Читать книгу Iris Has Free Time - Iris Smyles - Страница 20

A wood-lined room stocked with old books, a doctor in tweed with a beard and pipe, a leather chaise on which I lay face up, my eyes trained absently on the ceiling’s crown moldings as I describe in detail my most recent dream: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderlay again, which is weird because I’ve never been to Manderlay. . . .”

Instead I was shown into a small gray windowless cubicle where the “counselor” had me sit in a plastic and metal hard-backed chair directly across from her, leaving a space of just a few feet between our knees. She looked into my eyes and after a pause asked me why I’d sought “counseling.”

Counseling? I’d come to be analyzed!

I began scrambling for something, anything to tell her, scrolling through the highs and lows of my life thus far, when the whole of it, suddenly, struck me as so unimportant, so completely lacking in tragedy. Where was the pathos? The tortured soul that foretold genius in all the really good biographies?

Compelled to tell her something, I finally told her I felt pressure to have sex with my forty-two-year-old boyfriend, some alcoholic from the dive bars in Hell’s Kitchen where I’d lately been spending a lot of time. (It was a lie. I’d been leading him on for the last month, but was perfectly happy to lead him on another month to boot.) “My roommate and I call him ‘Uncle Craig,’” I told the counselor, thinking this might shock her, before wishing I hadn’t said it, for it had shocked me more. “As a joke,” I added with a laugh, though the room seemed to suck the air right out of it. Her eyes remained steadily on mine.

What would I have said if I had ventured the truth? That I’d never had any problems I could not manage on my own, that I enjoyed good health and was basically an optimist? That I’d taken a class called Madness and Genius and learned that neither Virginia Woolf nor Ernest Hemingway had been captain of their varsity swim team, president of their student body, debate team founder, ballet dancer, or member of the honor society? That I was afraid that everything good about me was just more proof that there would never be anything great? I hadn’t come to therapy for a solution, but with the hope of acquiring a problem!

How was I to know, lucky as I’d been, that illness and grief find everyone eventually, that I wouldn’t have to work so hard to usher them in? How was I to know that the sickness for which I’d sought treatment was youth?