Chapter Five
Anna sat back on the couch. She looked at Doc and then looked down at herself. She was relieved to have taken this step. Maybe things would be more soothing from now on. As Anna began to recite her autobiography, she felt even more comfortable. After all, she had long been the kind of person who explains herself regularly. It was part of a longstanding faith in being understood and a desire to apologize for every inadequacy. To ask forgiveness.
“Well … let’s see,” she said, “should we start with school?”
“Sure.”
“Well, elementary school was fine, I guess, until I started to get my own values. I remember exactly when that happened. It was one winter day, in class, when the teacher told us that light was the opposite of dark. I listened closely and tried to go along with it for some time. But then, that very evening, I noticed that light was like dark. Both were complete and ethereal, easily recognizable and metaphoric. That was when my problems began.”
“Go on,” Doc said.
“The next morning, on the subway to first grade, I decided to ask the teacher a question about the way that thoughts were structured - both his and mine. I wondered if everything was already known and each person just selected the facts that work for them. Or, were there still completely undetected ways to live?”
“What did he say?”
“My teacher couldn’t cope. He seemed to be demanding over and over again that I justify my opinion. I couldn’t just have it. That day, after nap time I walked into the wrong bathroom by mistake, and then made deals with God to get me out of that dump. Being doubted was so humiliating. I felt uncomfortable for the next twelve years.”
Anna looked at Doc. He too was overweight. On a woman the fat goes right to her ego. Then every man on the street has to mention it for the rest of her life. Doc just had a potbelly, she noted. Surely no one ever said a thing about it.
“How is this revealed in your contemporary life?” Doc asked.
“Well, Doctor,” she said, finally hooking her stockings on the jagged frame of the couch. “Doctor, in all my years of homosexuality I have never had sex with another lesbian. I’ve only made love to so-called straights or ambivalent bisexuals. Do you think that could be connected to not having been acknowledged as an intellectual?”
“Do most gay women love each other?” Doc asked.
“A lot of them love closeted movie stars,” Anna answered thoughtfully. “But I can honestly say that most of them love each other too. They have more trouble with themselves.”
“Anna,” Doc said. “What were some of the explanations that have gone through your mind, historically, when you have faced this question?”
She tried hard to remember.
“Let’s see. Well, I didn’t like being told what to do. I didn’t like being told that lesbians were the only group I could pick from.”
“What else?”
“I’m in competition with men, clearly,” Anna said. “Why should they be able to just walk in and have something that I can’t have?”
“And what’s that?” he asked.
“Straight women, of course.”
“Well, that does sound logical,” he said. “But it is also way off. What else?”
“Well, there’s also that big lie about homosexuality. I don’t believe that it’s just this tiny little band of deviants. I’ve been crossing the thin line all my life on a regular basis. If they’ll sleep with me, how straight can they be?”
“What else?”
“If a straight woman falls in love with me, she must really love me. If a gay woman loves me, she’s just a lesbian looking for a girlfriend.”
“You do amazing things with logic,” Doc said, writing furiously. “What else?”
“Well, men who are much less than I am get a lot of breaks. They’re judged differently. I wanted to be judged like they are judged.”
“What else?”
“It’s hard to love a beggar.”
“Do you prefer pornography or sex?” Doc asked.
“Sex,” Anna said.
“Anything else?” Doc asked.
“Yes,” she said. “On top of all my personal problems there are these social problems. There are these facts about my friends dying of AIDS. I’m thirty-one years old, Doctor, and I read the obituary page first.”
“I think we need to start at the beginning,” Doc said. “Let us start with your family. How do you feel about your family?”
Anna crossed her legs and arms in an unconscious attempt to protect her genitals.
“My family seems so unreal to me. And when I am with them, I also am not real. I am a character in some movie and someone else wrote the script. Doc, did you ever read Delmore Schwartz’s In Dreams Begin Responsibilities? In the opening piece a man walks into a movie theater, and there on the screen is the story of his parents’ lives. The story of how they met. He watches, amazed as he sees his parents’ courtship projected before him. They walk along the Coney Island boardwalk. They’re young, in love. Finally, Schwartz can’t take it anymore. He leaps up from his seat in the dark and yells, ‘Don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.’”
“Now, Anna, I know that patients often reveal unconscious wishes in seemingly casual anecdotes. So tell me, if you imagined that your family was a movie, what would it look like? What would happen on the screen?”
“Well, Doc,” she said, “it would go something like this.”