Intensive Therapy Read online

  The group included an attractive man who had not been at dinner. Although he had tangles and tangles of blond hair, his friends called him Mr. Clean. His real name was Bucky Bleyer. He, too, was a researcher on the neuroscience track. It took Victoria the rest of the evening to realize Leslie was playing matchmaker for her and Bucky.

  Later, Bucky offered to drive Victoria home. As they walked to his car, she grazed his jacket gesturing toward the houses along the way. “This block looks just like Society Hill,” she said.

  “That’s my apartment over there,” Bucky pointed across the street. “If it hadn’t been for Leslie, I’d have stayed in L.A.”

  “You know her from California?”

  “Didn’t meet her ’til I moved here. She read one of my journal articles and sent me a note asking me to consider Penn’s neuroscience program. She even found me an apartment on her block.”

  “Leslie helped me with biology,” Victoria said. “If it weren’t for her, I’d be slaving away right now memorizing the Krebs cycle.”

  “That’s so Leslie. She’s the earth mother who looks out for everyone. Want to see my place?”

  “Sure,” said Victoria, still quite tipsy. She liked the way Bucky paid attention to her.

  Inside, Bucky pointed at a wall-mounted electrified bookshelf as he showed her around the apartment. “See this? I built it myself,” he said with laugh. “What a fucking disaster. I crossed the wires, so when I plugged it in, sparks shot down my arm like lightning. I jumped as high as a kid in a haunted house.”

  Victoria laughed, too. She felt even warmer than before.

  “The next thing, the whole building went dark. People congregated in the hall. When we went into the basement to look for the circuit breaker, it was so cobwebbed and creepy we expected to trip over a corpse. I was so embarrassed.”

  “It’s not like you murdered anyone,” Victoria said.

  “You’re right. Everything turned out fine. We reset the circuit breaker and then I reversed the wires. Voilà!” Bucky said, as he turned on the bookshelf light.

  Victoria liked what she saw. “Umm. It makes the room feel very cozy,” she said. She caught sight of a clock. “Isn’t it late for you? What time do you have to be up?”

  “I was having such a good time, I forgot. Psych residents meet once a week at nine AM on Thursday mornings with the chief resident. Everyone loves him. He wears really colorful bow ties.”

  “Which clinic?”

  “Penn has a terrific outpatient clinic on the ninth floor of the hospital. Are you interested in neuroscience?”

  “You could say that,” she replied, imagining Bucky and Dr. Speller comparing notes.

  Bucky drove Victoria back to her dorm. “Can I call you?” he asked, reaching for her hand.

  “Of course,” she said, pulling him closer for a good-night kiss.

  Once she was settled in her suite, Victoria took a leisurely shower, relishing the pulsating stream of hot water. The thought of Bucky touching her made her skin tingle all over.

  Slipping under her covers, she imagined cuddling next to Bucky after having sex for the first time. About that, she had no reservations. But her thoughts shifted to the next day and her last therapy session before the semester break. She knew she couldn’t avoid talking about Bucky and her feelings about Dr. Speller and the dark-haired woman, which felt like too much to deal with. So before going to sleep, Victoria left a message on Dr. Speller’s answering machine canceling her appointment, saying she would see him the Monday after they returned from vacation.

  As soon as her head hit the pillow again, her imagination lit up with impressions of the evening: the dark-haired woman’s face, Leslie’s apartment, the warm feeling from the wine and Bucky’s attention. Didn’t he mention a haunted house? And a creepy basement?

  Creepy haunted house. Those words jogged a memory of a place Victoria hadn’t thought about in years. When she was a little girl, Victoria’s family spent several Augusts at a posh resort north of Saratoga Springs, New York. Her father’s client Bill Brendel, who owned racehorses, had invited the Schones to visit during racing season. She could vividly remember being dressed up and trotted out on race days. One morning, eight-year-old Victoria visited the barns where hundreds of high-priced yearling racehorses were on display for auction. She saw sadness in their eyes and wondered if her parents might auction her off, too.

  One August, the family visited Lake George Village, a tourist town south of the resort featuring an amusement park with a gaudy arcade, an ice cream parlor whose skeleton-like proprietress chain-smoked Lucky Strikes, and a dingy haunted house. Everything was so creepy it made Victoria’s skin crawl.

  As Victoria lay still in the darkness of her dorm room the smell of stale tobacco smoke began drifting through Hill Hall. She felt as if she were floating through time. Suddenly she was eight years old, wandering through mazes in a dimly lit house. When she looked in a mirror, she saw no reflection. It had vanished. People laughed at her. Then she heard a barker shout through his megaphone, “Ladies and gentlemen, step right up and see the amazing girl without a shadow. You won’t see this anywhere else.” When Victoria looked toward the barker, his megaphone had metamorphosed into a grotesque black rose.

  Half awake, Victoria saw the outline of her dresser. It looked so much like the barker’s lectern she couldn’t tell where she was.

  The scene transformed into a dry goods store selling cheap pajamas and dresses that looked like the wall hangings at Leslie’s apartment. Victoria tried on a polka-dotted skirt. When she returned from the fitting room, a dark-haired clerk resembling Dr. Speller’s date laughed, because Victoria’s left breast was twice the size of her right one.

  Then Victoria was in an ice cream parlor, where a dark-haired woman called her “little miss piggy” because she ordered two scoops of her favorite flavor.

  For the rest of the night she drifted among vivid dreams and periods of hazy lucidity—the same dark-haired woman weaving in and out of scenario after scenario of humiliation and freakishness.

  The next morning, Victoria awoke hungover and panicky. When she couldn’t get through to the clinic, she tore across campus through cold rain to reclaim her appointment, but the secretary said that when Dr. Speller heard about the cancellation, he left early for vacation. Victoria’s first thought: He couldn’t wait to get away from me.

  Cold-soaked and miserable, Victoria wandered through that interminable day until 5:20, when alone in her dorm room, she imagined herself in Dr. Speller’s office. I can do this, she told herself. It was a dream, only a dream. I can get hold of my thoughts.

  For the next forty-five minutes, Victoria let her thoughts go just as she would in therapy. She started with the haunted house barker, wandered through the amusement park past the dark-haired woman, and ended up outside Bucky’s apartment, by the rustling trees that reminded her of the copper beech in her Abington backyard. Its brilliantly colored fallen leaves had always made her sad. Then she remembered what she had learned in biology: The leaves die, but their hydrocarbons form the soil from which new life springs. Death followed by rebirth. The idea brought her peace. She ended her “session” promptly at six.

  At 6:15, Bucky called.

  18

  Friday, November 19, 2004

  Jonas arrived at his hotel room in a fever. Jennie, who had set the hotel room thermostat to boiling, was already in the bathroom getting ready. When she revealed herself in a black satin bustier and thigh-high stockings, there was no stopping her.

  “Look at us,” Jonas said, as they avoided the wet spot to cuddle. “We’re like a couple of twenty-year-olds.”

  “Ouch,” Jennie exclaimed involuntarily. “Damn. It’s sore under there,” she said, referring to her reconstructed left breast.

  “I hope I wasn’t too rough. I get carried away.”

  “No, it’s not that. It happened this morning on the massage table. The masseuse used a lot of pressure. She must have mashed my chest.”
r />   “You didn’t tell her to stop? If some guy was squeezing my balls, I sure would let him know it.”

  “You’re right. I should have told her to stop.”

  “So, why didn’t you?”

  Jennie rolled onto her back. “Not now, Jonas. Not now.”

  “What?”

  “You know what; I tell you all the time. So do Gil and Gracie. We hate it when you analyze us. I’m the daughter of a psychoanalyst; I’m used to it, but it bothers them.”

  “Bothers them?”

  “Yes, Jonas, it bothers them. Very much. You’re always saying, ‘Why didn’t you do this?’ or ‘How come you didn’t do that?’ They take it as criticism. Meanwhile, they hear how proud you are that this resident got a fellowship to Karolinska Institute, or that resident is on the fast track to tenure. They need that from you, too. Desperately.”

  “They never say anything about it to me.”

  “What do you expect? They’re kids. And they’re adopted. You’re the expert on adolescents. Gil may look like a model, but he’s shy. You know that teenagers who don’t get a handle on social anxiety before college can end up seriously depressed. Or binge drinking. Is that what you want to happen to your son?”

  “And Gracie?”

  “I worry about her, a lot. She’s just started her period. All of a sudden she stopped talking to me—not that it’s so surprising—but I don’t like the crowd she’s hanging out with. They act like they’re thirteen going on thirty. Next stop, sex. Then drugs. Things could go downhill really fast. I wish she would talk with you more. How would you feel if you came home and saw her with a nose ring or God-knows-what-other body piercing? Or with tattoos? Then what will we do?”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Jonas said. It was so much simpler when it was just the two of us. I love you so much, Jen, but I feel like I’m drifting when it comes to the children.”

  “I love you, too, Jonas, but there’s two other passengers on our boat now, and like it or not, we’re in for rough seas. We have to work together. My parents did a lot of things right, but not this. They weren’t together when it came to raising me. I wasn’t sure enough of myself to resist temptation, and it cost me big time emotionally. I was fortunate I didn’t get pregnant or something even worse. But now there are drugs we hadn’t even heard of when we were growing up, and girls give blow jobs the way we used to make out. I don’t want that for Gracie, and neither do you.”

  “You’re right, Jen. You’re right—I’m sorry. I just wish I had a better sense of how to relate to them.”

  “Well, like it or not, Jonas, the storm’s brewing, and there’ll be times you need to take the helm.”

  “Jesus, Jen. You sound like a sailing instructor.”

  “No sassing your way out of this, Captain Courageous!”

  “You’re right, Jen. You’re right. I just wish I we could chart a different course.”

  19

  Thursday, December 17, 1981

  Swissair flight 101 began the transoceanic portion of its journey to Geneva, Switzerland. Glowing with anticipation, Jonas settled beside Jennie Amernick. She had booked them a week-long ski trip in Zermatt. Ever since Thanksgiving, Jennie had become more than a friend, although they hadn’t slept together. And she hadn’t talked about her divorce yet.

  Jonas looked out upon a silver-yellow canopy of moonlit clouds stretching to the horizon. Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune came to mind. He felt a new world opening. “It’s so beautiful out there,” he said. “It was great how you arranged for us to get away a day earlier.”

  “All I did was call Swissair. Their Thursday flights are never sold out. They’ll remember it, too. We just opened up two seats on the Friday flight, which they’ll sell for five times what we paid. If we get some sleep tonight on the plane, we’ll have a whole extra day. I know a place named Villars that’s right on the way from Geneva to Zermatt. Miles of cruising trails. When the sun shines, it’s heavenly. I have friends we can crash with.”

  Jonas went after an itch between his shoulders.

  “Here, let me,” said Jennie.

  “God, that feels good.” Her touch felt tender. “If you like, I’ll return the favor.”

  “When we get there,” she replied with a mischievous smile.

  Jonas raised his wine glass. “Here’s to—”

  “Your first time,” Jennie finished his sentence. “Excited?”

  “Thrilled! Like getting ready to go to a great concert. Do you play any instruments?”

  “I took flute in grade school, but I was so bad, it felt like noise pollution. So, I drew and painted.”

  “That’s amazing. I hear melody everywhere, but I can’t draw a circle, let alone a face.”

  “You’re always talking about music. Why didn’t you become a musician?”

  “Honestly? I loved piano and violin but I wasn’t good enough to make it professionally. Besides, unless you compose or play improvisational jazz—which I never studied—you’re playing other people’s music, not making your own. That’s why I chose psychiatry; I wanted to be creative.”

  “Do you still play?”

  “Not since my father died three years ago.”

  Jennie frowned. “That’s a long time to be away from your instrument.”

  “Where do you paint?”

  “I had a studio.”

  “Had?”

  “In my apartment in New York. I took it apart when I moved out. I stored everything in my parents’ basement.”

  “You haven’t said what happened.”

  “No one knows the whole story. My parents, my friends—they know bits and pieces.” Jennie gazed out the window and then turned to Jonas with tears in her eyes.

  She was going to tell him. With the overhead reading lamp slightly askance, the amber light turned Jennie’s luminous eyes dark aquamarine. Jonas imagined adjacent ponds, the color of Monet’s water lilies. He brushed away Jennie’s tears with his cocktail napkin and waited.

  “I met Peter and his father on a tour of a French castle. His father’s a Hollywood psychiatrist, and the names of the rich and famous rolled off Peter’s tongue like they were his best friends. He dogged me across Europe and then back to the States, where his father bought him an apartment on Central Park West. It was so intoxicating to be pursued; I didn’t see things as they were.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That I was a trophy. He didn’t love me; he loved the idea of me, and he thought people would take him more seriously with a chic wife—which is how he saw me—at his side. Peter was twenty-seven, and aside from jobs his father’s patients got him as favors, he hadn’t become anything on his own. He drifted around the Mediterranean coast with a crowd of producers and directors, pretending he belonged. He told himself he was an up-and-coming movie producer but he was really just a hanger-on.

  “Peter’s family wanted a huge wedding, but my parents didn’t have the hundred thousand dollars. So Peter’s family humiliated my parents by limiting their guest list. I’m sure they were afraid Mom’s relatives would show up looking like the Beverly Hillbillies.

  “When my father pointed out that Peter hadn’t accomplished anything on his own, it infuriated me. He had no respect for Peter’s father, who crossed the country with a medicine chest of Valium and Dexedrine for impresarios and entertainers who wanted pills. I thought Dad envied Peter’s father because he charged ten times more than Dad did. I was so mixed up. I didn’t know who to believe.

  “The wedding was a disaster. I felt so alone. None of my aunts and uncles, not even my closest cousins, were there.

  “Then, one day I showed up at our apartment unexpectedly when one of my tours ended early. The place looked deserted, but I heard noise coming from the bedroom.

  “I walked in on Peter, grunting like a pig on top of a long-legged blonde who was squealing like a porn star. She couldn’t have been more than twenty.

  “I couldn’t believe it. I yelled at them so loudly it’s a wonder the neighbors didn
’t call the police. The girl—some ingénue model—leaped off the bed and bolted into the bathroom, leaving me staring at her purple thong on the bed. She claimed that Peter never told her he was married.

  “Please, Jonas, please don’t tell my father. Promise me,” Jennie pleaded.

  Jonas said, “It’s over. It’s done.” He put his arm around Jennie’s shoulder.

  “You’re the only one who knows.”

  “Why me?” he said.

  “Because I believe you won’t judge me, and that you’ll see the whole me, not what you need me to be.”

  Jonas held her while she cried. “You must have gone for therapy,” he said.

  “Where? I couldn’t go in Philadelphia. Mom and Dad know everybody.”

  “How about Marta? She seems so nurturing. Couldn’t you confide in her?”

  “Nurturing? You don’t know her, Jonas,” Jennie said stridently.

  Jonas was taken aback by the fervor in her voice. He hadn’t realized that she felt this way about her mother.

  She continued, “The last thing I needed was to be preached at by someone who spent my entire childhood telling me what a spoiled brat I was. If it had been up to her, she would have packed me off to the farm every summer to pick strawberries like she did when she was young. Thankfully, Dad saw it differently. He knew I wanted to spend summers at art camp and on writing retreats. When I have children I want them to be themselves. Growing up is complicated enough without your parents sending you mixed messages.”

  “What about New York? There’s a therapist on every corner.”

  “I felt like such a fool. Retelling the story would have just made me relive the nightmare.”

  “You’ve been sitting on this all by yourself?”