ridiculous plaid sport coat over a sweat suit, mopping sweat from his face with a remarkably petite Israeli Army towel. With him were his former patient and now AA sponsor George, and Mr K. They’d just come from a half-court three-on-three basketball game in the gym.

  ‘So tell me, Malik,’ I said, nodding toward Mr K. and George, ‘how come these patients of yours are always so interesting?’

  ‘Easy,’ he said. ‘I’ve developed a sliding scale, based on how boring they are. You do a sport today, Basch?’

  ‘I’m about to.’

  He glanced at Jill. ‘I mean aerobic.’

  ‘More punch?’ Jill asked me. I handed her my glass. She left.

  ‘Watchit, Basch,’ Malik said. ‘Sex in Misery is tricky.’

  ‘Uh-huh. So what’s with the sliding scale?’

  ‘The more boring they are, the higher their fee. Every month we evaluate it, and if they’ve gotten less boring, their fee goes down.’

  ‘Who decides how boring they are?’

  ‘We do it together, right, Mr K.?’

  ‘Yes, er, no, I hardly pay anything anymore.’

  ‘Pretty soon I’ll be payin’ him,’ Malik said. ‘Gotta go, Basch. Can’t be around all this booze.’

  ‘There’s a Christmas Alkathon,’ George said, ‘and a new meetin’.’

  ‘It’s called “the Brain-Damaged Group,”’ Mr K. said, laughing.

  ‘The thing about bein’ sober,’ Malik said, watching Jill walk toward us, ‘is that for better or worse you grow a conscience.’ He winked.

  Before I could figure out what the hell he meant, he was rocking away, again singing that same damn Aerosmith song. He disappeared into a thicket of social workers, just as Jill arrived with my punch.

  Then suddenly, there before me and Jill, was Berry. I felt myself go hot around the ears, the neck, the throat.

  ‘Oh hi!’ I said way too loudly.

  ‘Hi, Roy,’ she said. ‘I was driving by and thought I’d stop in.’

  ‘Berry, Jill,’ I said, tightly. ‘Jill, Berry.’

  ‘Heard a lot about you,’ Jill said.

  ‘Oh?’ Berry asked.

  ‘Roy and I worked together on Emerson.’

  Small talk was made. I felt drunker, in a world all afloat. Things turned glassy, glassine. Sweat pooled in the hollow of my back. We three made weird talk with several shrinks.

  Jill went for more punch and Schlomo Dove came over, sloppily dressed and looking particularly ugly, his jowls pressing down on the wilted collar of his white shirt, open at the neck so that gray hairs sprouted out over the loose, nooselike knot of his necktie. It was a stained number sprouting the same kinds of tropical fruits that currently graced the Barracuda’s dress and hat for her Amazon outing.

  Schlomo started hitting on Berry, so shamelessly that her eyes popped in amazement. She shot me an ‘Is this a joke?’ look, and tried to repel him. Things turned pitiful. Luckily, Viv cut in:

  ‘Four more admissions, Cowboy, one the Virgin Mary.’

  ‘Gotta go,’ I said.

  ‘I do too,’ Berry said. ‘I’ll walk you out.’

  ‘When can we talk?’ she asked when we were alone in the hallway.

  ‘How ’bout tomorrow?’ I said.

  ‘How ’bout tonight?’

  I hesitated. Jill and I had plans. ‘Fine. Come over at eight.’

  ‘These shrinks!’ Berry said, at the door. ‘What a bunch of losers! They’re like twelve-year-old boys, looking at your tits before they look into your eyes!’

  ‘Twelve’s pushing it. I’d say about nine.’

  ‘This brings it all back – the way they demoralized me, in my training. The men who run these places are pitiful!’ She stared at me. ‘Maybe that’s it.’

  ‘It?’

  ‘For you. We’ve got to talk.’

  ‘All hell’s breaking loose, Cowpoke, so c’mon!’

  ‘At eight.’

  I did my admissions, the last the Virgin Mary with a Chief Complaint of ‘Three times in the Bible Jesus said “I’m going to die” and nobody even stayed up with him and talked with him they all went to sleep and if there’d been any women among his disciples you can bet they’d try to comfort him by suckling him with these two gorgeous thirty-eights.’

  296.44, Bipolar Disorder, Mania, with Psychosis and Exhibitionism.

  At quarter to five I went up to my office in the attic of Toshiba to pick up my stuff. A woman was waiting for me. Her hair was bleached platinum and she was dressed all in black. On her lap was a wrapped Christmas present, all angels. Who could th
is be? She turned.

  ‘Christine?’ I said, surprised. My blond Lady in Black had gone platinum?

  ‘Oh, Dr Basch, thank God you’re here!’ She blew her nose loudly. Her eyes were red with weeping. ‘Can I see you?’

  ‘Sure. I’ve got a few minutes. Come in.’

  I hadn’t heard from Christine since she’d announced for Arnie Bozer and walked out into the door, bloodying her nose. Since I, Heilerized, had Heilerized her.

  ‘I’ve got a headache to die from. Aspirin won’t touch it.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Arnie. That prick. I was supposed to go to his home in Indiana with him for Christmas today, to meet his family. Last week I went skiing with my girlfriend in Colorado. The day before I came back, Arnie sent me a dozen red roses at my hotel. No-one had sent me flowers since high school. They were lovely. When I came back I was psyched. I mean he had said …’ she was overcome with weeping, and shouted out, ‘he loved me.’ Again her black mascara ran down her cheeks, diffusing in her rouge, in a lethargic gray. ‘So my first night back – last night – we get together for dinner, and I’m in such a loving mood. I’ve been thinking Arnie is it, Mr Right, right? So at dinner he starts talking about himself and his analysis with Dr Schlomo Dove.’

  ‘I thought he wasn’t supposed to talk about what Schlomo and he did.’

  ‘He never did before, but for some reason last night he starts to tell me everything. On and on about his childhood on the chicken farm. It was sort of interesting, but only sort of. I mean how interesting can a childhood with chickens be? And we were eating chicken too, wouldn’t you know it? It’s like he’s talking to a mirror. I start feeling I don’t exist.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘So I go – in the kindest, most loving voice – “Arnie, that’s fantastic, but I haven’t seen you in a week and, maybe, before we get into all that we can make a little contact with each other?”’ She looked at me imploringly. ‘Nothing wrong with saying that, is there?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Well, he goes apeshit. He goes, “I thought you were truly interested in me and here I’m telling you the most important thing going on with me and you don’t want to listen? You just want to talk about yourself?” So I go, “No, I don’t want to talk about me, I just want to talk a little about us, OK?” He goes more apeshit – like he’s going to smack me. I hold up my salad plate, for protection. And he goes, “Us? There is no more us. I’m out of here.” And he gets up and starts to leave. So I go, “Please, Arnie baby, please stay and talk. I need to talk to you.” And so he stares at me and with like incredible contempt he goes, “That’s a borderline dissociative response,” and walks out. Now he won’t return my calls.’ She lost it again, sobbing hard.

  Bozer was at the moment rotating on Emerson. His ‘borderline dissociative’ comment came from his Heilerization. I didn’t mention this to Christine.

  ‘Is there something wrong with me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I mean he seems fine. I must be the one who’s screwed up.’

  ‘Arnie’s got problems,’ I said, ‘big-time.’

  Startled by my frankness, she stared at me. ‘Y’know, they ought to have some kind of licensing board for men, some way they could look men over and check out all their wiring and connections and all, so they come out certified.’

  ‘Certified?’

  ‘To be in a relationship with a woman.’

  I burst out laughing, as did she. She gave me the wrapped Christmas present. It was a blue sleeveless sweater.

  ‘I knitted it myself,’ she said. ‘I’ve spent so much time looking at you, I’ve measured you in my mind. I’m sure it’ll fit. Go ahead, try it.’

  I slipped it over my head. It fit perfectly.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘It’s really nice. Regular time next week?’ She nodded, got up and went to the door. With her hand on the doorknob she said, ‘You’re a real sweetie. Better than two Bayer aspirin.’

  ‘Merry Christmas.’

  She started to cry. Waving bravely, she left.

  Jill was waiting for me at my car, with a bottle of cheap champagne.

  ‘I’m glad I met Berry,’ she said, ‘and that she knows everything about us.’

  ‘Everything?’ Jill was drinking from the bottle. She nodded. ‘But how? You didn’t tell her. I heard every word between you.’

  ‘You heard but you didn’t. We did it girlwise – too high a frequency for guys to hear. I really liked her. It’s worrisome.’

  ‘How’s it worrisome?’

  ‘If a guy like you couldn’t even make it with a girl like her, it makes me wonder what the hell I’m gettin’ myself into. It’s not that I don’t like sensitive guys, but give me a choice between a sensitive guy and a guy who’s great in bed and I’ll take in bed, every time. Like now.’ She kissed me. She tasted like vodka and cherry.

  ‘I’m not sensitive?’

  ‘I didn’t say that, you did. Let’s make crazy love all night long.’

  ‘I’ve got to see her tonight, at eight.’

  She was quiet for a while, as we drove along. Then she said, ‘I’m feeling pretty good right now. For the first time in a long time my self-esteem isn’t being affected by real-life disasters.’

  ‘It’s that low, is it?’ I said, trying to lighten things up.

  She didn’t laugh. ‘What’s with you guys and jokes? I mean really. What?’

  ‘Grief.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. Everyone’s got their own grief, sucking away at their heart.’

  ‘Flaky, but nice,’ Berry was saying guardedly a few hours later in my turret. ‘She seemed flaky, but nice.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, just as guardedly.

  She paused. ‘Roy, I think you’re depressed.’

  ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘You’re not – I mean, don’t take this the wrong way, but … but you’re not thinking of suicide, are you?’

  ‘Are you crazy?’

  ‘No, I am not cr—’

  ‘Don’t you know me at all?’ I said, irritated, coming down off the alcohol high.

  ‘That’s what I’m asking. I don’t feel I do know you very well right now.’

  ‘No, I am not thinking of suicide. It’s just tough right now, seeing so much grief coming into Admissions every day, and doing nothing much to help.’

  ‘Roy, please – you need some help. I think you should get into some therapy.’

  ‘Therapy? After seeing what it’s done to Solini? To Hannah? Hannah’s in fourteen different kinds of therapy and she’s worse than ever. When she talks to you, she stares up at the light fixtures. Because of therapy she left a great career as a cellist – to become a therapist! Not to mention my models as therapists: Heiler? Schlomo? Lloyal? Ike White! Gimme a break.’

  ‘There are other therapists, out in the community, not caught up in all the academic stuff, more common-sense people. I’ve found one.’

  ‘Hey – I’m not that complicated a person. I just want to stop thinking so much. All I want is to do my job till five, go home, not think.’

  ‘I thought you went into this to think, to understand?’

  ‘Right now I’m stressed out. I just want to have a little fun.’

  ‘And I’m not fun?’

  ‘I love you, but this, this is not fun, no.’

  ‘So you want it nice,’ she said, ‘but I want it real?’

  ‘All I want,’ I said, feeling more and more trapped, ‘is to be free.’

  ‘And if the only real freedom is in relationship?’

  ‘Real freedom is like climbing Mount Everest. You do it alone.’

  She took this in, then said, ‘Nobody climbs Mount Everest alone.’

  ‘Here we go again.’

  ‘Fine,’ she said, rising, her voice shaking. ‘Good night and good luck.’

  ‘No!’ I said, feeling as if some bottom were falling out. ‘I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. It’s just that, with you now, e
verything seems so damn hard. Like gravel or something.’

  ‘And I’ll bet that with her everything seems easy.’

  I hesitated. ‘Yeah. Like for you, with whoever you’re with – Chandra …’ I paused. She said nothing. ‘Or some red-hot nursery school teacher or something.’ She smiled. ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘If anyone, it would be my car mechanic.’

  ‘You’re making it with your car mechanic?’

  ‘I wish. If I were, my car heater would be working, wouldn’t it?’

  We both smiled. All winter her Volvo had been ice cold. The texture of the stuff between us went to velvet.

  ‘I just want you to know, Roy, that whatever I’m doing now, I’m not jeopardizing this relationship with you.’

  She waited for me to respond. Things turned, velvet back to gravel.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said finally. ‘I just don’t know.’

  She stared at me, and I saw the realization hit her, the horror in her eyes of our losing each other. I felt it too. She started to cry. I moved to hold her, wanting to comfort her. She cried harder. I felt her ribs expand and contract around her sobs, all edged, jagged.

  ‘Hey, come on,’ I said, ‘don’t cry.’

  ‘Why not? If I don’t cry over this, what am I going to cry over?’

  ‘I can’t stand you crying.’

  ‘If you can’t stand a person crying you’re in the wrong business.’

  ‘Patients I can stand. This is different. You’re not my pa—’

  ‘Terrific – you’re empathic with strangers, but not with your …’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘Whatever it was, it’s not anymore!’ She was furious now, her eyes afire, the pupils harsh, like pins. ‘You need help! And I’m sick and tired of trying to give it – without getting anything back.’