Dr. Morales dropped some papers on the floor. As he picked them up, he said, “Now we are like—what do you call them?—a champster on a wheel.”
“Hamster. But sometimes it must be physiological.”
“When it is, it is boring. As boring as this conversation. Unfortunate, maybe even tragic, but boring. The majority are fat because they want to be fat. They feel entitled to have more room and more attention than other people. They talk too loudly and they take up two seats on the bus. They cheave themselves around, and everyone else has to make room for them. And excuses, as you are doing. If you go to the mountain for a hike with them they get out of breath going up the hill and you have to wait for them. They want attention, and they are saying they should not have to take responsibility for what they do.”
Dr. Morales paused. “You are smiling again, I can tell.”
“It seems to me so outrageous as to be funny,” I said.
“But were you not angry at this woman?”
“Of course. I told you.”
“Then why do you laugh at me when I am denouncing her?”
The office was silent except for the ticking of the wind-driven snow against the windows.
“Maybe it’s because it would never enter my mind to go on a mountain hike with a fat person.”
“Again the ‘maybe.’ You disavow your anger, and you do not have the courage of your own contempt. She is a clown, I am a clown, the entire world is a circus, correct? But even then it is only maybe that the whole world is a circus and everyone except you is a clown. I must tell you honestly that I do not know how to proceed right now.”
“I did not disavow my anger,” I said.
“Ah, but you did, you did,” Dr. Morales said. “You presented it as if it were a play and you were a character but in the audience at the same time. You had even a title for it, as I recall. The Life of the City.”
“Life in the City,” I said.
“Now, really, Mr. Singer, I must protest. You are correcting me and resisting the treatment at every drop of the hat. You do not want intercourse but frottage.”
“All right. I was angry at the fat woman on the bus.”
“Oh, thank the good Lord Jesus Christ. Why?”
“Because she stole a token from me.”
“No.”
“She made me late for the session.”
“At last the penis goes inside the vagina. But not quite yet with the ejaculation.”
“What did I miss? Oh, I get it. Me. I made myself late.”
“And at whom are you angry?”
“Myself?”
“Why?”
“Because I was late? By the way, is there a makeup test if I fail?”
“You know, Mr. Singer, you are a gigantic pain in the ass. Now, again, why were you angry at yourself?”
“I already said: because I was naughty.”
“AND SO AT LAST WE HAVE FINALLY MADE THE BABY,” Dr. Morales declaimed.
“But I already said that.”
“No, you will have to pardon me, Mr. Singer, but you said first that you were angry at yourself because you were late. The second time, you said it was because you were naughty. Now, do not sigh this way, please. You are an English teacher. You know that the choice of words always matters.”
“So I was naughty, like a little boy.”
“Exactly.” Dr. Morales shuffled his papers.
“When I’m late, I’m always testing you or trying to provoke you.”
“Yes, especially if you could express a little less like a quadratic equation, with a little more feeling. You are a little boy who takes down his pants and shows his penis and testicles and anus, all the dirty parts, to see if your mommy will love you anyway, even though you are naughty. You are angry at yourself because you are in reality an adult who has allowed his unconscious to be seen. You also use your lateness to get me off the tracks of your more serious problems and to get extra attention for yourself.”
“Like being a fat person.”
“Oho! We have engendered twins today. Yes, the fat lady makes passengers wait. You make me wait. You are amused again.”
“All your patients probably do the same kind of thing.”
“This is guesswork, and in any case, much as you might like to, you cannot throw your arm on my shoulders and talk to me as a colleague about my other patients.”
“The guy after me is often late.”
“Perhaps he does not have a regular appointment time. You are hunting with blinders on and without a license.”
“Sometimes when I leave I see him running down the street.”
Dr. Morales yawned loudly. The wind moaned around the windows, as if nature itself wanted his special attention. The radiator behind his chair clanked and spluttered, the noise machine in the waiting room hissed, and the air seemed closer and hotter than ever. At length he said, “Are you not tired, are you not tired, Mr. Singer, from lifting these sandbags and throwing them up against the treatment here? You are only hurting yourself, you know. And the more construction you perform up on this bunker, the more clearly you can be seen.”
“Then what’s the problem? If it’s all grist for the mill, it doesn’t matter what I talk about, right?”
Another yawn, this one downright theatrical.
“I guess that to you, people who are fat or late for the ordinary little neurotic reasons must be just as boring as those whose pituitaries have run amok or who get detained by a police roadblock. It must be excruciating for you.”
“Nor do I need your sympathy, Mr. Singer. And I do not recall saying that your neurosis was little. You have now succeeded in filling up fifteen of the forty minutes available with dramaturgical exercises, procedural pettiness, philosophical speculation, an attempt to join the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and form a partnership with me, and condescension to the tedium of my practice. Not one mention of the headmaster who has reneged on his promise, not one mention of the woman who left you, not one mention of the joy of teaching, not one mention of the sadness you must feel about your estrangement from your father, not one mention of what you are doing in your sex life these days. I suspect that your being late is in fact not a plea for attention but a reluctance to tell me that you have been masturbating.”
“I’m sorry. I guess I was just struck by how boring many aspects of your work must be, and I said what was on my mind, as you are always haranguing me to do.”
A long silence ensued.
“You are so kind to think of my working conditions,” Dr. Morales said. “Perhaps you would like to vary my routine for me by going outside and taking a walk in the snow in the Park?”
“Well, you have been yawning and rearranging your papers back there.”
“I must congratulate you. You have graduated from being my partner to being my analyst. Shall we go?”
“You’re serious?”
“There are no jokes, Mr. Singer.”
THE sun was up high enough behind the clouds to give the air the bright, false-spring light that always marks an hour or two of daytime snowstorms, before afternoon arrives and the gloom lowers. The wind was coming from behind us, at the same speed we were walking, and the snow had retired from fine urgency to flaky slowness, its movement more horizontal than vertical, so that as Dr. Morales and I walked to the end of the block we seemed to be moving without moving. He had on a coat and hat so bulbous and red and shiny—it must have been some sort of weird new synthetic fabric—that he looked like a postmodern mountain climber or an explorer or astronaut. He didn’t appear to notice the glances he got from nearly everyone we passed but charged ahead as if he had just caught sight of some lunar objective. I tried to keep up.
We entered the Park at Ninetieth Street and went down a little hill. Paths that had been shoveled were already re-covered by snow, and the banks stood three or four feet high on either side. We walked in silence for a few minutes, following a course that took us—appropriately, it occurred to me—in a large circ
le. At the halfway point, Dr. Morales asked, “What are you thinking about?,” and I said, “Not much.” When we got back to where we had started, I stopped and scooped up some snow, made it into a snowball, and threw it at a tree about fifty feet off. It nicked the trunk.
“What a beautiful day, yes?” said Dr. Morales, beaming at the winter-scape as if he had created it himself. “It makes you feel like a kid, no?”
“Yes,” I said. “But you couldn’t have had much weather like this in Cuba.”
“You are still at point counterpoint, eh, Mr. Singer?”
“Just an observation,” I said, moving off down the path. “Sometimes a cigar is a cigar.”
“Yes, but not, I believe, when you light it and then try to ram it up someone’s ass.” He hadn’t resumed walking, and when I turned to face him he looked, now, less exploratory than extraterrestrially Bolshevik, with the snow—which was intensifying again—swirling about him. He stood perfectly upright in his carapace, a few feet away, gazing at me austerely, as if I had failed to hold my share of the line against the Fascists outside Leningrad. Off to the side, some schoolboys on an outing tossed a Frisbee back and forth. Dr. Morales picked up some snow, compacted it vigorously, and, encumbered as he was, fired it at the tree I’d aimed at. Bull’s-eye.
“I don’t think this treatment is getting me anywhere,” I said.
“You must give it time, Mr. Singer.”
“I want to stop.”
“Please do not do that, Mr. Singer.”
“I thought this whole process was supposed to be more sympathetic, kinder.”
“That is what you want? Someone to be kind to you?”
“Yes,” I said, and, with that, tears welled into my eyes. “Yes, that’s what I want.”
“I’m afraid this is not my function. What I shall try to do, if you will permit me, is to help you learn how to obtain from others what it is that you want.”
The tears were now starting from my eyes, as if expelled by some great interior pressure, and even as I wept I smiled in childlike delight to feel such sudden lightness across my shoulders, such relief in not being able to govern myself. Dr. Morales walked along the path toward me. Despite what he had said, I expected that he might put his arm around my shoulders or explain that it was for my own good that he remained so aloof and exigent—some little gesture of concern. But even in the face of my weeping he didn’t let go an inch, and what I got, after a Frisbee player ran between us, his coat flapping and his orange scarf trailing behind him like a pennant, was “I am sorry but our time is up. I must return to my office.”
We walked out of the Park once again in silence, and Dr. Morales once again struck a lively pace. I hastened along in order not to lag behind like a child, which is very much what I felt like as I tried to wipe the snot and tears from my face with the back of a snow-crusted glove. At Fifth Avenue, Dr. Morales gave me a single formal nod of the head and hurried off toward his office. I got on the westbound crosstown bus, and there was the fat woman, occupying two of the seats reserved for the elderly and handicapped.
HE MUST work out. His striding through the snow, his dead shot with the snowball, his billowing shoulders have led me to imagine him at a gym, lifting weights and then putting in half an hour on a Nordic. Next to a priest. It’s some kind of special, exclusively Catholic gym that I imagine, serving only the various brands of maniacal, too-bright-a-gleam-in-the-eye types that that religion appears to breed. The spirit of the place is martial. The fanatics go there and harden their bodies into worthy vessels of the all-consuming vocations they follow. So we have mafiosi grunting and sweating alongside philosophy professors, and young, sharklike politicians holding the ankles of supermarket managers as they do situps with barbells. Scattered throughout the cavernous facility, whose only ungrotty feature is a south-facing stained-glass window, are those who have gone the whole hog and become priests. And there is also a sprinkling of zealots who have somehow landed in the “helping professions”—tyrannical nurse supervisors, militant social workers, and one or two lunatic analysts like Dr. Morales. Commitment and determination burn like fire in the air around them.
This vision comes to me on my way to a session with Dr. Morales as I walk through the little hollow where we stood in the snow, me crying, Dr. Morales not relenting. It’s spring now—one of the few genuine springs I can remember in New York. After the snow on the back of David Letterman’s pig melted, there were soft, cool days and chilly nights, with weeks’ worth of trees fuzzing up with foliage, and none of the usual foretastes of the heat of summer, and no six-day block of rain and rawness.
I still feel as though in that blizzard I lost a battle in the war I wage triweekly with Dr. Morales, but it evidently instilled in me a love of combat, for I have gone on seeing him, holding in reserve the ultimate weapon: quitting. Soon after the al-fresco session, in fact, I took to leaving every morning at exactly the same time and walking across the Park, to make sure I wouldn’t be late, feeling a shade less desperate but not wanting to acknowledge it officially, for fear it wouldn’t last, muttering all the way, rehearsing the devastating termination remarks that have yet to be delivered. As the weather has turned, I’ve been making the trip more and more quickly, and I think, now, how this morning’s conversation might go if Dr. Morales were to indulge me and himself in a ceasefire:
ME: Have you noticed that I’m not late anymore? This morning I was actually ten minutes early.
DR. MORALES: Yes, I have noticed. And why do you suppose this is?
ME: I think it’s just that I’m getting into better shape and doing the walk faster and haven’t adjusted for the difference yet.
DR. MORALES: I see. Do you take any other exercise?
ME: No.
DR. MORALES: Then I doubt that this walk alone is putting you in better condition.
ME: Well, you ought to know.
DR. MORALES: And what does this mean?
ME: I just remember when we went to the Park in the snow that day. You seemed to be in very good shape yourself, the way you strode around and threw that snowball. Walter Johnson. And you look as though you lift weights or something.
DR. MORALES: The Big Train, yes?
ME: Yes.
DR. MORALES: You are amazed I know this?
ME: Yes.
DR. MORALES: Yet you know that baseball is if anything more popular in Cuba than it is here?
ME: Yes, I guess so.
DR. MORALES: No guesses, Mr. Singer. And you also sound surprised that I am in shape. You remark on this as though it defied credibility, like a snake with tits.
ME: I’m surprised you would have the time—that’s all.
DR. MORALES: Well, as you know, it is not my custom to discuss details of my personal life, but since you are so interested, I will tell you that you happen to be right—I do go to the gymnasium.
ME: Every day?
DR. MORALES: No, this would be impossible with the routine I follow. At my age the body must rest between these kinds of workouts. So, then, what do I do? I go every other day. I fool the body by letting it rest. That is essentially what you do—get the body ready for strenuous work and then fool it on a regular basis. Sometimes, when the body is ready the next day, I fool it even more completely by taking another day off.
I can’t help laughing as I picture my invented Dr. Morales resolutely shunning the gym every other day, pulling the wool over his body’s eyes. That image reminds me of his hirsute face and his stiff smile as he told me the time was up, the son of a bitch, and my own smile fades.
ME: Have you noticed that I’m not late anymore? This morning I was ten minutes early!
DR. MORALES: Yes, I did notice. You must know that this would be very disruptive when the buzzer rings in the middle of someone else’s session, and I wonder if you are not becoming jealous of the time I spend with other patients.
[1990]
DOROTHY PARKER
ARRANGEMENT IN BLACK AND WHITE
THE WOMAN
WITH THE PINK velvet poppies wreathed round the assisted gold of her hair traversed the crowded room at an interesting gait combining a skip with a sidle, and clutched the lean arm of her host. “Now I got you!” she said. “Now you can’t get away!”
“Why, hello,” said her host. “Well. How are you?”
“Oh, I’m finely,” she said. “Just simply finely. Listen. I want you to do me the most terrible favor. Will you? Will you please? Pretty please?”
“What is it?” said her host.
“Listen,” she said. “I want to meet Walter Williams. Honestly, I’m just simply crazy about that man. Oh, when he sings! When he sings those spirituals! Well, I said to Burton, ‘It’s a good thing for you Walter Williams is colored,’ I said, ‘or you’d have lots of reason to be jealous.’ I’d really love to meet him. I’d like to tell him I’ve heard him sing. Will you be an angel and introduce me to him?”
“Why, certainly,” said her host. “I thought you’d met him. The party’s for him. Where is he, anyway?”
“He’s over there by the bookcase,” she said. “Let’s wait till those people get through talking to him. Well, I think you’re simply marvelous, giving this perfectly marvelous party for him, and having him meet all these white people, and all. Isn’t he terribly grateful?”
“I hope not,” said her host.
“I think it’s really terribly nice,” she said. “I do. I don’t see why on earth it isn’t perfectly all right to meet colored people. I haven’t any feeling at all about it—not one single bit. Burton—oh, he’s just the other way. Well, you know, he comes from Virginia, and you know how they are.”
“Did he come tonight?” said her host.
“No, he couldn’t,” she said. “I’m a regular grass widow tonight. I told him when I left, ‘There’s no telling what I’ll do,’ I said. He was just so tired out, he couldn’t move. Isn’t it a shame?”
“Ah,” said her host.
“Wait till I tell him I met Walter Williams!” she said. “He’ll just about die. Oh, we have more arguments about colored people. I talk to him like I don’t know what, I get so excited. ‘Oh, don’t be so silly,’ I say. But I must say for Burton, he’s heaps broader-minded than lots of these Southerners. He’s really awfully fond of colored people. Well, he says himself, he wouldn’t have white servants. And you know, he had this old colored nurse, this regular old nigger mammy, and he just simply loves her. Why, every time he goes home, he goes out in the kitchen to see her. He does, really, to this day. All he says is, he says he hasn’t got a word to say against colored people as long as they keep their place. He’s always doing things for them—giving them clothes and I don’t know what all. The only thing he says, he says he wouldn’t sit down at the table with one for a million dollars. ‘Oh,’ I say to him, ‘you make me sick, talking like that.’ I’m just terrible to him. Aren’t I terrible?”
Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker Page 46