by Rick Gekoski
Suzy had no problems with the theory, and read her way through Dr Miller’s works enthusiastically and with only minimal criticism. She wrote out the key thought on a piece of paper, and taped it to the wall above her desk:
Learning is a result of listening, which in turn leads to even better listening and attentiveness to the other person. In other words, to learn from the child, we must have empathy, and empathy grows as we learn.
The ideas were just dandy. The problem was that, having located her inner child, Suzy didn’t like her.
‘Snivelling little bitch,’ she said, having recovered a memory of a particularly nasty scene in which, having been denied some treat or other, she had howled for an hour, vomited on her mother’s lap and then told her ayah to fuck off. She was four at the time, and given to such scenes, and language, on a regular basis. For a time, the neighbours’ children had to be protected from her, lest she infect their vocabulary permanently.
‘I was a ghastly little girl – no wonder nobody liked me.’
This was not, her therapist explained, an uncommon first response to the emergence of one’s former incarnation. Of course she didn’t like little Suzy, because she had introjected her parents’ attitude to their little girl: Sir Henry and Lady Sophia (Dr Frommer, irritatingly, gave them their titles) didn’t like her either, had shunted her off to her ayahs without compunction, and devoted themselves to furry pursuits.
And so little Suzy felt she was a burden, who did not deserve her parents’ attention. She was too needy, too tearful, too insistent: her many childish tantrums expressed her unhappiness and caused her parents to withdraw even more.
‘Perhaps,’ said Dr Frommer, ‘your desire to achieve fame through the writing of your books is an attempt to gain their attention and approval? And perhaps you are now blocked because your unconscious doesn’t approve of this project? The unconscious can be very wise, when you learn to listen to it.’
This irritated Suzy more than usual. ‘I don’t want to fucking achieve fucking fame. I want to write a good book. And far from courting my parents – my father, by this effort – I am alienating him with every fresh paragraph. He’s a buffoon. I hate the bastard.’
‘Ah, yes, why do you suppose – ’
‘Will you tell me something?’ asked Suzy. ‘I have been wondering . . . What sort of accent you have? Your English is too careful, your mouth cuddles your words, as if you were protecting something.’
‘I am not sure what you mean.’
‘I mean what Henry Higgins meant. You’re fucking Eliza Doolittle. Where do you come from originally?’
This discomfited Dr Frommer, as was intended, and there was a longer than usual silence.
‘Vienna. I came to England to do my analytic training, and have been here ever since.’
‘I knew it! Mittel-European! I keep expecting you to say your w’s as v’s. Ve have vays of making you talk!’
‘Well,’ said Dr Frommer, carefully avoiding any hint of a ‘v’, ‘that has answered your question, I hope? Perhaps we can continue now?’
‘Continue? I’ll give you continue! This is exactly what I have been repressing, and now it’s out, isn’t it? Shall we call it negative transference? The fact is, after all these months, I have come both to rely on you and to dislike you intensely.’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s it. Your Mittel-ness! Mittel-class, Mittel of the road, Mittel-brow, fair to Mitteling . . . Boring and earnest, and joyless and relentless. I want to get out of this chair and shake you!’
Dr Frommer was pleased to hear this, the most direct and deepest feeling that Suzy had yet released into the room. She looked at her watch. The outburst had been timed to end the session.
‘We have a lot of material to work on next week,’ she said. ‘I will see you then.’
‘You sure vill,’ said Suzy, rising abruptly and departing without a further word or look.
Next session, Dr Frommer began where they’d left off. ‘I believe,’ she said, ‘that we made good progress last time. You were having a tantrum – shouting, wanting to hit me. That was the voice of little Suzy.’
‘Don’t fucking patronise me. That was big Suzy!’
‘I want you to know that, however horrid you are, I will never reject you.’
‘You mean, until the money runs out?’
‘I mean as long as you don’t run out. You will be tempted – clients often are at this point – to give up therapy, to turn against the parent-surrogate with whom they are so angry. But we can work through this anger. It is a good sign.’
‘You’re quite right. I do want to give up. I don’t want what you are offering. It isn’t going to be good for me.’
‘What do you take me to be offering?’
‘I dunno. Reconciliation with my inner brat, I suppose.’
‘The judgement you are making is not in your own voice. You are repeating the judgement of your father, and making it your own.’
‘My father is loveless, and narcissistic. But his take on my childhood self was spot on.’
‘I do not see why you need to hold onto this.’
‘I was spoiled, petulant and self-referring. Daddy and Mummy were ashamed of me, Ayah indulged me entirely. For her I could do no wrong. Anything I wanted, I got. She doted on me as much as my parents ignored me. It was the wrong combination of elements, and it made me what I was. And still am: angry and foul-mouthed. And I still need to be doted on.’
There was silence at the other end.
‘And you know what? Last night I had – everyone should have one, they’re great – I had an epiphany. I have no psychological problems. . .’
‘Why do you conclude this?’
‘. . . I have moral problems! I am not unhappy because I am a victim of others, but because I am petulant and self-referring. I need help, but I need – God forgive me for the term – spiritual help, not psychological. I am depressed because I think I deserve things.’
‘I think,’ said Dr Frommer, for the first time with something of an edge to her voice, ‘I think we may have self-esteem issues to resolve.’
‘Fuck self-esteem. Self-esteem is for losers who go to workshops with other losers. Does no one believe in badness any more? Or humility?’
‘Can you not forgive yourself?’
‘Why should I? I am spoiled. I’ve always been spoiled. I do have low self-esteem, it is one of the few things that I admire in myself.’
Suzy got up. The session was only half over. ‘I’ll send you a cheque for this month’s sessions. I’m starting to feel better already. Thanks for nothing.’
By Suzy’s reckoning, Dr Frommer looked relieved.
*
At exactly 10 a.m. the next Thursday, when her session would have been starting, Suzy went into the study, gathered the few pages of the new novel, and threw them in the bin. She had very little idea what to replace them with, except that it was not going to be set in India.
It didn’t go well, but Suzy rather expected that, was reconciled to it. Her depression had been transformed, as Freud had recommended, into ordinary unhappiness. That was fine with Suzy: makers of things are necessarily unhappy, it goes with the job description.
‘After all, what are the best novels? They’re records of human misery. Madame Bovary. Portrait of a Lady. Crime and Punishment. . .’
I should have known not to argue, but couldn’t resist. I love counter-examples.
‘Oh yes? Perhaps you’re forgetting Ulysses? Or Huckleberry Finn, or – ’
She didn’t take the bait, she snapped it off at my wrist. ‘Shut up, James! That doesn’t matter. Writers do something at which they are bound to fail. We’re Platonists. We struggle every day to make something perfect, to assemble the very best words in the very best order. And every day, in almost every image, and sentence, and paragraph, we fail. All we can do is fail better.’
‘And feel better?’
‘Nope, it still hurts.’
I was resistan
t to this, which I thought romantic and inflated. As long as Suzy held onto this exalted set of notions, she was never going to get her book written. This was the result of her having adopted the highest models. If you have Sam Beckett peering over your shoulder, interrogating every phrase, then you will be unable to write with any freedom or authority.
Aspiring writers would do better to have read Physics. Anything, really, rather than English. ‘Isn’t it better to regard what “artists” do as a form of craft? Potters make beautiful objects, don’t they? And they don’t make such a damn fuss about it!’
‘It’s not making a fuss. It’s just trying to get it right. That’s all I want to do.’
I was unable, at such times, as she stared at her keyboard and hit so few keys, to conceal my irritation. She’d given up her therapy when it started to hurt, taken the easy route. Pretended to take a moral high ground, rather than the psychological low, and in so doing occupied neither. And wasted a lot of money.
‘What is the “it” you are working on, then?’
‘Not sure. I’ll let you know when I do.’
Writing was most assuredly art, not craft, but it did not depend on inspiration, though that occasional visitor was welcome when it came. Mostly it was work, and Suzy respected it as if she were employed in an office. She broke for a second coffee at eleven, and worked through until lunch. It was a short working day, but a novelist can do a considerable amount in four hours, if they actually write.
What Suzy did was sit and fantasise, make notes on yellow Post-its and in notebooks, and occasionally on the screen. Other than this – I later gathered – she thought about sex, then thought about it some more, and then masturbated.
‘This is what writers do,’ she thought, as she lay on the couch facing the window, pants around her ankles. ‘We are wankers, we need to keep ourselves excited.’ She had attended several workshops and had a regular writers’ group, and when she broached the subject, she got a rowdy acknowledgement that her fellow writers felt, and did, much the same.
‘It’s the anxiety!’ said one of the men, who was working on yet another dreary book about walking in the Lake District, admiring rocks and sheep.
‘I can’t bear it. A wank gets me through a couple of hours.’
‘And then you do it again?’
‘Yup. My record is four in eight hours.’
‘How many words did you write that day?’
He didn’t remember. That wasn’t the point, was it?
One morning, disobeying the injunction never to enter the study when she was writing, I walked in, in search of a new typewriter ribbon, to find her sprawled on the sofa.
‘Oh my God! I’m so sorry. I just needed to – ’
‘OK,’ said Suzy, ‘we have a choice. You can either join me, or we can be embarrassed about this forever. Seems simple to me!’ She shunted over to the side of the couch, and beckoned, continuing to play with her nipple. I came.
The scene was followed by many others of much the same kind, in which I would walk in – at more or less 1 p.m., after she had finished her writing – to find her naked and ready on the couch. It was like a set of undreamt dreams come true. We made love more often, and with more pleasure, than ever before.
And then Suzy was pregnant. I had always left matters of contraception up to her, aware that she was forgetful about taking her pill. We had agreed that the consequences of such laxity could be accommodated, though Suzy was not entirely sure that they would be welcomed. For me, too, bringing children into the world – this godawful madhouse – seemed a rash and cruel thing to do. Better to leave them unborn, swimming in the celestial soup of the spermatic discharge, than to create a little Emma or Conrad, gasping for air, ready to demand a lot, and likely to receive too little.
It was a cavalier and irresponsible attitude, and we were rather proud of it. Our married friends charted menstrual cycles, took temperatures, calculated ovulating days, stopped wanking to keep up the old sperm count, and frequently managed to produce their children in the summer, when there was nicer weather, and more holiday time to welcome them. No thanks, all this self-conscious family planning. If a child was to happen, it would. If not, not. But once Suzy found herself enlarging, rather bemused by her bump, but pleased at the growth of her breasts, and thrilled not to have her bouts of PMT every month, she had to acknowledge that some planning might be a useful thing. We were going to have a baby. By all accounts the actually process of giving birth was horrid. Could something not be done about it?
Ourselves children of our time, we decided to have a child of our time. For the last four months of what we were encouraged to think of as ‘our’ pregnancy, we went to natural childbirth classes, a zeitgeisty Oxford movement started by a proselytising, good-natured matron called Sheila Kitzinger, for whom the term ‘earth mother’ might have been invented. It was her counter-intuitive belief that, as childbirth is a ‘natural’ activity, it ought to be relatively straightforward, if only approached in the right manner and spirit. She could teach this. She’d had a bunch of kids herself, and apparently pushed them out in a jiffy, having hips as wide as a Hottentot, and presumably a birth canal to match.
There were six couples in our class, plus several women on their own. None of us had children, because those who did presumably knew the ropes, or had been strangled by them. We did breathing exercises – both men and women – learned the rhythm of contractions and about the gradual entry of the baby’s head into the world as the cervix dilated. There would be pressure, to be sure, and no doubt there was discomfort too, but the group was relentlessly positive with regard to pain. Quite the opposite, said our mentor. Like the act that caused the baby, giving birth to it could be an ecstatic, endorphin-drenched process. A form of delight! African women did it standing up while tilling the fields, ululating over the maize. Think: African woman! Breathe: Like sex! Remember: A BABY is coming! We’re having a baby! We can do it on our own. No gas, no air, no epidurals, no Caesareans. It’s natural: Let’s do it, together!
We were uterine fundamentalists. One evening, a woman in her early thirties, who had been participating reluctantly, presumably at the request of her rather keen vagina-less partner, got up off the mat and started to put on her shoes.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Our Leader.
‘I’m sorry. This is just not for me. I cannot believe that the fact that childbirth is natural means I should look forward to it, much less celebrate it.’
There were murmurs of disapproval in the room.
‘Why is that?’
‘I hate the whole process. The big belly, the swollen tits. It makes me feel like a cow. And all this push-push business, like we were sitting on the loo . . . I don’t feel “positive and creative” or whatever the recommended phrase is. It’s humiliating. I can’t wait to get it over with, and I will take whatever drug helps me to get through it . . . Why are we all denying this? Why all this bullshit? It’s going to be agonising! Everyone knows that!’
She put her shoes on, and left, not angrily, but with a resigned, steady tread. You might have called it bovine, had you been hostile. I certainly wasn’t: my sympathy was entirely with the cow. We’d been suborned into this misleading gloop – deluded middle-class youngsters pretending that we could deny and subvert the laws of nature. Childbirth is natural, our cult chanted. It’s positive and creative! It won’t hurt, not much.
On the day, it did. Lucy was not exactly reluctant to enter the world, which would suggest an inappropriate knowingness on her side of the uterine walls, but she was in no hurry, or perhaps just unable to hurry. After all, it wasn’t up to her. On our side of the process, Suzy and I breathed and panted, hoped and prayed, and very little dilation accompanied our efforts. This wasn’t in the script, or if it was, we had practised the wrong scenes and hardly knew the lines for this one, until Suzy found just the right words.
‘Give me the fucking gas and air, now!’ she shouted.
I had never been so proud of he
r. From then onwards, she practised her breathing exercises with useful intakes of Entonox, and I was released from the fatuous collegiality of mock pregnancy. It was a considerable relief. After all, it was she who was pushing the damn thing out – or failing to push it out – not me. ‘We’re having a baby!’ No, we were not. She was doing it, and it wasn’t a baby. It was a recalcitrant lump of impassable stuff. She had constipation of the uterus.
‘Fucking Sheila Shitslinger!’ Suzy muttered. ‘Call a lawyer! We’re prosecuting under the Trades Description Act!’ She pushed mightily, and her cervix dilated minimally further. ‘So this is natural childbirth? Never again! I want more drugs! Unnatural childbirth for me!’ She pushed again, and again. ‘It’s the greatest fucking con in the history of fucking women!’ Push. Again. Push. ‘Fucking Shitslinger!’
Lucy was born an hour later. Her exhausted mother could barely hold her in her arms, and I soon took her over. I’d been told that new-born babies have no capacity to focus their eyes, having just popped into the world, and presumably unable to tell what is worth focusing on. But brand new Lucy met my eyes with her cloudy new ones. I moved my head a tiny bit to the right. Her eyes followed. We looked at each other for a few moments, until my eyes clouded too.
Lucy was put into a crib beside her mother’s bed, and both of them settled down. Suzy was still high on gas and air, which the hostile nurse – who hated natural childbirth – had rather over-administered.
‘I’m rather pleased with myself,’ she said.
‘And so you should be, love. So am I!’
‘You don’t know what I mean.’
‘Well, of course it is you who actually had the baby,’ said I, irrationally hurt at her claiming primacy in the process, assigning me a menial’s role.
‘But we did it together, right? Remember: We’re having a BABY!’
‘No, no.’