Kramer vs. Kramer (12 page)

“You’re saying I should be in therapy.”

“We get all kinds, Mr. Kramer. Some people can’t function. Some people have a specific, overriding problem and you give them first-aid. Some people could just use help, generally, to understand where they’re coming from.”

“Me?”

“I’m not selling you. It’s for you to decide. I think you could be helped by therapy. I don’t think you’re without problems, Mr. Kramer.”

He told Ted he charged $40 an hour, and assuming one of his patients went through with his plans to terminate, he could take Ted on. Two or three times a week would be best, the doctor thought, one would be the absolute minimum. He did not see it as first-aid, and Ted knew that people often stayed in therapy for years. It was a great deal of money to Ted and the doctor agreed, but he did not know of anyone he could recommend who charged less. There was group therapy—he did not feel it was helpful enough without regular therapy included. There were clinics, if they would take him, with less experienced therapists, but they were also moving up with their rates. Ted had to make the decision about how much it was worth to have a clearer view of himself and to feel better about himself, as the doctor phrased it.

“I am getting by, though. I mean, for the most part, I do have things pretty well together,” going back to his there’s-nothing-wrong-with-me-doctor stance. The doctor was the doctor.

“Are you looking for me to give you a little star, Mr. Kramer? Just to be getting by is not necessarily everything.”

The time was up and they shook hands.

“Doctor, so long as I’m here, could I ask you a couple of quick questions?”

“If I can answer them.”

“In your opinion”—he felt foolish asking, but he went on with it—“do you think I should have redecorated my apartment?”

The doctor did not laugh at him. He took the question seriously.

“Are you unhappy with the way it looks?”

“No.”

“Then why would you want to change it?”

“Right.”

He had a last question.

“Do you think I should go out more?” and this time Ted laughed, trying to immediately downgrade his asking.

“Do you want to go out more?” he said, again taking it seriously.

“Yes, I do.”

“Then go.”

Ted pondered the idea of analysis for himself. He liked the man’s style and his lack of jargon. Maybe this person could help him. But he had no idea of how he could possibly afford $40 a week to go into therapy, or even at bargain rates, $30 on a week-in, week-out basis. Not with the cost of a housekeeper and real medical bills. What was rattling around inside him would have to go unsorted, he decided. He would settle for getting by. He would leave the apartment as is. And he would go out more. He would definitely go out more. Doctor’s orders.

T
ED KRAMER FOUND THE
social landscape altered since he had first passed this way. For some of the women, marriage was “obsolete,” as Tania, a dancer in her twenties told him. She was also “into women,” she informed him in bed. “But don’t let it throw you. You’re a nice guy. I dig it with you, too.”

Many of the women were divorced now, the first marriages had had sufficient time to break down under wear. A few of the women, in a non-competitiveness he could not recall, would give him names of their friends to phone when it was apparent that A Great Love was not on the premises. If the woman also had a child at home, a simple evening could take on the urgency of
Beat the Clock.
The meter was running on both sides. He was paying for a sitter, she was paying for a sitter. At $2 an hour each, it would cost them $4 an hour, total, just to sit there. Something big had to happen fast. They either had to like each other fast or decide that they were going to bed with each other fast. And bed did not just mean bed. It meant more time on the clock, more money for sitters, possible taxicabs, possible taxicabs for sitters. If they were at a midpoint geographically in the city and went back to his house, he would have to release his sitter, and therefore be unavailable to take the woman home, so she would have to take a cab. If he offered to pay for the woman’s cab, it brought up the question of her taking money from him. She had to figure out if she wanted to pay extra for
her
sitter, as well as pay for her own cab. At this point, the players might be having trouble following the game out of sheer exhaustion, since they were both parents and were likely up earlier in the morning than most civilians.

The logistics could begin to take precedence over the experience. This happened to Ted one evening when he was saying to himself, it’s 10:30, $6 in sitting. Do we stay or do we make love? If we make love, I think we should go in the next five minutes or it’s another hour in sitting, and he was short of cash that week. So he had turned his attention from her to watch the clock, none of this having anything at all to do with making love. On some nights, he was not aware of the meter running—the person, the warmth between them became dominant—but not very often.

Billy had little stake in his father’s social life.

“Are you going out again, Daddy?”

“I have friends like you have friends. You see your friends in the day and I see my friends at night.”

“I’m going to miss you.”

“I’ll miss
you.
But I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Don’t go out, Daddy, please.”

“I have to.”

In school, Billy had begun grabbing toys from other children, as though to hold on to as much around him as he could. Ted spoke to the pediatrician and to the nursery school teachers, and they thought it was a reaction to Joanna’s absence, and could pass or not. The times Ted spent with Billy were tranquil for the most part, except when Ted’s fatigue became entwined with Billy’s need to be clingy and Ted, feeling choked, had to physically pull him off his arm or his leg, hating to do it, but unable to bear his pulling at him like that.

T
ED MET A WOMAN
lawyer at a party. Phyllis was from Cleveland, in her late twenties, an intense woman. She wore bulky tweed clothing, a few degrees out of fashion. She was extremely literal, the conversations between them were high-level and serious. They were having dinner at a restaurant, and he was not watching the clock this night. They decided to go back for, euphemistically, “coffee” at his place.

In the night, getting ready to leave, she went out in the hall toward the bathroom. Billy, very quietly, had also been up and was coming
out
of the bathroom. They stopped and stared at each other in the darkness, like two startled deer, she, naked, Billy in his giraffe pajamas, holding his people.

“Who are you?” he said.

“Phyllis. I’m a friend of your father’s,” she said, wanting to be specific.

He stared intently at her and she attempted to cover herself, assuming it was inappropriate to do otherwise in front of a child. They were fixed in place. He kept staring at her in the dark. There was obviously something of great importance on his mind.

“Do you like fried chicken?” he said.

“Yes,” she replied.

Satisfied with the exchange, he walked into his room and went to sleep.

“I just met your son.”

“Oh?”

“He wanted to know if I liked fried chicken.”

Ted began to laugh. “Do you?”

“Yes, I like fried chicken. This is quite a bit to handle.”

“It is?”

“This is not a conventional situation,” she said rather literally.

Phyllis stayed in his life for two months. She was impatient with small talk, they discussed social issues, the nation’s morality. Ted read so many magazines, he was able to be up-to-the-week on current thinking. They had evolved to an intellectual relationship with sex. Her congressman from Cleveland offered her a job in Washington. She thought the position was desirable and that it was too early in their relationship to jeopardize “an important career decision,” she said, and Ted, ambivalent about his own feelings about her, agreed. “Also, to be honest,” she told him, “I don’t think I am prepared for such an ambitious undertaking as this.” They said goodbye, kissing warmly, and promised to write or call, and neither of them did.

Ted satisfied himself that he had been able to break out of the one-night, two-night carrousel he had been on. Someone had been in his life for a couple of months. But Phyllis had pointed out to him that it could be awkward for a woman to walk into “such an ambitious undertaking as this,” with a divorced man and a little boy.

T
ED AND THELMA BECAME
close friends. He did not have much confidence in his romantic interludes and he thought if he tried to make love to Thelma, he might gain a night and lose a friend. They both set aside ideas of becoming involved on any other level than friendship, and were there for each other, to support each other, to help each other get free for a few hours. If Ted worried, as he had begun to, that he was focused too much on the child, it was Thelma who reminded him this was inevitable—they were parents alone with their children, and Billy was an only child. As an assembled family group, they went to the playground one day, and it was a particularly difficult time. The children spent the day scrapping. “I don’t like Kim. She’s bossy.” “I don’t like Billy. He’s rough.” They argued over sand toys, apple juice, motorcycles, Ted and Thelma spending the afternoon as peacemakers. Ted took a sobbing Billy to the other side of the playground to calm him down. As he was walking across the playground, coming in the other direction was a father with his small boy.

“If you walk them out,” the man volunteered, “and take them out to the furthest ices stand, and they eat the ices there, and you walk them back, it’ll kill twenty minutes.”

Ted could not understand what the man was saying to him.

“Twenty minutes, easy, I’m telling you.”

The man was a Sunday father, putting in his time, or his wife was off shopping somewhere and would be back soon.

“I’ve got a little more than twenty minutes to kill,” Ted said.

The day concluded with Billy and Kim eventually joining forces to throw sand at a third child, whose mother started screaming at Thelma, calling her “an animal.” Billy was keyed up so high, it took a hot bath and many stories to get him to sleep. Ted wondered if he had been acting up that day or just being boisterous. Kim was capable of sitting for much longer periods, painting or coloring, than Billy, who was more random in his attention. Was it because boys and girls were different, or was it because these two particular children were different? Was it because he was hyperactive? Is he all right?
Am
I watching him too closely? God, I love him. Jesus, what a shitty day!

B
ROKEN PIECES FROM PLASTIC
trucks, wooden people with splintered torsos, loose pages out of torn coloring books—Billy’s room was littered with unusable items and Ted, the Grim Reaper, was coming through on a clean-up, Billy following him, fighting over every stubby Crayola.

“By the time you’re ten, this place will look like the Collier Brothers lived in it.”

“Who?”

“Two old men and they had a room that looked like yours.”

He had been tempted to do this at a time when Billy was out, but months later Billy would be upset to discover a missing broken car.

“Out!” A windup truck that no longer wound up.

“No. I love that.”

Ted surveyed the room. It was still Collier Brothers. He decided to do it a different way. He took Billy to a hardware store and bought several clear plastic boxes. Somehow it came to $14 just to organize part of a child’s room.

“Now, try to keep all the crayons in the crayon box and all the little cars in the little-car box.”

“Daddy, if I’m using the crayons, the box will be empty. How will I know it’s the crayon box?”

They were into Zen crayons.

“I’ll put labels on the boxes.”

“I can’t read.”

Ted could not resist laughing.

“Why are you laughing?”

“I’m sorry. You’re right. It isn’t funny. You will read one day. Until then, I’ll tape one of whatever is supposed to be inside the box, outside the box, and then you’ll know what’s supposed to be inside the box. Did you follow that?”

“Oh, sure. Good idea.”

“You’re the top pussycat, pussycat.”

On the floor, on his knees, combining three different sets of crayons into the crayon box, he had an insight, like an apple or a Crayola that landed on his head. Clean it up! Combine!

The next morning he was waiting outside Jim O’Connor’s office with his idea.

T
HE COMPANY HE WORKED
for published a magazine in each of several leisure areas—photography, skiing, boating, tennis, and travel. It had suddenly occurred to Ted that they could combine all of their magazines into one package. This would be an across-the-board buy for advertisers at a special rate.

“It’s so logical. We could still go on selling each book just as we’ve been doing. Except we’d have this new package on the side.”

“With a name.”

“We could call it anything we want. The Leisure Package.”

“Ted, I’d like to tell you it’s brilliant, but it’s not.”

“I thought it was.”

“What it is—is perfect. Perfect! What the hell have we been doing here? Why didn’t anybody think of it? Perfect, but not brilliant.”

“I’ll take a perfect.”

He had never seen Jim O’Connor respond to an idea with such enthusiasm, which O’Connor carried on to the research department, which was put to work that morning on statistics, and to the promotion department, which was to, come up with a campaign immediately for The Leisure Package. Within a week, a sales presentation had been prepared for Ted to use on exploratory sales calls for the company’s new advertising package, within two weeks a rate card and promotional brochure had been distributed to their sales list, and within three weeks ads began appearing in the advertising trade press selling The Leisure Package. A company that had been struggling along was now using this new sales concept as a sign of vitality. The response at advertising agencies was positive. Ted was taken off the travel magazine he worked on to do the selling of the new concept. He was receiving promises of revised advertising schedules and in several cases, orders for ads. The publisher and owner of the company, a dapper little man named Mo Fisher, who was seen as a presence moving in and out of the office with golf clubs and $400 suits stopped Ted in the hall. His last words to Ted had been several years before when Ted first joined the company. He said, “Good to have you aboard,” and had not spoken to him since. “Nice going,” he said, and kept on walking to the golf course.