The Reluctant Exhibitionist
Page 21
You are my closest friend. If you were transformed into a man tomorrow, we would be just as close.
You place things in perspective for me by asking the right question. When I was heavily pondering the question of whether or not all relationships tend to fall apart, whether or not we would repeat the pattern of my marriage, you asked me whether that had ever happened between me and my father. And of course, it never had.
I look forward to spending the next thirty-six years of my life with you.
This weekend we shall spend some time alone with each other. My writing will not come between us.
The Tantric summer has ended.
A new summer is upon us.
5/11/71
Epilogue by Judy
Marty just came in after reading this and said that he would like to include my letter to Mac in his book, but thought maybe I would think that it was too personal and wouldn’t allow it.
I accept the him that asks for this, and he can put it in his book.
April 29, 1971
For Mac, about Marty:
On and About In and Under Tenderness
The first time I kissed him on his balding spot I felt I saw his eyes wet over and he knew I was loving the old man in him. There is very little that escapes him.
If he is off in another space, floating in and around death and love and detachment and perspective, his hand will caress me. It almost has a mind of its own. He knows that I have difficulty with detachment and so he has trained his hand to lay itself on me and take care of me while he is away.
He always has time for my children.
Sometimes he feasts on me. He is an appreciative man. And he is capable of feasting on me as a thirty-six-year-old woman with a thirty-six-year-old woman’s body. If I can no longer hold my stomach in and say “to hell with it,” he says, “Judy, you age well,” and I feel his tenderness wrap me up and rock me.
He is not afraid to show how pleased he is.
When he realized that I was sensitive about being mistress of a beach house that he and Eivor had shared, he did three things:
He emphasized on our way out for the first time that he had designed the house and picked out everything in it, not Eivor.
He had a key made and said, “Here is the key to your house.”
He planted my favorite flowers in the front yard.
He accepts everything I am and does not expect me to be something I am not.
He is capable in the middle of great passion of merging his senses with his awareness and saying “I love you, Judy.”
He does not cry easily, but when he does, it’s with acceptance. I see him driving silently, his mind on the task, and the tears running silently down his face. I am only there to feel them on my fingers. And that’s enough.
When I cry and rant and rage, he says he enjoys it because it makes him feel needed.
He has the honesty to say, after a small fight followed by a large love-making, “Now I’m not mad at you any more.” And we both laugh.
He is the only man, or woman for that matter, whom I have ever heard say to a parent at the end of a phone conversation, “I love you.” Here is a thirty-six-year-old man who tells his father that he loves him after any very ordinary conversation. It doesn’t even have to be a special occasion.
I used to have trouble asking him for money, even if it was only carfare. He would make me repeat, over and over, “Marty, I need some money.” Pretty soon the words became unimportant and the real issues could be dealt with.
You know all those times that I came and held hands with you at the hospital, Mac? I was struck by how much you and Marty felt alike—same warmth in the palms and pads, same stroking fingertips, same pressure and release, same search and delight in experience. Experiencers, that’s what you both are, and what are we all but reflectors, absorbing and merging with stimuli? From you to him to me to him to you and on and on. I see us as waves, lapping, white-capping, foaming, breaking. Who knows where one leaves off and the other begins?
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Originally published as A Psychiatrist’s Head, by Peter Wyden, NY 1972. An amended edition entitled Memoirs of a Defrocked Psychoanalyst, by The Permanent Press, 1978.
Copyright © 1972, 1978, 1985 by Martin Shepard
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2859-2
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