Sheila specialized in addiction. Junkies, drunks, cokeheads, aspirin freaks, whatever. She got a lot of cancellations.
I called her up. Her three o’clock had OD’d, so she had a slot for me. I decided to walk over. It was a nice day.
Her office was in an upscale building in the east seventies, otherwise residential. You’d never have known the office was there. I supposed most of the residents didn’t. I was quite sure that the lunching ladies with Pekingese I passed on my way into the building would have been quite scandalized to know that back behind their very own marble-floored palm-plastered lobby, eight hours a day, fifty-five minutes at a time, sat, weeping, whining and rationalizing, scores of the city’s most hopeless slaves to substance.
The doormen, on the other hand, certainly knew. They knew everything. And being even more snobbish than their tenants, though also professionally discreet, they never failed to give me a tiny nod and a subtle sneer. Which I invariably returned.
I didn’t have to wait. The door was open. Sheila was in her recliner. I always called her Sheila. I liked the name. It reminded me of old Jack Lemmon movies. I knew she didn’t approve, though she never said so. But whenever she left me a voice mail she never said, ‘It’s Sheila’; she always said, ‘It’s Dr. Schwartz.’ And I would always make it a point to begin my return voice mail with, ‘Hi Sheila, got your message.’
That was the extent of my rebellion, though. We actually had a very good relationship.
I hoped so, for two hundred bucks an hour.
We talked about Warwick. She nodded sympathetically. She said the right things. What a terrible man, she said.
She made me feel better.
We got down to work.
You were telling me about your father, last time, she said.
Yes, of course, I said. Father, Warwick. Not subtle. But possibly effective. Yes, I was twelve.
When he died, I meant. He was thirty-seven. Keeled right over. Face in the lasagna. I wasn’t there. I heard about it later. Aneurism, they said. I envisioned a dark-clawed beast, stalking the unwary in the night. The dreaded Aneurism. The reality was simpler, more insidious. A vessel burst, the bleeding uncontrolled. Invisible.
After that, only women. Mother, sister, wife, daughter. I’d never had a son. I didn’t have a brother, either, anymore. My brother died. But don’t feel sorry for me. I barely remembered him. I was four. He was three. He’d had a fever. They took him away. He never came back. It was really only from stories I was told that I remembered him at all. It was years after the fact that I began to miss him. To regret.
Twelve years should be enough, I said, to have generated one fond memory.
You would think, Sheila said.
But I don’t have any. Not one. No hugs. No kisses. Not a pat on the shoulder. Not a good word. Nothing.
That’s terrible.
Her sympathy was palpable, genuine.
Not really, I said. I mean, he didn’t beat me or anything. I didn’t grow up in a war zone. I have all my limbs. People endure worse things. And even if he lacked the skills to love a child, he did leave me something. He went to work every day. A real job. In the copper mine. Not a pussy job like mine. He never missed a day. Never complained. If he’d been sick a day in his life, he sure didn’t let us know about it.
He set an example for you.
That’s what I’m saying. Something in me always makes me slog ahead. Never give in. Keep on keeping on. And I know what it is. It’s what he gave me.
But there’s more to being a parent than setting an example, Sheila said. It would have been one thing if you had gotten some love from your mother.
Right, I laughed.
My memories of my mother were far more vivid. Most of them involved humiliation. But Sheila and I had been through all that.
It’s a terrible thing, she said. It’s a huge gap in a person’s life. I don’t know if you can ever fill it.
I liked it that she’d say such things. I was quite sure that they weren’t in the shrink manual.
I don’t know either, I said.
Really, I thought, wasn’t all this the worst kind of self-indulgence? Who the hell had nice parents? Warm, loving, Leave It to Beaver folks? Nobody I knew, that’s for sure.
I changed the subject.
There’s something to be said for displacement, I said. It’s the differentiation. I read an article about it the other day.
Sheila leaned forward.
I loved the way she always seemed interested in what I had to say. So what if I was paying her to be interested? So what if she probably acted just as interested in the turgid tales of all those addicted idiots, every stupid recidivist story of stopping and starting and telling the wife and kids they’re sorry and starting again and puking blood in the airplane bathroom and passing out and not remembering a thing the next day and wondering where the hell that big gash on their forehead and the stuffed penguin came from, sounding exactly the same after a while from every pathetic one of them? So what?
I liked it anyway.
Children, I continued, the theory goes, contrary to the popular conception, go out of their way to differentiate themselves from their siblings. People are always surprised. My, they say, how different Johnny is from Joe. But it’s actually not surprising at all. It’s the natural order of things.
I was on a roll.
Differentiation is a strategy designed to maximize parental attention, I went on. A Darwinian world like any other. Your older brother already has a lock on, say, freestyle Frisbee. You can’t compete. He’s had three years’ practice before you were born. So you take up tennis. Occupy the tennis side of Mommy’s brain. Find a vacuum. Fill it.
There’s a lot of truth to that, Sheila said.
Yes, I said, but here’s the problem: You grow up. You become a lawyer. And then what? Who do you compete with for attention, wealth, success? All those things that stand for love in this society? A bunch of goddamn lawyers, just like you. And in that world, anybody the slightest bit different is viewed with suspicion, fear, hostility. Contempt. Who does he think he is, wearing sneakers to work? It’s everywhere. Christ, they spy on you.
Warwick, she said.
Back to Warwick, I laughed.
Of course, I mused aloud, without this competition to be the best of a bunch of folks just like you, we would never have a genius. The one who transcends it all. By taking sameness through the looking glass. Newton. Darwin. Shostakovich. But meanwhile, the rest of us pay the price. Anonymity. Wage slavery. Disgust. Despair.
But some people don’t feel that way, she said.
I suppose that’s right. Or at least not as strongly as I do.
Not nearly.
Not nearly.
Next time we’ll explore that.
Okay, I said.
My time was up. I was always agreeable about the fifty-five-minute rule. Some people were offended. But I used to drive a cab. I understood how a meter worked.