Love's Executioner (24 page)

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Authors: Irvin D. Yalom

Tags: #Psychology, #Movements, #Psychoanalysis, #Research & Methodology, #Emotions

BOOK: Love's Executioner
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I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t point out to Betty that Carlos was a special case, that he needed it. God knows she had needed it, too. I felt myself flushing. I saw I had no choice but to own up.
“Well, you’re pointing out one of my blind spots! It is true—or, rather, was true—that, when we first began to meet, I was put off by your body.”
“I know. I know. It wasn’t too subtle.”
“Tell me, Betty, knowing this—seeing that I didn’t look at you or was uncomfortable with you—why did you stay? Why didn’t you stop seeing me and find someone else? Plenty of other shrinks around.” (Nothing like a question to get off the hot seat!)
“Well, I can think of at least two reasons. First, remember that I’m used to it. It’s not like I expect anything more. Everyone treats me that way. People hate my looks. No one
ever
touches me. That’s why I was surprised, remember, when my hairdresser massaged my scalp. And, even though you wouldn’t look at me, you at least seemed interested in what I had to say—no, no, that’s not right—you were interested in what I
could
or
might
say if I stopped being so jolly. Actually, that was helpful. Also, you didn’t fall asleep. That was an improvement on Dr. Farber.”
“You said there were two reasons.”
“The second reason is that I could understand how you felt. You and I are very much alike—in one way, at least. Remember when you were pushing me to go to Overeaters Anonymous? To meet other obese people—make some friends, get some dates?”
“Yeah, I remember. You said you hated groups.”
“Well, that’s true. I do hate groups. But it wasn’t the whole truth. The
real
reason is that
I
can’t stand fat people. They turn my stomach. I don’t want to be seen with them. So how can I get down on you for feeling the same way?”
We were both on the edge of our chairs when the clock said we had to finish. Our exchange had taken my breath away, and I hated to end. I didn’t want to stop seeing Betty. I wanted to keep on talking to her, to keep on knowing her.
We got up to leave, and I offered her my hand, both hands.
“Oh no! Oh no, I want a hug! That’s the only way you can redeem yourself.”
When we embraced, I was surprised to find that I could get my arms all the way around her.
5
 
“I Never Thought It Would Happen to Me”
 
I greeted Elva in my waiting room, and together we walked the short distance to
my office. Something had happened. She was different today, her gait labored, discouraged, dispirited. For the last few weeks there had been a bounce in her steps, but today she once again resembled the forlorn, plodding woman I had first met eight months ago. I remember her first words then: “I think I need help. Life doesn’t seem worth living. My husband’s been dead for a year now, but things aren’t getting any better. Maybe I’m a slow learner.”
But she hadn’t proved to be a slow learner. In fact, therapy had progressed remarkably well—maybe it had been going too easily. What could have set her back like this?
Sitting down, Elva sighed and said, “I never thought it would happen to me.”
She had been robbed. From her description it seemed an ordinary purse snatching. The thief, no doubt, spotted her in a Monterey seaside restaurant and saw her pay the check in cash for three friends—elderly widows all. He must have followed her into the parking lot and, his footsteps muffled by the roaring of the waves, sprinted up and, without breaking stride, ripped her purse away and leaped into his nearby car.
Elva, despite her swollen legs, hustled back into the restaurant to call for help, but of course it was too late. A few hours later, the police found her empty purse dangling on a roadside bush.
Three hundred dollars meant a lot to her, and for a few days Elva was preoccupied by the money she had lost. That concern gradually evaporated and in its place was left a bitter residue—a residue expressed by the phrase “I never thought it would happen to me.” Along with her purse and her three hundred dollars, an illusion was snatched away from Elva—the illusion of personal specialness. She had always lived in the privileged circle, outside the unpleasantness, the nasty inconveniences visited on ordinary people—those swarming masses of the tabloids and newscasts who are forever being robbed or maimed.
The robbery changed everything. Gone was the coziness, the softness in her life; gone was the safety. Her home had always beckoned her with its cushions, gardens, comforters, and deep carpets. Now she saw locks, doors, burglar alarms, and telephones. She had always walked her dog every morning at six. The morning stillness now seemed menacing. She and her dog stopped from time to time and listened for danger.
None of this is remarkable. Elva had been traumatized and now-suffered from commonplace post-traumatic stress. After an accident or an assault, most people tend to feel unsafe, to have a reduced startle threshold, and to be hypervigilant. Eventually time erodes the memory of the event, and victims gradually return to their prior, trusting state.
But for Elva it was more than a simple assault. Her world view was fractured. She had often claimed, “As long as a person has eyes, ears, and a mouth, I can cultivate their friendship.” But no longer. She had lost her belief in benevolence, in her personal invulnerability. She felt stripped, ordinary, unprotected. The true impact of that robbery was to shatter illusion and to confirm, in brutal fashion, her husband’s death.
Of course, she knew that Albert was dead. Dead and in his grave for over a year and a half. She had taken the ritualized widow walk—through the cancer diagnosis; the awful, toxic, gut-wrenching chemotherapy; their last visit together to Carmel; their last drive down El Camino Real; the hospital bed at home; the funeral; the paperwork; the ever-dwindling dinner invitations; the widow and widower’s clubs; the long, lonely nights. The whole dreadful catastrophe.
Yet, despite all this, Elva had retained her feeling of Albert’s continued existence and thereby of her persisting safety and specialness. She had continued to live “as if”—as if the world were safe, as if Albert were there, back in the workshop next to the garage.
Mind you, I do not speak of delusion. Rationally, Elva knew Albert was gone, but still she lived her routine, everyday life behind a veil of illusion which numbed the pain and softened the glare of the knowing. Over forty years ago, she had made a contract with life whose explicit genesis and terms had been eroded by time but whose basic nature was clear: Albert would take care of Elva forever. Upon this unconscious premise, Elva had built her entire assumptive world—a world featuring safety and benevolent paternalism.
Albert was a fixer. He had been a roofer, an auto mechanic, a general handyman, a contractor; he could fix anything. Attracted by a newspaper or magazine photograph of a piece of furniture or some gadget, he would proceed to replicate it in his workshop. I, who have always been hopelessly inept in a workshop, listened in fascination. Forty-one years of living with a fixer is powerfully comforting. It was not hard to understand why Elva clung to the feeling that Albert was still there, out back in the workshop looking out for her, fixing things. How could she give it up? Why should she? That memory, reinforced by forty-one years of experience, had spun a cocoon around Elva that shielded her from reality—that is, until her purse was snatched.
Upon first meeting Elva eight months before, I could find little to love in her. She was a stubby, unattractive woman, part gnome, part sprite, and each of those parts ill tempered. I was transfixed by her facial plasticity: she winked, grimaced, and popped her eyes either singly or in duet. Her brow seemed alive with great washboard furrows. Her tongue, always visible, changed radically in size as it darted in and out or circled her moist, rubbery lips. I remember amusing myself by imagining introducing her to patients on long-term tranquilizer medication who had developed tardive dyskinesia (a drug-induced abnormality of facial musculature). The patients would, within seconds, become deeply offended because they would believe Elva to be mocking them.
But what I really disliked about Elva was her anger. She dripped with rage and, in our first few hours together, had something vicious to say about everyone she knew—save, of course, Albert. She hated the friends who no longer invited her. She hated those who did not put her at ease. Inclusion or exclusion, it was all the same to her: she found something to hate in everyone. She hated the doctors who had told her that Albert was doomed. She hated even more those who offered false hope.
Those hours were hard for me. I had spent too many hours in my youth silently hating my mother’s vicious tongue. I remember the games of imagination I played as a child trying to invent the existence of someone she did not hate: A kindly aunt? A grandfather who told her stories? An older playmate who defended her? But I never found anyone. Save, of course, my father, and he was really part of her, her mouthpiece, her animus, her creation who (according to Asimov’s first law of robotics) could not turn against his maker—despite my prayers that he would once—just once, please, Dad—pop her.
All I could do with Elva was to hold on, hear her out, somehow endure the hour, and use all my ingenuity to find something supportive to say—usually some vapid comment about how hard it must be for her to carry around that much anger. At times I, almost mischievously, inquired about others of her family circle. Surely there must be someone who warranted respect. But no one was spared. Her son? She said his elevator “didn’t go to the top floor.” He was “absent”: even when he was there, he was “absent.” And her daughter-in-law? In Elva’s words, a “GAP”—gentile American princess. When driving home, her son would call his wife on his automobile telephone to say he wanted dinner right away. No problem. She could do it. Nine minutes, Elva reminded me, was all the time required for the GAP to cook dinner—to “nuke” a slim gourmet TV dinner in the microwave.
Everyone had a nickname. Her granddaughter, “Sleeping Beauty” (she whispered with an enormous wink and a nod), had two bathrooms—two, mind you. Her housekeeper, whom she had hired to attenuate her loneliness, was “Looney Tunes,” and so dumb that she tried to hide her smoking by exhaling the smoke down the flushing toilet. Her pretentious bridge partner was “Dame May Whitey” (and Dame May Whitey was spry-minded compared with the rest, with all the Alzheimer zombies and burned-out drunks who, according to Elva, constituted the bridge-playing population of San Francisco).
But somehow, despite her rancor and my dislike of her and the evocation of my mother, we got through these sessions. I endured my irritation, got a little closer, resolved my countertransference by disentangling my mother from Elva, and slowly, very slowly, began to warm to her.
I think the turning point came one day when she plopped herself in my chair with a “Whew! I’m tired.” In response to my raised eyebrows, she explained she had just played eighteen holes of golf with her twenty-year-old nephew. (Elva was sixty, four foot eleven, and at least one hundred sixty pounds.)
“How’d you do?” I inquired cheerily, keeping up my side of the conversation.
Elva bent forward, holding her hand to her mouth as though to exclude someone in the room, showed me a remarkable number of enormous teeth, and said, “I whomped the shit out of him!”
It struck me as wonderfully funny and I started to laugh, and laughed until my eyes filled with tears. Elva liked my laughing. She told me later it was the first spontaneous act from Herr Doctor Professor (so that was
my
nickname!), and she laughed with me. After that we got along famously. I began to appreciate Elva—her marvelous sense of humor, her intelligence, her drollness. She had led a rich, eventful life. We were similar in many ways. Like me, she had made the big generational jump. My parents arrived in the United States in their twenties, penniless immigrants from Russia. Her parents had been poor Irish immigrants, and she had straddled the gap between the Irish tenements of South Boston and the duplicate bridge tournaments of Nob Hill in San Francisco.
At the beginning of therapy, an hour with Elva meant hard work. I trudged when I went to fetch her from the waiting room. But after a couple of months, all that changed. I looked forward to our time together. None of our hours passed without a good laugh. My secretary said she always could tell by my smile that I had seen Elva that day.
We met weekly for several months, and therapy proceeded well, as it usually does when therapist and patient enjoy each other. We talked about her widowhood, her changed social role, her fear of being alone, her sadness at never being physically touched. But, above all, we talked about her anger—about how it had driven away her family and her friends. Gradually she let it go; she grew softer and more gentle. Her tales of Looney Tunes, Sleeping Beauty, Dame May Whitey, and the Alzheimer bridge brigade grew less bitter. Rapprochements occurred; as her anger receded, family and friends reappeared in her life. She had been doing so well that, just before the time of the purse snatching, I had been considering raising the question of termination.
But when she was robbed, she felt as though she were starting all over again. Most of all, the robbery illuminated her ordinariness, her “I never thought it would happen to me” reflecting the loss of belief in her personal specialness. Of course, she was still special in that she had special qualities and gifts, that she had a unique life history, that no one who had ever lived was just like her. That’s the rational side of specialness. But we (some more than others) also have an irrational sense of specialness. It is one of our chief methods of denying death, and the part of our mind whose task it is to mollify death terror generates the irrational belief that we are invulnerable—that unpleasant things like aging and death may be the lot of others but not our lot, that we exist beyond law, beyond human and biological destiny.

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