All Is Not Forgotten (9 page)

 

Chapter Eight

Sean Logan was
a Navy SEAL. He'd grown up in nearby New London, the same town as Charlotte Kramer. His father had been in the navy, and his grandfather had died a decorated marine. He had six siblings, three older and three younger, making him the lost middle child. He was a beautiful man to look at. I don't care if you're a man or a woman, straight or homosexual, young or old. You could not look at Sean Logan and not be struck by his physical beauty. It was not one thing—his light blue eyes, his thick dark hair, the masculine bone structure of his cheeks and brow. These things together created a perfect canvas. But on that canvas was always painted some kind of emotion. Sean was not able to hide them. His joy, which I did not see until years later, was boundless. His wry sense of humor, infectious. He could make me laugh like no other patient I have ever treated, even in spite of my efforts to remain stoic. The laughter would erupt from my mouth like lava from a volcano. His love was deep and pure. And his pain was intoxicating.

Sean did not go to college, although he had earned a scholarship to Brown University. He was that driven, that smart. But he could not sit still within himself. We are all (most of us) at times overwhelmed by our feelings. Think about the first time you “fell in love.” Or the first moment you saw your newborn baby. Perhaps you experienced profound fear in some kind of near accident, or extreme rage when someone hurt you or your family intentionally. You might go days without eating much, without sleeping through the night, without having control of your thoughts as they fixated on the source of the disruption to normal life. You might think you feel “happy” if the source of this disruption is positive—“falling in love,” for example. But it is not “happiness.” The disruption is created by the fear of not knowing how to assimilate this new situation into normal life, not knowing if it will stay or go. Your brain is actually in a state of adjustment, trying to figure out what it will need to do to accommodate the change in this new emotional environment. Actual “happiness” is when the relationship settles down and becomes stable. When you sleep through the night next to your new love because you know she is here to stay.

Imagine never getting to that settled place after a disruption, and instead feeling that new, powerful emotion all the time. It is not sustainable, and truly quite painful to endure.

We in my profession usually diagnose this affliction as anxiety in one form or another. Sometimes it lends itself to OCD. Other times we just call it generalized anxiety disorder. Anxiety disorders are on a continuum like all mental illness. We must have names for things so we can communicate about what we see, but it is not the same as diagnosing a physical ailment like the flu. There are no little bugs we can see through a microscope. All we have are our observations and, hopefully, intelligent deductions.

I have treated many patients like Sean, though he was an exceptional case. It can be a difficult choice to prescribe these patients with the appropriate medication. I can make them come back down to earth, but there they will remain. While the rest of us flow through normal patterns of these elevated emotions and then the return to normalcy, these patients have to choose. I suppose it's akin to addiction and the choice to be in recovery. Would you rather live a life of total sobriety or be in a constant state of inebriation? I would certainly choose sobriety.

I did not know Sean before he joined the navy. He was just seventeen years old and, as he describes himself, jumping out of his own skin. He cycled through girlfriends, drank and got high every day, even through school. His mother was overwhelmed. Two of the older siblings had returned home to live, one after graduating from college and the other after dropping out. The younger three were always in need of something, a meal or a ride or a clean shirt. His oldest sister got pregnant at twenty-three, unmarried. She sometimes dropped the baby off with her mother so she could go to her job as an office assistant. What I am trying to convey is that Sean did not know how to help himself, and there was no one else up to the task. After his senior year, he enlisted.

Military life was not a bad option for Sean. The physical demands of his training and the endless opportunities to strain his body afforded him a different kind of medication for his anxiety. Endorphins and adrenaline produced from anaerobic exercise are chemicals that cause the body to feel good. That's the simplest way to explain it. For someone with anxiety, extreme physical exertion can provide significant relief. Sean excelled, making it through the process in just over eighteen months. He did one tour in Iraq at age eighteen and returned home just after his nineteenth birthday. His parents were proud, his siblings conflicted by pride and envy. But without his regimen, and the constant natural high from being in danger, he was again reeling with his anxiety.

Have you ever done coke, Doc?
He asked me this already knowing the answer. He was playful that way.
Well, you get real jumpy.

I can still see him sitting on the couch in my office, legs straddled, hands in two fists. He began to shake.

It's like that. Like you have to keep moving some part of your body to get rid of your nerves. You can't sleep. You're not hungry. Could talk for hours about stupid shit.

“That doesn't sound enjoyable,” I said.

Sean laughed.
I know, Doc. Cup of tea and a good book. We can't all be saints.

“When did you use cocaine?” I asked.

Aw, not since tenth grade. I'm just saying that's what I felt like all the time. I'd forgotten what it was like before, you know, after being in the desert for so long. I slept like a baby there. Never thought about what was churning in my gut.

“And when you did come home, the times before that last mission?”

Fuck, man. It was like being in a cage. Like some wild animal in a zoo. I'd wake up and have like a second of peace. Then I'd feel it creeping in until I had a full belly of acid. I'd jump up and get the hell out of the house, go for a run until I was wheezing for breath. I'd kiss my ma on the cheek and grab a beer, take it to the basement to lift until my muscles were shaking. That'd do me okay for a few hours. Spent the rest of the day drinking. I don't touch the weed anymore. Can't risk it, you know?

“And Tammy, your wife? You said you met her on one of your leaves? How did she come into the picture?”

Sean smiled and winked at me.
Well, I'd put fucking right up there with drinking. Fucking and drinking at the same time—that just about got me through the day. I'd just be in some bar and then see some chick catching my eye. It was too easy. I sound like an asshole. But they were into it. I don't know. Never had that kind of luck in school. Maybe they felt sorry for me, having to go back.

I did not doubt one word of what he told me. Sean was a perfect cocktail for attracting women.

I guess I just got careless. Next time I came home, I had a kid and a wife.

In spite of his promiscuity, I am willing to say that I believe Sean Logan was a profoundly good man. And not simply because he married the mother of his child. Sean was a fighter. He fought for his life, for his sanity. For him, the only thing he knew that made life tolerable was being deployed, and so he came home when he was told, and he did his best to love his wife and know his child. But he feared this time—not like the men in the other stories you know, the men who are suffering from PTSD or who become addicted to the adrenaline high. Those men, for the most part, had been normal before leaving for war. For Sean, it was quite the opposite. He had sought war to escape himself.

Tammy described it like this:

I love him. Please don't doubt that. Seriously—I would die if he ever thought I didn't love him, from the first time I saw him, as stupid as that sounds, I did, I just loved him. You can't imagine what it was like that afternoon. It was a rainy day, hot and muggy. I'd gone with some friends to drink some beers and shoot pool. It was Saturday, you know? There wasn't much else to do. He was at the bar, had the whole place in fits of laughter, telling some story about some crazy thing he'd done to one of his buddies, some prank over in Iraq. He never dwelled on the bad stuff. He always wanted to make people laugh. He could lift the spirit of an entire room all at once, with one story and his enormous smile. So I walked in and he saw me. He stopped for a second telling his story, but his audience was waiting, so he continued, even though his eyes kept moving around the room, following me. I didn't know it about him then, but when he sets his mind on something, or someone, he's like a pit bull. He won't let go until he gets what he wants. And that afternoon, he wanted me.

Tammy was a pretty woman, short blond hair, big brown eyes. She was just twenty-four when I first met her, and I think she had been weathered by motherhood, but mostly by her marriage to Sean. I found it interesting that she used a pit bull as a simile in her story. Pit bulls, it is said, do not release their jaws until the animal clenched between their teeth is dead. I tried not to read too much into this. The pit bull has become a colloquial symbol, and most people don't fully understand what they're saying when they use the expression. Still, she looked as though life were being squeezed out of her. She was embarrassed to speak to me about the more intimate details of her relationship, but I felt it was important, and so I did my best to put her at ease.

Well, okay. So I guess I was flirting with him, too. I would meet his eyes and then look away. The usual things women do. It's so stupid, isn't it? Being married now, having a child. All that stuff seems ridiculous to me. But it did work.
Tammy got a playful look on her face, and I could see the woman Sean saw that rainy afternoon.

When he was finished telling his story, he excused himself, took his beer and his shot of bourbon, and walked right over to our table. He had this shameless smile on his face, like “I'm here to get you to fuck me and I won't leave until I get my way.” It sounds so obnoxious, but he was like a mischievous little boy and I was a complete goner. He asked me to dance. He put on a track from the jukebox—David Bowie, “Let's Dance.” You know the song? “Put on your red shoes…” His hands were all over me, on my back, running down the side of my leg, through my hair. I had never felt that from a man before. It was like this desperate, raw need that only I could fill. And believe me, I know anyone with a vagina could have filled it, but that's not how it felt. And even if it did, it wouldn't have mattered. After a while of dancing and drinking and laughing, he danced me closer to the small hallway that led to the back door, then outside into the alley. It was pouring rain. He started kissing me, pulling at my clothing. His face turned from playful to deadly serious. He was on a mission to satisfy this need. He looked like he would die in agony if he didn't satisfy it, and something about that just overwhelmed me. I became equally desperate to help him, to save him. And it turned me on, this power I felt I had. It was primal. I felt like an animal myself, tearing at his clothing until we'd removed enough to, you know, make it possible. He lifted me up against the brick wall of the building. It was, I don't know. I can't really describe it.

Tammy disappeared for a moment, as though she was reliving the experience. I gave her time to sit with her memories and the feelings they were evoking. She went on to explain how she'd taken him home. How they'd stayed in bed for the next two days until he had to leave for his third tour. Then she told me something that I let pass without much attention. There was much more for her to tell, and it was important to Sean's treatment that I hear the story. It was not my intention to treat Tammy. But many months later, when I became involved with the Kramers, this part of Tammy's story came rushing back into my mind.

It may seem strange to those who have not been in therapy how much intimacy is revealed in the process. I suppose this is why patients sometimes favor a therapist of the same gender, so there is less embarrassment. But there really is no need for this, no place for embarrassment in psychotherapy. I have the same reaction when my female patients speak to me about their sexual encounters as I do with the men. I am not listening out of some prurient interest, but as a clinician, a scientist. It is no different from speaking to a gynecologist or urologist. And our sexual lives are inextricably bound to our psyches.

I will make this sole confession: Hearing women reveal their sexual deceit with men has caused me to evaluate my own marriage, the intimate aspects of my relationship with my wife. It is not that I worry about the deceit. I know it is there. I have already discussed the fact that everyone hides and everyone lies. I do not expect my wife to tell me the truth about every experience she has with me in our bedroom. But I have gained insight and knowledge over the years that have afforded me the opportunity to ask the right questions at the right time, and to minimize the deceit to a tolerable measure, both for her and for myself, for my own male ego. I wish I could tell you that I go home and forget the things my female patients tell me. But that is no more possible than if I had an electrician for a patient who told me how to fix a broken circuit. We can't unlearn. It's not how we're built.

Tammy revealed to me that she did not have one orgasm during all those encounters. She said it cryptically because she is a modest person and because she was not my patient. This process was new to her, and she was a willing participant only inasmuch as it was helpful to her husband. The issue came up as we discussed the frequency of their intercourse, even for new lovers. She provided this fact by way of explanation, that perhaps she had pursued additional intercourse because she remained unsatisfied. I did not inquire further, except to ask her why she thought this had happened.