Other people

Twenty-six Koch

Last night when I went down for the newspaper, a boy of seventeen, eighteen, dark, bumped into me on purpose. In a Spanish accent he says to me so that everyone can hear, "Watch where you're going, mister!" I look right and left. No policeman anywhere. Not a friendly face. Just other Spanish-speaking people, young, old, waiting to see if a fight will start.

I walk back to my house without my newspaper. I go upstairs, double-lock my door, imprisoning myself in my apartment. I cannot talk about the change in the streets to Marta. Can I call a friend like Allan-berg and tell him what happened? He will think me crazy to worry about a teen-ager who bumps me in the street. Do I call 911? The police will think I'm crazy too. I go to sleep thinking what is the matter with me, a small thing happens and I make some apocalypse out of it.

In the morning, my mood is still somber, but soon I have a phone call from my angel Francine and I am suddenly manic like a child. She says she has an unexpected conference at work, she will have to miss the regular hour, could she make it late in the day. I seize the opportunity like a gift. How late in the day, the last appointment? She says yes, that will be all right, is it convenient, and I say oh yes, and immediately put myself to calling the Murkoff boy's mother and say can he be brought right after school, I need his regular hour for an emergency patient (lie! lie!), and I am all set, Francine will be lago's last patient of the day. With my heart high, I hope that once the hour is over she will be led by me from the study to the living room where we will sit and drink tea as friends while my eyes see her from a more direct angle than I enjoy on the couch. Or do I hope that from the couch of my study I can lead her to the bed of the bedroom once she sees the enormity of my need? How many fantasies I collect in the wastebasket of my head, what she does, what I do, what we do together. I begin to believe that it may come true. Is that the supreme fantasy?

She greets me, as usual we shake hands, a concession to my being European. In Vienna I would brush the back of her delicate hand with my lips. Here it is mine to hold for a second, feel its warmth, and the softness of its skin. I think of the skin I have never seen, at the small of her back, at the back of her knees.

On her face she has a certain expression we analysts have come to recognize: today I am going to give you a present. What this means is she will tell me something she thinks I have been waiting to hear. I gesture at the couch, I wait for the ceremony of her lying down, the placement of her body, sitting first, then swinging her legs up, then lying back supported by one elbow, then flat, the line of her unconstricted bosom rising with each breath. There is the prolonged silence that sometimes means I refuse to talk but today I am certain means that the mind's podium is being dusted in preparation for a declaration. Ah, here it comes.

"That time, right after I was raped, when I came here for help, you told me I had no vocation."

"Yes."

"That I didn't know what to do with my life."

"Yes."

"Isn't it dangerous telling someone something like that when they're in a state of distress?"

"I would be a poor analyst if I did not sometimes take a chance."

"Take chances with your own life, not mine."

"Now, Francine, listen. You were under great stress. But your anger at my lack of tact helped keep the thought about vocation in your mind so that now, perhaps when you are prepared to deal with it, it is waiting."

Suddenly, Francine is sitting up, swinging her legs off the couch, facing me.

"I could have killed myself," she said.

"Francine, there are people who can kill themselves, and people who cannot. You are among the latter."

"You were playing with my life."

"I was not playing."

"How could you be sure I wouldn't do something drastic?"

"Oh one is never sure," I said, "but experience is a good guide."

Her face reddened with anger. "The risk wasn't yours!"

"Please lie back down."

"No. You're supposed to be a doctor. If I come in with a broken arm, I want it set."

"If you come in with the flu and demand a useless shot of penicillin, I will not give it to you just to make my lot easier. This is not instant therapy. Now please lie back down."

Instead, she stood up. "This is an impossible relationship, Dr. Koch. I talk, you listen. I'm supposed to be candid, but you're not candid with me. It isn't give and take, it isn't normal."

I remained seated. "My dear Francine," I said. "If I say something at the wrong time, you condemn me. If I say nothing, you condemn me equally. I am not a magician. Psychoanalysis is a learning process. Did you hear process? I am the backboard. You are the player with the ball."

"Why can't we talk like two people?"

"Please lie back down. One does not talk to the priest in the confessional as if he is a friend who talks back."

"Oh so that's what you think you are!"

"You know very well I'm not, my dear. The priest has the church's formulas for absolution. I have only yourself to offer yourself."

"Very prettily put."

"You are entitled to your sarcasm. Now may I ask you to please leave or please lie back down."

"You're ordering me!"

"I am suggesting."

These are the risks we take. Like governments practicing brinksman-ship. I watch Francine sit down on the edge of the couch. I say nothing. She looks at me. I say, "We have locked antlers. One of us cannot leave."

Finally she lay back down. I waited a few moments, then I said, "Can you define vocation for me? Think a minute."

"It's not just making a living."

"Correct."

"It's a whole scene that gets you excited. It's your thing."

"What about your father's vocation?"

"My father counsels his clients. He's a friend to a lot of them. He does contracts for them. He's sort of a general consultant in the guise of a lawyer."

"Guise?"

"His work doesn't excite him."

"What does then?" Besides you, I thought.

"I don't know," she said. "Perhaps nothing does. He could do lots of things."

"Such as?"

"He could have been a businessman or an ambassador, something like that."

"Listen carefully. What would he enjoy being?"

"Someone else."

She knew she had said something terrible. I gave her a moment to reflect, then said, "The other lawyer. Thomassy. Do you think he wants to be somebody else?"

"You've gotta be crazy, he loves doing what he does so much he doesn't want to have anything to do with anyone else!"

"Meaning you?"

"Anyone."

"Do you feel he is a competent lawyer?"

"He's a fucking genius. He's a fanatic about manipulating people, cases, laws."

"To what end?"

"It's an end in itself, he loves it!"

"He has a vocation."

"It's an obsession with him."

"Yes."

Then she said, "You don't like George."

"I wouldn't say that."

"I'll say it. You don't like George."

"My likes are not relevant. It happens I am not a policeman or a criminal. I live outside those things that obsess Mr. Thomassy. I do not need him in my life. Do you?"

"You're giving me the willies."

"How?"

"You make me think maybe I'm not like George."

"You want to be more like George?"

"It's his vitality."

"You have vitality. Don't you like your work?"

"I like some of the things I do at the job."

"Would Mr. Thomassy say that about his work?"

"No. He's a zealot about the whole lot."

"He has a vocation."

"All right! I don't! And I am about to fuck up my life by attaching it to his, living off the excitement of his drive. I don't want to do that. I want to be my own man."

We lingered in the silence that followed. Finally, she said, "I meant my own woman."

"There is nothing to be embarrassed about. Saying 'your own man' doesn't make you homosexual. The terms of our language are male. That is the only significance of your remark."

"You mean I'm not suddenly turning queer."

"Not suddenly."

"Now what the hell do you mean by that?"

"You spoke of yourself once or twice as having a crazy side. Tell me about that."

Experience has taught me to expect a long silence before she answers.

"Ever since I was a kid, every once in a while I just let all my crazy thoughts and words hang out, like I was letting some other nature out of me, some…"

"Uncontrolled?"

"My mother and father never let any crazy side of them show."

"Concealment?"

"Yes. To be decorous. Proper. Unexcitable. It's the essence of Waspdom."

"You were saying before that excitement was part of vocation."

"Yes," she said. "My vocation is not to be a Wasp. Like needling people, shocking the bourgeoisie, fucking blacks, you know."

"Or Turks?"

"What do you mean?"

"I meant Armenians."

"But they were enemies."

"Of whom?"

"Of each other."

"And?"

"My parents. They don't want to know people who are emotional, who dance wildly, who kill, who…"

"Say it."

"Who rape. They think the ethnics, all of them, are raping our world."

"Whose world?"

"My parents' fucking world!"

"Not yours?"

"I want out of that world. Look, Dr. Koch, there was a world of people before my mother and father and me, before any Wasps. It's a temporary stage. Their time is up."

"You fled from your parents into Cambridge, you befriended all sorts of types, talents, eccentrics, lunatics."

"Weirdos."

"You want to be like them?"

"I want to be like myself. Only…"

"Yes?"

"I want to be obsessed like George."

"Vocation. Yes. Well, I think that's all for today."

"Jesus, it's like coitus interruptus, right when I'm getting somewhere, you stop."

"Yes."

"It's part of the technique, right?"

She was sitting up, looking at me. I nodded.

"There aren't a lot of Wasps in your profession, are there?"

"Some," I said.

"Not many, I'll bet. Too embarrassing."

"Is your car parked nearby?"

"Just a couple of blocks away."

"I need some exercise after sitting all day. I will walk downstairs with you."

She looked at me, a slight smile subverting her countenance for the first time that day.

"Our antlers aren't locked any more?" she said.

I shook my head.

In the street she said, "It's like coming out of a movie into real life." She turned left. I went with her.

"Were there Spanish-speaking people in the area when you moved here?"

"It was a very long time ago. Maybe a few. I never noticed. Now it is the lingua franca."

"Lingua hispanica," she said, laughing.

"Yes."

So soon the tables turn. Before me, I think, came generations of refugees whose children wanted only to look and act and feel more like the ruling Wasps than their parents. Now the Francines are slithering out of the Wasp compound, finding their way out into the world, looking for the other inhabitants of the planet. She is becoming a European. She has been raped by a Slovak. We are two refugees in this West Side mini-ghetto of mine that shrinks every day like a grape drying. All around we hear the language of Torquemada. Look at those three young toughs eyeing us, sucking machismo from cigarettes, laughing. I feel the fibrillating panic: the bars on the cages are being lifted, the animals are being let loose, the holocaust is coming again.

"Are you all right. Dr. Koch?"

"Fine, fine." Dear God, I have lived in this neighborhood for twenty-six years, with Marta and after Marta, will I have to move, become a refugee once more?

As she reaches her car, she says, "It's a very colorful neighborhood you live in."

"Yes. Full of life." And death.

She shakes my hand. "Thank you for accompanying me."

"De nada," I say in the language of the enemy, as she gets in and I close the door. She ignites the engine, backs up turning the wheel, then pulls away from the curb with a roar, my Francine, waving with one hand. I walk to the corner newsstand, and amidst the Spanish magazines, I find the evening paper, and walk warily back across no man's land to where, I suppose, I live.