My Other Life (50 page)

"Don't you feel as though you have come home?"

"The irony is that I came home only to find myself in exile. I don't know where I am. I didn't realize that in losing my wife I lost everything. I didn't live in a country. I lived in a house—a home."

"Why do you think—" She was about to say: Why do you think you can't make a new home? But I did not want to hear her say it.

"I'm lost here and I can never go back!"

That session, like many of them, ended in tears, and it was terrible because Dr. Mylchreest was so punctual; and so there was no consolation, but only the reminder that after fifty minutes her intense alertness dimmed and the temperature in the room seemed to go down a few degrees; it was time for me to go.

I was reluctant to leave—I wanted to continue, to talk about something else, or to listen to her. I was attracted to Dr. Mylchreest. I knew nothing about her, and she had kept me in the dark so that I wouldn't fantasize; but my knowing nothing kept her mysterious and made me inquisitive. I could see that she was intelligent. She had large feet, and she was big boned and somewhat humorless, but she was strong and practical, and her loose clothes and full skirts and heavy sweaters did not hide her figure, but emphasized it.

She had a splendid angular body, and I wanted to hold her, and for her to hold me. It was hard to be in this room with her week after week and not touch her. I wished at the end of each session that I could go home with her. I wanted for us to forget everything else and watch TV in our pajamas and eat popcorn, or else rent a video and lie in bed, propped by pillows, drinking wine and watching it.

It was not love. She was the only person I saw or spoke to. I knew I could get along with her and I liked her physically. I could not prowl around, or look for women as I once had, because of AIDS. I was cautious, even somewhat fearful when I thought of approaching a strange woman.

We got through a month of this, twice a week, and I began to see psychoanalysis as a permanent part of my life. The sixty-four-mile drive to Charles Street on those winter afternoons, puzzling over what I would say—the sort of idea that I might have explored in a short story before now was fodder for therapy, blunderingly blurted out in a simple form. Afterwards two Coronas and a plate of quesadillas at Amigos, and then the drive back, my mind blank, my body exhausted, depleted from the talk and the long ride.

Exile seemed to me the most accurate way of describing my state of being. I had used the word many times in writing, but only now did I see its meaning. It was a secular form of damnation; a half-life, halving again every second in an almost perpetual diminishment. Exile was not a metaphor. I was an exile and I believed I would stay that way. It was no good to see myself as cast out, as though I had fallen from grace. I had not known any Eden. The closest I had come was at Moyo, in 1964. That leper colony had been my paradise.

But this was a different exile. As a traveler, I always had vivid dreams in strange countries—something about those clammy rooms, those lumpy beds, that sour air, the nameless nighttime noise. In those places someone would call out, in Gujarati, in Hakka, Quechua, or Ilocano; and I had no idea of what was being said. But this atmosphere penetrated my sleep and gave me dreams.

So I dreamed here, vividly, in this place that was no longer my home. They were incomplete dreams of exile and crime. I had become a broken writer babbling in his sleep, and the dreams were like the faded remnants and rags of my work.

"It's the same one," I told Dr. Mylchreest.

An old dream that I had been dreaming since arriving back in the United States—my public phone booth period; I thought of it as "the suitcase dream," but now I saw the point of it. I was involved in a murder. I did not do the chopping but I had wordlessly agreed when the other people—three men—asked me if I would help. It was my car, I knew the owner of the suitcase, I even had a sense that I knew the victim. No one had a name in this dream. The unsuspecting victim was snatched and killed, then chopped in half and crammed into a suitcase.

The crime itself was a small part of the dream. The rest was our driving, the men and I, with the leaky suitcase on the back seat: up
the turnpike, at the pickup window of a drive-in restaurant, in a rest area, in heavy traffic, a long red light, a child with a diseased face staring out the rear window of the car in front, a big slavering dog barking at the suitcase. We were stopped by a policeman. "What's in the bag?" He did not notice the smear of blood on the handle. But each time the question was asked, I was farther and farther from the car. I was like a ghostly spectator. I always got away.

When I woke up in fear and dread, I was gasping, drenched in sweat, my hair soaked. I was furtive in the dream; awake, I was sick with guilt, and it stayed with me, a sense of woe like nausea.

Then I needed Dr. Mylchreest, to tell her the dream. What would I have done without her? I used to think that with Alison; even in the worst moments I had not been able to imagine life without her. When my life had been whole, I would have used such a dream in my writing. Now I had no writing and no wife; I had Dr. Mylchreest. Flaubert's lover, Suzanne Lagier, told him, "You are the garbage pail of my heart, I confide everything to you."

"Try to identify the men, Mr. Medved."

"I might have been in high school with them."

All my dreams seemed to be high school dreams.

"That's helpful."

"I hated high school. I had some friends, but I was fearful."

"Go on."

"Of ignorance. Stupid people always seemed capable of terrible cruelty. And intelligent people were mocked. It was as though a bright person was a homosexual. Homosexuals were mocked in the same way."

"You've made an interesting comparison."

"Oh, God," I said.

Her lovely face said nothing, but behind it the flash in her eyes revealed a tumult of speculation.

"You think because I am making that comparison that I am unconsciously saying that I might be gay. Don't you see that I am stating it like that so that you will understand?"

"There are so many ways to describe something, and yet you choose those words."

"There are many ways," I said, trying not to shout, "but this is the clearest comparison. My imagination was my secret. At my school, if a secret got out, if any detail were known—a liking for something odd, a funny middle name, anything—you were subjected to unmerciful mockery. No one was gay—no one admitted it. But there must have been many. So they had to listen to mockery about faggots, homos, queers. If you were smart, you were 'Einstein.'"

"What about the victim?" Dr. Mylchreest asked. "In your dream. Do you want to talk about it?"

"I have a feeling it's a woman. I sense that I know her."

"But you say that you are the driver of the car. You were not the one who killed her. Correct?"

"It's as though I did it."

"Yes?"

"The point is that when I wake up I feel guilty, not because of what I've done, but because of what I know."

"The guilty feeling doesn't go away?"

"No. I sense the crime has not yet taken place. I feel it is going to happen, and only I know where and when. If I puzzle out the dream, I could save someone's life."

"Yes?"

But Dr. Mylchreest did not seem to be seeking more information about the murder victim in my dream.

I said, "If this is precognition, it could be very serious."

She did not respond to this. She had become motionless and deaf. I felt awkward, like someone still talking on a telephone line that had been cut off, and I realized that my hour was up.

"I'd like to stay a bit longer."

"That is impossible."

"Is there someone waiting?"

"It's five past five, Mr. Medved."

"I'd appreciate it if you called me Pavel."

"As you wish. Pavel."

"I'd like to see you three times a week instead of two," I said, and the words sounded to me like those of a man wooing a virgin in an old-fashioned courtship.

"It might be difficult, but I'll look at my appointments."

The lamps outside were large and blurred by whirling snowflakes, which wrapped them in great yellow gusts that slanted towards the wet street.

"It's snowing."

"Yes."

She wanted me out of there, and her urgency made me linger. I
fastened my attention on her body—her lips, her legs, her hands, her eyes. I did not want to leave. I clung to her.

"Your time is up," she said, and she had never looked prettier to me, though I could only think that she was waiting there for the next man, like a hooker in a room turning tricks.

Driving back to the Cape, I was weary, sorrowing in a new way. In those few minutes of her urging me to leave, Dr. Mylchreest had uncovered a tangled feeling within me. She had not simplified it, only unintentionally exposed it, and left me with the open wound. It was new and raw, still bleeding. I could not hug the pain away. The pain was love.

I saw clearly that I could survive the loss of my other life and everything that I had known if I had her, Dr. Mylchreest. I desired her with a love that overwhelmed me because I was wounded and she was a whole woman, practical, attentive, intelligent, and lovely. I had the sense that I could awaken a sexual impulse in her and that in time, when I told her who I really was, she would understand the necessity for my deception. Then we would live together: I saw the house, the bed, the books, the wine, the table set for two. I would resume writing. She would commute to Boston and keep office hours. We would be complete. And it was possible. The decision was hers: she was at the age when the door was about to shut for good—we might still have some children.

This was at first a fugitive thought. But it grew, and before our next session it dominated everything I did, everything I thought. It was as though I had discovered that I had a serious illness and at the same time realized that only one person on earth could cure me.

It was love, I knew, because it was pure pain, like the worst hunger combined with the worst loneliness, a wasting disease that gave the sufferer an intimation of death. Its pathology was partly a form of madness. I had to have her any way I could, and I saw that it was worse, more desperate than being without my wife. It was my next step. I had no idea it would happen so quickly, and it frightened me and made me sick when I considered the agony of being in the same room with Dr. Mylchreest. I wanted to hold her,
hug her, kiss her, bury my face against her. I wanted to devour her, actually to eat her, and for her to demand it, to lie naked and murmur, "Take me."

I had last felt this way in high school, desperate and frustrated and helpless. I knew it would frighten her if I told her how I felt, and so I concealed my feelings towards her, but in the sessions after this I talked about sex—dreams, impulses, episodes from the past, many of them invented. A common theme was that I was highly charged sexually and that my marriage had been awkward as a result—my wife unwilling.

"I needed it, not just for reassurance, but because I think of sex and work as being the two most powerful human drives."

This was a blatant appeal to Dr. Mylchreest's Freudianism.

She said, "And what response did you get?"

"Most of the time, not a lot," I said. "I am an incredibly passionate person."

She smiled and said something like "Anyhow."

It was her intrusive accent. She was trying to say "
Annie Hall.
" She asked me if I had seen the movie. I said yes. She reminded me of the scene where Woody Allen tells his psychiatrist that Annie is frigid: "She only wants to make love three or four times a week." At this moment Annie is telling her psychiatrist that Woody is rapacious: "He wants to make love three or four times a week."

I resented Dr. Mylchreest's using this insubstantial and jokey movie to respond to the serious point I had made. How would she like it if I compared her to one of the New York psychiatrists in a Woody Allen movie? But I resisted. I could be hurt, but I was too deeply in love with her to be discouraged.

"And polymorphous perversity," I said. "I often feel a strong urge to experiment."

"Yes?"

I was watching her closely, those eyes with their own life.

"I cannot be indiscriminate, though. Very few people in my life have moved me. I have very rarely been in love."

"When you have been in love, what has attracted you?"

"Strength, beauty, intelligence, honesty, character. It is partly physical, but it is more a kind of knowledge—looking deeply into a person's soul. There is no other word for it."

"And this feeling, does it make you happy?"

"It makes me sick."

"Go on."

"I'm sick now."

"Yes?"

"Doctor, I love you. I can't bear to be without you."

She was not fazed. She said, "This is natural, a consequence of the therapy relationship."

"I mean it."

"Of course. You are transferring. We can work through this transference love." She smiled and glanced at her watch. "Next time."

In my love I could not separate myself from Dr. Mylchreest—there was no boundary between us, we were the same person. My time was up. I felt ashamed, humiliated, but what did it matter? I was convinced of my love, but though I dragged myself away, I knew I was incomplete in leaving her. I was eager to return and yet dreading it for the way I suffered when I was with her, sitting near her when I wanted to be on her, tearing at her clothes, pounding deeper into her.

It took my mind off my separation, yet it was another problem and an unexpected one. I had been numb before, not knowing what had happened to me. Now I knew the solution: to love Dr. Mylchreest and be her lover. She was my salvation. I had left Alison. It was illogical to go back. I needed to continue, to move on and find my missing half. Dr. Mylchreest was my other half, my other life. With her I was complete.

At the next session I said, "I have the strongest urge to make love to you. I can't bear the thought of living without you."