Your Voice in My Head (7 page)

I told my classmates I was going to Hebrew lessons, which was a weird invention given that my sister and I were the only Jews at school. How to make me seem like even more of an outsider. But I kept eating that brownie, looking at the therapist’s built-up shoes. People decided I was getting better, and I was even invited to a party. My mum took me to get a special outfit, preparing for this party to which a child had been forced to invite me because my mother had complained that invitations ought not be handed out in class if the whole class was not invited. Preparing me for something to which I was not welcome and had no place.

What was funny was the mothers who openly disliked me. They knew, because they were adults, that something was off with me, something that would never fall into place. Girls would corner me in the bathroom to tell me: “
My
mother says
your
family are common.”

Lucy, she of the note, said, “Don’t you feel bad for killing Christ?” and I said, “No, I feel good,” and then she called me a nigger. Lucy was Greek. It took until I was twenty-seven, on a 6 train up to Dr. R’s, to think to myself, Hey, hang on. On the ethnic scale, if Nubian is out here and Swede is over there, surely Jew and Greek fall in the same place?

“Dr. R? Don’t you think, on the ethnic scale, that Jew and Greek fall in the same place?”

“It sounds right. On the contributions to mankind scale too.”

I take a piece of his paper and painstakingly draw him the ethnic scale.

“Does it matter?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because it wasn’t fair.”

He raises his eyebrows. Writes something down.

“Have you ever known life to be fair?”

“No.”

“It would be a funny time to start.”

“Yeah.”

“Probably better to just run with the good things.”

I look at the diagram I drew. “Jews win.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Duh!” I hand him the piece of paper. “We invented psychiatry.” I smile.

“And then we wrote songs about it.”

I sing: “Officer Krupke, you’re really a square / This boy don’t need a judge, he needs an analyst’s care …”

Dr. R, beaming, sings, really badly: “It’s just his neurosis that oughta be curbed / he’s psychologically disturbed!”

We had a lot of fun in our sessions. Our sessions were often the most cheerful I was in a week. Not manic, like when I listen to “Pata Pata” by Miriam Makeba fourteen times in a row. Just properly happy. Other patients remember him as a natty dresser, but to me Dr. R dressed awkwardly, like
my dad, who wears shorts and black leather lawyer shoes at beach resorts.

“You know how all Jewish men are kind of gay?” I ask Dr. R not long after we meet.

“Yes!” he says, quite earnestly, swiveling in his chair.

Encouraged, I add, “Like how they all love musicals?”

“I love musicals!”

“Yeah, my dad does …”

“Which one’s his favorite?”

“Um,
The Music Man?”

“I
love The Music Man!”

From the start, Dr. R feels like family, but in a good way. Like a family member you’d never have to write a thank-you letter to because he’d never send you something that itched.

One afternoon, I come to his office quite agitated. “You know the band Coldplay?” He shakes his head. “Yes you do.”

He shrugs. “OK. Fine. You’re seeing one of them?”

“Hell NO! Jesus, Dr. R! Why do you assume that?”

“Track record.”

“OK. Right. Coldplay. They’re a band and they’re really popular and the singer is called Chris Martin and I keep seeing him in my neighborhood running errands and wearing a ridiculous hat.”

“So?”

“It’s sort of a felt jester’s hat made out of wool. Why is Chris Martin wearing that hat? What does it mean?”

He puts his hands out in front of him like a Borscht Belt comic trying to get the audience to settle down. “I don’t think it means anything, Emma.”

“It means something.”

He distracts me away from distraction.

“I’m more concerned about the cutting.”

“Really?” I say this like, “How eccentric of you.”

He raises his eyebrows at the page. I catch from him in occasional split seconds an inner sigh of, She’s a cuckoo clock! It makes me trust him more.

When people say, “How are you?” he’s the only one to whom I can truly answer, “Dude! I am not OK.”

He never says, “I am not your dude.”

I MEET GLORIA STEINEM
after my friend the poet and activist Sarah Jones tells her about a novel I wrote, an opus of self-mutilation. Gloria Steinem, whom I have admired from so far for so long, listens as I describe the book, then asks if I was sexually abused. Did I say we’re on an escalator? After a screening of
The Manchurian Candidate?
The remake with Meryl Streep? And that I’m holding a half-empty bucket of popcorn? I swivel my head up to Steinem from the moving step below.

“No. I wasn’t sexually abused.”

She says, “Are you sure?”

I say that I’m sure, and offer her some popcorn.

The Tiffany lamp seems exceptionally bright in East 94th Street that session.

“Dr. R. Gloria Steinem told me most cutters were sexually abused.”

“A significant portion,” he says, turning down the lamp, knowing by now which squint refers to which circumstantial discomfort.

“Right, so a majority of cutters were sexually abused. It’s just that: I wasn’t.”

“OK.”

“So, like, I sounded really super-defensive and evasive with one of my great heroines. On a moving staircase.”

This turns out to be a double session, something we rarely do. And it’s funny we take up so much time, because he’s unusually silent. I hear myself talking and think, Stop talking now, let him say something now. But I don’t.

“I wasn’t sexually abused as a kid. I was, I think, like almost every woman I know, sexually weirded-out as a kid.”

He nods. “Anything specific?”

Of course, of course something specific. Something with a specific landscape and even a specific scent. I put my head on my knees, and then sit up again.

“I was working for the
Sunday Times
, writing about music. I was sixteen. I’d never had sex. I met this woman at a Breeders show I was reviewing.” I look up. “They’re a great, great band.” I say this as if it somehow qualifies what’s coming next. “And this woman was from San Francisco and we talked the whole show and late into the night—she was forty and really beautiful and there alone—and she said, ‘Come stay with me in California.’ ”

She was tiny, with very white skin and a platinum bob, as if Louise Brooks’s hairdo got ruined in the wash.

“She was sort of mystical, how she looked, how she talked, that she was there at all, in this sea of moshing teenagers. She made me think of one of the goddesses on my oracle cards. Wait. I have that the wrong way. She gave me my first pack of goddess cards. I didn’t know, until after I
left her, what she reminded me of. Anyway. You know I’ve always loved being around older women …”

“I know.”

“And she was in a fucking band!”

Not a successful band, they hadn’t been signed yet, and at forty, it was probably unlikely. But they gigged regularly in San Francisco, had a following there.

“So I went to stay with her for a week, going there with, honestly, with this huge crush. I’d never been with a woman, but I really, really wanted to be with her. She gave off absolutely no vibes that she was that way inclined, by the way. I was just fixated on her, the way I’ve been fixated on a dress or a book or a lipstick.”

He’s making a ballpoint dash here and a ballpoint dash there, and he looks up for half a moment and simply smiles when I say:

“She didn’t mention she had a husband.

“I’d just landed, and there she is at the airport, waiting for me, and she takes me for lunch at a pier-side restaurant. She waves in the middle distance as this beautiful boy walks towards us. But he doesn’t stop when he sees her: he keeps walking, right to the edge, then he dives into the water. And as all the restaurant patrons gape, he climbs out of the water, shakes himself like a dog, and sits down with us.

“Her husband was much younger than her. He was in his twenties, maybe his early twenties, it’s hard to judge other people’s ages when you’re sixteen. Everybody’s just
older
. Everybody is nefarious and wants you and has ulterior motives and everybody is playing at Dangerous Liaisons. You know?”

Tick. Dr. R goes: tick, on his notepad.

“So her husband was completely surly and rude. He barely acknowledged me when she introduced us and it took me the lunch to understand that they were married. They argued all through dessert and they never stopped. My heart was pounding and I thought, I’m sixteen, where am I, what have I done?

“We got to their apartment and I realized they had to walk past my daybed to get in and out of their room. She and I would spend our days on the beach—she’d photograph me in my bikini. I pretended I was Bettie Page and she was Bunny Yeager, you know, the female photographer who made Bettie a star. She’d take all these pictures of me and I loved posing for her. I had all this tits and ass that felt exciting in a strange land. Back home in England, the tits and ass just felt like bad omens.

“At night I’d hear them argue, screaming fights, and I’d hide under the blankets, like a kid and her parents.

“He got into my bed one night, said he needed to talk. That they couldn’t stop fighting and he didn’t know what to do. I was flattered. I told him that I knew she loved him and they’d sort it out.

“What did I know? I’d never had a boyfriend. My platinum-bobbed beauty started to be too busy during the afternoons to hang out with me—she had a new shift in a bar. So she assigned him to keep me entertained. We went to see
Two-Lane Blacktop
at a revival cinema. The film was confused, largely silent, and bubbling with sexual curiosity, just like me.

“He took me on a motorbike ride across the Golden Gate Bridge. I was shaking so hard the motorbike was starting
to swerve and he was saying ‘Goddamnit, Emma! You’re shaking like a fucking leaf! You’re making the bike swerve. We’re gonna have an accident!’

“We nearly did, several times. By the time he let me off, I was drained of all color, all feeling. It was evening, and he said I needed a shot.

“Then we were watching her band play. She had this great girl playing bass. Then we were at a bar. No. Then we were at a bar, then we were watching her band play. He had been feeding me Jägermeister shots. I couldn’t stand up, and her band was done, and she wanted to stay out and party. I was spoiling it.

“So he told her he’d walk me home. They kissed for a really long time before we left.

“We were in an alleyway when he said that he had seen the photographs she’d been taking of me in my bikini, on the beach.

“And then he kissed me.

“And I kissed him back.”

I wait for Dr. R to write that down. He doesn’t.

“Then I stopped kissing him back. But he kept going. He moved me forward until we were leaning against a church and I could see a stained-glass window. No light was refracting through it, because it was night. He pulled down my pants. Because it was from behind, and because I had never had sex, I didn’t even know if it was normal sex or if that meant it was anal sex.”

Dr. R still isn’t writing.

“It didn’t hurt much. I wasn’t there. He said he couldn’t help it. He said it was because of my body.”

I look at my feet. I have on red sneakers I don’t ever remember buying.

“If it didn’t hurt much and I wasn’t there, what was it? What am I upset about? Why did it leave me feeling marked?”

He says nothing.

“Afterwards, on the street, we ran into her bassist. She sensed something weird and asked if I wanted to go hang out at her place and he let me go off with her. So I went to her loft, with all these hippie musicians hanging out, and she laid me down on the sofa and I told her, I wasn’t crying or anything, I just said, really matter-of-factly, ‘I think I’ve just had sex.’

“It wasn’t the thing of it that upset me so much as the name of it. I passed out cold on the sofa, and when I woke up, she said, ‘I called the …’ ”

I don’t like this part. I really, really don’t like this part, for so many reasons. I start to cry.

“She said, ‘I called the rape hotline.’

“I didn’t ask her to do that.”

Dr. R finally looks up. “You were unconscious, how could you?”

I shrug.

“When he pulled down your pants, you asked him to stop?”

“Yes.”

“Because?”

“Because I didn’t want to have sex.”

“He didn’t stop.”

“No. I wanted him, I guess. But not like that. I’d never
even made out with a boy. But mainly, I was devastated because I lost her, my platinum blonde. I wrote, like, these love letters and she never replied. What I heard through the bassist was, he had told his wife I hit on him and he made a mistake.”

I remember, on the plane, I was too sore to sit down.

I remember too, that before I lost consciousness on the bassist’s sofa, one of her roommates was playing Leonard Cohen, splicing together different lyrics of Cohen admiring the female nude. My dad and I had seen him play the year before at the Royal Albert Hall. And now Leonard Cohen was there in the aftermath I couldn’t tell my dad about. Links and ribbons, people knowing things without knowing. I’ll love Leonard for the rest of my life. My lids heavy from the Jägermeister, a searing discomfort in my vagina, the last voice you hear …

“So, anyway,” I tell Dr. R, “I don’t like standing-up sex.”

I’m ready to change the subject now.

“It’s funny that you associate certain positions with certain lovers when you get old enough. There’s ‘the one who always wanted me to sit on his face.’ ‘The one who always wanted me on top, facing away so he could see my ass.’ Bianca says it’s called ‘Reverse Cowgirl.’ ”

Dr. R blushes. I don’t like making him blush so I’m trying to joke it all away now, inventing sexual positions to make him laugh: “Extravagant Car Phone.”

“Rheumatic Kitten.”