“But I said nothing about Karen. I only reminded you of the wife of your colleague, whom you ran into that afternoon at the shopping center in Madison.”
“You’ve got such a good memory, why don’t you also remember that I didn’t even fuck her! She blew me, in the car. So what? So what? I tell you, it was a surprise to the two of us. And what’s it to you, anyway? I mean that! We were friends. She wasn’t so happily married either. That, for Christ’s sake, wasn’t ‘sexually acting out.’ It was friendship! It was heartbrokenness! It was generosity! It was tenderness! It was despair! It was being adolescents together for ten secret minutes in the rear of a car before we both went nobly back into Adulthood! It was a sweet and harmless game of Let’s Pretend! Smile, if you like, smile from your pulpit, but that’s still closer to a proper description of what was going on there than what you call it. And we did not let it go any further, which was a possibility, you know; we let it remain a kind of happy, inconsequential accident and returned like good soldiers to the fucking front lines. Really, Your Holiness, really, Your Excellency, does that in your mind add up to ‘acting out sexually with other women from the beginning of the marriage’?”
“Doesn’t it?”
“Two street whores in Italy, a friend in a car in Madison…and Karen? No! I call it practically monkish, given the fact of my marriage. I call it pathetic, that’s what! From the beginning of his marriage, the Italian-American poet had some crazy idea that now that he was a husband his mission in life was to “be faithful-to whom never seemed to cross his mind. It was like keeping his word and doing his duty-what had gotten him married to this shrew in the first place! Once again the Italian-American poet did what he thought to be ‘manly’ and ‘upright’ and ‘principled’-which, needless to say, was only what was cowardly and submissive. Pussy-whipped, as my brother so succinctly puts it! As a matter of fact, Dr. Spielvogel, those two Italian whores and my colleague’s wife back of the shopping center, and Karen, constituted the only praiseworthy, the only manly, the only moral…oh, the hell with it.”
“I think at this point we are only saying the same thing in our different vocabularies. Isn’t that what you just realized?”
“No, no, no, no, no. I just realized that you are never going to admit to me that you could be mistaken in any single particular of diction, or syntax, let alone in the overriding idea of that paper. Talk about narcissism as a defense!”
He did not bristle at my tone, contemptuous as it had become. His voice throughout had been strong and even-a touch of sarcasm, some irony, but no outrage, and certainly no tears. Which was as it should be. What did he have to lose if I left?
“I am not a student any longer, Mr. Tarnopol. I do not look to my patients for literary criticism. You would prefer that I leave the professional writing to you, it would seem, and confine my activities to this room. You remember how distressed you were several years ago to discover that I occasionally went out into the streets to ride the bus.”
“That was awe. Don’t worry, I’m over it.”
“Good. No reason for you to think I’m perfect.”
“I don’t.”
“On the other hand, the alternative is not necessarily to think I am another Maureen, out to betray and deceive you for my own sadistic and vengeful reasons.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“You may nonetheless drink that I am.”
“If you mean do I think that I have been misused by you, the answer is yes. Maureen is not the issue-that article is.”
“All right, that is your judgment. Now you must decide what you are going to do about the treatment. If you want to continue with your attack upon me, treatment will be impossible-it would be foolish even to try. If you want to return to the business at hand, then of course I am prepared to go forward. Or perhaps there is a third alternative that you may wish to consider-perhaps you will choose to take up treatment with somebody else. This is for you to decide before the next session.”
Susan was enraged by the decision I did reach. I never had heard her argue about anything as she did against Spielvogel’s “brutal” handling of me, nor had she ever dared to criticize me so forthrightly either. Of course her objections were in large part supplied by Dr. Golding, who, she told me, had been “appalled” by the way Spielvogel had dealt with me in the article in the Forum; however, she would never even have begun to communicate Golding’s position to me if it were not for startling changes that were taking place in her attitude toward herself. Now, maybe reading about me walking around in Maureen’s underwear did something to boost her confidence with me, but whatever had triggered it, I found myself delighted by the emergence of the vibrant and emphatic side so long suppressed in her-at the same time that I was greatly troubled by the possibility that what she and her doctor were suggesting about my decision to stay with Spielvogel constituted more of the humbling truth. Certainly in my defense I offered up to Susan what sounded even to me like the feeblest of arguments.
“You should leave him,” she said.
“I can’t. Not at this late date. He’s done me more good than harm.”
“But he’s got you all wrong. How could that do anybody any good?”
“I don’t know-but it did me. Maybe he’s a lousy analyst and a good therapist.”
“That makes no sense, Peter.”
“Look, I’m not getting into bed with my worst enemy any more, am I? I am out of that, am I not?”
“But any doctor would have helped you to leave her. Any doctor who was the least bit competent would have seen you through that.”
“But he happens to be the one who did it.”
“Does that mean he can just get away with anything as a result? His sense of what you are is all wrong. Publishing that article without consulting you about it first was all wrong. His attitude when you confronted him with what he had done, the way he said, ‘Either shut up or go’-that was as wrong as wrong can be. And you know it! Dr. Golding said that was as reprehensible as anything he had ever heard of between a doctor and his patient. Even his writing stinks-you said it was just jargon and crap.”
“Look, I’m staying with him. I don’t want to talk about it any more.”
“If I answered you like that, you’d hit the ceiling. You’d say, ‘Stop backing away! Stand up for yourself, twerp!’ Oh, I don’t understand why you are acting like this, when the man has so clearly abused you. Why do you let people get away with such things?”
“Which people?”
‘Which people? People like Maureen. People like Spielvogel. People who…”
“What?”
“Well, walk all over you like that.”
“Susan, I cannot put in any more time thinking of myself as someone who gets walked over. It gets me nowhere.”
“Then don’t be one! Don’t let them get away with it!”
“It doesn’t seem to me that in this case anybody is getting away with anything.”
“Oh, Lambchop, that isn’t what Dr. Golding says.”
Spielvogel simply shrugged off what Dr. Golding said, when I passed it on to him. “I don’t know the man,” he grunted, and that was that. Settled. As though if he did know him, he could tell me Golding’s motives for taking such a position-otherwise, why bother? As for Susan’s anger, and her uncharacteristic vehemence about my leaving him, well, I understood that, did I not? She hated Spielvogel for what Spielvogel had written about the Peter who was to her so inspirational and instructive, the man she had come to adore for the changes he was helping to bring about in her life. Spielvogel had demythologized her Pygmalion-of course Galatea was furious. Who expected otherwise?