My Other Life (51 page)

Read My Other Life Online

Authors: Paul Theroux

Tags: #Travel, #Contemporary

BOOK: My Other Life
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"Let's talk about that."

"But I want to hear what you have to say."

She smiled in a superficial way and said, "I am your therapist. Any relationship other than a professional one is out of the question."

"Are you saying that you are not attracted to me at all?"

"That's interesting. Do you often wonder whether women you don't know are attracted to you?"

"No. Only the few I've loved."

"What qualities do you imagine they see in you?"

"Please stop asking me therapist questions. Doesn't it mean anything when I say that I love you?"

She frowned, and when she did I saw how easily she assumed the expression, as though this disapproval came naturally to her and was part of her face. She said, "You must consider what you are saying and where you are. You are my patient. I have been careful. You know nothing about me."

"I know more than you think."

Though I was bluffing, I could tell from the way she tried not to show it that she was worried.

"You need to work through these feelings, Mr. Medved. If you do, and understand them, you will know more about yourself."

"I know everything about myself. I want to know more about you."

That pleased her, as though after all I were admitting my ignorance.

"You are the only friend I have," I said, and it sounded pathetic to me. "I'd like to take you to the Boston Symphony next week, and then to dinner."

"You must stop fantasizing about this."

"You encouraged me to fantasize."

"To understand your fantasies, not to give them reality," she said tersely, as though snapping a handbag shut.

"What is the point of fantasizing if you don't experience it?"

She said nothing. That meant she wanted me to reflect on what I had just said, the absurd echo of it. But I did not find it absurd.

She was smiling her insincere smile again.

"Next time," she said.

"I had the suitcase dream again," I said. "It was more specific. The woman is someone I know fairly well—not Alison. Instead of protecting her, I allow the others to kill her. She is dismembered and crammed in the suitcase. Although there are a number of close calls, even with police, we are not caught. The suitcase is found in a locker in South Station. I could show you the locker."

"Did you witness the woman being dismembered?"

"No. I turned my back on it. But I heard it, like a butcher hacking ribs with a cleaver, the knock of a knife on bone."

"And how did you feel when you heard it?"

I stood up and said, "Jesus, Dr. Mylchreest, I am an intelligent man. I've read Freud—not just the usual stuff but
The Future of an Illusion
and
Civilization and Its Discontents.
I can prove by algebra that
Shakespeare was the ghost of Hamlet's father—look, you don't even get it! I know particle physics. I have been to India and China and Patagonia. I am moved by metaphysical poetry. I collect Japanese prints. I own Hokusai's
Red Fuji.
I speak Italian and Swahili."

I stopped—not because I was short of examples but because I was out of breath.

Dr. Mylchreest said, "What do you conclude from this?"

"That I am a Martian. I am lonely here—not in this city but on earth."

"Obviously. Perhaps this is why you chose therapy."

"No, I don't need therapy. I need you—your love."

Her face was expressionless, as always, but her eyes were vulnerable—it was her youth. An older woman would have been hardened to this, but I could see that she was struggling to contain her emotion, to disguise it and take command of this session. But it was hopeless for me. The only way to succeed would be by embracing her, fumbling with her clothes while she feebly protested and allowed me to run my hands over her. I saw this all being enacted on the carpet of her office while she howled into my mouth.

"Please sit down, Mr. Medved."

I hated that—her flat tone, her irrelevant demand, a slightly curdled sound of pity in her voice. I did not want her to pity me, much less analyze me. I wanted her to fear me.

"The woman in the suitcase," I said. "It was you."

She tried not to wince. She said, "Go on."

"There is nothing more to say except be very careful, Dr. Mylchreest."

"Yes?"

"I am not here because I am lonely. I came because I was desperate, and I stayed because I fell in love with you. I will fall out of love—no one is more repulsive than a pretty woman who proves to be a deceiver."

"You did say that you were lonely."

"Of course I'm lonely!" I shouted. I had nothing to lose, I would never be back. "But it's not that I am alone now. I have realized lately that I have always been alone and that I was kidding myself, whistling in the dark, when I thought otherwise. Loneliness is the human condition. Loneliness is why everyone does everything they do."

"You came to me because you had a problem with it."

"I don't have a problem with being lonely!" I was howling again. "I want to know why I am alone. I am almost fifty years old and I have no one—not one person. Tell me why I'm alone. See, you have no idea!"

"We have been talking about the past—"

"I was always the way I am now," I said, defying her again.

She nodded, allowing the silence to penetrate the whole room, and then said, "I sense that this might be our last session."

"Yes. You are beginning to look pathetic to me. Like a murder victim."

I admired her for ignoring my saying this.

She said, "Freud always believed that literature was a way of approaching the unconscious. He said as much to Arthur Schnitzler. You know him, his play
La Ronde"?

"You are confused. Schnitzler's play is called
Reigen.
Max Ophuls's film of it is called
La Ronde.
"

She merely shrugged. "And Harry Stack Sullivan," she went on, "a brilliant psychoanalyst and also someone who wrote well about Herman Melville. And of course there is Simon Lesser's book,
Fiction and the Unconscious.
"

"I knew Lesser at Amherst."

"His grasp of Freud was not great, but his understanding of literature was extremely subtle."

"I thought it was the other way around. He made such heavy weather of Dostoyevsky and yet he couldn't read Russian. It's obvious that Prince Myshkin in
The Idiot
has a problem, but is it—as Lesser says—homosexuality? He said that was everyone's problem. Flaubert. Hawthorne. Poe."

"And you think he was wrong?"

"Wouldn't it be truer to say that Lesser might have been explaining his own sexuality? That was such a dark secret in the 1960s."

"It's still something that people hide. I'm interested that you raise the question. Would you like to pursue this—homosexuality?"

"You think you are being subtle. You are making the clumsiest and most naive connection."

"Mr. Medved, you should not dismiss the reading of novels for psychological insight."

"I can't read anything when I am depressed. It's too demanding."

"What about novels directly relating to your state of mind?"

"Even worse."

She smiled, and this smile was the most final expression of a farewell.

"There is really nothing more I can do for you," she said. "Nothing more I can say. Now it is up to you."

So it really was over. She seemed to understand that a part of me was refusing to be involved and instead lurking in each session. This was no spectator, idly standing aside; it was the writer in me, not a casual onlooker but a passionate witness. Therapy could not work while this part of my mind scrutinized the process with such icy detachment, but that was the great thing about being a writer in therapy—of course you failed, because you needed your secrets, but you always had the last word.

Feeling sentimental, I took pity on her. I said, "The woman in the suitcase. I was lying. It was not you."

"Should I thank you?"

"No. That's just the way it was. The victim was a jogger in her twenties, blond, a divorcée from somewhere on the South Shore."

She said nothing. She was no longer interested in the details of my dreams. "You have to help yourself."

"By reading?"

"Or writing."

"That's ridiculous."

"Just read for pleasure."

"I always find it harrowing, I'm sorry to say."

"That might not be a bad thing. When I can't do any more for them, I always send my patients away with a book list."

It annoyed me that she had the list so near to hand. It was as though, long before I had told her, she knew that this was going to be my last session. She gave me a four-page list, and I could see something foreign in her typing—the machine, the spacing, the punctuation. The list had its own order, its own clumsiness, like a bad translation.

I saw my name at once, near the bottom of the third page, four of my novels.

"Paul Theroux."

"You should read him."

I looked her straight in the eye: did she know whom she was talking to?

"And what will I see?"

"You will see whatever you want to see," she said. "But you might look closely at the way he deals with marriage, the complexities of freedom and dependence."

"You think he's put my marriage in his books?"

"Oh, no. They are all totally different. I want you to see how different it can be for each person. But his characters have hope, they are resourceful, imaginative. He might have answers for you."

"There are no answers. You've just proved it to me."

"I am speaking of suggestions. His writing will show you possibilities. Half an answer," she said. "You supply the other half."

Perhaps she knew who I was—perhaps she was telling me to look at my own writing and see the work that I had already done; that I had to understand that the only way out of my dilemma was to write, as I had before, and then I would recover my missing half.

A month later, the suitcase was found in a locker at South Station. It had begun to smell, because it contained the dismembered body of a twenty-two-year-old woman, recently divorced, from Plymouth, who had been abducted while out jogging.

FOURTEEN
Medford—Next 3 Exits
I

T
HREE DAYS AFTER
I stopped seeing my psychiatrist, I got into my car and drove to Boston, as though it were a habit I could not break. It wasn't the session with Dr. Mylchreest but the drive I needed. I had come to depend on the twice-a-week routine, and I wanted to be out of the house—playing the radio, being busy, counting the miles, eating afterwards. The transition from afternoon to evening, light to dark, especially that ambiguous hour in winter when it is neither and both, was the hardest part of the day. And today it was snowing again—light dusty flakes as insubstantial as ashes and as aimless, not white but bluish gray and sifting from the low seamless sky of the dark city and melting on the pavement and making the small stones beside the road damp and black like dog noses. But the distant hills that were visible from the psychiatrist's window had been white.

I was thinking, as I passed Mylchreest's Storrow Drive exit, that the sessions themselves, which I had expected to resemble a spell in a confessional, were more like visiting my tutor, presenting homework—my dreams, my fears—having it graded, and repeating this same business three days later. It was a monotony of effort made into an elaborate ritual, another secret. And what for? It did not help me to live any better. It was like school, the most hateful aspect of school, in that it was not life but a dated rehearsal for
living. I stopped seeing the shrink because I was holding back—the way I stopped writing a daily diary long ago when I realized there were things I did that I did not write down. If you did not tell the whole truth, there was no point at all in anything you did.

There was something still wrong with me, but the thing that was wrong had made me a writer, and maybe I would write again. Never mind that I did no writing now; at least I was fully awake, and my alertness and my fragile state made me remember everything. The drive, though, the sense of having something to do on a particular day at a specific time—that helped me plan my week. It gave me a sense of anticipation; then the day itself, which was dominated by the session and excited my mind; and on the day after I felt slightly behind and busy, and that gave me a sense that I was working.

Most of all on this drive I was experiencing American roads again—the size of them, the speed, the way the highway signs were full of choices and reminders. I listened to the call-in shows on the radio as only solitary people do, and I understood the confusion and anger. I listened to the lyrics of country music, the way they described my own feelings. And the expressway through Boston, Route 93, was not a corridor leading through a ribbon of land—no great American road is. It is a highway in every sense, signposted for places, some of which were very distant, because that was another feature of the great highway, and showing
Kennedy Library
and then
Chinatown
and
To Providence and New York,
and past
For New Hampshire and Maine
a green sign just as large reading
Medford—Next 3 Exits.

At each session I had talked about Medford more, something to do with the signs on the highway, the sight of snow, and at the end of the twenty-odd sessions, when I gave up on it all, Medford was on my mind. I puzzled over the thought that I had not gone there from somewhere else; I had been born there, and I had left. So I associated the word Medford with departure.

I went there this winter afternoon like a dog, agitated by being near something he doesn't understand, just to sniff at it. Medford Square was the intersection of five wide streets, Main, Forest, Salem, High, and Riverside Avenue. The city square was shabbier than I remembered, but the river beside it had kept it the same shape. Medford was distinguished by the Mystic River. It was pretty
but sluggish as it had always been—dark, silent, still. The river had made the place rich. Ships built on it sailed to Boston and the world. In grade school we all talked about Medford ships and Medford rum. The last Medford ship was built in 1873 and there had been no rum for years—you had to go to Somerville to buy liquor.

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