Mount Misery

by Samuel Shem

  The harder I tried, the softer it got. I lay over her, my belly sagging onto hers until my back started to ache. I rolled away, humiliated.

  What followed was at every step haunted by Cherokee and Christine. Jill tried everything. Nothing helped. My penis, like his, would occasionally struggle up from its hairy pillow like a drunken sot, only to flop back down.

  Lying beside me, staring with me up at the accusatory ceiling, Jill asked, ‘How are you feeling, Roy?’

  I stiffened – all but my penis – and said, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Come on, Roy, I love you – you can tell me.’

  ‘I told you, I don’t know,’ I said, feeling testy.

  ‘You don’t have to get angry at me.’

  ‘I’m not angry.’

  Sighing, she slipped her tiny bikini up over her rump and adjusted it so it made a satiny ‘snap.’ She slipped the silky whorled bra onto her shoulders, bringing both sides around her boobs like hands around fruits. Her red-lacquered fingernails met at her sternum and latched the bra shut, like closing the store for the night. I got a little hard, but was afraid to try it again and fail.

  ‘I feel sorry for guys. I wouldn’t be a guy for anything in the world. Let’s just chalk it up to a bad night and a weird rotation.’

  ‘Weird rotation?’

  ‘Analysis, babe. Hard on the significant other.’

  The next morning in supervision with A.K., I told her about Cherokee Putnam’s impotence. She read the entrails and sometime after the three-pencil mark her eyes enlarged. I braced myself and she said, ‘And you?’

  My face got hot. How had she known? ‘Last night I was impotent too.’

  ‘Uh-huh. And I notice that you’re now scratching your arm.’

  Mortified, I looked down and noticed that I had in fact been scratching my arm, just inside the elbow, a red patch over the olecranon. ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘V.D.,’ she said.

  ‘Venereal Disease?’ I cried, thinking, It’s already gone from my dick to my arm?

  ‘Vagina Dentata. Classic. You have the fantasy that vaginas have teeth and will bite off your penis.’

  ‘I’m a wreck!’ I blurted out. ‘I’m feeling really really down!’ And I told her about myself as I never had before. About Berry and Jill and about my family. As she wrote this down there was, again, a kind look on her face.

  ‘You need outside help,’ she said. ‘You need to take this to an analyst.’

  ‘So you think it’s time for me to take the plunge?’ The obvious unconscious referent, to my limp penis, made her smile, and I smiled. ‘Can you suggest someone?’ The itch was incredible, and I tried to rub it as nonchalantly as possible on my new suit coat.

  ‘It would pollute the transference. You have to find your own.’

  ‘Go to Schlomo?’ She said nothing. ‘Your old analyst, Schlomo Dove?’

  But the fourth number 2 was in that big beautiful hand and I was history. I got up and trudged to the door and grasped the doorknob.

  ‘Dr Basch?’

  I was not history? A countertransference doorknobber? ‘Yes?’

  ‘Would you like to play tennis sometime, and come over for dinner?’

  I turned, tears of gratitude in my eyes. ‘Yes!’ I said, wanting to add but catching myself, darling.

  ‘Keep it up,’ she went on, smiling, ‘and you too may someday be good enough to be a candidate at the institute.’

  I left, floating on air, feeling that I was very very special.

  ‘Your father died today,’ my mother said on the phone that night from Florida.

  ‘What? Grandpa’s dead?’

  ‘No, no, your father, your father. He had chest pains last night and I called you but you didn’t call back and then today in the hospital suddenly he just died.’

  My father is dead. No more conjunctions.

  ‘The doctor said it was painless.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  It was Friday evening, the twenty-sixth. We talked about the details but I was in shock. The funeral would be on Monday, March 1, at home in Columbia.

  I hung up feeling lost and guilty, and needing to talk to someone. But who? Berry? I still hadn’t talked to her and felt estranged. A wave of desolation broke over me. She was family, my real family. I needed her with me in this, the first of our four parents to die. Yes. I called, praying to get her, not her machine.

  I got her machine. Worse: ‘… and I’m out of the country until Tuesday.’

  I felt horrible.

  Who else to call? Malik? Jill? I thought about it. With each, right now, there seemed to be too much old baggage, they would be too demanding. Solini? Hannah? Forget it. And then I thought of A.K. She would not be intrusive, no. I called her up at home.

  ‘My father died today, suddenly.’

  Two seconds. ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘What should I do?’

  Two seconds. ‘Listen for it in the material.’

  ‘Material? You mean my cases?’

  Two seconds. ‘Yes and in your own material. At the funeral. You might also try “Mourning and Melancholia.’” I could have sworn I heard the scritch scritch of a pencil. ‘Father dies. Son is impotent. Impressive. Good night.’

  So to prepare for the funeral I read Freud’s classic. I hadn’t looked at it since the seminar, after which Ike White had shaken my hand, wished me a nice vacation, and gone upstairs to kill himself. Now, reading it, I was impressed. Here was genius. It was absolutely clear: the healthy response to the death of my father would be ‘mourning,’ and the pathological response would be ‘melancholia.’ The crucial difference seemed to be the matter of ambivalence, where, if you had mixed feelings about the dead person, or ‘object,’ in Freud’s words, ‘The shadow of the lost object falls across the ego.’ When Ike had quoted that incredible phrase, I hadn’t understood; now I did. This falling shadow was big trouble, leading to insomnia, loss of appetite, self-reproach, even suicide:

  The tendency toward suicide makes melancholia so interesting – and so dangerous … It is true we have long known that no neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.

  Ike had failed to work this out. I certainly had mixed feelings about my father. I’d have to be on guard.

  The night before the funeral, as I sat in our living room in Columbia listening to the local rabbi, one Goldfarb, a chubby pink-cheeked young man with bright red hair, recently moved to Columbia from Nebraska, ask my mother and brother and me about my father so as to be able to compose the next day’s eulogy, I was on guard. Any ambivalence about my father would have to be nipped in the bud, analyzed out, and kept merely neurotic.

  ‘And what did your husband like to do?’ Goldfarb asked my mother.

  ‘Golf. Golf was his first love.’ She paused. ‘I mean after the boys.’

  ‘“Golf.”’ The rabbi scribbled this down. ‘And where did he golf?’

  ‘We golfed all over the world.’ My mother and brother, like me, were numb. Dry-eyed. As my mother talked about golf, the rabbi, feeling he now had enough information about golf, turned to me, the oldest:

  ‘You know, Doctor, Columbia is the pupik of America. You know pupik?’

  ‘Pupik?’

  ‘Yiddish for belly button. And you know what a belly button collects?’

  ‘You have some thoughts about what a belly button collects?’

  ‘Schmutz.’ He stared at me expectantly.

  ‘And you have some feelings about schmutz?’

  ‘Yes, Doctor, I certainly do have some feelings, yes. This congregation is unreal. Schmutz. Now. What else did your loving husband like to do?’

  It went on like this, the rabbi writing in a little notebook a little, and then turning to me again and telling me how terrible Columbia was:

  ‘I was in New York not long ago, having a bite at a deli, and the waiter asked where I was from and I said Columbia, New York, and he said, “Still got the whores
up there?” This place was famous for its red-light district!’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘everybody knows that.’

  ‘I didn’t, when I took this job. Now, Mrs Basch, what did he belong to – I assume B’nai B’rith, but was he an Elk, a Lion, a Moose?’

  After he left, my mother and brother and I had a chance to talk.

  ‘He loved you boys, you know,’ my mother said. ‘Do you know that?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. My brother said yes too.

  ‘And in his own way he loved me. These last few years, he didn’t really show it. He was so bitter. But you should have seen the cards he wrote me, for birthdays, and anniversary. Wonderful, wonderful cards.’

  ‘Why was he so bitter, Mom?’ I asked. ‘He’d always dreamed of golf in Florida.’

  ‘I think it was money,’ she said.

  ‘He had plenty,’ my brother said. ‘His own, and what we gave him.’

  ‘Not plenty compared to some of the others down there. And especially some of the less educated men, the building contractors, the businessmen. He felt superior to them, being a professional man, and yet they had more money. Some had millions, so he said. He said it wasn’t fair. I think he felt that he wasn’t a great success.’

  We talked on, numbly, into the night.

  The next day the funeral was held in what used to be a childhood friend’s home that had become a funeral home. It was a freezing cold day and we were all still in shock. There was some question whether they could break ground at the cemetery.

  I cried twice. Once, when my grandfather arrived from his nursing home in a wheelchair, his eyes filled with grief and rage at God for taking his only son first. Then, as I was being offered condolences by my father’s dental assistants and by Bill Starbuck, the aged town doctor, and by an old high school buddy who’d just lost his own father, and I saw in their eyes the pain they felt and thought I was feeling, the pain of the loss of a father – rather than my feelings for my particular father – then I really sobbed, recalling the good golf games, swept by guilt that I had been cool to him the last time, with Jill, and that I’d missed the diagnosis: the hiatus hernia pain was not his stomach but his heart – one clue in hindsight being the astonishing fact of his quitting golf before the eighteenth hole – and maybe I could have saved him if I had been a better real doctor.

  As I sat in what used to be my childhood friend’s romper room and listened to the rabbi’s excellent eulogy, which made it sound like my father had been not only his trusted dentist and devoted congregant but also a dear friend, I thought: Is this split – between the idea of losing a father and the actual loss of my own father – the seed of a killer ambivalence? I was dry-eyed through all the Hebrew at the grave and the lowering of the coffin and the dance of the pebbles on the coffin lid, which completed the journey from strong potent man to dirt, and then, back at home, dry-eyed at the buffet. My mother and brother were just as dry-eyed; all of us seemed to be taking it as neurotically as possible.

  ‘Are you sick?’ my grandfather asked, bending me to his wheelchair.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, thinking of myself as neurotic.

  ‘Yeh, me too. Sick at heart. And God must be sick too, to do dis – the Big Fella needs a psychiatrist – nu? I should be foist. Den him. Den you. Here – take dis.’ He handed me a fifty. ‘Where’s dat nice goil, Berry?’

  ‘We broke up.’

  ‘Nah, don’t be stupid. Get a gun, like I did wid mine vife. Show her who’s d’boss.’

  I hugged him. We both wept. Was this the last time I would ever see him?

  At sundown the rabbi returned. He did a quick riff of Hebrew, blessing the bread and wine, and then buttonholed me again:

  ‘And cheap? To get a raise here is like pulling teeth. If you hear of any openings where you are located, Doctor, think of me, will you?’

  ‘It’s not that much different there. The reality of “location” is less important than the fantasy.’

  ‘No, no. No. You remember your anatomy, Doctor? One pupik, and this is it. Shalom.’

  I said my own sad shaloms to all and drove the three hours back, alone, free-associating, fantasizing, analyzing it all out.

  The next morning, preparing for my cases, some unconscious motivation made me pick up Freud’s classic, ‘Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.’

  A wife’s like an umbrella: sometimes one takes a cab.

  I made a note to try this one out on Cherokee Putnam later that day.

  Solini appeared at my office that evening. He seemed more worried than ever, and now sported a tic. His right eye twitched like crazy, as if trying to mate with his right ear.

  ‘How are you, Henry?’

  ‘Depressed?’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Good? I’m worried about Hannah?’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘She didn’t show up today for our meeting? We debrief our sessions with the Slapper every Tuesday? And she’s never missed, not once? I asked around? Win said she didn’t show up at the drug unit – didn’t show up at Misery today at all? So I called her condo and there’s no answer?’

  I felt a chill. ‘Let’s go.’

  We drove together in his red Geo, which churned through the flat iced-up planes of the night, laboring badly, as if the planes were being stacked before its beak in ever-more-fore-boding succession. Solini hunched over the wheel as he had that first day driving out to Ike White’s. Now, instead of Bob Marley, there was Silence, one of Jesus I Hope She’s OK.

  At the concrete bunker that served as the outer walls of her condo, we got out and, either from cold or fear, started running across the parking lot, our breaths hanging in the air behind us like cartoons of choo-choo trains. We knocked on her door. No answer. We stared at each other wondering what to do. Henry had a key. Gingerly we entered, walking as if on foam, though the floor was uncarpeted. I’d never been inside, and now realized why she hadn’t wanted me to see her place: it looked unlived-in, boxes still unpacked, nothing on the walls except an announcement of a conference in Kuala Lumpur entitled ‘Borderlines of the Singapore Boom’ with Heiler’s name highlighted in yellow Magic Marker. In a corner, in its case, was her neglected cello.

  We called, softly, then louder, ‘Hannah? Hannah-babe? Hannah?’

  No answer. The first thought that came to mind was that she’d hanged herself in her closet. We rushed into her bedroom and I threw open the closet door. Nothing. We rushed into the bathroom. Yes.

  She lay naked in the half-filled tub, a plastic Wonder bread bag over her head. The bag was misted from within with moisture that hid her face. Time stopped and my mind expanded to fill the vacuum with crazy and shameful thoughts like, She’s dead and it’s my fault, and What a wonderful body she has from the waist up, and What’s that on the floor is it really a yellowed clipping from the New York Times headlining a ‘Young Cellist’s Stunning Debut’?

  ‘Shit!’ I cried out and was at her, Henry beside me, ripping the bag off, feeling for a pulse and – hurrah! – finding it! She was drugged and drunk but she was not dead. Henry and I took the moaning Hannah out of the tub and dried her, the towel snagging on her puffy skin. We fed her full of coffee and brought her back.

  ‘Christ,’ she moaned, ‘I can’t do anything right.’

  We sat up with her all night long. She talked about losing Blair’s love.

  ‘But the final straw was when I was on call Sunday night. I got a ride with Security way over to Geriatrics, in the Rokitansky Building, to see an old woman who’d fallen out of bed. The guy from Security – the Ukranian with the lisp – he tried to kiss me, and I said no and he kept on and on – I thought he was going to rape me or shoot me. I finally broke away. So yesterday I went to talk to Lloyal von Nott, to make an official complaint, and you know what he said?’ She paused, and then went on, bitterly, ‘“Be a man,” he said, “If you can’t take it here, get out.’”

  ‘Shithead!’
I said.

  ‘Let’s kill him, man?’ Solini said.

  Hannah was staring into space. Then she clicked back in. She looked around the bare-walled room as if seeing it for the first time. Suddenly her eyes came alive. ‘That’s it! All these men, all my life – fucking me over. And I try to kill myself? Kill me, for them? For these pricks, these Nazis? Give up my cello, for psychiatry? I must have been insane! In-fucking-sane!’ She stood up. ‘That’s it. It’s over. I’m out of here. No more psychiatry. No more men!’ She picked herself up and, with a fresh energy, got out her Vuitton valises and started packing.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked.

  ‘Wyoming.’ She looked around. ‘Now where did I put my cowboy boots?’

  ‘Wyoming, babe?’

  ‘Wyoming, yes!’ Full of fire, full of life, she suddenly seemed bigger, more beautiful, even incandescent. ‘My old college roommate Gilda lives there. On a sweet little ranch. No men. Gilda’s a musician too – viola – we used to play in a chamber group. She did law school, for a while she was a criminal lawyer. Now she’s mostly a rancher. She’s always wanted me to come out there. I’m gonna do my music in Wyoming!’

  She swore us to secrecy about her suicide attempt. As the sun pulled itself up out of its cloud cover, she wondered why she hadn’t died.

  ‘The Wonder bread bag lets air in,’ I said.

  ‘I thought it was airtight, to keep the bread fresh.’

  ‘In the bread section of the supermarket,’ I said, ‘what do you smell?’

  ‘Fresh bread.’

  ‘So how can you smell it if the smell can’t get out?’

  ‘Christ. Another lie. That’s been it, hasn’t it, here, I mean right from the start, with that sonofabitch Ike White! But then what keeps it fresh?’

  ‘Chemicals, babe,’ Henry said, ‘killing us all, just like Malik says?’

  Before we left, Hannah thanked us. Looking us each, in turn, directly in the eye – no more eye roll-ups now – she said, ‘Guys, you better get out while you still can.’

  ‘Of Misery?’ I asked.

  ‘That too,’ she said. ‘I was thinking of your psychoanalyses.’

  I stared at Hannah. Despite her near disaster, I was not feeling much really. For a second, I worried about that. Yet wasn’t my not feeling much a proof of my deep repressed feeling, of the severe psychopathology in me, which in fact demanded my going into psychoanalysis? So I said to her, ‘I’m not in it, yet.’