It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive (13 page)

I’d also underestimated the challenges Abbey Leigh would encounter integrating herself into an unknown culture. Shopping (and driving, and even watching television) in a foreign country can require tremendous energy and intense concentration. I’d had a taste of it myself in Australia. Abbey Leigh often arrived home from running simple errands hours later than she expected, and wildly frustrated by her inability to function as proficiently as she was accustomed to.

Just a few days into our stay I woke from a nap to hear the front door slam. I followed the sounds of banging cabinets to the kitchen, where Abbey Leigh was unpacking groceries.

“What is it with you Americans? You can’t keep the jam in the supermarket near the bread where it belongs? It took me twenty minutes to find strawberry preserves.”

I held up the jar. “Actually, there’s a better brand than this.”

“Don’t get me started.” Then she added, “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of finding Marmite?”

As tempting as it was to make fun of Marmite, I’d already learned that was a mistake to be avoided.

“Mmmm. Not much.”

Abbey Leigh stormed out toward the porch, lighting a cigarette along the way.

“Could you please not smoke in the hou– ”

“I’m not in the house,
lover
…”

Abbey Leigh liked to twist the endearment “lover” with the inflection one would use to sneer, “
fucker!
” I learned this was intended to mean, “Get off my back.”

You see? Even in code we understood each other. We were communicating.

“…I’m on the terrace,” she continued.

And by the time she’d finished the sentence, she was. But by then she’d already taken two drags on her cigarette, leaving clouds of smoke behind.

Yes, Abbey Leigh was a smoker. And I’m allergic to smoke. It causes instant irritation to my nose, throat, and lungs. Sometimes the symptoms from brief exposure are as simple as a series of sneezes. Sometimes I’ll get a sore throat, or cough and wheeze for hours on end. This is an illustration of one of the many differences we’d failed to anticipated between falling in love with someone illicitly, and living together successfully. For the former, there’s no responsibility for the other person. It could even be argued the entire scenario requires disregard for the wellbeing of everyone involved. For the latter, there are levels of interdependence I was unprepared to live up to, or to acknowledge my own need for, until they were gone.

The difficulties didn’t all originate on Abbey Leigh’s side. I’m no picnic to play house with, either. The selfishness that Abbey Leigh had commended me for feeling badly about some months earlier didn’t magically disappear. I was consumed with the desire to find work for myself and wasn’t as sympathetic to her struggles with Los Angeles as she would have liked, and that might have been appropriate. She was also understandably confused over my chronic sinus infections and the resulting medical terrors they stirred up for me. Abbey Leigh was aware of my past. But there’s a big difference between knowing someone’s story, and living with that story’s results.

“Do I feel hot to you?” I asked, every time I felt the slightest flush.

At first she put her hand to my head and tenderly told me, “No.”

But, “What am I, your nurse?”, was what she eventually started snapping back.

Abbey Leigh and I were getting to know each other all right. We were getting to know how little about each other we’d known to begin with. I learned that it’s easy to be crazy about a person in counterpoint to another. It’s a different trick to forge a relationship with that new person alone.

On the positive side (and there was one), Abbey Leigh enjoyed a sexual awakening in Los Angeles, and I got to enjoy a sexual reawakening of my own along with her. With Abbey Leigh there was none of the terror surrounding the exchange of fantasies and desires I’d experienced with some other lovers. It was a free-for-all. Talking with her was like playing “Can You Top This?”

In our first days in Los Angeles together, I was dizzy with adoration from every glimpse of her. I passed the bathroom early in her stay and saw her sitting cross-legged on the blue and yellow tiles of the shower floor, the spray raining down on her head. She’d plunked herself down the way a little girl would arrange herself. I’d never seen an adult bathe that way. Abbey Leigh sat in the shower and groomed and examined her body for almost an hour at a time. Witnessing her pleasure and concentration was a revelation.

Abbey Leigh and I also both loved good food and restaurants. We loved to admire the dishes we’d create for each other when we cooked at home. I was particularly enamored of the Australian habit of complimenting a meal by calling it “beautiful,” rather than “delicious,” as if the taste of the food was merely one component of its splendor.

But the thrill I got from her naked innocence and her cooking didn’t compensate for my annoyance when she cuddled up to me after smoking the one, two, or three cigarettes a day she’d already whittled herself down to on my behalf. And she got irritable when I asked, as a man of a certain age and with certain familial predispositions to heart disease, that she prepare more of the meals she cooked without butter.

The fact of whether or not you like living with a person depends on details as mundane as how long it takes them to get ready to leave the house, or how often, or well, they wash the dishes. But the most serious problem Abbey Leigh and I had wasn’t minor to me. It was an ingredient I’d never encountered in a relationship before. Whenever the two of us had any serious disagreements, or really, whenever Abbey Leigh felt the urge, her way of releasing tension was to have a screaming fight.

It wasn’t unusual to come upon Abbey Leigh throwing utensils around the kitchen. Without metric measuring tools she wasn’t able to accurately calculate a recipe, and had therefore ruined a béchamel sauce (the cholesterol of which I could have lived – longer, perhaps – without anyway). She stormed out of the house, sometimes several times a day, furious over something I’d said, in order to have a cigarette. She then stormed out for another, muttering under her breath, after I wrinkled my nose over the tobacco smell that had infiltrated her hair since she’d gone out for her first. She sometimes shouted insults at me, insisting I scream back at her, for reasons I couldn’t comprehend.

“I feel like picking a fight,” she said one night, smiling. When I stared in silence she said, “What’s the matter, Big Boy? Cat got your tongue?”

Big boy? I thought. Cat got your tongue? What is this, a Barbara Stanwyck film? There were times I was convinced she must be kidding. But there was nothing funny about her anger once she let it fly.

Me, I tend to discuss. I can see how for a certain percentage of people that might be frustrating. But I was unequipped for what Abbey Leigh craved, which was a brawl. Eventually, there were times when I lost my cool and screamed right back at her.

A series of auditions led to my being cast in a pilot created by two writers who’d worked on my last television show. Filming wasn’t due to start for several weeks, so I essentially lived a life of leisure while Abbey Leigh continued to endure the indignities of casting calls in a city where she lacked the reputation she’d earned at home. The disparity in our situations only increased the tension between us. I hadn’t realized how apparent the dynamic was to others until some friends told me they’d seen me out on Sunset Boulevard the night before, but hadn’t said hello.

“We saw you shouting back and forth with an Australian woman underneath a streetlight,” they said. “We figured we’d better leave you alone.”

I’m not claiming I never did anything worthy of her anger, but I wasn’t used to the way Abbey Leigh expressed it. It wasn’t my style, and I knew it wasn’t the way I wanted to live.

The final fight with Abbey Leigh happened outside a video store. I have no memory of what incited the incident. Maybe we disagreed on which film to rent. This time, afterward, she refused to get into the car with me to drive home. Instead, she lit a cigarette and stood defiantly several cars away in the parking lot.

“Get in the car, Abbey Leigh,” I said.

She wouldn’t turn toward me, or acknowledge me.

“Get in the car!”

I wanted to get out and wrestle her into the automobile, but was afraid I’d get arrested. I felt like I was a participant in a reality TV show I never would have even watched. We were only blocks from where we lived, so I simply drove away. I didn’t go home, though. I parked on another street and sat alone in the dark. I became unbearably sad. I couldn’t believe I’d reached another dead end. All the ingredients had changed, but the result was the same. Or, all the ingredients had changed, except for me. I was the common link through all the fiascos. From the very first kisses with my second-choice girl, through two broken engagements, to the absurd Australian-American odyssey.

I searched the car for the saddest CD I could find. Bruce Springsteen’s
Tunnel of Love
caught my eye. The album had been Patricia’s favorite Springsteen recording. How ironic. The woman who couldn’t reveal her own feelings was drawn to an artist’s most nakedly confessional work. I remembered something Patricia had said to me on one of our last days together, as a rebuke of my rejection of her.

“You don’t even know me
.
”

She said it with contempt. I got the sense of someone whose depth I’d never experienced, which wasn’t surprising. But her awareness of the dynamic was.

“Because you won’t let me!” I wanted to scream. But it had been said already, in all sorts of different ways.

I sat alone in the car like a sullen seventeen-year-old. I listened in the dark as Springsteen sang about moving one step up and two steps back. It made me feel slightly better to know I was having similar problems to those Bruce had once had. Then I thought how his steps up had been so much larger than mine, or at least a good deal more remunerative.

I thought again about Patricia, and I missed her terribly. Our relationship had been impossible, but, in retrospect, her withdrawals in the face of her fear seemed more appealing than Abbey Leigh’s attacks. I wondered how I’d wound up with a stranger, and her strange ways, waiting for me at an unfamiliar, rented home, to share with me someone else’s borrowed bed.

The next day Abbey Leigh broached the topic I was hoping she wouldn’t. She wanted to know whether I’d been thinking about the future, and, if so, what my thoughts were. We were barely halfway through our scheduled eight-week LA stay, but I can’t say she was jumping the gun any more than we’d already jumped it together. I told Abbey Leigh I couldn’t really see things continuing after our allotted time.

Abbey Leigh didn’t yell or scream. She silently snatched her cigarettes from the pocket of her coat and went out to smoke on the terrace. She came back relatively calm, having wrestled with a decision I hadn’t foreseen her considering.

“I won’t be going home right away,” Abbey Leigh announced. “I’d like to stay here with you, have as much great sex as possible, and then go home when I originally planned.”

I quickly agreed. I was too frightened to upset her equilibrium. But, honestly, I wasn’t terribly confident the two of us would be able to function better once we’d conceded defeat, as opposed to when we’d been filled with hope and excitement. If I could have had my way without repercussions, I would have sent Abbey Leigh on her way immediately.

From that point forward we started relating to each other in a kind of relationship haiku. No wasted words. But there were to be no more sexual hijinks. Abbey Leigh came down with a urinary tract infection that invaded her kidneys and nearly required hospitalization. She was bedridden with a fever and chills for the better part of three weeks, effectively ending her pursuit of acting work for the remainder of her stay. I helped nurse her back to health between my appointments, unsure as to whether the infection was the result of the amount of sex we’d had, her shower floor sitting, or merely a fluke. She became gentle as a kitten, either from the illness or her own sense of sadness, and we lived out our remaining days in a kind of death row calendar countdown. Only, instead of suffering execution, on the final day I’d be set free.

Abbey Leigh’s departure day arrived and I took her to the airport, eager to be on my own. I had it in my mind that, once she was gone, I’d feel released and unburdened. But I’d deceived myself. The moment she waved apologetically and vanished into the crowd I felt abject loneliness. And failure. Abbey Leigh had tried to have a relationship in Los Angeles, while I’d continued to see it as some kind of “experiment.” Hers was the more sensible attempt. A relationship is a concrete goal. I don’t know how you have an “experiment” with someone. I’d failed, once again, to accept and love another human being as she was. I’d failed to grow into the man I expected to become. I’d failed to live up to any of the promises I made to myself years before. The only thing I hadn’t failed at, it seemed, was simply staying alive.

I closed up the rented LA apartment and flew back to New York to begin living again in my own place. I was forty years old, the age I thought I’d never reach. I was unmarried, I was on my own, and I was alone.

For a period of six years I was treated by a psychiatrist who goes by the name of Dr. Loopy. That’s not how it’s spelled, but it is how it’s pronounced. I’m aware of the fact that a certain segment of the population might refuse to see this doctor based on that information alone. Were I asked to predict my own behavior I would almost certainly place myself into that group. The happy fact is that Dr. Loopy is a master of his craft. This happy fact was tempered, somewhat, by a less happy fact: Dr. Loopy charged me two hundred dollars per session. Which meant that, throughout my therapy, I got to spend a certain number of hours (and dollars) discussing with Dr. Loopy how trapped and angry I felt about spending so many hours (and dollars) telling him how trapped and angry I felt. Seeing Dr. Loopy was the therapeutic equivalent of living inside an Escher drawing.

Dr. Loopy is the best psychotherapist I’ve worked with, and I’ve worked with a few. His insights were well considered, his patience admirable. Still, I doubt our work together has been of tremendous help to me. When it comes to psychotherapy, I’m not sure I’m very good at it. I’m not even convinced I still believe in psychotherapy as the transformational tool I once imagined it to be.

I first came to Dr. Loopy years before meeting Patricia, while in the midst of a burgeoning sexual compulsion. The compulsion I’m referring to had nothing to do with direct contact with another human being. It started around the time I purchased my first laptop computer and logged onto America Online, that family-friendly Internet access system with the cartoon logo interface. I immediately started spending hour after hour, for months and months, in various chat rooms typing messages back and forth with an assortment of chat “buddies.” Rooms with titles ranging from “self pleasure” to “submissive f4m”; from “I’m pulling it now” to “I Want Daddy for Pleasure.” To me, the most pleasing – and puzzling – was “Millionaire for Female.”

These chat rooms were stocked with lying men and gullible women, and probably a good number of the reverse. They were but a few of the hundreds of choices awaiting the inquisitive. Or the perverted, depending on your point of view. I struck up private, instant message conversations with hundreds of supposedly female chat room inhabitants. I was regaled with tales of bisexual experimentation, of partner swapping with strangers; of meeting and coupling in bus stations, airports, parks, and alleyways; of fantasies of being impaled on sharp spears, and of elaborate efforts made to enable taking their friends’ dogs deep into the woods for an unhurried fuck. As far as entertainment value went, it sure beat hell out of the six o’clock news. Over the course of a couple of years I wound up having heard it all. More than my share; more than I was comfortable with; more, in the heat of my own morbid passions, than I wish I had ever known existed. Still, I found myself compelled to go back.

I was once told, less than twenty minutes after typing to someone, what a good friend I was. That I was someone’s
best
friend, someone who could really be trusted. At times I was told that
while pretending to be someone I wasn’t
. I was fascinated by the craving for acceptance expressed by the people I encountered. I was stunned by the depth of their need, and the recklessness it led to. I was baffled, and appalled, at how they could experience the world as the benevolent place they apparently did, after already being driven to such an impersonal arena in their quest for understanding. How did they convince themselves of my sincerity after five minutes when they’d spent eighteen, twenty-three, forty-five years failing to locate it in their own lives? What were they hoping for when they logged on in the morning for their marathon sessions? When they’d send me their phone numbers and invite me to call? When they asked if I’d like to meet? When they offered to fly themselves to wherever I was and wait naked in an unlocked hotel room wearing only a blindfold so I could do whatever I wanted to them? Who were these women who were either unable to acknowledge the dangers of the world they lived in, or willing to risk their lives in pursuit of pleasure, of relief, of debasement, of humiliation, of whatever apparently feels like love and closeness to them? Then there was the most frightening question of all. The question that drove me to see Dr. Loopy in the first place. What, sweet Jesus, was I doing in there with them?

Dr. Loopy was helpful in gaining some insight. He was helpful when he refused to accept my explanation that I was simply investigating an interesting avenue for material to write about – though I still think of that as a damn good excuse (not to mention good subject matter). But my work with Dr. Loopy was thrown into crisis when, in the midst of our discussions of my Internet adventures, I started running into him every day at the gym. Not for our scheduled sessions, mind you. We just both happened to exercise – and undress, and shower – there.

The first time I saw Dr. Loopy at the gym I was just entering the locker room as he was walking out. I stopped dead in my tracks, did a double take, and sputtered out, “Hey…” I’m not sure whether that syllable was intended as a substitute for the word “hello,” or whether it was the beginning of a sentence that would have ended with “…what the fuck???” I got into my shorts and T-shirt, walked up a couple of flights of stairs, and found myself faced with the choice of hopping on the treadmill next to my psychiatrist, or altering my workout routine by switching to the StairMaster.

Ultimately I snuck away to exercise on another floor. Though “ultimately” is the wrong word. Because “ultimately” what I did was learn my psychiatrist’s workout routine and avoid being at the gym during those hours. When it became clear that the hours he used the gym were the most convenient for me, I took up jogging around the reservoir in Central Park. My discomfort after our first encounter was extreme. But as Dr. Loopy began to ask about my thoughts surrounding our meeting, my discomfort only grew. And grew. And grew.

I first talked about self-consciousness and competition. I described my feelings of inadequacy in terms of my physical condition. Those topics were all vivid enough. But, Dr. Loopy, being the skilled fellow he is, continued to probe for the deeper fears that fueled those concerns. It wasn’t long before Dr. Loopy and I were back where we’d run into each other in the first place: the locker room.

We talked about nudity, about what made me uneasy about it, and what made me uneasy about it in terms of my psychiatrist.

“Have you had any fantasies about it?” Dr. Loopy asked.

We’d used the term “fantasy,” to this point, in contexts that were primarily non-sexual. The term was used simply to explore what kinds of things I imagined might occur in any given situation. But my thought process at that moment went like this: “Oh, I wonder if he’s asking me whether I’ve ever had sexual fantasies about him”; then, “I wonder if it’s appropriate for a psychiatrist to ask whether I’ve had sexual fantasies about him”; “I wonder, if I’d had them, whether I’d tell him that I had”; and, “If I had, and I wouldn’t tell him, then what the hell am I here paying two hundred dollars a session for in the first place?” In the midst of those questions running through my mind, which were running through my mind only as a result of the question Dr. Loopy had posed, I had my very first, momentary flash of a sexual image involving Dr. Loopy and myself. Then I wondered, since it had only occurred after Dr. Loopy’s prompting, whether or not it counted.

I figured if it was a thought I’d conjured it had its place. I told Dr. Loopy about it, and that’s when things really went haywire. Once I’d shared with Dr. Loopy the image that had flashed through my mind, our brief glimpses of each other at the gym only felt like greater humiliations. Now it wasn’t just a case of what I might have been thinking. Now I knew that Dr. Loopy
knew
what I was thinking, and that only made me start thinking it more. Like the feeling you get when you walk out of a store without buying anything, worried that the owners will think you’ve stolen something; like the way I’ll worry, when surrounded by people of another race, whether they think I’m a bigot. I started conjuring sexual images of Dr. Loopy whenever I was in his presence. And I became angry, because I felt the origin of the thoughts didn’t lie with me, but that they grew out of his suggestion.

To recap, I was now having recurring sexual thoughts about Dr. Loopy whenever I was in his presence, accompanied by the fear that he knew what I was thinking as I was thinking it. I thought he knew what I was thinking because I thought he’s the one who planted the thoughts in my brain to begin with. Not only did I think he knew what I was thinking, but I felt guilty about keeping the thoughts he had planted, and that he knew were in my brain, to myself. Was this progress? I wondered.

Occasionally, before ushering me into his office, Dr. Loopy would excuse himself and disappear through a doorway into a section of the converted apartment with which I was unfamiliar. I’d never contemplated what these delays had meant before. I now started imagining he was using the bathroom, and extrapolating on how that would require his touching his penis. I found myself trying to imagine Dr. Loopy’s penis even as I tried to stop myself from imaging his penis, all the while convinced that the only reason I was thinking about Dr. Loopy’s penis was because of Dr. Loopy’s suggestion that I might have already been thinking about his penis. Then I’d skulk into his office and spend the next hour talking about my mother.

When it comes to psychotherapy, I’m not sure I’m very good at it.

I went to Dr. Loopy to confront my obsessive online behavior, but the issues we wrestled with quickly broadened. I was among a tiny number who had ever survived what I’d been through years before. I was still having trouble adjusting to my status as a living human being. I knew I was a lucky man. But the trial had been costly, and losing the years from ages twenty-four to twenty-nine had set me back in comparison to those I’d started out with. I felt bitter about what I’d been forced to endure, and about what had been lost. I was a man whose life was filled with gifts and riches, but I still felt like I’d been robbed.

“You expect too much,” Dr. Loopy said. This was also Dr. Loopy’s response in regard to my complaints about Patricia.

“She won’t communicate with me,” I’d say. Though the more correct representation would have been that she wasn’t able to.

Patricia is a person who considers the personal to be private. She’ll be horrified by my exposure of any details of our time together. I know this because she did become furious at me for talking about details of our life in private sessions with my psychiatrist,
who’s bound by law to keep it all to himself
.

“In my family,” Patricia once told me, “when there’s a problem, we lift up the corner of a rug, open the cover of a can sunk into the floor, sweep everything into the can, put back the lid, and seal it up tight. We put the rug back in place, and make believe the problem was never there in the first place.”

It was all I could do to stop myself from gasping. Patricia had said it with a half chuckle, as if she knew it was kind of crazy. But the half that wasn’t chuckling still seemed to think it was a pretty good strategy. The only way I know how to relate to people is through direct communication. Patricia and I were headed for a collision.

In spite of these warnings I’d already been considering asking Patricia to marry me. I was proud of myself for having stuck with the relationship with the level of commitment I’d brought to it so far. I was determined to work my way past what I’d come to see (with what I took as Dr. Loopy’s approval) as my own inability to accept the limitations of others. But there were some crevasses on the landscape I couldn’t leave unexplored.

Patricia had given me hazy indications that there were events in her past that she seemed to find troubling, but she wasn’t willing to recount them. She told me she was bothered by thoughts and memories that felt too large and frightening for her to confront, but she would not consider talking about them with me or with a professional. She wouldn’t even tell me what they were. Whenever I broached any of the topics I thought couples considering the considerable step of marriage ought to discuss, like finances, child rearing, religion, or aging parents, Patricia met my inquiries with ferocious resistance.

“I feel like you’re testing me,” she complained.

“No. I’m trying to get to
know
you,” I responded. “I’m trying to get to know how you feel about things, how you handle things, how you think people should interact and share information and responsibilities. That’s how people can tell if they’re compatible.”

“You see,” she said. “You
are
testing me. What if I don’t give the right answers? You might decide you don’t want to be with me.”

I never knew how to answer this. It always seemed to be the ultimate trap-door question. I tried to answer honestly, but also lovingly and reassuringly.

“But that’s what people
do
. They investigate. They
talk
. And then, yes, they decide. But what I can say is that I hope – whatever gets said, and whatever gets revealed – that we continue to decide we want to be together. Maybe even want to be together all the more.”

“I just think it’s a leap of faith,” Patricia insisted. “If you love someone, you trust that you’ll find a way to solve whatever problems come up. You can’t think up every problem in advance. You cross those bridges when you come to them.”

Upon hearing this exchange, Dr. Loopy gave me one of my favorite tidbits of his insight.

“What I’m getting,” he told me, “is that you see a bridge in front of you.”

And I did. But it was the rickety, hand-made variety, like in a jungle adventure movie. With lots of slats missing.

These were the early days of my psychotherapy with Dr. Loopy, long before I’d first traveled to Australia and met Abbey Leigh. I was dutifully trekking to his office once or twice a week, giving it the yeoman’s try to stop feeling cheated, and to learn to appreciate the abundance of goodness life had already offered me.