Other people

by Sol Stein

  "Who referred you, please?" Koch asked me.

  "George Thomassy," I offered. "But he didn't exactly refer me."

  "I cannot place Dr. Thomassy."

  "No, no. He's a lawyer up in Westchester. Someone I've known for a very long time. He passed on to me a reprint of yours, Dr. Koch, about the three types of human personality. Thomassy thought it brilliant — he practices criminal law — and when I read it, I had to agree. In my corporate practice, understanding the psychology of clients, self-made businessmen in particular, has always been of special interest. I thought your speculation extraordinarily acute, and the daughter I wanted to consult you about is a very bright girl who has the ability to run rings around her elders. I was once told that a very bright person needed a very bright analyst."

  "That is not necessarily true," said Koch.

  I had hoped to flatter him. His voice sounded as if he hadn't even understood the compliment and was merely responding to what he thought was an incorrect assertion of mine.

  "It would be a very great favor, Dr. Koch."

  "Sir, it is not a question of favor, it is a question of time." Then he said, "Did you think of asking your physician for a name?"

  "The truth is I gave my physician your name and asked him to look up your credentials. Which are excellent, of course."

  "I do not make a specialty" — he pronounced the word the way the British do, as if it had five syllables — "of children."

  "My daughter," I said, "is twenty-seven."

  "What is the problem?"

  "Insomnia."

  "Well, we all have sleepless hours from time to time…"

  "No, no, no. She gets desperate from lack of sleep many nights in a row. And…"

  "Yes?"

  "She's got a Seconal problem now, I'm afraid."

  "Does your daughter know you are calling me?"

  I thought Dr. Koch rude. In retrospect I can see that he was not being rude at all.

  "No."

  "Psychotherapy has to be a voluntary process."

  "I'm sure she'll agree."

  "You seem to know your daughter better than most fathers do, Mr. Widmer."

  He must have written down my name to remember it.

  Finally he said, "I will give you an hour next Tuesday at four. Is that convenient?"

  "I will make it convenient," I said, relieved and immediately wondering what meetings I would have to reschedule.

  Tuesday at four turned out to be very inconvenient. I had to ask one of my partners, Whitney Armitage, to sit in for me at a meeting with the head of a foreign shipbuilding firm who would have been insulted to have met only with an associate, though the associate knew the matter better than I did and Whitney would have to take notes in silence as he had never been involved in maritime work, much less the particular client company.

  I pleaded a personal emergency.

  "You haven't got cancer, Ned?" my partner asked with his usual directness. He and I had both lost a partner two years earlier who had several "personal" appointments that eventually led him to Columbia Presbyterian and death.

  "No," I said, wishing a witticism had come to mind.

  "I did something very indiscreet, Ned. I leaned over your lovely secretary's shoulder and saw your calendar has a Dr. K. on it. Is that a cover for a new mistress, Ned?"

  "Why of course," I said. He looked at my calendar.

  "About time," said Whitney. "Keeping the pecker busy is a good way of pretending to stay alive."

  Whitney was related to the Cabots by marriage, which in our circle at least gave him license.

  "Don't worry, Ned," he said, "I'll go to your meeting. I can imitate anyone's style, including yours."

  "Thanks, Whitney."

  "Just keep a chit. One favor owed. I might want you to visit my mistress when my pecker's down."

  It wouldn't be his nonexistent mistress. It was Alexandra, his queen of a wife, that I'd lusted after in the safety of my mind.

  In some ways I wish Whitney were keeping the appointment with Koch for me, though I find it hard to imagine him entering the building on West Ninety-sixth Street that Dr. Koch apparently both lived and worked in. It had a doorman whose eyes were glazed in front of a closed-circuit security monitor. He responded to my tap on the glass of the locked front door as if I had interrupted him.

  "Dr. Koch," I said.

  "Got an appointment?"

  Why that look? I nodded.

  "Elevator on the right."

  The elevator had initials scratched in the walls. Its operator, a dark young man with hair that hung over his uniform collar, nodded when I gave Dr. Koch's name and said something that sounded more Spanish than English. At the sixth floor, he let me out and pointed to a door down the hall.

  The nameplate read "Gunther Koch." No mention of doctor. I rang the bell before I saw the small sign that said, "Walk in. Do not ring." I flushed with embarrassment.

  Inside there was a waiting room with seven or eight identical plastic-covered chairs. I don't see why doctors can't have decent furnishings in their waiting rooms. Depends on their clientele, I suppose. If we had anything but leather in the firm's waiting room, some of our clients would be certain the firm had undergone reverses.

  I had dreaded the prospect of finding several people waiting. Fortunately, the room was empty. Some doctors — not the kind I normally see — derive their self-image in part from the number of people they keep waiting at any one time. Dr. Koch was, in this respect, civilized.

  Despite my having rung the bell, I sat ungreeted. No receptionist. Someone had to make out his bills, type his reports to other doctors. Did she occupy a back room somewhere? Discretion?

  From the recesses of the apartment I heard the movement of furniture, voices, then the door opened and a man came out, forty or more, had a perfectly good suit on, vest as well, a watch chain with a key. I thought they let patients out a second door?

  Then I saw a man I correctly assumed to be Koch, heavyset, a bit rumpled, a full head of disorganized grey hair. As the patient closed the outside door, Koch glanced at his wristwatch, then extended his hand to me. "Mr. Widmer," was all he said. His voice sounded much richer than it had on the telephone, or was this the mystique working? I followed him into a room where the drapes were drawn. The room was dark except for the light shed on his huge desk by a large lamp. There were four or five manila folders on the desk. Behind it was a high-backed leather chair of the kind that judges used in the days before our courtrooms were modernized. While I am not expert in such matters, I would suppose that the Persian carpet on the floor had once had great value. My eyes naturally wandered to the leather couch along the wall, the foot covered with a piece of transparent plastic to protect it from the shoes of patients. Somehow I had imagined that patients in analysis took their shoes off! The head of the couch was covered with the kind of paper headrest one sees in the economy sections of aircraft. I suppose he changed it from patient to patient?

  For one awful moment I thought he was going to ask me to lie down on the couch my eyes had been taking in! Dr. Koch beckoned me to a chair across the room and sat down opposite me.

  "I was flattered that you liked my paper, Mr. Widmer. I thought only other psychoanalysts read it."

  "Mr. Thomassy's clients — he practices criminal law — are nearly all your category two and three people. The twos are small-timers who work for other criminals and get caught. The threes are the tough cases."

  "Your clients are not like that."

  "No."

  "Not thieves?"

  "No. Businessmen."

  Dr. Koch laughed. "Tell me about your work, the essentials."

  I gave him a three-minute summary. Why was he concerned about what I did?

  "That will do," he said, I thought a bit brusquely. "As we have only fifty minutes before my next regular patient, perhaps you will tell me about your daughter."

  I felt he was being unnecessarily quick with me, the way my father used to in my youth. O
r was I imagining something that is part of this unnatural relationship?

  I gave Dr. Koch a brief synopsis of Francine's life up until the point where her insomnia started.

  "Very good," said Koch. "I mean you summarize well. Now tell me about yourself."

  "As you know, it's my daughter I've come about."

  "Yes, yes. However, she is the daughter of a particular set of parents. I don't often get an opportunity to consult with parents until much later and usually they are dead and I can't talk to them at all. Just a word or two about yourself and your wife."

  I told him about Priscilla. When I finished, he said, "You left yourself for last. Very courteous."

  I wondered if he was being sarcastic. I was not ducking. I tried to summarize myself.

  "I could have read that in Who's Who in America," Koch said. "You have told me objectively verifiable facts. Now tell me the truth. How did you feel when…"

  He probed deeper than any employment interviewer would dare, then said, "Mr. Widmer, have you ever considered analysis? For yourself."

  "The thought never occurred to me. I'm not aware of any overriding emotional problems." I tried not to let my voice betray my annoyance.

  "Understood," Koch said. He remained silent longer than people do in ordinary conversations. Then he wrote on a card and handed it to me.

  "That is your daughter's appointment. Please have her telephone to confirm it. I do not know yet if I will take her as a patient."

  I started to protest.

  "No, no," he said. "It is perhaps that she should have a woman analyst. I think not, but maybe. I will direct her to another analyst if I am not right. However…"

  He seemed to be trying to gauge my expression. People in my profession have had long experience in keeping their thoughts from intruding on the musculature of their faces.

  "Mr. Widmer, from what you have told me, I cannot tell whether your wife or your daughter is the first woman in your life. You mention two other daughters, but you speak of this one in a way you do not speak even of your wife." He raised his hand before I could say anything. "That is natural, normal, nothing to suggest therapy. But you have said, perhaps not in so many words, that you have spent your life in a career that you stay in almost entirely because you are following the customs of a narrow class. You are an individual."

  "I certainly like to think that I am."

  "I don't know how well you know yourself as an individual."

  I began a sentence in my head that I could not utter because my sense of protest blanketed any specific articulation I could muster.

  "You are how old?"

  "Fifty-seven," I said.

  "And you have not yet led your life. Or do you maintain that you elected to be an affluent slave?"

  The impertinence of the man! I knew I should not have come to the offices of a West Side Jew!

  He smiled. "Good," he said, "very good. You have a high color in your face now. You are angry at me. If you were in analysis, one day you would tell me the sentence you just thought and we would both begin to find out who you are. No, Mr. Widmer, I am not soliciting you as a patient. I have enough. If I take your daughter, I will have more than enough. But if your daughter is eccentric, as you say, and forthright, as you say, and conducts her life in a manner undreamt of by her parents, as you say, she has done so without a model in her immediate family, she has had to shape her own life outside it. If her life style deviates greatly from her parents', she may be suppressing the guilt she feels about her rebellion. We shall see. I am not surprised that she has insomnia. Please have her call me. I will send you a separate bill for this time."

  He saw me to the door. Then he said something odd.

  "The unexpected can be interesting."

  What did he mean by that?

  As I pressed the button of the elevator I glanced at my watch and noticed that he had given me only forty minutes, not fifty! I caught the absurdity of this reaction instantly, as if I had been shortchanged in a meat market. He hadn't given me short shrift. He had opened my head with a cleaver. Did I dare put Francine in the hands of a man like that?

  Six

  Koch

  A first meeting is for me always a difficult acting role. I spend so many of my working hours being passively sympathetic. As the patient explores his thoughts, I grunt neutral sounds. I listen the way a neighbor or a friend does, forming my own perceptions. I remember the Baumgarten woman telling me I sounded like a big teddy bear, a larger version of the stuffed animal of her childhood to whom she talked for comfort. We are so lonely in our anguish that talking to a willing listener is itself therapeutic, and if the listener is a priest or a doctor, who knows, perhaps his experience of listening to so many private torments that are, at heart, so similar, perhaps the listener will have something useful to say in the end.

  Yet if the person I am seeing for the first time is another doctor's patient upset at his transference, ready to switch allegiances, interviewing me to see if I am acceptable, I must seem to be harsh, cold, uncaring, a stone wall that talks back. And if the person who has come to see me is not the patient, but a father like Mr. Widmer who acts as if he knows his own high place in the world and has come to deliver his daughter over to the psychological zookeeper, I am an actor again. He is used to businessmen who smile when they feel derision, but he is not used to the idea of a doctor who sees through his great surface calm. A Jew, a Greek, an Italian would have wailed about the plight of his daughter. Widmer speaks calmly — I would like to know what his pulse was, I would like to have seen his electroencephalogram. He flatters me, he says he comes to me by reading a piece of my work, am I to believe that? Somewhere in his mind, when he comes to visit me, he is trading down. His child has fallen from grace. She has terrible insomnia. She has betrayed the Wasp ethic of control. Am I to do some Freudian hocus-pocus so that she will become acceptable again to her mother and father?

  In three minutes Widmer reveals that he is a lawyer who is not a lawyer. He is not a Clarence Darrow spellbinding a jury, he is a businessman who takes money for writing the same contracts over and over again, changing the names of the parties, the terms, it doesn't matter, he will never shake the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution, yet he lusts after that excitement in the law and hangs on to it by a vicarious thread to an Armenian who is a real lawyer! Then, in the next few minutes, he betrays that in his mind — where else does man fornicate except in his mind?! — he is a lover to his daughter and a pastor to his wife. Is this none of my business except that it arms me now to deal with the girl?

  I come out to the waiting room for my first look at Francine Widmer.

  "How do you do?" she says, standing.

  She is as tall as I am, blond, with unusual bone structure in her face. I wonder what her father thinks of the touch of oriental in her eyes. A distant ancestor? A mutation?

  "I am pleased to meet you," I say, shaking her hand. "Please come in."

  She has looked directly at me. Good.

  We are standing in my study at the moment of greatest discomfort. "We will have a talk first," I say.

  "Shall I sit here?" she says, pointing to the chair in which her father sat during our interview.

  "Yes, please."

  Am I imagining she slides her body into the chair as if it is an intimate act? I notice the naturalness of the shape of her breasts. Marta wore a brassiere always, a girdle always. It was the times.

  She crosses her legs in defense of the flower. Better than the subway-riding women, sitting legs apart, unwanted. She tosses her hair. I expect it is lovely to touch.

  "Our actual sessions," I explain, "will be with you lying down."

  I have said this so often, and yet this time the words lying down simmer with an expectation that sounds sexual. What is this, Gunther?

  I know of an actual case, a father who was himself a doctor, who had a heart attack at his beautiful daughter's wedding reception. Everyone thought of him as the happy father giving he
r hand in marriage, but he was in the darkness of his mind the dismissed suitor, haunted by the guilt of his illegitimate claim, now seeing his daughter's body claimed forever by a legitimate lover. What a heart it takes to adjust to that! But that was long ago. Marta and I thought of ourselves as brave revolutionaries, having intercourse four months before marriage, mingling in a sweat of excitement that would have brought apoplexy to our parents. Now Widmer and I live in a world where children — why do we still think of them as children?! — openly fornicate, shocking even those of us who were trained to think that our lusts are natural and the restrictions of society unnatural.

  If I think poor Widmer am I not also thinking poor Koch? Isn't Widmer a warning to myself? I, too, walk around in camouflage, showing the world what? a passive teddy bear listening?

  I am older than Widmer by three years at least, a widower who sees no one, who rolls on the screen of his mind nostalgic movies about his dead wife, who sublimates by immersing himself in helping other people realize themselves, and who has talked himself into believing he no longer lusts, this man, Koch, sees a twenty-seven-year-old girl and feels his loins tingle for the first time in how long? How can I say of Widmer that he confuses his wife and his daughter when his daughter has the same effect on me? With less cause. Widmer has seen this Francine since a baby, watched her naked body grow lean, her legs lengthen, her breasts develop into pearls, her hips widen, her childhood lope become that walk she had when she walked into this office. I accuse Widmer's accuser of carnality! Of being human still at sixty!