Nevertheless, its absurdity made a kind of sense. The proposition was clear enough, clear enough to elicit in me an unambiguous obligation to resist. I was not free. In fact, I was bound to remove myself from a position at once compromised and compromising. I could no more continue with Miriam than I could have continued with someone revealed to be my half-sister.
I wonder now, Father, in the car with the café owner, did I permit myself the indulgence of indignation? I had been willfully deprived of understanding. How could I continue with something begun under false pretenses—or if not false, then at least partial? I had been manipulated, perhaps unwittingly but manipulated nonetheless. I had been cast in a role wholly different from the one I understood myself to have been playing. (I thought of our trip to the first monastery, where I had suddenly found myself thrust into the role of silent retreatant. That silence did not care if I was a devout pilgrim or Miriam’s leash boy.) Surely I had earned the righteous satisfactions of outrage.
These weeks, these months, together had been a dream, shared in part, but in essence solitary for each of us. In our cells, adjacent but isolated, each of us had painted and gilded the other person into an icon of our own desires. Miriam’s desire, I believed, had been to strip away the tar of death that clung to her after her suicide, to consume it with her own hunger, as a mare craves to lick the caul from her new foal. I was merely the instrument of this instinct, used to nudge her awake, lick her upright, fuck her out of her black bag. She in turn had fucked it into me, the tar of death, filling my hollows with it. Freighted with her unbearable burden, I was to be dispatched, driven out from the city, and Miriam, spent and naked at last, could consign herself to the spent, naked enclosure of the monastery.
In my own reverie I had fashioned from her person a solitary companion for my own solitude. Certainly I had known or had at least sensed her desolation. I must have sensed from the very beginning that the mere fact of her living, of her breathing, was the accomplishment of a great labor: the perfectly simple, perfectly impossible task of staying alive. No doubt this intuition had flattered my pride, pride that she had elected me to receive the full weight of her body, to hold her up, to prevent her from sinking. She would remember me as one who had saved her from drowning, while I in turn would hold the note of an unpayable debt. How my pride, in secret, must have feasted on that.
The entirety of this secret revelation had been encoded in the strange thrill of being (as she called me) “her last lover.” The first, she had said, is special only in theory, the experience is unforgettable because it is so forgettable. The last, though, she went on, tracing her finger along my eyebrow, the last was something else entirely.
In the fullness of time, having been employed in Miriam’s great labor, I would return to my world, to my own city and my work. I would go back to being a doctor, an expensive New York doctor, the doctor into which I had been so expensively made. Wasn’t that what New York meant, expense? When I returned, everything would be expensive. Rent for my private office would be expensive. My hourly rate would be high. And however dizzying, the fee for my patients was only the beginning of the cost, the analytic undertaking promising neither comfort nor relief. It is instead a severe curriculum, Freud’s school of suffering: the universal conviction of shame, the pain of disclosure and of the resistance to disclosure, the awful vertigo of free association, the torment of encountering one’s hungers, hatreds, lusts, avowing them, claiming them as one’s own. I would become, anew, the minister of that suffering. In my costliness I would be a temple prostitute set apart and ceremonially dressed (in cardigan, gray flannels, polished cap-toe oxfords). My patients would pay me, not for something that they received from me, but instead for me to neutralize the account of whatever they had inserted or discharged into my person.
That was the world for which I was destined. And like Miriam’s world, mine was founded on a kind of trust: the belief that the life of the body—its desires and hungers, its suffering—made for a kind of currency, valid and negotiable, a living tender to be traded for wisdom. I would place myself in the hands of this belief the day I returned to New York and reported to the clinic I was to direct. This belief, this scandalous idea (I was only now aware of this), had terrified me at least as early as the first year of medical school, when in gross anatomy my scalpel first trembled over the solar plexus of the cadaver assigned to me, the body I was to excavate for the entirety of that term. The dissection itself provoked in me neither disgust nor dread. On the contrary, from that first medial incision, it elicited a steady thrill. The work had combined, in exquisite symmetry, both violence and delicacy, one day requiring me to bear down through the squeal of the cranial saw, another demanding I hold my breath as I teased free the minute bones of the inner ear. What did appall me (I know now looking back) was the ease with which the body opened and unfolded itself, as though in life it had been as densely and tightly closed as a bud, a bud whose destiny was to unfurl itself in perfect shamelessness. Each organ repeated the
