A Curable Romantic (7 page)

He glanced over at Dr. Freud. The two seemed to be sharing some
stimulating secret. It’s well known now, of course, that in addition to aiding and abetting Dr. Fliess in his numerological preoccupations, supplying the data-hungry Berliner with all sorts of information — the birth dates and death dates of his family, the rhythm of Frau Freud’s menses, the ebb and flow of their children’s illnesses and of his own literary productivity — Dr. Freud twice allowed Dr. Fliess to operate upon his own nose as a cure for various cardiac complaints and that he recommended courses of nasal therapy to many of his own patients as well. Dr. Fliess typically swathed the postoperative nasal passages of these patients with lavish doses of cocaine, and this might go some distance in explaining the extraordinary benefit to mood perceived by all of them, including Dr. Freud, who, we now know, conducted an ill-considered love affair with the narcotic. Indeed, cocaine might go some distance in explaining Dr. Fliess’s mesmerizing conversational style. His light-footed rhythms, his quicksilver connections, his inexhaustible fund of images all bear the cloven hoofprint of that old devil, although of course none of us realized this at the time.

“And let me tell you something even more marvelous and originally profound!” he cried out. “As our host has heroically shown — and cheers all around for Dr. Sigmund Freud!” — he raised his glass in Dr. Freud’s direction — “neurasthenia in young people is caused by nothing less sinister than masturbation!”

Though he pronounced the word with a practiced frankness, several of the women in the room gasped, and suddenly I understood the Bernays sisters’ consternated toe-tapping. Dr. Rie hemmed and hawed; Dr. Rosenberg threw his hands in the air; Dr. Breuer scowled behind his wispy beard; Dr. Rosanes laughed into his drink; but Dr. Fliess continued on as boldly as before.

“Naturally enough, bad sex behaviors in both genders affect more than just the nose. The nervous system is harmed as well, of course, but it’s the nose that suffers most.”

A woman moaned. “Good Lord, man!” Dr. Rie protested weakly.

Misunderstanding the nature of their distress, Dr. Fliess hurried to defend his thesis: “Let me assure you that I’m speaking here strictly from experience with my own practice in Berlin. Immediately after
masturbation, one may observe a very characteristic swelling and a heightened sensitivity to what I call the nasal-genital spots.” He tapped his nose twice with his forefinger.

“Sigmund, may I speak to you this very instant?” Tight-lipped and white-knuckled, Frau Freud gestured her husband from the room.

“That’s the problem, you see,” Dr. Fliess continued. “One may remove the painful spots — I’ve done it a million times: scrape, scrape, scrape! — but they simply return as long as abnormal sexual satisfaction is occurring. Now it’s a well-known scientific fact that unmarried women who masturbate suffer from painful menstruation, along with neuralgic stomachache and excessive nosebleed. Who among us does not know this? And so you’re correct, Dr. Rie: my nasal therapies are helpless, absolutely, in aiding these women
until
they surrender these vile practices.”

He was losing his audience. This frank talk was costing him the attention of all but those of us in possession of a medical degree. Most of the women had already fled the room.

“Preposterous,” Dr. Rie muttered.

“Preposterous?” Dr. Fliess glanced over our shoulders at the defectors. “No, but I shall tell you what
is
preposterous. What
is
preposterous is the fact that this condition, prevalent for so long in our society, has gone undetected, and that those daring enough to attempt its cure are laughed at and scorned and mocked and driven from our professional societies until we are nearly insane with bitterness and rage!” Dr. Fliess clapped the back of one hand against the palm of the other. “And yet, despite the opposition I have personally received on this score, I have persevered in devising a cure. A cure, yes! By altering the left middle turbinate bone in the nose’s frontal third, precisely in ‘the nasal stomachache spot,’ as I have termed it, I have cured my patients not only of their abnormal sexual practices but of the neuroses these practices create as well.”

“Nasal stomachache spot!” Dr. Rie harrumphed again.

Dr. Fliess was bristling now. “Yes. Unfortunately, however, as I’ve discovered, there is more profit in addressing oneself to laymen who are grateful for one’s work than to professionals who, in their Latin-nomenclatured ignorance, betray that ignorance by scoffing!”

“Wilhelm, my dearest friend.” Dr. Freud had at that moment reentered the room and was looking anxiously between the two men. “You’ve allowed us to detain you long enough. When you publish the rest of your beautiful novelties, as you must, you’ll astonish more than a small group of sympathetic friends. You’ll astonish the world. And although we can wait for that, our dinner, I’m afraid, cannot. May I invite everyone in to dine?”

(As for Dr. Fliess’s presumptive villainy, I can say only this: In the coming months, a strange story was bruited about the cafés and whispered over in our little medical circles, to wit: that Dr. Freud, fearful that through his newly minted psychoanalytic bias, he may have overlooked a physical reason for Fräulein Eckstein’s suffering, invited Dr. Fliess in to consult, and that Dr. Fliess had suggested to him that the Fräulein’s hysteria was symptomatic of nasal reflex neurosis and had recommended, as a cure, the removal of the left middle turbinate bone of her nose. The story continues: having never performed this surgery, his own mad invention, before; indeed, having never performed major surgery at all; having previously confined his practice to simple cauterizations and cocainizations of the nose, Dr. Fliess botched the job and nearly killed the girl when he accidentally left a meter of surgical gauze inside her nasal cavity. This story, as my own narrative will demonstrate, is preposterous, of course, designed to blot out the true events, which I will now recount.)

CHAPTER 6

Nothing was as I imagined it only an hour before. I could barely concentrate on my dinner. Frau Freud had placed me between Dr. Freud’s sister Rosa and Heinrich Graf, her fiancé, and though they tried to include me in their conversation (something about the massacres at Aleppo), I could think of nothing but Dr. Fliess and his strange theories. Was it possible that masturbation actually disfigured the nose? And could the removal of the left middle turbinate bone truly relieve not only stomachache and uterine bleeding but also the psychic distress caused by masturbation? And
did
masturbation really cause psychic distress? (Or wasn’t it the other way around? Speaking for myself, abstinence seemed to create as much psychic distress as did autoeroticism; and normal sexual satisfaction, as Dr. Fliess had so blithely termed it, would, I feared, create only more.)

Granted: there
were
similarities between the genitals and the nose. Both hung on the central column of the body without a complementing twin. In women, the nostrils resided above the mouth as did the oviducts above the nether labia; both were capable of bleeding. In men, the formal symmetry between the nostrils and the testicles, being external, was even more pronounced. I couldn’t help glancing about the table at the twenty or so noses ringed about me. Sharp, flat, hooked, pug, aquiline, Greek, snub, hawk, celestial; this one wagging his, that one caressing hers; how shamelessly we displayed them in public; how baldly we allowed them to protrude into the open air — quivering, vulnerable, receptive! I blushed as the scrolled nostrils of the woman across from me seemed suddenly as enticing as might the dimples of her rump! How was it possible, I wondered, that neither law nor custom forbade the display of nose hair in public? The way it sprouted from some of the older gentlemen’s nostrils in stifftufts seemed almost lewd, as did the blue veins that stood out on the reddened skin of some of the coarser specimens on display. Beards,
mustaches, side whiskers, even eyebrows now brought to mind only one thing: the littler beards we kept hidden beneath our trousers and our skirts. I dropped my gaze when this one chortled through hers or that one brought a handkerchief to his, pulling on it with sharp brisk tugs until he’d emptied it of its contents.

Frau Freud’s cherried veal tasted like wood pulp in my mouth, and I’m afraid I availed myself too eagerly of the wine. It was bad enough that everyone appeared to be wearing a pornographic postcard glued to the middle of his forehead; worse was the disillusionment I felt upon finally meeting the great and brilliant Dr. Fliess. The dashing young genius from Berlin, about whom I’d heard so much, struck me as little better than a Bedlamite. I was aghast to watch him, seated at Dr. Freud’s right, soliciting from those who’d been honored with chairs near his the dates of all the significant events of their lives, from which, like a fortuneteller, he was busy calculating the hour of their demise.

“Fifty-one months from your birthday,” he said, adding up his figures, “fifty-one being twenty-three plus twenty-eight, minus the difference between them, which is five, multiplied by twenty-three squared, divided by the square root of twenty-eight … ah, yes, here it is. According to my calculations, you can expect to expire at precisely thirty-six minutes past two on the morning of March 14, 1938.”

His dining companions appeared eager for this information and, once it had been revealed to them, delighted to possess it. Indeed, I watched with my mouth agape as Amalia Eckstein inscribed the date of her death into a booklet she withdrew from her purse, penciling it in as though it were a dental appointment!

(Proof of the prophet’s worthlessness, I told myself, was the fact that according to his calculations, a majority of the people at the table were to perish in March of 1938.)

I could only shake my head. Dr. Freud had a weakness for gypsy-like parlor games, it’s true; but Dr. Fliess had gone him one better. If, like an Hasidic rebbe, Dr. Freud could read a man’s sins in the lines of his face, Dr. Fliess, like God Himself, knew the hour of his demise.

What did it say about Sigmund Freud, I wondered, that he revered a man of such low caliber?

STILL, ALL THIS
was nothing compared to the heartbreak I had experienced upon seeing Fräulein Eckstein again. Never for a moment had I imagined that the woman whose picture I’d carried in my heart for over a month might feel only indifference towards me! It was madness to have come here, I told myself. I regretted pressuring Dr. Freud into inviting me to this odd Christmas soirée (in attendance at which there seemed to be only Jews; at a quick glance, I estimated that none of the guests had ever been within ten feet of a baptismal font!). Still, I couldn’t help watching Fräulein Eckstein. The way she laughed at Dr. Fliess’s calculations, hanging on to his every word, made me blind with rage. It pained me to see her eyes glistening with admiration for him while she sat with her fingers braided before her mouth and her nose laid out like a dainty for him upon the platter of her hands.

(Her interest in Dr. Fliess, it turned out, was completely counterfeit. As I would learn the next day, she was merely flattering him as a way of pleasing Dr. Freud.)

“Dr. Sammelsohn!” I heard my name called as though from a great distance. “Are you still with us, then?” I refocused my eyes, and the white and blue blotches before them unblurred into the person of Fräulein Rosa Freud, sitting beside me in a shimmering blue dress.

“Ah, Fräulein Freud,” I said, “pardon me. I must have been daydreaming.”

“I was only asking you whether you agreed that what Herr Graf just said was wickedly funny.”

I looked at her fiancé, Graf. He smiled at me ludicrously, his watery eyes brimming behind his pince-nez. “Oh, well, no,” he said with modest good humor, “it’s nothing really.” He smiled tenderly at Fräulein Rosa. “I was just saying that it’s apparently not enough for Dr. Fliess to cure gynecological concerns, but he must stick his nose into Dr. Freud’s neurosis as well.”

Although this was the second time in as many minutes that she had heard the witticism, appreciative laughter fell from Fräulein Rosa’s painted mouth. She reached across me to caress Herr Graf’s hand, and the two retreated into the privacy of each other’s gaze.

I’d never felt lonelier in my life.

What further disaster could befall me that evening?

“A
H
, D
R
. S
AMMELSOHN
, may I touch it?” Amalia Eckstein had sneaked up behind me when I’d stopped in the hallway to admire the Freuds’ new telephone. A wooden box with a phallic-looking tube above two silver bells that resembled naked breasts — or so, in my current state of mind, the apparatus appeared to me — it was the first I’d seen in a private home.

“What in Heaven’s name are you talking about?” I cried, turning in alarm. I had thought, of course, she had meant my nose.

“Why, your hair, you silly-billy,” she said. “Because it’s so extraordinarily thick and marvelous!” She lifted her hand and let it hover in the now-electric air between us. What could I say to her? That I’d prefer she didn’t touch me? Of course, I did the only thing a gentleman could, which was to bow my head and offer it to her. “Oh! But oh — oh my! It’s so much softer than it looks! So soft and so curly and so full! Oh — but it’s an absolute delight!”

I felt as though I were being examined by a careless phrenologist. Her nails nicked the skin behind my ears. As strands of my hair became entangled in her rings, she simply plucked them out. Worse: she’d pushed the shelf of her bosom so near my face that my breath had steamed up my glasses, and when I heard Fräulein Eckstein’s strangled cry — alas, the Fräulein had stumbled upon our unfortunate tableau — I had no choice but to read through the steamy lenses the horror etching itself upon her face.

“Mother!” she cried.

“Darling, you must come here and caress this young man’s hair immediately! It’s une expérience sensuelle.”

“I will do no such thing! My God, Mother” — Fräulein Eckstein dropped her voice — “there are people in the other room!” Unable to force herself from the passageway, she covered her face with her hands, blocking out the image, and I feared she might at any moment faint.