“Do you think Béatrice is a lesbian?” I asked. The autoroute was dark now and the night clear, though in the distance the glow of Paris had swallowed the stars.
“No more than you are,” she said, giving my earlobe a little tug, then resting her hand on my thigh. “T’inquiète pas, mon ami,” she said. “And anyway,” she added after a pause, “we both have our tickets.”
TWENTY-THREE
With absolute conviction we declare we recognize someone. The ethologists and developmental psychologists say the gift is innate, the ability to pick out one face among hundreds, among thousands. An adaptive trait, they call it, survival depending upon the parent’s capacity to recognize the face of the child, the child’s to recognize the face of the parent. Yet when we try to describe a face, even the most beloved, it could be any face at all.
In this new photograph from my correspondent she is seated at a café, a map open on her lap. The image flashes with captive sunlight, but the map itself hides in the shadow of the table. Clementine is the only figure in the frame, but there are two cigarette packets on the table, and alongside the coffee cup is a tall glass nearly empty, a pastis by the look of it, dilute and milky green. The café bill has been placed beside Clementine’s hand. A little clip secures the slip to its tray, where a breeze lifts its corner. To her left on an empty chair rests a well-thumbed French–English dictionary alongside a glossy fashion magazine. The photograph, taken from behind, asks me to read over her shoulder, to examine the map held open on her knees. At my desk I take out my magnifying glass, lifting and lowering it with care over the image, as though I were trying to snare with a string something fallen through the grate of a storm drain.
Unlike the others, this photograph is in color, and the corner panel of the map is a bright blue, somewhere between turquoise and ultramarine, the blue that in France denotes a topological map of the most precise sort, as detailed as those issued here by the U.S. Geological Survey. I recognize the blue because Miriam and I had one with us at the monastery we visited together for the silent retreat; we had taken it with us on our walk down to the dilapidated bridge. Such a map was a hiking map, one not serviceable in Paris. There would be no reason for Clementine to have such a map now unless she were planning to leave Paris, to go on a trip.
Of course: because now one of her strongest motivations for being in France at all is to visit the place where Miriam was born, to meet, if possible, Miriam’s parents, her French grandparents. Her friend at the café, whoever this friend might be, would help her locate them, their town, their address, on the appropriate map. Miriam had been born not in Paris but in Nevers, in the provincial department of the Nièvre.
In theory, the map Clementine is reading could be a map of any part of France, perhaps of some other place entirely. Are there no blue-clad maps in Spain, in Austria? This idea is present to me but insubstantial in the face of a dreadful possibility. If she goes to Nevers, if she goes to acquaint herself with the small, tattered city where her mother went to school, to locate and walk out on the bridge over the Loire, the river rapid and troubled in summertime, to look down at the place where Miriam died, if she finds where Miriam’s parents still live…well, what then? What will happen?
I cannot say, and yet, even as I write this, I hear my own voice, my clinician’s voice: “You cannot say, Mr. Abend? Or is it that you would prefer not to say? Or perhaps, Mr. Abend, you feel that for some reason you must not say?”
—
Someone must have calculated the average age when patients begin psychoanalytic treatment, the average age they encounter some major disruption in life or find themselves in the midst of intractable difficulties. Whenever that moment arrives, the future grows suddenly steep, whether by dropping off precipitously and requiring a terrifying leap or by rearing up like a cliff face against the sky. One way or another, the way forward has vanished.
As a young analyst, like so many other practitioners, I quickly and without design acquired an expertise in the paralytic afflictions of affluent graduate students, in the torpor of stalled writers, in the obscure torments and metastatic dissatisfactions of corporate lawyers and investment bankers. However debilitating these passages were for my patients, however dizzyingly steep the future had become, their predicaments presumed that a future was possible, a future that could be, at least in principle, better than the past. This of course was my presumption as well, perhaps the presumption of every analyst. Nothing, therefore, prepared me for the appearance in my office of Arnold Ullman, a man in his mid-sixties who referred himself to me a number of years ago, after reading an article I had published called “The Metapsychology of Death-Anxiety in Patients with End-Stage Organic Disease.”
In my writing and in my clinical work, I had been drawn by the theoretical question of what happens when anxious or psychotic patients are confronted with a real and inescapable threat. My conclusions were wholly inconclusive, but Mr. Ullman in his first session proclaimed himself glad to have found someone who had thought about the things that he, Arnold Ullman, needed to think about, and fast.
