"The thought never occurred to me. I'm not aware of any overriding emotional problems." I tried not to let my voice betray my annoyance.
"Understood," Koch said. He remained silent longer than people do in ordinary conversations. Then he wrote on a card and handed it to me.
"That is your daughter's appointment. Please have her telephone to confirm it. I do not know yet if I will take her as a patient."
I started to protest.
"No, no," he said. "It is perhaps that she should have a woman analyst. I think not, but maybe. I will direct her to another analyst if I am not right. However…"
He seemed to be trying to gauge my expression. People in my profession have had long experience in keeping their thoughts from intruding on the musculature of their faces.
"Mr. Widmer, from what you have told me, I cannot tell whether your wife or your daughter is the first woman in your life. You mention two other daughters, but you speak of this one in a way you do not speak even of your wife." He raised his hand before I could say anything. "That is natural, normal, nothing to suggest therapy. But you have said, perhaps not in so many words, that you have spent your life in a career that you stay in almost entirely because you are following the customs of a narrow class. You are an individual."
"I certainly like to think that I am."
"I don't know how well you know yourself as an individual."
I began a sentence in my head that I could not utter because my sense of protest blanketed any specific articulation I could muster.
"You are how old?"
"Fifty-seven," I said.
"And you have not yet led your life. Or do you maintain that you elected to be an affluent slave?"
The impertinence of the man! I knew I should not have come to the offices of a West Side Jew!
He smiled. "Good," he said, "very good. You have a high color in your face now. You are angry at me. If you were in analysis, one day you would tell me the sentence you just thought and we would both begin to find out who you are. No, Mr. Widmer, I am not soliciting you as a patient. I have enough. If I take your daughter, I will have more than enough. But if your daughter is eccentric, as you say, and forthright, as you say, and conducts her life in a manner undreamt of by her parents, as you say, she has done so without a model in her immediate family, she has had to shape her own life outside it. If her life style deviates greatly from her parents', she may be suppressing the guilt she feels about her rebellion. We shall see. I am not surprised that she has insomnia. Please have her call me. I will send you a separate bill for this time."
He saw me to the door. Then he said something odd.
"The unexpected can be interesting."
What did he mean by that?
As I pressed the button of the elevator I glanced at my watch and noticed that he had given me only forty minutes, not fifty! I caught the absurdity of this reaction instantly, as if I had been shortchanged in a meat market. He hadn't given me short shrift. He had opened my head with a cleaver. Did I dare put Francine in the hands of a man like that?
Six
Koch
A first meeting is for me always a difficult acting role. I spend so many of my working hours being passively sympathetic. As the patient explores his thoughts, I grunt neutral sounds. I listen the way a neighbor or a friend does, forming my own perceptions. I remember the Baumgarten woman telling me I sounded like a big teddy bear, a larger version of the stuffed animal of her childhood to whom she talked for comfort. We are so lonely in our anguish that talking to a willing listener is itself therapeutic, and if the listener is a priest or a doctor, who knows, perhaps his experience of listening to so many private torments that are, at heart, so similar, perhaps the listener will have something useful to say in the end.
Yet if the person I am seeing for the first time is another doctor's patient upset at his transference, ready to switch allegiances, interviewing me to see if I am acceptable, I must seem to be harsh, cold, uncaring, a stone wall that talks back. And if the person who has come to see me is not the patient, but a father like Mr. Widmer who acts as if he knows his own high place in the world and has come to deliver his daughter over to the psychological zookeeper, I am an actor again. He is used to businessmen who smile when they feel derision, but he is not used to the idea of a doctor who sees through his great surface calm. A Jew, a Greek, an Italian would have wailed about the plight of his daughter. Widmer speaks calmly — I would like to know what his pulse was, I would like to have seen his electroencephalogram. He flatters me, he says he comes to me by reading a piece of my work, am I to believe that? Somewhere in his mind, when he comes to visit me, he is trading down. His child has fallen from grace. She has terrible insomnia. She has betrayed the Wasp ethic of control. Am I to do some Freudian hocus-pocus so that she will become acceptable again to her mother and father?
In three minutes Widmer reveals that he is a lawyer who is not a lawyer. He is not a Clarence Darrow spellbinding a jury, he is a businessman who takes money for writing the same contracts over and over again, changing the names of the parties, the terms, it doesn't matter, he will never shake the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution, yet he lusts after that excitement in the law and hangs on to it by a vicarious thread to an Armenian who is a real lawyer! Then, in the next few minutes, he betrays that in his mind — where else does man fornicate except in his mind?! — he is a lover to his daughter and a pastor to his wife. Is this none of my business except that it arms me now to deal with the girl?
I come out to the waiting room for my first look at Francine Widmer.
"How do you do?" she says, standing.
She is as tall as I am, blond, with unusual bone structure in her face. I wonder what her father thinks of the touch of oriental in her eyes. A distant ancestor? A mutation?
"I am pleased to meet you," I say, shaking her hand. "Please come in."
She has looked directly at me. Good.
We are standing in my study at the moment of greatest discomfort. "We will have a talk first," I say.
"Shall I sit here?" she says, pointing to the chair in which her father sat during our interview.
"Yes, please."
Am I imagining she slides her body into the chair as if it is an intimate act? I notice the naturalness of the shape of her breasts. Marta wore a brassiere always, a girdle always. It was the times.
She crosses her legs in defense of the flower. Better than the subway-riding women, sitting legs apart, unwanted. She tosses her hair. I expect it is lovely to touch.
"Our actual sessions," I explain, "will be with you lying down."
I have said this so often, and yet this time the words lying down simmer with an expectation that sounds sexual. What is this, Gunther?
I know of an actual case, a father who was himself a doctor, who had a heart attack at his beautiful daughter's wedding reception. Everyone thought of him as the happy father giving her hand in marriage, but he was in the darkness of his mind the dismissed suitor, haunted by the guilt of his illegitimate claim, now seeing his daughter's body claimed forever by a legitimate lover. What a heart it takes to adjust to that! But that was long ago. Marta and I thought of ourselves as brave revolutionaries, having intercourse four months before marriage, mingling in a sweat of excitement that would have brought apoplexy to our parents. Now Widmer and I live in a world where children — why do we still think of them as children?! — openly fornicate, shocking even those of us who were trained to think that our lusts are natural and the restrictions of society unnatural.
If I think poor Widmer am I not also thinking poor Koch? Isn't Widmer a warning to myself? I, too, walk around in camouflage, showing the world what? a passive teddy bear listening?