Blues for Beginners: Stories and Obsessions (2 page)

“So, to return to your earlier analogy,” he
says, ‘‘We agree with the principle; now we’re just dickering about
price.”

.

The times we run into each other in his lobby
and share the elevator are always awkward, at least for me. I can
make elevator small talk with anyone except Dr. Freundlicht. Even
though I know he’s off-duty I expect him to know what I’m thinking
at all times. I assume he has a wife, two children, a gray Volvo
station wagon and a labrador retriever, along with season tickets
for the symphony. He could be gay, drive an Oldsmobile, and have
season tickets for the Redskins, but I’ll never know.

As he pointed out early on, if he wanted to
talk about himself he’d be obliged to pay me.

.

It turns out Dr. Freundlicht used to be a
smoker. He lets this slip out when I tell him about my blind date
from the City Paper classifieds.

“We’re sitting at an outdoor cafe and he
takes my cigarettes off the table. I wanted to smack him. He had
this patronizing smile like he was doing me a big favor. Quitting
smoking means giving in to those sort of people.”

“The surprising thing for me when I quit was
how no one noticed anything different,” Dr. Freundlicht says.

.

I stare at the smiling duck faces of his
brass bookends. For the hundredth time I wonder if the Modern
Library edition of Freud in his bookcase are just props. I smoke
one cigarette half-way down to the filter and stamp it out in the
ashtray.

“What are you not saying?”

“I thought I heard a sniffling sound. Was
that you?” I say.

“I’m afraid so,” he says.

The room is smoke gray from my cigarettes and
I’ve just pulled out another.

“Maybe we should have a rule that I don’t
smoke here.”

“Then you’d be going without to please me,
which would make you resent me even more,” he says.

“Well, it would be extra material for when we
run out of things to talk about.”

“Don’t worry,” says Dr. Freundlicht. “We’ll
have plenty between us. There’s always enough.”

I can not bring myself to light the crummy
Merit nor can I slip it back into its pack.

“What are you not saying?” he asks
gently.

“I wish I’d picked a shrink who still
smoked,” I say, “It’s too late now.”

.

I am still weepy when I leave his office, and
it feels good. If the nun in the elevator notices the tears
streaming down my face, she is too polite to say anything. We
exchange pleasantries about the weather all the way down as if both
of us are normal.

The summer of 1981, Magazines were full of
articles about professional women reaching career plateaus and
finding themselves at dead ends with their biological clocks
ticking. It was as though TIME and NEWSWEEK had turned into my
mother, whose letters sometimes included free samples of the latest
deodorants and feminine hygiene sprays. ( “Dear Lauren, This came
in the mail and I thought of you. When will you bring that nice
Meltzer boy home again?”).

.

My closest women friends were all married,
some for the second time, with mortgages and serious furniture. I
was 34, still single, still working for the Department of Labor and
sleeping on a futon; a relic of the idealistic, if somewhat
self-serving Carter era. Signs of the Reagan ascendancy were all
over Washington. I was tired of friends asking ‘when are you going
to leave government and get a real job?’ as though working for a
federal regulatory agency was something to be ashamed of when you
make more money in the private sector helping corporations
circumvent the same laws you used to enforce.

.

Fortunately, Government High Option Blue
Cross paid generous mental health benefits in those days, which why
I could afford psychoanalysis, the Rolls-Royce of psychotherapy.
Not that I had much to show for it. Although I’d been seeing Dr.
Freundlicht for more than a year, I was still hooked on cigarettes
(three packs a day) and Jake Meltzer, a divorced lawyer who said we
had a mature adult relationship.

Whatever that meant.

“What are you thinking?” asked Dr.
Freundlicht.

Jake hadn’t called in two weeks, not since
the night he’d dropped in for dinner, bearing Chinese takeout; kung
pow chicken, shrimp with walnuts, and crummy fortune cookies.

Mine had read Your Mother Was Right.

.

“What are you thinking that you don’t want to
tell me about?” Dr Freudnlich asked.

In other words, he wanted me to say whatever
was on my mind “without fear or censorship.” Jake was off limits,
as far as I was concerned. Too embarrassing. I searched for
something safe as soap, yet sufficiently provocative so Dr.
Freundlicht wouldn’t suspect I was holding out on him. He needed
new soap in the bathroom off his waiting room. By now, the solid
pink bar of Lifebuoy I remembered from the start of my analysis was
a melted- down puddle of tan slime. For that matter, the office
bathroom was dusty. I wondered what that meant, and what my
noticing meant.

.

Analysis was about paying attention to little
things as though they were important, and then talking about them,
even though it was embarrassing. I imagined cleaning Dr.
Freundlicht’s bathroom, replacing the tan slime with a new bar of
blue Zest, and buying him terry cloth hand towels. That sounded too
much like transference, or was it self-abasement? As far as I was
concerned they were the same thing. Or else I was turning into my
mother, the Bitch-Goddess of Hygiene.

A sigh escaped me.

“Hm-m-m?” said Dr. Freundlicht.

“I’ve got a new nervous tic. Or else it’s an
old nervous tic I’ve noticed for the first time.”

“Describe it,” he said.

“I take deep breaths and sigh all the time.
Sometimes I forget to exhale. It’s depression, right?”

I was boring to listen to when I talked about
depression, which always made me feel more depressed, as well as
guilty for boring Dr. Freundlicht, even though he was paid to
listen. I was about to apologize for being a guilty boring puddle
of melted down tan slime when he said, crisply:

“You may be experiencing a loss of elasticity
in your lungs. It’s an early warning sign of emphysema. If you’re
truly concerned you should have a check up.”

We had a truce, Dr. Freundlicht and I. He put
up with my smoking, but took every opportunity to inform me of its
hazards to my health, which were the times I felt free to tune him
out.

This time, as though on command, I put out
the cigarette.

Not that I wanted to.

I felt suddenly split in two, half of me
watching, with dread and curiosity, a stranger, who was also me,
but who wanted to stop smoking. Where would the surplus nervous
energy migrate? I saw myself knitting a long, lumpy muffler while
gobbling fistfuls of junk food. Within a month I’d be too fat for
standard sizes. In a year I’d be sideshow material.

I could barely remember what life was like
without cigarettes to movie it along. Stretches of boredom
bracketed by spurts of anxiety and chasms of loneliness, that’s
what it was. A childhood of walking home from the orthodontist in
the rain. Frantic hours of piano practice the night before piano
lesson as penance for not practicing all week. Staring out of
classroom windows. Staring at the clock.

I fished the crumpled cigarette out of Dr.
Freundlicht’s ashtray, ready to light up, but my hands shook too
badly for matches. The rest of my life stretched before me as a
series of disconnected,

desperate improvisations.

“What are you not saying this time?” he said,
but he’d seen the whole show.

He knew what it meant. I didn’t have to tell
him.

.

The summer of 1981 I lived in the remnants of
a group house near National Zoo with Rainbow, an acid casualty who
had good office skills and many irritating mannerisms, but
housemates my age who tolerated chain-smoking and meat eaters were
hard to find. She’d lived in places like Big Bear and Boulder, but
moved back east to be near her family and become a grown-up. Her
words, not mine. I couldn’t figure out whether she was sincere or
just goofing on me in a post-modern ironic way. Out of the blue
she’d say stuff like “it’s okay to love your country and be a chick
again” or “capitalism is really hip, y’know?” Her wardrobe came
from thrift stores, and her big ideas seemed to come off matchbook
covers, the kind that said Earn Big Money Now! Learn in Your Spare
Time. She was taking a correspondence course in truck driving so
she could become an independent entrepreneur.

.

“It can’t be healthy for you to live with a
retarded person,” Jake told me after he met Rainbow for the first
time. “You have to be some kind of a moron to believe you can learn
to drive a truck by mail.”

Sometimes I imagined her presence in my life
was in reality a re-education program for Sixties holdovers
underwritten by the Heritage Foundation, but somehow I understood
her better once I met the rest of her family.

Rainbow’s family lived in an excessively
restored farmhouse outside Leesburg, and were consumed by hobbies.
Her father repaired clocks in his garage workshop. There was a
congealed boyishness about him, something sinister and gauche. He
wore black socks with his Bermuda shorts, and his face was too old
for his hair. He made a point of telling me, not that I asked,
about being first trombone with the navy band until he lost his
embouchure and retired early on disability. Rainbow’s mother was
taciturn and fidgety in a way that suggested long midwestern
winters. Each kitchen appliance had its own cover, either quilted
or crocheted. She showed me her root cellar and what appeared to be
a lifetime supply of homemade relishes and preserves. I never got
to meet Rainbow’s brother, who was fighting the Battle of
Spottsylvania with his Civil War re-enactor group. Later, Rainbow
told me the retired trombone story was just cover, and that her
father was really a retired spy. CIA. The root cellar was cover
too; it was a fallout shelter. Space was reserved for Rainbow, who
hoped she could get to it in time.

“Just make sure you leave early so you miss
rush hour,” I’d said, “That traffic jam around the Pentagon is a
killer.”

A sanctimonious expression came over her
face, as though she pitied my ignorance but it would be a breach
national security to tell me more.

“It’s no joke, Lauren.”

“You really want to live in a hole in the
ground with your parents and eat pickled relish?”

“I’m a survivor,” she’d said.

Not me.

I wanted to be at ground zero when the big
one hit. I wanted to be vaporized.

.

The kitchen smelled deliciously of ginger and
cinnamon.

“I’d rather die than not live under a
Capitalist System,” said Rainbow by way of a greeting.

She took a tray of cookies out of the oven.
The polka-dot kerchief tied around her curly red hair and her
ruffled apron were pure I Love Lucy.

You twit! I wanted to say. Do you know what
your life would be under Godless Communism? Pretty much the same; a
shared apartment with a roommate or two in a nice part of Moscow.
An office job where you typed letters and answered the phone. A few
more amenities than your average Commie working girl, thanks to a
Daddy in the KGB.

“I just quit smoking,” I said. “Four hours
and twenty-nine minutes ago.”

“Oh wow, Lauren. You must be feeling so good
about yourself right now.”

“I feel weird. Like I’m driving on I-95
without brakes. Like I’m driving a strange car with manual
transmission. A BMW before they were cool. Everything’s too
intense.

“Have some milk and cookies, and you’ll feel
better,” she said. “The ones in the jar are cool enough.”

The cookies in the jar looked like chocolate
chip, but turned out to be oatmeal raisin made with too much
ginger. I’ve never liked raisins, but I ate a second one. I reached
for another cookie, but thought better of it.

“Any messages for me?”

“Jake hasn’t called,” Rainbow said, “Tell me
you’re not in love with him. Are you?”

I’d never used the word, even to myself. Jake
was my sentimental education, my destiny. We grew up in adjoining
New York suburbs that we despised. We met at a progressive summer
camp in Vermont when I was 16. He gave me my first kiss, after
which he’d made a play for Wanda Johnson, who was my tent mate, but
that didn’t count. What counted was our meeting up in Washington,
half a lifetime later and connecting. My first orgasm ever was the
time he took me from behind on his living room rug. Karastan,
machine made, unlike genuine oriental rugs that were made by
exploited labor. We shared Saturday nights and Sunday mornings.
Naked brunch: sex, bagels, and lox, fresh bagels and fresh lox
because we were both from New York and could taste the difference.
Together, we knew all the answers to the Sunday Times crossword
puzzle.

“Yeah, it’s love.”

“He’s not good enough for you,” said
Rainbow.

She looked like she wanted to say more, but I
cut her off.

“That’s sweet of you, but actually Jake and I
are pretty well matched. He’s a little lacking in social graces,
but, hey, I’m not the world’s best housekeeper—”

“Jake made a pass at me the last time he was
here,” she said.

“In the kitchen with the Chinese food?”

“He sort of snuck up behind me in the kitchen
when my hands were full and copped a feel, so I stepped on his
feet. If I’d known you guys were serious, I would have said
something sooner. He’d tried something like that once before.”

I wanted to believe she was making this up,
but knew better. Rainbow lived in fantasy land but she didn’t tell
lies. Soon every cell in my body would shriek betrayal, but for now
I wanted something to do with my hands or put in my mouth that was
not a cigarette.