Читать книгу The Hopeful - Tracy O'Neill - Страница 9

SESSION III.

YOU’RE a reader not only of people, I see, Doctor. You are also a Romantic. My father gave me a copy of that book, which he was assigned in college.

I put the doctor’s copy back on the shelf and continue eyeing the line of books. Centuries pass this way. People pass too. Dickens. Lacan. Fitzgerald. Flaubert. Freud. My father owns some of these books and often quotes passages proudly until my mother tells him to stop showing off. The longer I linger, the less I have to say for myself.

You’re welcome to borrow any of the books on the shelf.

I read for keeps, doc: “O Rose, thou art sick!/ The invisible worm/ That flies in the night,/ In the howling storm,/ Has found out thy bed/ Of crimson joy:/ And his dark secret love/ Does thy life destroy.”

“The Sick Rose.” Is that your favorite?

My favorite poem of his is perhaps one of his prints, “Job’s Evil Dreams” from the Book of Job. It’s a frightening image, in which God has been transmuted to a serpent-wound Satan, hovering above suffering Job. Beneath the image is the inscription Why do you persecute me as God & are not satisfied with my flesh.

I had forgotten Blake was also an engraver, the doctor says.

The beauty of forgetting is you don’t know what you’re missing, but I suppose that’s antithetical to your line of work. Or rather, it makes the job impossible, I say.

There are many processes used in the profession. We can try any number.

Hedging bets is only rewarded in finance, and even then only sometimes. In capitalism and out, the greater the risk, the greater the reward.

Do you consider yourself a capitalist?

Well certainly I will never be a communist. I’ve never been much for sharing.

And yet you shared your skating hopes with your father quite generously. Would you agree?

It’s odd to think of sharing something that was ours. You can’t monopolize dreams.

The doctor looks at me patiently.

There was nothing generous about it, I say. But of course there was. Some people might not care for their loved ones to involve themselves in their dreams at all. They might consider it interference, or they might consider such vicarious living distasteful, a way of taking a dream that isn’t theirs. I think of Mrs. Closerman and Emma, psychical Siamese twins, with two minds and one body between them. I think of the mother heaving her purse on the ice one day in frustration, asking, “If you’re going to throw away your career, why am I even here?” and the daughter telling her “You’re not throwing away your career. You’ll do better. Please will I stay?” Mrs. Closerman wept over the wastebasket after she threw away Emma’s skates.

If by saying that I shared my hopes with my father you mean that I made him suffer, then yes, I did. We put all of ourselves into my dream, and when it was over, I left us with nothing.

You had each other. You had your relationship. You cannot blame yourself for anything your father might have felt.

She says it with such certainty, as though certainty is intrinsic to any relationship. She says it as though people are dependable.

To be culpable is to be capable, Doctor. This is what we’ve learned from the justice system. You cannot be burdened with guilt if you are insane, and I am not insane, as I’ve said. I am utterly normal. And if there is one thing that I wish to cling to, it’s that I was capable. That I am normal, capable, culpable for the loss of the life we lived so beautifully those years, thinking I could be better and better and better.

And did you consider your father at all culpable?

Is this a way for you to ask if he was capable?

You can answer however you see fit.

I look at my shoes. It’s something I do when I don’t know how to answer without admitting I’m wrong. They don’t allow shoelaces here. Shoelaces could be used to hurt someone. So could spiral notebooks, bobby pins, or balloons. I guess you can tell a loony bin runaway by the Velcro shoes.

And if I don’t? I ask.

If you don’t answer?

If I don’t see any way to answer fitly. I think about how people are in and out, leaving and dying and never there for you in the first place. First place, third place, in any case, wanting more, wanting something, wanting you to want less.

In this instance we might suppose that a non-answer is still an answer, the doctor says, and we might plumb the non-answer answer for the question of why. Why, for example, do you see no fit way to answer the question of your father’s culpability?

Because of “The invisible worm/ That flies in the night.”

You mean yourself?

I didn’t say that.

And yet, your name: Alivopro. You said it was a compression of the phrase Alis volat propiis, she flies with her own wings. Is the she who flies with her own wings, too, the invisible worm that flies in the night?

She’s the rose. She’s the worm. She’s the howling storm.

A great multiplicity of the natural world.

I laugh. I could like the doctor if she wasn’t my doctor.

Multiplicity I’ve never suffered, except of course, of mothers.

Yet we know that you did not only have a biological mother and an adoptive mother but also a biological father and an adoptive father. Why do you think it is that you mentioned only a multiplicity of mothers?

She asks a good math question, though it’s not a balanced equation. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but the only mathematical fact I know is that families are always multiplying and dividing, adding, subtracting.

It must be quite trying for you, Doctor, to do this over and over, I say.

Perhaps you’re projecting? Perhaps it is you who finds it trying to go over what has already happened? Or perhaps it is you who finds it trying to uncover the inconsistencies in your account.

Of course I do! It’s trying, I’m trying. I don’t know the answers.

Well just think it over then. Why do you speak of a multiplicity of mothers and not fathers?

I think of this multiplicity, how once I hadn’t known what it meant to be adopted, that it meant to be unburdened and reburdened. I didn’t have you inside of me. You had another mother who she couldn’t take care of you, but I could, my mother told me. Maybe she was too young or didn’t have a job. I noted that she didn’t have a job either. I don’t have a job because I have you, my mother said. Then, I don’t know, Ali. I don’t know why she couldn’t. Maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe she didn’t want to have a child. Probably she’s dead.

Let me ask you a question to answer yours. Why do you do this of all things, Doctor? Why is this your life? You have Patient X, and you talk and you talk—problems, the past, problems of the past—and then finally, the breakthrough moment. But then what? Patient X sees the problem. She sees the deep-rooted cause of all the misery. But how does she change it? The deep-rooted cause of misery is still there because it’s located in the past. So why do what you do?

Treatment is not simply about diagnosing the “deep-rooted cause,” as you refer to it, though much of it is about understanding causal relationships. It’s also about developing a plan for future action. But we needn’t speak in generalities. We’re here for you. What would you like to see result from these sessions?

I didn’t choose to come here, Doctor, so why would you presume I have any end goal in sight?

None of us choose to “come here,” as it were. But still we create objectives, we enact plans, we succeed or fail. It can be anything. As I said, we’re here for you.

I’m sick of me, Doctor. I am the disease.

You are not a disease, but who is it you think you are infecting?

My parents, of course.

Most believe it’s something of the opposite that’s true, that their parents have ruined them.

But most descend genetically from their parents. I descended upon them.

And yet you descended from their nurture if not their nature.

Their nurture!

We’re quiet for a minute. She looks at me and I look at her, these mirror images, doctor and patient. There’s nothing of the child’s staring contest in it. No one is going to break down laughing.

I think it’s interesting that when I asked you to start from the beginning of your story that you began with your skating life, she says finally.

That was the beginning of my life.

You must have had a life before skating.

That’s not where I began my life, I say. The words come out fast, as though I’m not even the one saying them, as though the voice and sentiment precedes me.

It seems you don’t want to talk about your life before skating, so why don’t we talk about what happened after? After your spinal injury.

And I can see that she’s giving me two options. She wants me to believe I still have choices.

The summer after the accident, I turned into someone who didn’t resemble a younger version of my mother. One day I was sharp as a blade. The next there was gore in my pants that meant I was a woman. What I saw in the mirror could not swindle physics but was a swindled physique. It suggested an hourglass of slipping sand. My mother’s concerns were about the development of my mind, not my body, however, so she hired a tutor for me, worrying that years of homeschooling had left me behind my peers. His name was Mark Orrechio, and he was twenty-four years old and taking time off from his doctorate program to campaign for a third-party politician most voters didn’t know existed, a little big-voiced communist named Leonard Leonards who had famously thrown himself in front of a bulldozer to protect an independent bookstore as the former bookstore owner yelled, “Stop hamming it up!” (She had sold the store to a chain and was moving the next day to a gated community for people who didn’t work anymore.) They showed this film clip on the news when Leonards announced his candidacy with a speech titled “A Piece of the American Pie for All.” Evidently, this speech had excited Mark, and my mother got a lucky deal on an almost Ph.D.

The day we met, my mother brought him up to my room before she left for the salon. I was still in bed, steaming beneath the covers, and even when I saw two pale green eyes lighting across me, even when I realized this was the first man to come into my room that wasn’t my father, I stayed in the sulk of my sweaty linens.

“Lying is no way to live,” my mother said. She figured company would embarrass me vertical or at least into mascara. I was wearing leggings, my unbrushed hair twizzled into dark filigree. My only excuse for the degradation of my hygiene was that I was down one identity, and there was no longer anyone left I wanted to try to be.

“I can’t bend at the hips,” I said. “How will I sit?” I pointed to my torso where under a T-shirt I wore a medical corset to form my spine properly. Cruelly called an immobilizer, it pitched me erect, and because it extended over the tops of my thighs, I couldn’t sit. Nor could I walk so much as waddle side to side like a metronome, my torso swinging in the sweat-drenched synthetics.

“If sitting was a Salchow, you’d find a way,” my mother said.

“If sitting was a Salchow, I definitely wouldn’t be able to do it,” I said. “I just want to finish my coffee in bed.”

Mark rushed into the conversation. “Coffee is how I got through grad school.” He didn’t speak so much as blurt, and immediately I liked his awkward valor.

“Coffee is how I got through starving,” I returned. To be afraid or to laugh? he looked to wonder. “To getting through,” I said, and he raised his paper cup as though we were celebrating.

“To getting through.”

My mother departed quickly—“I’d better be leaving for my permanent then”—and I knew I’d embarrassed her. Replacing my coffee cup on the bedside table, I watched her wilting curls shrink in the doorway.

Mark took his hand in and out of his pockets, then sat at the end of my bed.

“I’m Mark,” he said. He held one hand above my body.

“I’m pathetic,” I said.

“And self-effacing,” he said. “A virtuoso.” When he smiled his cheeks wrinkled like disturbed pond water.

He started talking about himself, about graduate school, about not being in graduate school, about Leonard Leonards, about communism. All I knew of communism, I told Mark, were unfair advantages. Until the Soviet Union dissolved, communist countries churned out some of the best skaters in the world, while only moneyed families could afford the expense of figure skating in the United States. Soviet skaters were fed caviar, trained, and professionally massaged with government funding. The Eastern Bloc had had an advantage, and even now for an American to take lessons from a former Soviet was somewhere between chic and treacherous.

“Figure skating,” Mark said smiling, “is not much different than American politics.”

But figure skating was much fairer than American democracy, I thought. In rinks, the justice of corporeality trumped patriotism. At one point, I had been between Filthy Phil and The Russian. Lauren had been my coach for years, but sometimes I wanted that Salchow more than I wanted not to hurt her. Filthy Phil got his name from his five o’clock shadow and the way he touched his girls’ butts. All the coaches touched their students’ butts; it was the only way to make us feel how our bodies should be positioned for certain skating movements. They grabbed and pulled our pelvises forward. They called this being beneath ourselves, and being beneath ourselves was the only way to turn correctly in the air. But parents said that for Filthy Phil, butts weren’t just business. That left the Russian. “Better dead than red to some, but he does get results,” my father had said. “The judges couldn’t argue with the Salchow.”

“So you went with The Russian?” Mark asked.

“No,” I said. In the end I stayed with Lauren, maybe because I loved her. She had drilled me until I landed double loops, scratched out odd-bodied spins. There was genius to her methods, the innovations that flipped pain into the appearance of ease. I remembered when I was breaking in new skates, my feet bloody-pus blistered, and how she sent me running barefoot on a trail of broken seashells in the parking lot. “You want to know pain?” she called. “Pain is not cutting it. Pain is falling short. Pain is not making it. Are you in pain, Ali? Are you in pain?” I pounded over the seashells—no no no, no no no pain—until nothing could hurt me except the things I thought, the mistakes all my doing, like the one that broke my back and made me a normal girl, wallowing through summer tutoring.

“Tell me more,” Mark said, and I did, though for him it was just a blip in the Cold War. For me, it was the only thing worth fighting for.

A few weeks after I began my tutoring sessions with Mark, I didn’t need to immobilize anymore. The physical therapist prescribed abdominal exercises for my recovery, and I enjoyed the sit-ups, even if their only objective was that I could function regularly. It was nice to be behind—it meant there was somewhere left to go, even if that somewhere was, as my father once said, all the way up to mediocre. It was a better way to exhaust my moroseness than imagining windmill sails slicing synapses between sadness and the everyday.

“This is excessive therapy,” my mother told me one afternoon. I’d been at it on the floor, pulling rubber cords colored like primary school crayons and rolling my spine against an oversized Styrofoam log. “There are reps and sets for a reason. There’s the expression ‘too much of a good thing’ for a reason.”