Chapter Ten
Doc waited impatiently for Anna to return from the bathroom so that the session could resume.
“Doc,” she said, crouched over, “there is something that has been particularly weighing on my mind. Something I want to resolve while I have the will and strength of character to face it.”
“What?”
“Well, Doc…I never had a lover who let me meet her parents.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because sometimes they just couldn’t. Sometimes they had no parents. Sometimes their parents were back home in some small town in Pennsylvania or the Bronx where these daughters just didn’t make sense. But there were also times, Doc, when the women were … ashamed of me. It was because they were ashamed of me. Because they thought I was less. Because they didn’t want to make their families uncomfortable, so they made me uncomfortable instead.”
“Are you sure?” Doc asked.
“I’m absolutely sure,” she said.
“Give me an example,” Doc said.
“Some girl named Sarah fell in love with me. We hitch-hiked across America, stopping off in Chicago where she fucked her exboyfriend. Three days later, in a parking lot by the Bonneville Salt Flats, she said, ‘You think I’m a homosexual but I’m not.’”
Oh my God, Doc thought. That’s exactly what that woman in white leather said to me. Only why did she say that to me? I’m a man. I’m supposed to be immune to that sort of thing.
“Then what happened?”
“We went to California anyway. I only had twenty-six dollars and couldn’t very well turn around and hitch-hike back to New York alone. I could get raped. Spent a few weeks picking walnuts in her hometown of Visalia and ate potato dinners followed by harassing questions by her family.”
“Hold everything, Anna,” Doc said. “I though you said you never had a lover who let you meet her parents.”
“We weren’t lovers anymore, remember? She’d gone straight conveniently in Utah.”
“Oh yeah.”
“So, one day we’re hanging out by the one and only hot dog stand on Visalia’s main drag and her father reached into his car and handed me a present. ‘Here’s something you might be interested in,’ he says. It was a book called The History of Deviance in America.”
It seemed to Doc that her time was almost up, but he decided to make it a double session.
“So then, Doc, we go to LA where she picks up some guy on the UCLA campus and we end up living with him. Me, sleeping in the living room in a condo in Westwood, listening to them fucking. Finally, she realizes that she’s pregnant from that guy in Chicago. I spent three days sitting silently beside her in welfare centers and abortion clinics until the Medi-Cal came through and she gets it paid for. See, I was still acting like a lover. So, the night after the operation we’re eating in that guy’s apartment and news comes on the TV that Medicaid abortions have just been outlawed by the Hyde amendment. The next morning I told that guy, ‘Buy me a one-way to New York or I’ll break your legs.’”
“Did he do it?”
“They always do it. All you have to do is mention New York.”
“What happened to her?”
“She had a nervous breakdown and joined EST. Nine years later she came out again and apologized. But that’s a long time to wait, nine formative years.”
Yeah he’d make it a double session but only charge her for one. Or was that too Pavlovian and unprofessional?
You’re not supposed to let your patients know that you like them, he remembered. It’s that fucking blank slate.
“What can you do to feel better?” Doc asked.
“My last lover’s boyfriend got to go to her mother’s house whenever he wanted to. He got to go so much that he didn’t want to anymore. He even got to go when they were breaking up so she could be with me. But I never got to go.”
“Oh,” Doc said. “That is not right.”
“Soon it will be my birthday and I want to go.”
“I think you should go,” Doc said.
“Her mother has an apartment on the Upper West Side. I want to go there.”
“Do you have the address?”
“Yes, I called information and got listings for everyone with that name on the Upper West Side, and I narrowed it down to her.”
“How are you going to get there?”
By this time Anna’s body language was entirely different. That’s because she was scheming, strategizing for things to go her way.
“I’m going to wake up on the morning of my birthday. I’m going to put on my best clothes. I’m going to take the subway, and when I get out I’ll go to the nearest Korean fruit stand and buy some flowers. Some special flowers. Some orange ones. Then I’ll go to her door and ring the buzzer.”
“What if there’s a doorman?” Doc said. “They have those on the Upper West Side, you know.”
“If there’s a doorman, I’ll announce myself. I’ll say ‘I’ve come to bring some flowers.’ I’ll get the best ones.”
“Even if they’re expensive?”
“It’s my birthday,” Anna said. “I don’t care how much it costs.”
There was a pause then, common among patients, and Doc took advantage of it to look out the window. He always noticed these shifts in conversation that seemed to be physical ones. They had to do with breathing.
“But Anna, what if she doesn’t let me in, I mean, let you in?”
“I don’t know,” Anna said.
There was another one, a shift. When a person walks on a dark road at night and no light, there’s a bouncing slide and dry smell. Then, let’s say, the road becomes asphalt. It’s obvious, the change.
“What do you think, Doc?”
“Well,” he said. “Why do you need her mother to let you in the house?”
“I need it because I am not slime. I need it because I am good enough to invite for dinner.”
“Well then,” he said very upset, “well then, I think you’re doing the right thing.”