Empathy (9 page)

“Why not?”

“Doc, let me explain it to you. I am a victim. Get it, Doc? A victim.”

The Complainer sat there. His name was John but Doc called him Cro-Mag because he was so unevolved.

“Do you know what poor means?” Doc asked.

“I am poor. I am poverty-stricken. I have nothing except for an eighty-thousand-dollar co-op. Do you know that means on today's market? It means nothing.”

“Well, what would give your life more meaning?” Doc asked, quietly, repressing his own desire to strangle this guy.

“You know, I'd like to do something heroic, have an adventure. Like Francis Ford Coppola making
Apocalypse Now
. I'd like to take a few million, go down to some Third World country, hire a couple thousand natives at a dollar a day and really take a risk.”

“What risk did Francis Ford Coppola take?”

“Doc, he mortgaged his house!”

“Well, John, you can have life-shattering experiences in your own neighborhood. You could … well, you know … you could do something for … someone else.”

“Politics is boring,” Cro-Mag said in a drippy way. “It's hopeless. I wouldn't have any fun. Besides, I'm too poor. I don't have time to be political.”

“There are people sleeping in the park in shelters made of plastic and cardboard,” said Doc. “There are people living around the park in co-ops and condominiums like Christadora House and Eastbeth. The police tear down the tents of the homeless. Now, I'm going to ask you a trick question.”

Doc was using cognitive therapy.

“Who are the victims?”

“I am,” said Cro-Mag. “I am the biggest victim.”

“What are you going to do tomorrow?” Doc asked.

“Tomorrow I will sleep till noon. Then I will go to a coffee shop and pay someone else to cook and serve me breakfast. Then I will go home and do errands and make notes. Then I will make phone calls. Then I will do something else. Then I will go to the gym. Then I will eat dinner in a restaurant. Then I will go to an art event. Then I will go to a bar or watch TV and get drunk or maybe I will find a twenty-one-year-old who will feel sorry for me and have sex with me. Then I will go to sleep.”

“And if you were not a victim, then what?”

“If was not a victim I would wake up around noon and have sex with someone who did not have a job to go to either. Then she and I would talk about what geniuses we are. Then I would get a phone call from a fancy museum and mail from a foundation. Then my girlfriend would do the vegetable shopping. Then I would go to the gym. Then she would tell me that I am brilliant. That I am a great artist.”

“How are you going to get from here to there?” Doc asked.

“I don't know,” Cro-Mag said.

“I can see why,” Doc said.

Later Doc placed Cro-Mag squarely in relation to his other issues. Was mankind de-evolving? Survival of the least interesting?
Doc was willing to continue this study of the stupefaction of the privileged, but he had to be careful. Too much time with Cro-Mag was like watching television. Like holding a magnifying glass to a bottomless pit.

They became what they beheld
, he remembered, and gave Blake the last word.

Frail state. Frightened star. Sensual feeling. Anna was doubly affected. Recognizing others' masturbatory habits, she too needed a feeling and not a thought. But that raised the question of
style
and what one was. It's a romance, that's for sure. Some mythical visceral experience or a box a person fits into for other purposes. Something to swear by, even more. She'd never thought about this before.

On the street there was a Hyundai seething with criticism. Then Anna digressed back to that desired state where
think
is a sequence toward a solution. It's all about logic. Anna stared ahead at the dirty city street. She had to concentrate really hard to think it through for herself. Something wasn't right. There was something not true about Doc. There was something a little off. Thank God for logical conclusions: they are an activity of pure permission.

She noticed a young homeless man doing the Sunday
Times Magazine
crossword puzzle. Anna couldn't know how badly he felt.

“Can't you say something nice?” the homeless man asked when he caught her staring.

“Undulating vulvas,” Anna said. “Pistachio, sky blue, red-andwhite stripes, bare blue ass kiss, guess who.”

“Okay,” the guy said. “Now back to the insults.”

The next woman who passed wore eyeglass frames whose color reinforced the illusion that she was a redhead.

Maybe that explains the problem I've always had with female identification
, she thought
. It's like looking at Picasso's
Three Women
only to come away thinking, “My breast is your thigh.”

These thoughts illuminated the weird formation that broke up Anna. The whole experience became some sort of bucolic mutilation as she climbed the stairs to therapy.

“So what brings you to therapy today?” Doc asked.

“Well, there are a number of things on my mind,” Anna said. “I was sitting in NYU Medical Center, in the Co-Op Care, massaging the feet of another friend of mine who is dying, in this case named Paul. Then I realized that I have a lot of unresolved anger.”

“Why do you massage the feet of dying people?”

“Well,” Anna answered, “the reason we massage the feet of dying people is because they have been in bed for a long, long time and have poor circulation in their feet. They need to be touched but chest catheters and IVs get in the way. Besides, they can't sit up. By rubbing their feet, you sit on the edge of their beds and they can see you. You can talk to them and touch them at the same time without them having to move. You can take one long last look.”

Silence.

“Here, Doc, I brought in some show-and-tell.”

She handed him a folded-up newspaper clipping with circles drawn around different items. She held her breath, waiting to see his reaction, Doc read out loud.

“What is this?” Doc asked.

“It's an oppression document,” Anna said. “File it under O.”

“Not only are they all
discreet
,” Doc said, looking it over, “but being white seems to take on paramount importance.”

“I hope I live to see the day,” Anna said, rearranging the cushions on the couch, “when the words
straight-acting
have naturally disappeared from the English language. And Doc, don't you dare tell me that
all people are basically bisexual
. I don't think I could take it.”

“Why not?”

“Well, you know,” she said, “when I was a teenager the rule was that everyone was really heterosexual and since I wasn't, I became really deviant. Now the rhetoric seems to be going in the direction of everyone being really bisexual and I'm not that either. So I'm still a deviant. Blame it on Freud, right?”

“Freud is only an idea. It can work for you or against you.”

That was a good sign
, Anna thought, deciding to take the next step.

“Do you do dream analysis, Doc? Is that where all this is leading? I mean I did have a strange one last night. It was a strange night.”

Anna felt somewhat dowdy, not fitting properly into her dress.

“It was a strange night. It was gray and very cold. I was thinking about all the women I've ever loved. I was thinking about each one of
them individually. The opera singer who couldn't stop coming and the waitress who didn't know how. I was thinking about the women who had to fight for their orgasms and the ones who got theirs like they got their lunch. I was lonely because of the weather. I was reviewing all the ways that my life has been propelled by strategizing for access to the female body.”

“Did it feel good?”

“Well, Doc, each encounter left me with some erotic memory. You know, a flash of something she said. Some small gesture or the way she moved her body. Something that really pleased me. Then I fell asleep and had this dream.”

“What did you dream?”

“I dreamt that I took William Burrough's penis and tied it up with piano wire. I hung him like a Chagall painting. He's an old feeble man so he swayed in the wind.”

“Then what?”

“Then, in my dream, I took a rapist's penis and grafted it onto his forehead. He had to walk around all day with his own dick in his face. I called it
Surrealism
.”

“How does the rapist fit into it?”

“Well, Doc,” Anna answered, like she'd already thought this one through, “a lot of my lovers have been raped. Easily half. Some were raped twice. One was gang raped twice. And, well…Ibegan to wonder, recently, if I might have had something to do with it.”

“With them being raped?”

“No, with them coming to me. I mean, I began to wonder if I was especially attractive to women who had been multiply violated. Women who were not safe.”

“You mean,” Doc said, with a twinkle in his eye, “you mean you worry that these women look to you for the father/protector they never had.”

“What an odd comment,” Anna said. “What a terrifying thought. What a confusing possibility. What a construction. My father takes
care of people and I do too. Does that mean I have problems with my femininity? I mean, after all, Doc, the reason I've been involved with so many women who have been hurt might actually have something more to do with demographics and the gene pool. I mean, most women that I meet have fairly normal female experiences. And being raped seems to be … well…a natural part of all that. I don't mean
natural
, like destiny. But it is awfully common. It's not just me. So, now comes the interesting part of the dream.”

“Oh goody,” Doc said.

“In the next part J.G. Ballard swam through streets of female urine. The girls read his book
Crash
and then mowed him down with their Volkswagen, crushing his chest slowly against a brick wall. As he screamed in agony larger than representation can accommodate, they referred to his text and had orgasms. Later, they jumped up and down yelling, ‘You're not a hero. You're not a hero. You're not. You're not. You're not.'”

“How do you analyze that part of the dream, Anna?”

She paused, suddenly shy.

“I guess I'm nervous about my birthday.”

“Oh, come on. You can do better than that.”

“Doc, it's just that we've … we've … we've been so oppressed.”

“Anna, your dream seems to be about a justifiable revenge. The women in your life have been hurt by men. There's nothing wrong with wanting to protect them.”

“But, Doctor, how can I protect them if I'm one of them?”

“Uh …”

“Doctor, have you ever been in therapy yourself?”

“Nope.”

“Figures.”

“You know why?” he said, leaning over. “You tell them one real thing and then the doctor thinks he knows you. He starts getting arrogant and overfamiliar, making insulting suggestions left and right. You have to protest constantly just to set the record straight. Finally
he makes offensive assumptions and throws them in your face. A stranger in a bar could do the same. You know what, Anna?”

“What, Doc?”

“I have secrets I'd like to tell. There are things I need to figure out, out loud. But I would only tell them to someone who would never need use it.”

“Use it how?”

“To get ahead. To get revenge. To get better. To get started. You know, to win.”

“Gee, Doc, someone must have really hurt your feelings.”

“Yes,” Doc said wearily. “I only want friends who never expect to
win
.”

That's when she realized she missed that one friend. But she hid it behind incremental blocks of description.

Doc waited impatiently for Anna to return from the bathroom so that the session could resume.

“Doc,” she said, crouched over, “there is something that has been particularly weighing on my mind. Something I want to resolve while I have the will and strength of character to face it.”

“What?”

“Well, Doc…I never had a lover who let me meet her parents.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because sometimes they just couldn't. Sometimes they had no parents. Sometimes their parents were back home in some small town in Pennsylvania or the Bronx where these daughters just didn't make sense. But there were also times, Doc, when the women were … ashamed of me. It was because they were ashamed of me. Because they thought I was less. Because they didn't want to make their families uncomfortable, so they made me uncomfortable instead.”

“Are you sure?” Doc asked.

“I'm absolutely sure,” she said.