December 9, 2006--Saturday Story--Ludavicio et al.--Part Five

In Part Four Lloyd became faculty advisor to Brooklyn College’s Writers Workshop. His only real responsibility was to sign the form required to secure a room for the group and, if he attended, which he did, assure the central administration that no intoxicants of any kind were served. But half the reason he attended was because many were available and generously shared by the participants—mainly Vietnam vets and middle-aged women who returned to school after raising children and being dumped by their husbands. Lloyd screwed up his courage after months of attending but not participating and read the opening pages of his novel—in his mind a sort of Jewish On the Road. But it had provoked only laughter, especially from a mid-forties divorcee from Flushing, Queens who was not mocking it, as Lloyd at first had feared, but rather because she loved what she referred to as its ironic subtleties. Unable to get salt-of-the earth Kathy from his mind as he drove home, including her voluptuousness, in his mind he revisited his work, now through the lens Kathy had provided, thinking that maybe he had unconsciously stumbled onto something even better than he had intended. Perhaps even something that could modestly fit into the long tradition of works by American humorists. But all of this was rudely interrupted when he reached his house and found Lydia raging and ultimately telling him that he again had to be treated by her shrink—this time by Boris Merkin, the “eclectic,” who had replaced Dr. Luven, who she now perceived to be a failed quack of an Orgonomist since she was still not getting “there.”

So in the Fifth Part, we . . . .

To my considerably surprise, I came to enjoy seeing Dr. Merkin. My first impression, though, was not positive—of him or of me.

In regard to him, and I admit this is profoundly superficial, to me Dr. Merkin looked more like an accountant than anyone’s idea of how a real analyst should look. Dr. Luven, by contrast, in spite of the way he dressed, at least he had the appropriate middle European accent, serious hair, and had studied in Vienna and Berlin under Wilhelm Reich and other psychoanalytic pioneers. Merkin, by contrast, was a graduate of Brooklyn College—at my initial session the first thing I did was check his framed diplomas—and Flower Fifth Avenue Medical School, at the time the only commutable “safe” med school for Ashkenazi Jews recently moving on from the city’s outerborough ghettos. In addition, he had a hair problem—his head was rimmed by a two-inch wide band of inauspicious fuzz which looked as if it had been affixed to his always-perspiring head; and he wore baggy suits that only accented the lumpiness of his formless body. Then, when he stood, which was rare, he barely came up to the height of my chest. All of this, far from ideal. I thought that he could at least have grown a beard.

In addition to my own initial doubts, I wondered what Lydia saw in him, considering her various fixations on bodies and their various functions. He did not set a good example for any of that.

Then in regard to myself I also was not impressed—what was I doing there in the first place? Good question. And why had I so passively allowed her to decide I needed more treatment; why had I allowed her to select my therapist—assuming that I would agree to see one, which was, I needed to admit, a non-discussable and foregone conclusion—why did I allow her to schedule a time for me to see him without asking in advance if it was convenient? Good questions all. But there I was in any case--on a late-June Tuesday, precisely on time at 11:00 a.m. at his office right off Grand Army Plaza, taking over Lydia’s regular appointment. I was even found lying on his cracked-leather couch, with a box of Kleenex tissues on my chest as if I were a side table. What, I thought, was portended by the fact that he so automatically plopped them there?

But well before that thought could develop, he laid out what he called “the rules of the road”:

“It is not often my practice to treat two members of the same family.” Up to that point I had never thought of Lydia and me in this way—to me “family” meant my parents, brother, aunts, uncles, and cousins. “But in your case,” he continued, “I feel that having a limited number of sessions with you,” I was relieved to hear him mention they would be limited in number, “might be helpful to you—in fact, if you prove to be honest and work hard I feel that you will benefit—but more than that it will be helpful to your wife.” Another term that I was not used to employing. “It is no secret to you,” that was an understatement, “that I have been working with her now for almost five years. Even by classical analytic standards that is a considerable amount of time.” And I was about to add, “money,” since I wrote checks for all of his fees—Lydia had for most of that time either been taking dance cases or performing in junior companies for pittances that barely covered her expenses—in fact in three weeks she was again going to be out of town at Connecticut College for their annual modern dance festival. “So, after careful discussion with her and our together deeply probing her feelings about this arrangement, she, and now I have agreed to allow you to work with me.” I was so glad to learn that my therapy, limited though it was decided by the two of them to be, had been so deeply analyzed—again I quickly calculated how much the discussion about that had cost me.

“I even took the time to see my own supervising analyst—I haven’t been to him in years: he is a great man,” how much more would that cost I wondered, “and he counseled me that if I take certain precautions, especially being careful to manage any potential transference issues that might emerge, that it would be permitted.”

Everyone was getting into my act I thought. And as a result of that feeling, which I analyzed on my own, thank you, by looking squarely at how I was reacting to what he was saying, not well I noted, I came to conclude that I was an unsuitable candidate for whatever it was that he had in store for me after he finished laying out the rules.

“And so we will work together for a month. I should quickly add, because I want to get us to work,” he checked his watch, “that there is often value in placing such limits on therapy (of course truth requires me to say that the concomitant potential benefits are equally limited)—it will force you to be efficient in your use of our valuable time.” Not just valuable, I thought, unable to shut off the meter that was ticking in my head, but also expensive. “Above all, in this unusual circumstance of treating spouses,” another concept foreign to me, “it is essential, I emphasize essential, that what happens here, what is discussed and shared, will remain completely and totally confidential.” I thought I heard the hint of a Germanic accent when he articulated, carefully syllable-by-syllable, com-plete-ly and to-tal-ly. As a post World War II baby I knew from that how seriously he meant me to take these orders.

“Are we in agreement?” he asked in conclusion, sounding again more like the Brooklyn boy he was. I pulled a tissue from the box, feeling I should get all of my money’s worth of services and goods, and nodded with sufficient vigor that he would be able to see me through his thick glasses. It was not difficult to get me to agree not to discuss any of this with Lydia—I could always put the blame on her Merkin when she picked away at me, demanding that I tell her everything.

And so we began. His technique was so different from what I remembered of my tortuous time with Dr. Luven. Over the course of the month, in place of body work, he had me talk about early memories, my feelings about my family, my actual family, especially about my father and his relationship with my mother. I sensed that he was probing here to see if there were any echoes of that resonating, my word, within my relationship, his word, with Lydia. He was particularly interested in what he called “dream material”—insisting that I keep a pad by the bed so I could record even fragments of dreams before they were lost to consciousness. To this I keenly agreed, thinking maybe I could work some of this into my novel—as a window into the unconscious and my authentic self, particularly if I could weave some irony into the way I transformed the material into narrative.

So, in spite of my hesitations and Merkin’s demeanor, I came to look forward to my time with him. I even on occasion found I made actual use of his tissues, especially in the next-to-last session when a dream about which I had scribbled 2:00 a.m. notes involved what he, and I eventually as well, suspected revealed very early hitherto hidden memories of something sexually untoward I had glimpsed going on between my father and one of his sisters. Yes, of course, it was Madeline.

At the final Tuesday session, Lydia by then was up in Connecticut, two days before the July meeting of the Writers Workshop—Kathy was again preoccupying my mind—Dr. Merkin, before I could share material from another dream, asked me if this time I would sit in a chair facing him. I of course did, being sure, since I had no idea what to expect from this radical change in routine, to bring the Kleenex with me.

When I was seated he slid a pad and drawing pencil across to me. “Please,” he said looking directly at me, “on this pad, draw a picture of a woman’s vagina.” I was stunned, but not enough to deflect me from wondering why he asked me to draw a women’s one—didn’t that go without saying?

“A what?" I finally said, somewhat incredulously, “What do you want me to do?”

“I think you heard me clearly enough. If we had the time, this is unfortunately the final session, we could spend much valuable time analyzing your reaction to this. But now, with our limited remaining moments, please as I asked you to do, draw a vagina for me. On the pad,” which he tapped with the stem of his pipe.

Drawing was something I prided myself in doing well, even if I was untrained, but this assignment was so unexpected and emotionally ladened that I worked hesitantly, in truth not doing a very good job at all. What I produced was more a cartoon version of a vagina than one that was naturalistic, with finesse or shading.

But I also quickly had to confess to myself, certainly not to Dr. Merkin, that I had not had enough experience studying actual vaginas to enable me to produce one in perspective, with verisimilitude. I knew enough by then from my experiences with therapists, limited though they were, that to share and then deal with this properly would likely take months or even years.

“That’s quite incomplete,” he said to me when I paused. “Please proceed. You have produced just the barest outline.” He again tapped the pad; this time with his eyeglasses. “To me it looks more like a clamshell standing on end than an anatomically correct vagina.”

“Well,” I attempted to defend myself, “you didn’t tell me how specific you wanted it to be.”

“Very,” he said sternly.

Feeling admonished I picked up the pencil again and fiddled some more with my drawing, adding some squiggles around the outer edge of the image in a feebly attempt to represent pubic hair.

I’m not interested in that,” he almost growled. I want you to deal with the inside.” I didn’t move. “I gather you were a pre-med in college. Isn’t that correct?” I nodded without looking at him, “So, for example, where’s the urethra? Not that I care that much about it. Much more important,” he pressed on, “more germane, considering the problems—forgive me, I should have said ‘issues,’” he was now taking great care to be professionally precise, “With the most significant issue in your family,” I again thought, what does any of this vagina business have to do with my ‘family’, “I am asking, of course, about the clitoris. Where’s the clitoris? You forgot to include it.”

“Oh that,” I said, attempting to sound as nonchalant as possible. “Why, it’s right over here.” And with that I drew a small oval in the middle of the clamshell.

“Well actually,” he said, “that’s not quite correct. It’s higher up.” He took hold of my hand, in which I still grasped the pencil, and directed it to the top of my vagina. “There,” he emphasized, “There.”

I sheepishly erased the first oval and inscribed a second one where he had placed my pencil. In the anatomically more correct location.

“Good,” he said in a softer tone which helped to calm me. “I have asked you to do this, of course, because it has to do with the most important issue still unresolved in your relationship with your wife. Lydia.” He had not previously used her name. “The fact that you are clearly unfamiliar with the location of the clitoris,” he waved me off as I rose to object, “which in fairness I should add is not uncommon with pre-Masters-and-Johnson men of your generation,” this generational allusion made me feel decidedly middle-aged and I wanted so much to be able to retreat to the sanctuary and comfort of his analytic couch, “But this suggests,” he was relentless, “why you have been unable to satisfy your wife, Lydia, to--how shall I best put this--to bring here to resolution, to fulfillment.”

I knew of course that we were inevitably headed here—forget all the prior visit’s interest in intrapsychic, intergenerational problems. Or as he would have preferred to express it, “issues” within my family. I had been sent to Merkin, as I had been sent to Luven, so that Lydia could “get there.”

He went on, “I of course am familiar with her prior treatment with, I forgot his name . . . “

“Dr. Luven,” I said, “Dr. Arthur Luven. I saw him too. Three times. Like you, he also put a limit on my sessions.”

I thought it would tweak him to be compared to that, Lydia’s term, quack! But he was imperturbable. “I understand,” he said without evident emotion, “But my point is that his techniques lacked nuance. They were too much about mechanics. Plumbing, if you will. He is in my view insufficiently eclectic.”

Then what, I wondered, was all this drawing of urethras and clitorises? More plumbing, no? But as if he had read my mind, he quickly added, “Yet then again, some of it is just that. We are also animals, no? Biological? So we need also to know about these anatomical matters and must learn how to use them in our pursuit of an authentic and happy life.” He had me there.

“And so, here we are,” he inhaled deeply, sucked on his pipe, which was unlit, and looked over at me. Just as at my last session with Luven, I hoped we were about to run out of time. I did not respond or move since I was also attempting to stifle any revelations that might escape from my body language.

I successfully out waited him and so, under time pressure, he was forced to say, “We do not have the time for me to tell you all that you need to know about the differences between clitoral and vaginal orgasms.” Orgasms again--I was flashing back to my days with Luven. “Suffice it to say that the former potentially leads to the latter.” I was so distracted and confused that I could not sort out which he had mentioned as the former and which the latter. I continued to sit there as immobile as possible, not saying a word, counting the ticking of his Regulator clock. “And,” he said, “a woman’s full fulfillment requires you not to stop, feeling satisfied with yourself, when she, Lydia, your wife has reached merely the former.” I still said nothing while staring down at my vagina cartoon so as to appear to him to be making sure, by studying it so intently, that I would have a clear memory, after my treatment was concluded, of at least what was inscribed there.

“OK,” he said. Clearly we were almost out of time; and he popped out of his chair with more alacrity than I would have imagined possible, considering the considerable pull of gravity on his stump of a body, “Where does this leave us?” It was clear that he meant this now to be my final opportunity to say something.

After a few uncomfortable moments, in a way that I hoped would be light spirited and perhaps even amusing, I pointed at the clock, and offered, “I suppose, this leaves us out of time.”

I tried a smile, which clearly didn’t work since he said, “Not very amusing Lloyd. We have been engaging in serious business here, and I had hoped for more from you.”

“Well,” I said, restored to meekness, “I suppose I could try again.”
He peered at me, clearly wanting me to say more. And so I did, “With Lydia, I mean.”

“That’s more what I was hoping to hear.” He clapped his hands to signal the end of our session and the termination of my treatment.

I rose slowly and said as I turned to leave, “Thank you Dr. Merkin. I’m sure this will prove to be very helpful to me.” And without his needing to do any more chastising, I corrected myself, “I mean to us.” He did not respond.

But as things turned out, my prediction about the “me” and the “us” would soon prove to be more the former than the latter.

* * *

Two days later after my final session with Dr. Merkin, it was Thursday. The last Thursday of July and I was among the first to arrive at the Writers Workshop. I did not bring anything of my own to present but was keen to see if Kathy would read something of hers—she had indicated she was working on a poem and would bring it in if she could only find the right voice for it. Otis was there and busy rolling a half dozen joints that would help sustain us through another stifling night in our unair-conditioned meeting room. Howie was pulling the corks out of on two big jugs of cheap raffia-wrapped Chianti. That too would help.

Others drifted in and shared what we at the time called Black-Power handshakes—among others, Dean Mason was there, a demolitions expert who had his left arm blown off in Vietnam when attempting, while high on LSD, to defuse a land mine—he wrote surprisingly wistful poems about various forms of loss set in turn-of-the century rural French Indochina; also there was Ralph Santiago, an Air Force vet, who had been shot down over the South China Sea and somehow managed to survive in the shark-infested water for almost a week before he was miraculously rescued—he wrote short stories which were more a hallucinatory series of shouts seamlessly braided with epithets than coherent narratives set, as best as anyone could tell (they were that difficult to unravel and he refused to talk about them), in Manhattan’s barrio where we thought he had grown up; and also there was Loraine Nostra, one of the gut-spilling abused, who tried being a lesbian for a while, and wrote about that, in an attempt to redefine her life—she wound up a year later living with and eventually marrying Ralph; and then there was blubbery Bobby Richman, barely eighteen, veteran and survivor of a very different kind of warfare—his own battle against the most nouveau-riche upbringing the borough of Brooklyn was capable of imposing (there were many contenders for that distinction); he took this as his inspiration and wrote about that aspect of his life with more precocious talent and even genius than the rest of us combined could muster—about his mother’s “vinyl universe” of Staffordshire figurines and plastic slipcovers from which he extracted metaphoric truth, proving, back to Blake once more, that the universe could indeed to be found in just a grain of sand.

But no Kathy. Which sent me straight into a funk. With Lydia out of town and after my sessions with Dr. Merkin, especially the last of them, I felt ready for another try at adventure. Or at least the semblance of one.

Otis declared that we had a quorum, though we hardly needed one considering the business in which we were engaged—none whatsoever--and indicated by just beginning to read that he had something to present. A poem called Motherfucker. I think, actually, as I reflect back on that year, that all of his poems had the same title.

Since it, like the rest of the series, was not distinguished, and this narrative has gone on for about as long as you (and I) are capable of enduring, I will not quote from it or the discussion that followed—suffice it to say, since that discussion was so brief and thus will not divert us, it included Howie saying, “Far out”; Ralph offering his ubiquitous, “Too much”; and Lorraine spitting, “Men!”

And it was thus a great relief to me that, just as the last “motherfucker” ricocheted back at us off the black board, Kathy slipped into the room and sat down where I had previously dwelled-- behind the inner circle of chairs. It was obvious that she was agitated and, with a sigh of relief, grabbed at the perfectly-timed bottle of wine as it reached her. I watched as she took a long drink, which appeared quickly to help settle her. She shrugged off a crocheted sweater, which she wore even in this heat, and let it fall at her feet. She was wearing beneath it a blue spandex tank top, which, I could not help but notice, her breasts stretched almost to its elastic limit. And using the traction offered by her rubber-soled shoes she pulled her chair and herself, inch by inch, into the circle. I also noticed that she had a tightly folded paper in her hands, which were visibly shaking. I thought I understood why.

Then, like Otis, without any introductory comments, before anyone else could seize the floor, Kathy began to read, in a voice full of timbre from years of smoking, drinking, and who knows what else:

There will be no more songs at midnight
Nor no moans of life transporting
Or lives with meaning.
These, this was for another time
When there were lilacs in our dooryard
And you chanted songs to me.
This, these have shed their echo
And I am left
With nothing but this moon. . . .

There was more, but just this fragment was enough to intoxicate me; and, I sensed, the entire room of the wounded and left behind—the allusions (to Whitman?--I was still incapable of not being pedantic); the sentiment; the, yes, voice so different from anything I, in my stereotypical categorizing, had in truth been expecting. This was gut-spilling, true--I recalled her telling me about her prick-bastard Ex--but with an ironic, subtle vengeance!

And with that, as if on cue, the lights in the classroom, and from what we could see across the campus, all of these lights blinked off and we were left in total darkness and an uneasy silence broken only by the scream of the sirens set off by the emergency lights that flashed on to mark the exits. I was concerned about what flashbacks the vets might be experiencing.

After a tense moment, illuminated by only the glow of now multiple joints circling to help calm the many scarred nerves, I moved across the room and eased myself into the chair next to Karen. Bobby, who had been in the bathroom, burst back in and breathlessly reported that he had heard from one of the college’s security people that the whole city, maybe even the entire country was backed out—just like it had been in 1965. For him, it was a great adventure; for the rest of us at best an inconvenience.

In the nearly utter balckness, I heard Kathy mutter caustically, “Wouldn’t you know it. This really makes my day.”

I leaned over toward her, breathing her in, and said as gently as I could, “That was amazing. You accomplished just what you said you wanted to achieve, you . . . “

She cut me off, no longer thinking about her poem, “How the fuck am I gonna get home?” The spell was broken--she again was Kathy from Queens. “Billy, my kid will think the world is ending.”

“I’ll get you there,” I said, attempting to sound strong and assuring.

“But don’t you live in an entirely different direction? Maybe the buses will be runnin’. I’ll be OK. Trust me, I’ve had to get through much worse things.”

I did trust that and, thinking again of the things she alluded to in her poem and at the June meeting, I offered, “Not on your life. I’ll drive you and then I’ll go home.

“But it’ll be dangerous. The traffic lights will be out and I live in a dangerous neighborhood in the middle of Queens. There was all sorts of lootin’ the last time this happened. Two people got shot.”

But without real protest she allowed me to lead here out into the hallway, holding on to my hand, which I hoped was not trembling for what could have been many reasons, as we were guided along by the flickering emergency lights.

We quickly found the car and were soon heading diagonally across Brooklyn, seeking the Interboro Parkway, which would take us up toward Queens. She slouched against her door and smoked one cigarette after another, not saying a word. I put on the radio and we pulled in reports from around the country—it was indeed another massive power failure, and New York City was again totally paralyzed.

But thankfully the traffic was lighter than I had expected so to relax us I put on WRVR, my favorite jazz station. Wouldn’t you know it, Miles Davis immediately filled the car, his mellow sound mixing with the Kathy’s raspy breathing.

She began to sing along with him--

Can't get out of this mood
Can't get over this feeling . . .
But now I'm saying it,
I'm playing it dumb,
Can't get out of this mood . . .

I thought I heard her say plaintively, before the final line, “This coulda been written for me”--

Heartbreak here I come.

At that she chuckled, “I already been there. Not plannin’ to go back again.”

We could have been anywhere as we glided along deserted streets in a car full of the sweet breath of her exhaled smoke, drawn along, as in her poem, by a humidity-rimmed moon.

She had been directing me through streets unfamiliar to me as we got closer to the depths of Queens where she lived. In “Archie Bunker Land,” she joked as the asphalt-tile clad two-family houses sprang into view, lit by my headlights, as we probed our way into the heart of that, she was right, raw landscape.

To be concluded, finally, next Saturday . . .