A Shining Affliction

by Annie G. Rogers

  I remember myself, or was it someone else?—someone lost, falling in vast darkness, falling in the night sky and landing on her back in snow.

  I want Melanie to fling herself into darkness so vast that she won’t be able to remember whether it was herself falling or not.

  I waken, crying, as I try to invent Melanie-Melanie remembering me.

  53

  When I return to see Blumenfeld the following week, he gets up to slip the brass latch on his door into place, as he has done each time I’ve entered the room. This time, I turn and suggest, “No, let’s not lock it.”

  “It’s not to lock you in,” he replies. “It’s to lock out anyone who might intrude.”

  “No, let’s not lock it,” I repeat.

  “All right. You will be in charge of the lock. If you want it unlocked, fine. If you want to lock it again, that’s fine too.”

  I have brought with me the journal I began keeping when I first met Melanie. Telling the story about the ending of my relationship with her has awakened the necessity to understand what led up to it. The ending still looms incomprehensible before me. I cannot hold onto Blumenfeld’s words from our last session. I dreamt about Melanie. And I tried to read my old journal over the weekend by myself.

  I hand the volume to Blumenfeld, telling him that I tried to read it but couldn’t go on.

  “That’s right, Annie, there are some things you can’t understand by yourself, and it would be dangerous to try.”

  I do not sit down immediately, as usual. I feel, for the first time, a need to explore my surroundings. I walk slowly around his office, looking at the titles of his books, commenting whenever I come to one that I own: “I have that book too.” There are quite a number we have in common.

  I come to a bookcase with two doors under it that open when I pull at them. Toys underneath.

  “Aha!” I say. “I wondered where you kept your toys.”

  I continue my tour, and come to a door. I turn and look at Blumenfeld, who nods, so I open it, expecting something interesting, to find only a closet with boxes and a few coats in it.

  I sit down. “It’s strange not to be seeing a woman, and especially not to be seeing Melanie,” I begin, noticing for the first time that Blumenfeld might be my therapist.

  “Were you looking for her in those places where you found the toys and the coats?” he asks.

  “No, I did not expect to find her really.” I sigh. “No, but if you were a woman, if you were a mother, I would want to know where to hide sometimes.”

  “And you don’t because I am a man?” he asks, eyebrows up in surprise.

  “Because you are a man, I don’t feel the need to hide in the same way. With a woman, I would feel so exposed, as if I had no skin. But I can’t go to a woman now, not now.”

  Blumenfeld nods, as if this makes sense to him.

  “I don’t know if I should go on seeing you,” I tell him, as if this is our first meeting. “I don’t know how I will pay you. I don’t even know what your fee is!” I’m a bit embarrassed to say this, when I’ve been seeing him almost daily for two weeks already.

  “If you should go on seeing me, then the fee will settle itself. You need not worry about that right now,” he says as if his is a leisurely, no-need-to-worry-about-money sort of practice.

  I don’t know what to make of that. I lean back and the chair lifts me up, a sensation of being taken off the ground. I feel suddenly quite small, and think of Galle, or as Blumenfeld calls her, “little Annie.”

  “I dreamed that Melanie was in your office,” I tell Blumenfeld, and sigh again.

  “That does help me,” he says, his eyes lighting up. “I had a fantasy that I might see her here.”

  Startled, I look up at him.

  “The little pieces are still attached to her, Annie, and they keep searching for her, don’t they?”

  A rush of relief. “I’m so glad you don’t hate her. I’m so relieved that you haven’t made her into a monster. Even my best friends are inclined to do that. I keep looking for her everywhere. She appears in my dreams. I even hear her voice in the room sometimes at night when I wake up—but she’s never there.”

  “The little pieces are the cement of your personality, and you are shattered now. But they are still searching for her, they believe that she is still your therapist. So, you see, I had a fantasy this weekend that I might meet with Melanie. We might speak the same language. But you know her better than I do. Do you think this is something to explore?”

  “Yes,” I tell him. “But I don’t know if she will come here.” I shiver. “I can’t afford another mistake, another shattering. But I can’t afford to feel so cut off and completely betrayed. And I can’t go to see another woman.”

  “So, there is no healing for the Annie who held the gun?” Blumenfeld asks.

  “I don’t care about her. She should never have done that,” I come back angrily.

  “She is the core of yourself, Annie. You brought the very core of yourself to your therapist. The Annie who held the gun is a girl who sees with blue lenses, and she was shattered. When you say ‘I don’t care about her,’ I know that even the blue lenses were shattered.”

  I know what he is saying, and I am also confused. “What do you mean, a girl with blue lenses?”

  “You have never read that story?” he says, incredulous.

  “No.”

  “It is about a girl in a psychiatric hospital, and every time a doctor or nurse came into her room, she saw a viper, or a ravenous vulture, or an ugly boar. She saw them as they were, she saw their essences, and she trusted none of them. She had blue lenses, as you do. Then one day a Saint Bernard came into her room.”

  “Were you the Saint Bernard?” I ask him.

  Blumenfeld laughs. “I could be,” he said. “If you were lost in such a place, I could probably become one and find you there.”

  “Yes, I think you probably could,” I admit.

  I sit in the silence, with this image of him carrying something around his neck into a room, somewhere where I have been.

  “When will you call Melanie?” I ask him.

  “You will need to call her, Annie,” he says.

  “Why? She won’t listen to me.” I feel a rising panic. “She said she would answer no phone calls.”

  “Because it would be like sneaking in her back door, for me to call. I want you to knock on the front door,” Blumenfeld explains.

  I protest, angrily. “Don’t you understand? She said no to any contact! She threatened to call the police!”

  “Don’t you need to know,” Blumenfeld asks, “if she would do that—in response to something so simple as a phone message?”

  “No,” I tell him. “I don’t want to know anything more than I know now. No. I don’t want to know. I already know too much.”

  “I disagree with you there, Annie,” Blumenfeld says softly. “Truths about people are never too much.”

  Suddenly, I feel he is right. But nothing changes my fear. “I am just too frightened to call.”

  “The little pieces will know when,” he says.

  I ask him, “If I call her and ask her to call you, will you let me know right away if she does?”

  Blumenfeld smiles. “You may know before I know, but yes.” He gets up and goes over to his desk, and writes something down on a scrap of paper. He hands me the paper.

  “If you want to call me, at any time, call me. I am giving you my phone number at home. And if you call me in the middle of the night, I will especially like that because I love going to sleep, and I will get to do it twice in one night.”

  As I leave, he adds, “Annie, about the latch. You never liked it because I was locking Melanie out, wasn’t I?”

  I smile at him, nod, go out into the waiting room, and out into the warm spring air, where Sarah is waiting for me.

  I sit at my desk, push aside art materials, and write in a blue spiral notebook, as if I am sitting in the playroom at Glenwood.

&n
bsp; In this session, Blumenfeld and I are introduced again at a deeper level. Although I’ve told him a most intimate, frightening story about myself, this session feels like a first meeting. I explore the office and raise questions about his fee and about whether or not I should continue to see him. Most crucially, in this session, we begin to move, for the first time, through the space between his fantasies and wishes and mine. We understand one another’s words and actions through this unconscious and powerfully deep connection. And, as we begin to understand one another in this way, the logic of both sets of our associations becomes clear. For example, he understands my trouble with the latch (he kept locking Melanie out), as well as my tour of his office and its hidden places (I was looking for Melanie there)—through his own fantasy of meeting with her over the weekend. And he is very accurate in his interpretations. We don’t even have to be in the same room to be with one another in this way. I “help him out” with my dream that Melanie comes to his office, a dream I experienced over the weekend when he had his fantasy.

  But as soon as I sense the possibility of her presence there, I am troubled that Blumenfeld is not a woman, and tell him this. This is a comfort because I don’t feel the need to hide, yet I have sought out the hiding places in his office, as if I wished that I did have to hide. The fact that he is not a woman, and therefore not a mother, is inescapable.

  54

  I call Melanie and leave a message for her to call Dr. Blumenfeld. He calls me and lets me know that she has spoken to him (that same day), and she has agreed to come and talk to him. Blumenfeld also tells me that she said she had a fantasy of working with me again.

  A thin sliver of hope opens up in me, and with my hope—confusion and terror.

  I dream of an unknown woman and myself entering a dark little house. We must bend over to enter the doorway. Inside there are several children, crying. She undresses them, and me, now small, and, in terror, I move quietly out of my body and hover above this scene.

  I dream of going into a dark corridor with Melanie. It is dimly lit by slits of light from above. Above us a little bird flies back and forth, crying, chirping, desperate to get out.

  I wake up trembling, walk down the hallway to the bathroom, and coming back, turn the corner, expecting to see Melanie there. I feel her presence and can’t stop trembling. I get up to call Blumenfeld, but the whole room tilts. I crawl back into bed.

  I begin to get lost on my daily walks again. Keeping track of time is confusing. I draw a picture of the garden of the house where I am staying, and nothing is in its proper place.

  I have cut down on the Haldol I was taking when I left the hospital. I begin to take the regular dose again, but it does not help the confusion. Twitches and spasms wrench my back. I take more Cogentin to allay the worst of these side effects and pace a path in the rug of my room. I decide nothing could be worse than this and stop taking the Haldol altogether.

  I stay in my room more often, reading children’s books and trying to draw.

  At around three thirty each afternoon Noah comes home from school. This fourteen-year-old boy and I are the same height exactly. Fine-boned and thin, with light-brown hair, we look uncannily like brother and sister. We even have matching blue Patagonia jackets, the same size.

  He speaks quickly in long sentences, swallowing some of his words, and I can’t follow him always, but I manage to get most of his jokes. We walk to the grocery store to buy bubble gum, we fly stunt kites in the field to the left of the house, we cook dinners together (he’s an accomplished cook), and we make chocolate-chip oatmeal cookies, called “cowboy cookies” in his family. And at night, Noah comes to my room in his robe and slippers with two steaming cups of tea and talks to me as I draw.

  His ease with me reminds me of Ben, whom I cannot see.

  55

  When I come to see Blumenfeld the following week (we have settled into meeting three times a week), I bring a paper bag with two rabbit ears sticking out.

  I lift the stuffed rabbit out of the bag by the ears and put her on my lap. Blumenfeld looks up. “Why have you hidden him in that uncomfortable bag?” he asks.

  “Her,” I correct him. “There are grown-ups in the waiting room,” I explain, hoping he has read The Little Prince.

  “Oh yes, the grown-ups!” he says. “That reminds me of playing ‘The Frog Prince’ with a three-year-old, Amanda, on the golf course one day. I was playing the frog, of course, and I was really into it, squatting down and croaking, when suddenly Amanda stopped. She looked sort of tense and embarrassed, as you do right now. I looked up, and there was a whole cluster of golfers watching us. So we waited until the people went away. Amanda felt rather silly about it.”

  “And you?” I ask him, picturing the whole scene clearly.

  “I’ve had more experience at looking silly. I’m used to it.”

  We sit in the silence. I notice that my journal is on his desk. “Did you read it?” I ask him.

  “I started to read it. There is much to absorb, so it’s going to take me a long time. I think you knew even from the earliest time with Melanie that she might abandon you, Annie. I sensed that earlier, and now I’m quite sure of it.”

  “I don’t understand that very well,” I tell him. “It’s almost as if I went about creating the very thing that I feared the most.”

  “Yes, in a way that’s right, Annie. But you did not create it alone,” Blumenfeld comments. Tears bloom in the corners of my eyes. I finger the ears of my rabbit. Despair and longing. “And you, you really get this, you get the whole .story in a way I never imagined anyone could or would, but you are not a mother-person. You don’t have any breasts!”

  “I could try to grow some for you,” he says, and I have to laugh. But he is perfectly serious.

  The silence grows. Blumenfeld breaks it by asking, “Does your rabbit have a name?”

  “Her name is Pimmy,” I tell him, and thinking about how he might grow breasts, I add, “Do you think you could nurse her?”

  He smiles. “I wouldn’t know how to. Pimmy would have to tell me how to hold and nurse her.”

  Immediately I retreat, wondering if he is afraid of this.

  “Do you think Pimmy would talk to me about it?” he asks.

  I look at the rabbit. “She isn’t verbal.”

  “That’s OK—words get in the way of talking sometimes,” Blumenfeld says, stretching out his hands to me.

  I give him the rabbit. He puts Pimmy up on his chest, her head on one shoulder, loosely cradling her neck and tail. Had the rabbit wanted to squirm, she could have. Her ears flop back. He says, “She is talking to me, and she says she doesn’t want to be fed right now, she just wants to be held and surrounded and not dropped.”

  The image of the rabbit and a baby girl blurs with my tears. We sit like this for a long time, and then Blumenfeld hands me my rabbit back.

  “Oh, by the way, I have figured out the fee, if you want to continue to see me,” he says. “My fee is sixty dollars a session. You can pay me whatever you can now, see me as often as you like, and pay me the rest when you are wealthy.”

  “When I am wealthy?” I ask, astonished.

  “When you are wealthy. After you publish. You see, when I started to read your journal it became clear to me that you are a writer, and when you publish, you will probably make a lot of money, and then you can pay me.”

  “And if I don’t publish, or don’t get wealthy from it?”

  “Then you will owe me nothing beyond what you can pay me now.”

  “I am a student, so that won’t be very much at all! That wouldn’t feel fair to me.” I hardly know what to make of what he is saying to me.

  “Then you can pay me whatever you like afterwards as well. But, Annie, if you do not publish, then you owe me nothing more. This therapy will have been a complete failure.”

  I get up to leave him, stuffing the rabbit back in the bag.

  “Someday, I hope you will carry him proudly,” Blumenfeld says.


  “Her,” I gently correct him, and go out.

  Pimmy is the fourth in a series of rabbits I have owned, named after the original rabbit called Pimmy, given to me by my father when I was four. This one was white once, but is gray by now, with a worn green ribbon around her neck. She is the rabbit I brought to Melanie as well, the representative of my smallest self.

  I bring the rabbit to Blumenfeld after he has begun to meet with Melanie. She has agreed to meet with him regularly to talk. He does not tell me anything about these talks, but I trust him because he has not dismissed my wish to see her again. I also believe he grasps, without my needing to tell him, what is at stake in this meeting with her.

  Blumenfeld plays with me through his story about himself and Amanda playing “The Frog Prince” on the golf course. He seems to be saying that he is older than Amanda, and older than me, and is therefore “used to” feeling silly, but there is no shame in Amanda’s embarrassment, nor in mine. And he is transparent, he is trustworthy, because he plays. He has not given in to the constraints of “the grown-ups.”

  Later that evening I find myself thinking about the fairy tale called “The Frog Prince.” A little girl, the youngest of the King’s daughters, has lost a golden ball in a deep well. She meets a frog when she is crying about her loss. I remember the first line in the story: “In the old times, when it was still of some use to wish for the thing one wanted ...” And this line reverberates with my session with Blumenfeld. I find myself in despair about my wish for a mother-person in a therapist. My wish comes to life in Blumenfeld’s presence—a man who clearly breaks many conventional rules of analytic practice. He tells me that he has played a frog, and I remember a fairy tale where a frog helps a girl by returning her golden ball from the well. The similarities are striking. It’s not for free that the frog retrieves the golden ball; he makes the little girl promise him that she will grant him a wish in return. And Blumenfeld’s help isn’t free either. In this session, we finally agree upon a fee, though in a most unusual way. But I think his wish, his deepest wish, isn’t about money. He risks not getting paid if I don’t “get wealthy,” after all. I think his real wish is to learn how to become a mother-person, something he has not been able to do. When I tell him, “You don’t have any breasts,” he says, “I could try to grow some for you.”