Kyra

by Carol Gilligan

  The room tilted. I thought the plants would slide off the desk.

  “But here, with you,” I continued, “I have no way of knowing. This is for me, you say, for me to know my feelings, my thoughts, to understand why I did what I did, or play it out with you so I could see it. But you?”

  “Therapy is a hothouse,” she said. “It creates an intensity that has to be contained.”

  Her whole posture seemed to close, like a flower.

  She pursed her mouth. “I’ve thought a lot about what you’ve said, about the costs of continuing to work in the traditional way. For you, given your life, the issue is so stark that you cannot help but see it as something you want to subvert, a structure to change. But I see it as well. Sometimes traditional therapy works and people are freed to move on with their lives, but sometimes a spark goes out. Sometimes people agree to what they should not agree to.”

  A smile crossed my face. It was what I thought. I had seen it in students, making an accommodation, swallowing the loss of what had been most alive in themselves. For the sake of what? I wanted to ask them, but they had already turned away. Because of fear, because of ambition. It’s not the way, I wanted to tell them. I said it to some. If you do the work you want to do, that you believe in, then whatever happens, you’ll be okay. It was somewhat naïve, but basically true.

  “When you first came,” Greta said, “you said that you had cut yourself because you had to see into a darkness. You had stepped onto ground you thought you could trust and you found yourself all alone. My eyes teared up because I too had taken that step and experienced the aloneness. You sensed that, and it’s one reason you trusted me.”

  She hesitated, then added, “And I trusted you.”

  We sat in silence for a long moment.

  It was a moment I would hold close to my heart, the quiet room, the window darkening, summoning it up at those times when I wavered in my belief in myself as a trustworthy person.

  Then she told me the story. “I think it won’t surprise you, given your experience with academic politics, but it will tell you what is at stake for me in doing this with you. It’s only partly what I was concerned about but it was a concern, and I needed to resolve it for myself.

  “Some years ago I was working with a patient, a candidate at the institute who was in analysis with me. She was a woman who spoke her mind, an independent thinker, a little self-righteous, but she was right for the most part and she had a sense of humor. What happened was she said what she thought about the institute, that it did not allow independent thought, but she put it more pointedly in an article that was published in a psychoanalytic journal. She wrote that her institute beheads those who think independently. And so, inevitably, they went after her, not for this but for breaking some rule about seminar attendance, not conforming to institute procedures. People spoke of her as an angry patient. Her candidacy at the institute, her ability to become an analyst, was called into question. Her case was taken up at a meeting of the training committee.

  “That’s the part about her,” Greta said, her voice taking on an edge. “The part about me is that I spoke out in her support. I spoke up for my patient at the meeting. That was considered a violation of analytic neutrality, a breaching of the analytic boundary. I was to analyze, not comment on what she had done. But there’s another layer to this story.”

  A look of uncertainty crossed her face.

  “Another analyst this patient had seen in therapy, a person with whom I had been friends, resented the fact that this woman had left her and chosen me instead for her analysis. There were all sorts of issues involved having to do with the fact that my practice was flourishing, I had more of a reputation in the community. What happened is this analyst reported me to the American Psychoanalytic Association for ‘boundary violations.’”

  She stopped, shook her head. Her voice had become hoarse. She cleared her throat.

  “This started the chain of events that, as you picked up on, has left my relationship with the institute unsettled. To my astonishment, my colleagues, instead of supporting me, took a hands-off attitude. We’re not going to decide who’s right and who’s wrong, they said. I felt it as an enormous betrayal. I had assumed they would protect me.”

  The look in her eyes, like an animal suddenly caught in a trap.

  “The committee at the American that takes up these issues said that they didn’t want to put me through a trial-type thing, where this other analyst and I would both be called to testify, one person’s word against the other’s. But the very fact that they would even entertain the belief that I’d done some terrible thing made the whole thing humiliating. In place of a hearing, they said that if I would accept six months of supervision on the case by an outsider, an analyst from New Haven, from the institute there, who was a friend, they would let the matter drop. And since I had many patients in analysis, including many candidates who were in training to become analysts, I decided to do it. But for me personally the matter has not been dropped. It’s become part of a larger series of questions about what I will stand up for in my work.”

  There was a light in her eyes. “So on a personal level I had some understanding of what you were going through, and maybe you can now see why when others were so alarmed by your cutting, I had a sense of what you were doing. I understood how important it was in the midst of that confusion to hold on to your experience. And although the cutting itself was very dangerous, I admired your intention, your determination to see for yourself.”

  Somewhere in the house, a phone rang five times and then stopped.

  “I want to thank you,” I said, my eyes brimming with tears.

  “Your understanding was crucial to me at that time. Others were trying to be helpful. They were trying to tell me what they knew. But I knew something different, and it was hard for me to believe it or to put it into words. You encouraged me to trust my experience, which was huge because it was very difficult for me to do that once he had left. It would have been easier to take what seemed the moral high ground, he the betrayer, I the betrayed. And I also want to thank you for having encouraged me to look at my relationship with Simon.”

  There was a lot I needed to tell her. I said I would like to come again the following week, pay for the session. I wanted to tell her about my mother, talk through my feelings about Andreas and Vienna and his letter and also Anna’s pregnancy, and also what happened at the Vienna conference, my quirky project accepted now, in the spotlight.

  “It sounds like more than one session,” she said, taking out her book. In the end, it turned out to be five, but it felt more like a gateway than a return.

  We also made the beginnings of a plan.

  “Let’s rely on dreams to start with,” she said.

  We would write down our dreams, keep track of them in a journal, and in the interim time, once we were no longer meeting in the traditional structure of therapy, we would write each other on Thursday evenings, plumbing our dreams for what was emerging.

  Standing, I said to Greta that in reality everything was in suspension, and yet I felt grounded in a way I never had before.

  Greta smiled and rose from her chair.

  We stood for a moment, silently taking in where we had come to.

  pack

  write out Jesse’s schedule for Abe

  leave money for Szofi

  buy razor blades

  pick up shirts

  find the book on Atlantic seabirds Rick sent

  pay bills

  call Gabe

  I PUT THE LIST ON THE COUNTER. REHEARSAL HAD RUN LATE. SZOFI had left dinner for me on the stove. She had made the chicken the way I like, with cinnamon and paprika. I took a plate to the living room and turned on the TV. It was the Soviet film of War and Peace. I turned down the sound but it must have carried because Jesse ran down the hall. He stood for a moment in the doorway. Then he walked to the sofa and climbed up beside me.

  “Daddy,” he said, “I like your pants.”


  I was wearing my old rehearsal pants. I looked down at the frayed cuffs and suppressed a smile.

  “Want some of this chicken?” He nodded. I scraped off the sauce, he liked it plain.

  “That’s Napoleon,” I said, “the one on the white horse.”

  “Is he the good guy?”

  I pointed to Kutuzov, his round face, his sleepy eyes, his uniform decorated with stars. “He’s the good guy, and he’s going to win, but not yet. His motto is ‘Time and patience.’”

  Not in Jesse’s lexicon.

  Part One ended, the screen turned to snow. Jesse followed me into the kitchen.

  “Daddy?”

  Standing beside me in his spaceman pajamas, he looked so small.

  “What?” I lifted him up.

  It could have been anything, but what he wanted to know was about gravity. How it holds us to the earth.

  “I love you so much,” I said, kissing his head, carrying him down the hall back to bed.

  In the end, it was love that held me to the earth. At first, I felt it as a betrayal. “Love life,” Tolstoy had said, “for God is life and to love life is to love God.” I had cast my lot with the living now, but I couldn’t believe in God.

  When I came back to Budapest after the summer on Nashawena, I felt I had no choice. I thought it was my fate to live here and to do my work. A Hungarian refugee who came to see Tosca in Boston had said, do this in Hungary and I’ll give you the money to start your own company. The condition was that I do it within the next six months. It was an opportunity I felt I could not refuse. Not to go seemed wrong. My friend Gabriel offered to be my partner and handle the business side. But the ambition I had for the company, to do opera in a way that would change how people saw, was also an excuse for not seeing what was before my eyes.

  Kyra standing on the deck in Provincetown—her face, the suffering in her eyes. She wouldn’t speak. I hadn’t seen the impact I’d had on her. What had made sense to me didn’t make sense to her.

  After that, what loyalty meant was no longer simple.

  I couldn’t be loyal to Irina now without being disloyal to a living person. I said this to Clara, Gabriel’s wife, and she said, “Including yourself.” I found that unsettling.

  I was reading a book on memory. I picked it up from the bedside table and found my place. One must refuse the temptations of closure, it said. I underlined the words, “Forgetting without amnesia, forgiving without effacing the debt one owes to the dead.”

  I still looked for Irina in the street. Last night, she came to me in a dream. She was wearing a black dress, her face pale. A white moon reeled around the sky. “You are moving away from me,” she said, “and like the wind, it’s impossible to stop.” “I’m sorry,” I said over and over again, my voice thick with grief. She disappeared.

  The dream shifted. It was indoors now. A concert hall. A woman was singing. I thought it was Irina, but the face was Kyra’s. I stood off to one side listening. A voice I had always heard and never heard. Bright and clear in its assurance.

  I had been impatient with the tenor tonight. I was sorry about that. I had tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. “How does hope feel to you? Where does doubt lodge in your body? When Orpheus hears the noise that will lead him to turn around, what happens viscerally in that moment?” We’d been through it many times. “It’s beautiful, Nick, the singing is beautiful, but with the control you have, you can afford to take more risks.” We were leaving now for King’s College Chapel. We might as well be doing nine lessons and carols. On Monday in England, the instrumentalists would join us. And then Kyra.

  There was one more question I had asked the tenor. “What is the sensation of joy?”

  I turned off the light.

  The combination room in King’s College was painted deep red. Over the mantel, a painting of a man peering down from a balcony at a group of women dancing onstage, their ballet costumes scant. I wondered what Kyra would make of the painting, or would her eye be drawn to the row of high windows on the far wall?

  The director of music had organized a Monteverdi festival. The invitation to perform came as a surprise. He had heard about the Tosca production in Boston. He was hoping to come to Budapest next winter. He came over to me now.

  “How do you find the chapel?”

  Kyra had arrived that morning. She had taken the bus from Heathrow to Cambridge. My friend Rick, a fellow at King’s, had picked her up and taken her home to sleep since I was in rehearsal all day. He’d bring her into King’s for dinner.

  I glanced at the doorway and turned back to the director.

  “What can I say that hasn’t already been said about the acoustics? In the last act of L’Orfeo, the echo is shattering.”

  I checked the door, any minute now. It had been two months since I’d seen her.

  Fear wrapped around me. What if something had happened? A bus accident? What if she had changed?

  Monteverdi had changed the ending. In the original version, Orpheus runs off at the end, fleeing the Bacchantes. Two years later, when Monteverdi published the score, the Bacchantes were gone. Instead Apollo appears, descending from heaven to rescue his son from anger and grief. He invites Orpheus to heaven, to live with Eurydice in the sun and stars.

  I yearned for Kyra. We would have a week.

  “Do you find the apotheosis convincing, or do you think Monteverdi was pandering to his audience?” the music director asked.

  “What troubles me,” I said, fighting distraction, “is not the ending. All through the opera it’s clear that fate can be reversed. But there’s always a contingency. Here Orpheus renounces all living women. Compared to Eurydice, he says they are worthless.”

  As if on cue, Kyra appeared, an expectant look on her face. Rick stood beside her, the butler behind them, bell in hand.

  I went over to kiss her and felt in her a reserve—was it the college? Her public, academic persona? I hadn’t thought that mattered to her. I had wanted to pick her up at the airport, meet her at the bus station in Cambridge, but the timing was impossible. “I hate operas,” Jesse had said one day, “I hate your work.” She had said she understood.

  We filed into the hall with the others, assembling around the high table. It was literally raised, on a platform at one end of the vaulted room. The Latin benediction was said. A scraping of chairs, we assumed our seats. The music director was at the head of the table, Kyra on his right. Smart man, I thought. I was seated toward the other end between the music tutor and a physics professor. I picked up the printed menu and counted the courses. There was a limit to this. The performance of the Vespers started at eight.

  We followed the path around to the chapel, trailed by the group from the high table. I squeezed her hand. “Soon,” I said. At the door of the chapel, we stepped aside and let the others go in. Then we moved into the shadows and kissed, the warmth of her body rushing through me. I touched her face, then her shoulder under her sweater. The feel of her skin. I longed to undress her. I thought of Jesse, only the spacemen were watching. It was freezing. I put my arm around her, and we went in. I couldn’t stop looking at her.

  “This is a first,” she said. I thought she meant the chapel but what she said was that it was the first time we were together at something where neither of us was responsible. I wasn’t directing, she wasn’t speaking. It wasn’t my performance or her project.

  We found our seats, in the front section to one side.

  The leader of the orchestra came out. A final turning, then a hush in the audience. The conductor appeared. I put my jacket on my lap. Underneath, we held hands.

  If I could just keep touching her. The ghosts, were they with us here in this chapel? The fan vaulting, the stained-glass windows dark. The voices rose, resounding. We had come out of this history, the Latin words resplendent: laudate, seraphim, audi coelum verba mea, hear, oh heaven, my words.

  I pressed my leg against hers, and her face flushed. I wanted to know what she hadn’t said in her let
ters. We had a week, her spring break. Szofi was staying with Jesse and Abe. Gabriel and Clara said they would look in. Clara was a painter, like my mother. She looked like a Gypsy. “Read my fate,” I had said one evening, holding out my hand. She had laughed. “Aren’t you doing L’Orfeo? Then you know what not to do.”

  Don’t turn back, that was it. Orpheus didn’t trust that Eurydice was following him. How can you trust, after the earth has opened under your feet? She had been snatched away from him before, it could happen again. But maybe not.

  On the night Irina disappeared, I ran through the streets calling her name, my voice echoing against the buildings. I had visions of her body bruised, her face distorted with fear and pain.

  I’ll slow down the tempo in the fifth act to allow for the echo.

  The Magnificat began, my favorite part of the Vespers. It was not to relinquish the past but to trust the present. Kyra must be tired. The overseas flight. She had walked through the open market. Cambridge a market town. Fishmongers, vegetable and flower stalls, bright spots amid secondhand books and clothes. Monteverdi had recycled his music. The passage here was almost identical to where Orpheus is seeking Eurydice in the underworld. Kyra had gone into the underworld. I had not followed her. With Jesse, I had to pay attention—Daddy, play with me now, he would say, insist, his face dark with intention. Now, Daddy, now. He would take the score from my hands. Esurientes implevit bonum. I turned to Kyra. She loved the word esurientes. Who knew it meant hungry, she said one day when we were making love. Let the hungry be filled with good things. Let the Hungary be filled with good things.

  After the concert, we declined invitations to go out for drinks. I had a concert the next night, Kyra had been on an overseas flight, we said. But the truth was, all we wanted was each other. We picked up her suitcase from the porter’s lodge where Rick had left it and climbed the stone stairs to my room in King’s. I wanted to look at her. I wanted to hold her. She turned on the desk lamp, I turned off the ceiling light. I wanted her. She dropped her coat on a chair. I buried my face in her hair. Kyra, Kyra, Kyra, my lips brushing the softness.