True Confections (4 page)

I have chosen instead to worship in the house of psychoanalysis, which offers little solace in any immediate sense, and which in fact holds the possibility of a great deal of shame for anyone who voices a wish to be held and comforted and soothed.
You can only analyze your desire to be held and comforted and soothed, and you can discuss why it wouldn’t be appropriate for that ever to take place in this room with this person you employ to listen to you talk to yourself, and you can feel waves of shame that you are in the grip of the transference neurosis that drives this attachment to the doctor, to whom you pay enormous sums of money.

This is how I started seeing Ellie Quest-Greenspan on the side. Howard and I went to her just four times, at the recommendation of my dentist, who told me that her imperiled marriage had been saved by Ellie. Perhaps that sounds silly. I thought we did good work, as they say, in those appointments, but Howard was really only showing up to humor me. It was the least he could do, he said, with that door-opening, chair-pulling-out, walk-on-the-street-side-of-a-lady, superficial gallantry of his. Nothing that was said in those sessions (though he acknowledged that he knew he was breaking my heart, which was better than if he had no idea, I suppose) was going to change his plan to leave me and go to Madagascar, where he could finally truly inhabit his other life, his real life.

Howard walked out of the appointment halfway through that fourth and final meeting, saying he would get more satisfaction out of hitting a bucket of balls, and that was it. Ellie simply held me and rocked me while I cried for the remainder of the appointment. She asked if I wanted to come back, and I said I did, and I kept seeing her, with appointments every other week, while I was at the same time still seeing Dr. Gibraltar three or four times each week.

I would like to point out that I was never a big spender of the Ziplinsky millions in any way other than this, the tens of thousands of dollars in checks I wrote to Dr. Gibraltar over those twenty-five years of psychoanalysis. For all those prosperous
years with Howard, in that era when everyone around us was so frantically getting and spending, I lived modestly. For twelve years I was comfortable driving a sturdy Saab acquired when Julie was in preschool, though Howard, a car nut, was always urging me to get a fancy German sedan. (He was disappointed when the Saab finally died and I switched to a Jeep.) Unlike ordinary women (according to the magazines I read in the checkout line at the supermarket), I have no desire to own more than just one handbag, a nice one, a Coach bag in red leather, and I have only a few pairs of shoes. I have certainly never bought myself fancy jewelry or designer clothing. I have never gone to a spa to have processes applied to my body, and I have never taken vacations in the Caribbean or gone on a cruise. Wouldn’t most women in my position have felt utterly entitled to do all of those things routinely?

The most money I have ever spent on myself was when I bought an original Harriet Rose photograph, a charming picture of a cat sleeping in the window of a pharmacy, for my fiftieth birthday. I have modest needs and desires.

I resent, therefore, the statements that I have recklessly squandered Ziplinsky money on neurotic quantities of psychotherapy hours. (a) My medical expenses that are not covered by the insurance provided by Zip’s Candies are in no way relevant to the matters in dispute, (b) nothing about my psychotherapy has any relevance to my competence as an employee or an administrator at Zip’s Candies, (c) I concede that the gasoline in my Saab was paid for with a Zip’s Corporate ExxonMobil Speedpass account, though records have never been kept concerning personal mileage of Zip’s employees, and this is an irrelevancy, and (d) I am angry that in the name of family loyalty Howard has apparently chosen to disclose details of my private life to his sister.

D
R
. G
IBRALTAR DIDN’T
know about those continuing appointments with Ellie Quest-Greenspan. I didn’t want to tell him I was still seeing her, without Howard, because I had felt his skepticism hovering like a cloud in the air behind my head as I lay on the couch reporting to him about our first appointment with Ellie. When I described her credentials (surely not everyone with a degree from an alternative modality institute in Colorado is a kook) he shifted uneasily in his chair. When you’ve been in analysis a long time, you know how to read things like this, and he might as well have leaned over and smacked me in the face. Despite his obvious disapproval, I went into the details of the role-playing and nondominant hand, silent finger-painting dialogues that had taken place in that first fruitless appointment with Howard, and Dr. Gibraltar withdrew his attention and stopped taking notes (his scratching pen went silent). I knew he was punishing me, waiting for me to get to more reasonable material before he was willing to engage with me again.

After Howard and I met with Ellie the second time, when I told Dr. Gibraltar that she had been concerned about my cough and at the end of the hour had given me a CD of James Galway playing that ubiquitous
Echinacea Serenade
you hear in every massage therapist’s office, and that I had listened to it over the weekend and I thought it had really helped me get over my bad head cold, he made a doubtful sound in his throat, and I could hear his pen fall onto the rug, where he had dropped it in disgust.

I didn’t tell him that Howard had walked out of that fourth appointment, because I knew Dr. Gibraltar would have admired him for doing so, and if he took Howard’s side I would have been devastated. It was bad enough that I would have been expected to
analyze why I thought he had taken Howard’s side, while being stonewalled with the usual “I am a tabula rasa”–inflected interventions such as “How does that make you feel?” and “Where’s that coming from?” (It makes me feel that your countertransference is showing again, Doctor, which is always thrilling, but also it makes me feel like crap, and surely you’re the one who should know where it’s coming from, just check the tags on your own psychodynamic baggage!)

Meanwhile, something I said to Ellie a few weeks into our work together about missing analysis made her think I had terminated my treatment, though Dr. Gibraltar was in fact only away for the month of August (every year he went to Wellfleet with all the other psychoanalysts). I didn’t correct her impression at that moment, as I had only been taking a break before getting in touch with my anger at my unavailable father by doing some more screaming and hitting a pillow with a plastic bat, and I didn’t want to lose my emotional momentum.

No, that’s untrue. I didn’t want to admit to her that I was still on Dr. Gibraltar’s couch, still working away at the glacially slow process he once called “turning ghosts into ancestors.” When we had our first (I thought), hopeful marriage counseling appointment with Ellie, and I made reference to my long and ongoing experience with psychoanalysis, she had gotten a look on her face that was like the expression of a tolerant vegetarian friend to whom you have just mentioned a fantastic steak dinner. So I didn’t want to admit to her that I was still seeing him almost every day. Consequently, each of them thought I had come to my senses and stopped seeing the other.

I was committing therapist adultery. But what of it? I could afford it. I had the time. It helped me, and it made me feel more in control during the appointments. It pleased me especially when I was lying on the couch in that beige room with the
annoying wrinkled Escher poster that attracted my gaze even when I didn’t want to look at it (I get it, we cannot trust our distorted perceptions!) and I would parrot a bit of Ellie’s wisdom, and I could feel Dr. Gibraltar’s glowing approval of my progress as evidenced by this analytic insight, which was manifest in the way he made his little approval noise, sort of a satisfied chirp, and the way I could hear his pen scratching as he jotted process notes. It was the same set of approval sounds I loved to hear when I rambled through an especially successful interpretation of one of my fabricated dreams. Dr. Gibraltar was obsessed with my dreams. What harm did it do, paying the dream extortionist with counterfeit dreams that delighted us both?

Similarly, when working with Ellie in a feeling session, I would appropriate some of Dr. Gibraltar’s interpretations of my personality, blurting them out as if they were my own sudden associative insights in the middle of a process, and Ellie would always tell me she was proud of me and hold me in a particularly loving maternal hug that meant the world to me.

I liked the way this worked. I really miss all that therapy, now that Ellie has moved to Big Sur and Dr. Gibraltar has died. He broke his neck diving into the surf last August, in Wellfleet. I read about it in the
New York Times
. He hit a sandbar. He was seventy-three, and his wife is a social worker who was born in Santiago, Chile, and there were two married daughters and five grandchildren. A secretary called me a week after that to tell me the news and cancel our scheduled post–Labor Day sessions. She said she was a secretary but I knew she was actually one of his daughters. I could hear it in her voice. I let her tell me the sad news in a sensitive, caring way, and I pretended that I didn’t already know, because it was the only conversation I was ever going to have with anyone about Dr. Gibraltar’s death. I had nobody to tell.

So I miss all that therapy, but also, I do miss that funny private
dynamic. My only consolation is a secret little minor habit I have recently developed. Although I have the sturdy Tatnall teeth and gums and I floss regularly, and all of my dental checkups are quite routine, I have become a patient at three different dental practices, rotating my cleaning appointments among them on a regular schedule. Whenever I go for a cleaning, each of my dental hygienists praises me for my extraordinarily pristine oral hygiene. I like this. And for someone in the candy business, I do have exceptionally good teeth.

S
TRANGE AS IT
seems, when we met to discuss our wedding plans, Rabbi Matt didn’t care that I hadn’t formally converted, though in those days, when I was under a sweet spell of Ziplinsky enchantment, and grateful to have found this new and better family, I would certainly have done it, gladly and willingly. But Frieda insisted, perversely, that I shouldn’t, that it wasn’t at all necessary. In retrospect, it was just one more way she tried to keep me out. If I had converted, she wouldn’t have been able to hold it against me that I was a Gentile; she wouldn’t have been able to be such a martyr to her son’s mixed marriage.

My mother chose not to walk down the aisle formed between the few rows of folding chairs on the grass. Howard’s best man, Ted Thorntel (his Yale roommate), played Bach’s “Bourrée in E Minor” on his guitar as my father walked me stiffly to the front. He left me there with the intimacy of a man dropping a letter in a mailbox, and then he went to sit with my mother somewhere near the back. The ceremony was more bizarre than I realized at the time, as this was my first Jewish wedding, and it wasn’t until I accumulated some experience of ordinary Jewish weddings over the years that I realized retrospectively just how flaky and altogether nonstandard ours had been.

When Rabbi Matt pronounced us man and wife, we kissed a little self-consciously, and then Howard stomped on a glass wrapped in a linen napkin. We had debated skipping this ritual, but the rabbi had persuaded us a few hours earlier that it didn’t represent the consummation of the marriage so much as it symbolized the unchangeable transformation of the two of us, who would be as permanently altered by the state of marriage as the broken glass would be forever beyond reconstitution. Rabbi Matt, swaying slightly as he stood before us in his off-clean embroidered shirt, offered a final admonition as we faced him. Both of us were trembling and tearful as he told us that our love would be everlasting if we remembered each day to “Sprinkle, sparkle, and do art!”

Howard squeezed my hand tightly and I caught his eye and damp sobs of laughter erupted from both of us at once. Ted picked up his guitar and began to play the recessional music we had chosen, Gershwin’s “Love Is Here to Stay.” I felt incredible happiness at that moment, as we turned and walked the few yards across the grass between the rows of smiling people, and there it was, like a déjà vu of a déjà vu, the faint lingering notes of a lovely and familiar tune that cannot quite be identified. It was the echo of the burst of inexplicable joy I had felt on that first day at Zip’s Candies.

My parents were barely present that afternoon, at the margins of the gathering of perhaps fifty people. Neither of them met or talked with anyone they didn’t already know, except when absolutely cornered. Many of the guests on the Ziplinsky side (and most of the guests were on the Ziplinsky side) didn’t realize my parents were even there that day. I was Arson Girl friendless; neither of my parents had close family, and they had declined to invite as many guests as they had been offered to by Frieda, who was, to her credit, very gracious about hosting the
wedding, even though the family of the groom has no such obligation. It suited her; it gave her the advantage.