Oliver's Story

I'd used my hands to gesture and they now were disengaged from hers. (Relief?)

'But still … '

She didn't finish. Maybe it began to puzzle her the way I kept insisting I was just a stupid jock.

My only purpose was to let her know I wasn't really worth her time. I mean she was so nice. And kind of pretty. Well, at least z. normal guy with normal feelings would have found her so.

She had a fourth-floor walk-up near the hospital. As we stood outside her door, I noticed she was shorter than she'd seemed at first. I mean she had to look straight up at me to talk.

I also noticed that my breath was kind of short. It couldn't be from climbing stairs (I run a lot, remember). And I began to feel the vaguest sense of panic as I talked to this intelligent and gentle doctor lady.

Maybe she'd imagine that I liked her more than just platonically. What if maybe —

'Oliver,' Joanna said, 'I'd like to ask you in. But I go on at six a.m.'

'Another time,' I said. And suddenly could feel more oxygen within my lungs.

'I hope so, Oliver.'

She kissed me. On the cheek. (They were a bunch of touchers, her whole family.)

'Good night,' she said.

'I'll call you,' I replied.

'I had a lovely evening.'

'I did too.'

And yet I was ineffably unhappy.

Walking back that night, I came to the conclusion that I needed a psychiatrist.

 

 'Let's begin by leaving out King Oedipus completely.'

Thus began my well-prepared self-introduction to the doctor. Finding a reliable psychiatrist involves a simple set of moves. First you call up friends who are physicians and you tell them that a friend of yours could use some help. Then they recommend a doctor for this troubled person.

Finally, you walk around the phone two hundred times, you dial, and make your first appointment.

'Look,' I rambled on, 'I've had the courses and I know the jargon we could toss around. How we could label my behavior with my father when I married Jenny. I mean all the things that Freud would say is not the stuff I want to hear.'

Dr Edwin London, though 'extremely fine', according to the guy who recommended him, was not, however, too inclined to lengthy sentences.

'Why are you here?' he asked without expression.

Then I got scared. My opening remarks had gone okay, but here we were already in the cross- examination.

Why exactly was I there? What did I want to hear? I swallowed and replied so softly that the words were barely audible to me.

'Why I can't feel.'

He waited silently.

'Since Jenny died, I just can't feel a thing. Yeah, now and then a twinge of hunger. TV dinners take quick care of that. But otherwise … for eighteen months … I have felt absolutely nothing.'

He listened as I struggled to dredge up my thoughts. They poured out helter-skelter in a stream of hurt. I feel so terrible. Correction, I feel nothing. Which is worse. I'm lost without her. Philip helps.

No, Phil can't realty help. Although he tries. Feel nothing. Almost two whole years. I can't respond to normal human beings.

Now silence. I was sweating.

'Sexual desire?' asked the doctor.

'None,' I said. And then to make it even clearer, 'Absolutely nothing.'

No immediate reply. Was London shocked? I couldn't read his face. So then, because it was so obvious to both of us, I said:

'No one has to tell me that it's guilt.'

Then Dr Edwin London spoke his longest sentence of the day.

'Do you feel … responsible for Jenny's death?'

Did I feel responsible for Jenny's death? I thought immediately of my compulsive wish to die the day that Jenny did. But that was transient. I know I didn't give my wife, lukemia. And yet …

'Maybe. For a while I guess I did. But basically my anger was against myself. For all the things I should have done while she was still alive.'

There was a pause and Dr London said, 'Such as?'

I talked again of my estrangement from my family. How I had let the circumstances of my marriage to a girl of slightly (hugely!) different social background be a declaration of my independence. Watch, Big Daddy Rich-with- Bucks, I'll make it on my goddamn own.

Except one thing. I made it rough on Jenny. Not just emotionally. Though that was bad enough, considering her passion when it came to honoring your parents. But even worse was my refusal to take anything from them. To me this was a source of pride. But shit, to Jenny, who'd grown up in poverty, what could be new and wonderful about not having money in the bank?

'And just to serve my arrogance, she had to make so many sacrifices.

'Do you think she thought of them as sacrifices?' asked London, probably intuiting that Jenny never once complained.

'Doctor, what she may have thought no longer is the point.'

He looked at me.

For half a second I was frightened I might … cry.

'Jenny's dead and only now I see how selfishly I acted.'

There was a pause.

'How?' he asked.

'We were graduating. Jenny had this scholarship to France. When we decided to get married there was never any question. We just knew we'd stay in Cambridge and I'd go to law school. Why?'

There was another silence. Dr London did not speak. So I continued ranting.

'Why the hell did that appear the only logical alternative? My goddamn arrogance! To just assume my life was more important!'

'There were things you couldn't know,' said Dr London. It was a gauche attempt to mollify my guilt.

'Still I knew — goddammit — that she'd never been to Europe! Couldn't I have gone with her and been a lawyer one year later?'

Maybe he might think this was some ex post facto guilt from reading women's lib material. It wasn't that. I didn't hurt so much from stopping Jenny's 'higher studies', but for keeping her from tasting Paris. Seeing London. Feeling Italy. 'Do you understand?' I asked. There was another pause.

'Are you prepared to spend some time on this?' he asked.

'That's why I came.'

'Tomorrow, five o'clock?'

I nodded. And he nodded. I left.