The Position

  Elisa had been a mistake from the start, though he’d once been attracted to her laugh, and her leotards, and how she wore her shiny dark hair pulled back into a knot in an attempt to look like one of George Balanchine’s women. In reality she was a fledgling sex researcher whose own ideas about sexuality were derivative. Elisa wrote a book called Bloodbonds: Loss of Virginity and Female Identity, for which she interviewed dozens of virgins and dozens of nonvirgins about their experiences or lack thereof, and for which, in the end, she could not find a publisher. No one had liked her, not the children, not Paul’s friends, no one, and yet he’d insisted that she was right for him, she was it for him, she’d be the one to get him over the hump in his life that was Roz.

  Roz, the first.

  Roz, the one he would always think of as his wife. These women who came afterward, they became second wife and third wife, but never simply wife. Elisa and then Elise were wives, the ones who came later, the ones who had missed all the things that had happened before them.

  “I can’t have the book in print again,” he said tightly to his son in the restaurant.

  “You don’t want to give Mom the pleasure,” said Michael. He pushed away his plate elaborately. “I’m not hungry,” he announced. “I hate this chicken.”

  “Don’t be a child,” said Paul, and it was an absurd comment, for if Michael wasn’t going to be a child here, in front of his father, then where? From the outside, they appeared to be just two men at different stages of life, one ascending, the other starting a shaky spiral downward. His son knew the truth about him, knew it like a visionary, or like a psychoanalyst.

  Paul didn’t want to give Roz one thing. Even thinking about the way he used to hold her against his chest created a tide of unbearable sensation. The second wife Elisa had been wiped away, his skin was clean of her, but Roz hung around like an apparition, and he had to defend against her, prevent her from staying for an eternity. He would not be seen with her in print again, not ever. Michael was correct; he would not give her the pleasure.

  Now a shadow darkened the midday table, and looking up he found himself facing Elise, she of the hundred-year nap. “There you guys are,” she said. “I looked on the golf course, but you weren’t there. I wish you’d told me you were coming here. I love this place. Michael, I see you got the chicken. Isn’t it good?”

  She was fully dressed in a lime-colored linen outfit, and if you hadn’t known she had been asleep only moments earlier, you could never have guessed. She smelled clean and limey, as though she’d chosen a scent to match her clothing. No sleep creases lined her face; she was carefully composed even now, in a way that Paul and Michael were not, and never would be.

  Paul realized how sorry he was to see her here. His own wife, and her presence sank his heart. “Here, I’ll pull up a chair for you,” Paul said, starting to stand, but two waiters, who had nothing much else to do, were already on the job, producing a high-backed chair, a place setting, and a menu.

  “What have you been talking about?” Elise asked, looking from Paul to Michael, and back again.

  “Oh, the usual suspects,” Paul said. “Life, love, birth, death,” and because he felt so guilty about his disappointment at seeing Elise conscious and ambulatory, he reached out and took her hand in his.

  Early on in his first marriage, Paul Mellow had boasted to friends at a dinner party that if you really want to get to know the woman you will marry, then you should begin your relationship as analyst and patient. For this was how Roz and Paul Mellow had met, forty-five years earlier, in January 1958, at the Ava Schussler Psychoanalytic Institute on East 36th Street in New York. The Institute occupied a surprisingly shabby town house in the middle of the block. You entered through the front and found yourself in a yellowed antechamber with a spectacularly ugly set of chairs. There the patients sat, lining the walls like people in a subway car who were conscientiously ignoring one another. In the beginning, Paul, age twenty-three, a clean-shaven, eager new candidate, was also one of those patients. The Institute accepted students without medical degrees; Paul was working on a PhD in psychology from NYU, and that was acceptable to the screening committee, though like all candidates in the program, he would have to undergo a classical analysis himself while attending classes.

  The Institute’s eponymous director was a woman in her eighties who had personally hit a kind of dazzling analytic trifecta, having been analyzed by Carl Rogers, Melanie Klein, and, very briefly, by Freud himself. At least this was how the story went. Ava Schussler was, to most people, a terrifying figure with her ice-white hair and gnarled cherrywood walking stick, and yet she was also apparently a gifted analyst whose grateful former patients sent her presents of potted plants and fudge and orchestra seats for Oklahoma!

  “To me, Melanie Klein always represented the approving mother,” Mrs. Schussler would say at a reception following someone’s lecture, with a gaggle of young, nodding analysts sitting nearby, preferably on the thin rug or on a scatter of low ottomans. She always spoke slowly, punctuating sentences with sighs or long umms, as though she were extemporizing. “And Freud, he was . . . well, oh . . . I guess I made him out to be the short-tempered father. Sometimes I would be late to an appointment, and I could almost see his anger in the air as I entered his consulting room at Berggasse neunzehn, though naturally he suppressed it, for it would have been an interference. And I guess that I,” she added after a moment, chuckling lightly, “am the eternal daughter.” In reality she seemed like no one’s daughter, but instead like someone’s imperious, irritating, ultimately shunned grandmother.

  One night Paul dreamed that he and Ava Schussler herself were dueling. The battle took place between her cherrywood cane and his penis, both instruments clanging loudly, as if made not of knotted wood or fibrous muscle, but of steel. He knew enough to be wary of her, yet he was also excited to be in her presence. Having spent far too much time applying electrodes to mice in a laboratory during graduate school and helping a professor conduct sodium-pentothal experiments on volunteers from Riker’s Island, the correctional facility for men, he was restless and trying to give his life some shape. Psychoanalysis was still in vogue, a lasting craze in a long line of American crazes—the whalebone corset, New England Transcendentalism, the jitterbug, anti-Communism, and so on—and to Paul the idea of entering his own analysis, and later managing those of other people, seemed a compelling way to spend his life.

  He had come from a neat row house in Queens, from a set of parents—a pipe fitter and a housewife—who were earnest, kind, and unwaveringly literal people who said grace around the dinner table, almost never read books, had no insight into the self, and certainly meant well, but when he was a child, had often told their exasperatingly questioning son, “You think too much.” Yes. That must be the problem; he thought too much! It made sense, even as he was offended by the sentiment, as if the mind were there to simply lie around like a piece of liver in a pan. Year after year he thought about his parents’ remark, reminding himself of it so that he would never forget what his problem was and why he felt alone much of the time.

  As a brainy boy he attracted similar girls, and they always wanted to sit endlessly at a varnished library table and work out elaborate outlines for school papers they were jointly writing. The girls were decidedly unerotic, like Adele Flick with her shadowed upper lip and furred forearms, or Susan Masterson, whose features seemed to have been manually pushed into the thick flesh of her face. Or else they were sexually unapproachable, like the dark-haired beauty Margaret Paymer, who did physics problems in her head, and who, for four years, had been writing “an epic poem about seafarers,” but who was apparently saving herself for the equally brilliant, as-yet-faceless man she would someday marry.

  Sometimes Paul would notice a claque of fast, easy, hungry girls lurking on a street corner, and he understood that they weren’t virgins, and it infuriated him that he had no access to their accessibility. Their hair was piled on their head, their breasts were forced
upward and outward through some miracle of cloth and wire, and their bodies, he knew, were pale and hot and endlessly calisthenic. But they would never want him, for though he was good-looking enough, he was too cautious, too smart, too mild, too everything, and so he stayed on his own, waiting for the time when he would get what he wanted. It would happen someday, he knew; he simply had to believe this, or else there was no point to life. He lay in bed at night, fantasizing about sexy girls and women of all kinds, big chesty ones, small shy ones, older ones with entire résumés of sexual experience. The only quality these phantom women had in common was their willingness, their eagerness, their desperation to have intercourse with him, and as a result, Paul’s bedroom at night was a festival of masturbation.

  Later, in college and even in graduate school, he began to find women to sleep with who were both attractive and bright, and though sex was certainly exciting and in fact a great relief after all this time, none of the women were willing to go deeply enough into the world of the bed, to try things that he could only vaguely imagine, but which he longed to make real. No, these women wanted straight-up fucking, the kind they’d read about. You could kiss them first, you could touch their breasts, but then they expected you to perform right away, as though they’d read a manual in which this was described. He couldn’t help but feel disappointed, for he wanted to linger, to be daring, to use his mouth, to move about, to doodle his way through lovemaking with a sense of leisure and discovery. Once, when he tried to keep the lights on during sex, Cynthia Brancato, a student at NYU’s dental school, looked at him with furor, the small panes of her own sharp, perfect teeth showing. How dare he try to see her during the sex act! She wanted only shadows and muted colors, with the outlines of body parts occasionally rising up for attention in the darkness.

  One day when Paul was a graduate student working part-time at the lab, attaching electrodes to quivering mice, it occurred to him that he could find a way to “think too much” professionally, while wading waist-deep in the river of sex and sexuality, a place that no woman would yet let him go. He would train to become a psychoanalyst, spending his days sitting in a chair and applying traditional Freudian principles to the ramble of words uttered by the person lying nearby. He’d always enjoyed reading Freud’s case histories, the torment of those patients laid out for all to see. All people were tormented, though usually not to the point of the Wolf-Man or poor Dora with her unproductive coughs and fear and trembling. If he was lucky, he would meet an exciting female analyst-in-training who would want to have all kinds of sex, in all kinds of positions, perhaps with the lights on, and certainly without shame. They would be vocal together, and adventurous, and equal in their shared mission.

  Yes, Mom and Pop, I think too much, he imagined himself admitting to his parents, but here is what I’ve decided to do about it, and in his vision he was much older, wearing a three-piece suit and a watch fob; he had sophistication and could finally justify his absorption in thought. Actually, he knew in some deep and sheepish way, the truth was that he had never exactly thought too much—he had just thought too much about himself. But as a psychoanalyst, he would train his eye away from the inside of its lid, and instead he would focus on other people’s hidden worlds and longings and failures.

  When he first began his training, his parents presented him with a gift: a set of books, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, with baby blue covers and crisp, uncut pages. Inside the first volume, his father had written, “To our Son who Makes us Prouder than He’ll ever Know. With Affection From your Mother and your Father.” He was moved to tears when they shyly presented the books to him one night in their living room. How had they known what to get him, and even where to buy it?

  For the first few months at the Schussler Institute, Paul Mellow attended weekly classes, wrote papers, and began an analysis with one of the senior analysts, a Dr. Sherman Long, whose unwavering, gentle paternalism was a tonic to all his male patients who hadn’t gotten enough of their fathers, those distracted, unyielding men, those actuaries and patent lawyers and pipe fitters. Paul would rest his head against the burnt-orange hide of the analytic couch in Long’s office and speak so bitterly about his own father that after a couple of years of this there was no bitterness left, only a small, thin, sucked-on lozenge of regret.

  This was what most men arrived at eventually in their analyses, Paul began to realize as he compared notes with a few of the other young analytic candidates, all of whom, to his dismay, were men. The group of them would have breakfast once a week at the Murray Hill Coffee Shop on Lexington and 39th, where above the clatter of plates and china and shouted egg orders, they talked about their analysts and their fathers and their dreams and their progress. Though the details and locales were always different, there was homogeneity to the experience of being a son: it seemed to mean wanting more than you were given. And this, he’d learned so far in life, was also the experience of being a lover. Why didn’t women want to go the distance, to taste everything and try everything? Why were they always hesitant when push came to shove? Four times a week, Paul dutifully recounted his bedroom dissatisfactions to Dr. Long.

  “Marie, yes, Marie . . .” Long once said thoughtfully, stroking the edges of his mustache, after Paul had mentioned a former girlfriend. “Forgive me, Paul. Was she the one who gagged uncontrollably when she attempted to orally gratify you, or the one whose mother had lupus?”

  The conversations he had with his analyst had never seemed to go deeply enough—not unlike sex. Later on, after being sent on his way by Dr. Long, pronounced by him “an interesting, still somewhat conflicted young man who will make a fine analyst,” he realized that he alone seemed to want something more than what was available. Almost everyone else accepted the limitations of dialogue, of bodies in motion together, of being mortal. It was depressing to find this everywhere he looked, but still Paul slogged on during dates with unsatisfying women, and, now, with the two analytic patients he had recently begun treating.

  One of the patients was a handsome homosexual teenager named Ricky Lukins who looked about thirty-five, and the other was a thirty-five-year-old reference librarian named Miss Fowler, who looked about sixty, and who spoke at length about how she lived in fear of the cataloging system being changed. “And all my good work, gone down the drain,” she said mournfully, as though it had actually happened.

  Paul worried about his interpretations, fretting to his supervisor, Dr. Marty Stengel, about whether they were good enough, original enough, or whether, in fact, they were perhaps wrong. The work was intermittently interesting and deadly, like all jobs, he supposed. Other people’s interior lives could be compelling, but there were occasionally times when Paul had to suppress the desire to stand up during a session and say, “You said what to her? Now you’ve ruined everything!”

  Still, he tried hard to be attentive and insightful and consistent; it would never have occurred to him, in those early days, that he was the kind of person who could commit a serious transgression. But he was; oh, he was.

  In the winter, Paul Mellow arrived at the Institute one day in a snowstorm, unwrapping a snow-crusted muffler from his frozen, red face. He was to meet a new patient that morning, and there in the waiting room he found himself looking into her warm, young, radiant, intelligent face. Her name was Rosalyn Woodman (“Roz, if you don’t mind,” she’d said when they shook hands). Upon absorbing her beauty, he practically began to shout at her to come inside this very minute.

  Paul Mellow was Roz Woodman’s analyst for only seven months. Throughout that time, the analyst tried his best to remain neutral, to listen “with evenly hovering attention,” as Freud had suggested. But as he listened, and glanced at the rise and fall of her chest and rib cage as she breathed, and as he took in the full power of her beautiful skin, sympathetic nature, palpable intellect, and the plaintiveness of her desire to make something of her life, he became frustrated by the need for distance.

  “I nev
er really relax completely,” she said. “I never try to have an experience for experience’s sake. I’m always thinking about how things seem to the outside world, and not how they feel to me. I don’t know why it’s like that, but it is.”

  Paul scrawled in his notebook, trying to catch her words, to preserve them for himself, like a little treat he could take out later when no one was around. For what she was saying seemed to exist on a track that ran parallel to his own unhappiness. “I don’t want to be afraid of things,” she went on. “I don’t want to be held back all the time, but I keep noticing that I hold myself back anyway, and don’t realize it before it’s too late. I think it might be related to being female. I’m pretty certain that you’ve never experienced anything even remotely like this.”

  Paul bit down gently on his tongue to keep from admitting the truth to her. It was his job here to be quiet, to shut up, to not impose, to not try to fill in a moment of silence just because it was there. Learn to work with the silence, he told himself. Let her speak or not speak. Keep yourself out of it.

  Paul sat bathing in that silence, keeping himself still, and steady, listening so hard to Roz Woodman’s words that he realized his teeth were clenched in concentration, as though, through her speech, he might get more of her. Countertransference was common, he knew, and in the beginning he tentatively discussed the matter with Dr. Stengel, making sure to dissemble enough so that his feelings appeared to be limited to sensations of protectiveness toward his lovely and sensitive patient.

  “I just want to help her so much; she seems so fragile,” Paul told Stengel. “She had a very unusual, difficult childhood. I guess, what with her history and all, she brings out these fatherly feelings of countertransference in me.”