Indecision (18 page)

“And the fact that you can’t, the fact that you think you have this special private reservoir of truth inside you—I really don’t see how this squares with your I-agree-with-everybody-about-everything-ism. This is the one thing everybody
does
agree on.
Everybody
thinks they have their own special something inside. Only it happens to be so vague it can’t be described. So everyone gets to keep their specialness all to themselves. So we all get to prefer ourselves to everyone else.”

Now with my paddle I slapped a few splashes of water at Alice for her insta-forgetting of our whole conversation. “Do you still smoke weed? Because I just
explained
—”

“Not why aren’t you seeing a girl. Why aren’t you seeing a
shrink
? I’ve asked you this before. They have been known to help. Or they’ve been alleged to help.”

“You really should meet Dan, Alice—that’s what
I
keep saying.” Alice and I sometimes would try to set each other up. “He’s also very smart and cynical about things.”

“I will have coffee with Dan if you will make an appointment with a shrink. Deal?”

I reminded her that in my capacity as an assistant communications technician subcontracted to Pfizer, I pulled down only around 26K a year and couldn’t afford a psychiatrist. I didn’t even have health insurance, despite what I’d told mom and dad, and whenever a cab bore down on me as I sauntered across the street I half hoped that if it landed a direct hit I would die rather than be maimed, lest our parents get cleaned out by hospital bills.

“So talk to mom and dad,” Alice was saying.

“Oh that would be great therapy.”

“No.” She sighed deeply. “I mean about money. Ask them for money! For the shrink!”

“Oh. But no—because dad is bankrupt—”

“Formally.”

“—and I’m not going to ask mom to subsidize my mental problems. Which then she’d have her suspicions of confirmed.” So we just kayaked along in silence with wavelets quietly laving our bright, plastic-kazoo-like hulls.

I looked off to the glass shore of lower Manhattan. Its towers, especially the two tallest ones, were so bright and smooth that my mind seemed to squint and clutch at them without result. And the nearby water was equally dazzling, the whole lulled surface inlaid with blinding facets.

“I have an idea,” Alice was saying. “
I
can play shrink.
I
could see you. We could do it twice a week. I’m serious. My schedule this semester isn’t going to be that bad.”

“But you’re my—” I looked at her. “I don’t know, Al. Some of my issues must be related to you.”

“Trust me. We can deal with it. I’ve read tons of psychoanalysis. And I’m free—gratis.”

“No way. Come and lie down on your couch? That wouldn’t be just way too weird?”

“It’d be fun.” She was smiling, which I liked. I always
had
liked Alice, always potentially too much. For example there was the incident which occurred one Christmas break at our old Lakeville house, when Alice gave me and a friend some acid with instructions to report back in a few hours. My friend—Ford, as it happened—soon got totally absorbed in the movie of Pink Floyd’s
The Wall
—sorry, but true—with tears running down his face, refusing to be torn away. Whereas I feared absorption very much, and went to find Alice. She was sitting up reading in her four-poster bed. I wanted there not to be any evil brick wall between
us,
and since she was at that time a sex-positive individual opposed to all conventions, and had given me the acid herself, I figured she would endorse anything I thought or did while on it. Therefore I climbed onto her bed and tried to kiss her. “No, Dwight. You’re very funny and smart and cute. But I don’t want to kiss you. The incest taboo is
that
strong.”

“You’ll lie on the couch,” she was saying now, out on the water. “I’ll smoke a fat cigar.”

“I don’t know, Al. I could imagine that for my problems to be cured by you might somehow compound them.” Then again people often said that the best way out of your difficulties was to exacerbate them.
The worse, the better
was a slogan I seemed to remember Al quoting from somewhere. “At least you already know about my childhood,” I allowed.

“Right. And this is typically one of the problems with analysis: how can the analyst evaluate the claims of the analysand? She has nothing to check them against. So, yes—”

“So you’re saying only siblings should be each other’s shrinks?”

“You have a tendency to generalize—that’s another issue we’ll discuss. We’ll combine a cognitive approach with a more Freudian . . .”

“But aren’t my issues your issues too? Something is wrong with us, Al. Clearly. I mean, the same thing—but as different for me as for you. What
is
it, do you think?”

“It’s an overdetermined phenomenon. This is something we’ll discuss. Part of it is that we belong to a social class and a generation where our parents live too long and remain too economically powerful.”

“Is this going to be Communist therapy?”

“Neither mom nor dad shows any sign of declining, much less
dying.
Any fairy tale, the hero or heroine’s parents are dead or as good as dead. Otherwise the fantasies can’t come true.”

“Dad drinks too much. That’s declining. Mom—”

“They’ve been fucked up in the same way for years. They’ve really made a type of health out of being so fucked up.”

“So should we kill them?” I asked. “And take the remaining money? Mom still has money.”

“Which she gives to dad. This is also fucked up. But you love them.”

“And you love
me.
That’s another of our problems. We have this kind of unfulfilled incestuous—”

“Speak for yourself.”

“Not that I’d ever propose actual
in
cest.”

“This is about as close as you’re going to get. Therapy from your sister?”

“See, you’re trying to seduce me into doing it!
That’s
what’s fucked up.”

“Unneutralized erotic transference is a common feature of the clinical situation.”

“That’s total malpractice, talking like that. I don’t even know what that
means.
”

Nevertheless we arranged for me to come by her apartment before work on weekdays. And then as if this agreement had been our destination all along, we turned around and headed back to shore. Back over Battery Park you could see a few kites with blunt rocking heads and wriggling tails straining like lost spermatozoa in the light.

“Another thing,” she said. “We have to talk about this evil job you have.”

“Tech support is not
evil.
It’s beneath good and evil. This isn’t really going to be Communist therapy, is it?”

“Beggars can’t be choosers.”

“That doesn’t sound very progressive.” And as we neared the shore I said, “What about you, Al, you seeing anyone? Like romantico-sexually? In that sense?” Alice was the one who’d coined the whole
romantico-sexual
term—the least romantic- or sexual-sounding term you could think of. But there was a labor organizer in Ft. Collins, Colorado, with whom she had, or at least
had
had, passionate IM-exchanges on apparently wide-ranging subjects. She’d even flown out to see him and come back with a roll of film proving his reasonably handsome and rugged existence. Yet last I’d checked the only framed pictures in her apartment were of mom and dad and the two dogs, and one of me.

“I miss Josh,” Alice conceded. But the melancholy seemed to belong about equally to the missing him and the not-missing-him-more.

I sighed. “Dude, I miss
someone.
”

FIFTEEN

Alice had opened the door dressed as herself in some seventies-ish striped silk pajama bottoms and this defunct indie band’s tee shirt bearing the words MEET THE PERSON MOST RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR SAFETY. But also she was smoking a big fat Freudian cigar. “These are hard to light,” she said.

I just shook my head and went on in.

“Sit—or you can lie down—wherever you feel most comfortable. Of course I don’t have the right kind of couch.”

I sat down in her tan corduroy chair. “How it’s going Al?”

“You can call me that instead of Dr. Wilmerding, but during our sessions we won’t discuss
my
life. Or I won’t anyway.”

The chair was like a giant friendly person’s lap and seemed too comfortable to face my torments in. I stood up and looked around. “You know how I love it here.”

Dad had given Alice lots of money before losing so much of it himself, and along with this spacious prewar one-bedroom she had purchased some nice furniture and artworks, plus these soundproof double-paned windows that, hushing the city, made the dim environs with the warm lamps and the lazy fan, the plants and the green Middle Eastern rug, and then this red abstract painting that kind of throbbed in the gloom like a last mental sunset, feel like a semi-oasis somehow lodged in the metropolis. Outside you could see the sunlight just pouring it on, lighting up the surrounding walls of ocher brick and the neighbor’s window box—but that was outside.

“Maybe we’ll try the bedroom,” I said. “A bed’s kind of like a couch. But will it be revealing where I choose? Are you making notes about this?”

The little twin bed in the bedroom was covered in a pleasant and reassuringly girlish lavender bedspread. Yet directly above it was mounted the notorious, pouting
ibex
from Alice’s and dad’s last hunting trip. Of course I’d seen it before, but still . . . “Isn’t that ibex troubling to any partners you might bring home, Al?” And it seemed like probably similarly troubling to the prospective lover—I thought as I sat down testing the bed—would be the propaganda poster from the former Eastern Germany, in which a grinning greedy capitalist, with dollar signs for pupils, reaches out from the sky to try and snatch up the smoke-belching factories of the generally pretty unappealing-looking workers’ paradise, until his fingers are met by an enormous red hammer smashing down on them. The text underneath said
Unsere Antwort!
The meaning was
Our Answer!
and the feeling was of pain.

Alice sat beneath the slatted blinds in a chair upholstered in nylon like a winter parka. Blue smoke, the color of x-rays, leaked from her sarcastic mouth and got slowly riddled by undetectable air currents crumbling it away.

“I’m not going to ask you leading questions. You’ll need to come up with our topics. In that way the ultimate cure, not that I expect you to believe in any such thing—but in that way the ‘cure,’ such as it is, will resemble the process itself. So what’s on your mind, little brother?”

“Hmm. Well to start with, I do feel like I can be honest with you, Alice. That’s nice. It’s nice that you already know my arguably worst secret—I mean the mildly incestuous feelings that from what I’ve heard it usually takes a long time to uncover.”

“Don’t give me that—you don’t
desire
me.” She choked a little from unfamiliarity with being a cigar connoisseur. “The only reason you’ve been able to overcome the incest taboo mentally is that it’s so firmly in place as an
actual
obstacle to your desire.” She kind of burped and choked at once. “It’s such a weak and easy fantasy for you to have, because actually you don’t want it fulfilled. It’s just that it’s out there in the culture—it’s a shoo-in for pathos and drama. It’s a one-size-fits-all secret. Therefore fake. Look, the trouble is not that you and I or any siblings actually want to fuck one another. The trouble is that we don’t—everything would be so easy if we did. We like each other, we know each other well, thank God we don’t have to meet each other’s parents. So why, then,” she was asking rhetorically, “do you fantasize about me? Why—?”

“But I don’t, I swear!”

Smoke ring, shrug. “The reason you have this idea is that I’m the one girl you actually got to know in the right way. It was gradual, it was inevitable—obviously we didn’t have any choice in the matter. There wasn’t all this deformingly distinctive and abrupt self-presentation that constitutes contemporary urban dating, where you always have to give your stunted personality the hard sell—the hooks, the slogans, the shtick. Where right away you always try to imply
Me, me,
I
belong to
your
demographic—and no one else ever will.
”

“Hey Alice, wait—”

“I mean, why do you think Nurse and Soldier are so popular with people like us?”

“You mean the band Nurse and Soldier?”

“Of course I mean the band. Go onto urge.com, look at the personals, everybody’s like, ‘Really into Nurse and Soldier.’ That’s how they describe themselves.”

“But hold on—”

“Just bear with an adjunct professor for a second, would you? The characteristic feeling of Nurse and Soldier—like
I’m alone and full of dread and all I want is a tiny, tiny house to be safe in for a little while
—everyone feels that all the time. But it’s a feeling you don’t cop to. So when you do it’s a guaranteed huge relief to find that someone else feels the same. The response is, ‘Oh, you too?’—when actually all you’ve discovered is that this other person feels the one thing that they’re bound to feel.”

“Al, you listen to Nurse and Soldier. More than me I bet. You’ve got
bootlegs.
”

“Nurse and Soldier are great. I listen to them constantly. But if I met some guy who felt the same way—meaningless. So we happen to share the basic feeling-tone of all anxious young white over-slash-undereducated people who happen to live in first-world cities? So what? And it’s interesting, another thing—”

“Hey, who’s the patient here? Aren’t I the one supposed to have the issues?”

“Sorry. I think I feel a little high from the cigar—making me chatty.” She got up and I heard the cigar sizzle out as it landed in the toilet.

When she returned she sat down with a notebook on her lap. “Ah yes, your problems . . . I bought a new journal to fill with them.”

“That’s a big journal. Is that a three-section notebook?”