At a charming bistro in Bryn Mawr close to midnight, Joan told me she really wanted to talk about the movie we'd just seen. Shine.
"It was soooo rich," she said. "Some extraordinarily fertile ground for inner exploration. No?"
Yes, of course. I said first of all the camera work was beautifully evocative, especially of the piano playing. All those wonderful details: The black lacquer of the grand piano, its shining ivory keys, the brass and felt and wire strings, the sound of the keys' action, the feel of them, the gold-leaf logo: STEINWAY. A tactile experience. That movie conveyed perfectly what it must feel like being a concert pianist.
"I just love that scene where David goes with his friends to a night club and he ogles the naked dancing women and drinks and, with enormous manly satisfaction, lights up a cigar."
"Isn't love too strong a word?" she asked.
"No, because when I was 17 I was in the Cleveland airport on my way to U.S. Air Force boot camp. I lit up a cigar to celebrate my liberation from my drunken abusive father."
Joan wanted to hear more of this. More!
"Okay, right off we're introduced to that screwed-up Peter Helfgott, David's father, who abuses everyone in his care. Hides behind his patriarchy. 'I know best, believe me.' he tells his wife. Which reminds me of you-know-who, and my life with him in that dreadful cockroach-infested house on Superior Street in Youngstown."
The beginning of the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto--or "The Rach 3" as it's called--was the opening theme of the nightly classical music radio station I used to listen to as a boy. In my troubled childhood music and books were my solace. And those introductory bars in the movie evoked a great recognition, remembrance.
I was brought back to the acute excitement music always evoked in me in those days. Composers like Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and Bellinni were telling me, "Jimmy, don't worry! A beautiful world like this exists out there, and someday you'll be in it yourself!"
To me music was proof beyond question that my perceptions of beauty were valid, authentic. Despite my father angrily insisting it was nothing but crap, and gave him a headache, so turn the fucking thing off, right now, okay? What he really wanted to turn off was me, but he didn't have the balls to say it out loud.
In Shine David pursues the study of the piano not so much for himself, but rather to win his father's unobtainable love. Which naturally struck a few chords with Joan.
Joan said David appeared to have little real interest in the music, "so the movie is not about music, it's about the struggle to be loved." The boy, she said, might just as well have been a brick layer or a plumber.
I said, yes, David sought his father's love, and failed. In the end, though, his playing won approval from the audience--and the world. So in this instance the music served very well as a means, not an end.
Joan said she found that awfully familiar. And indeed she was right.
When the movie began a man behind us kept rustling a candy wrapping. Joan turned a couple of times to give the guy a disapproving glare, but without effect. The man ignored her. Finally I turned and said, "Would you stop that, please?" But he ignored me as well.
Joan said she heard and felt the anger in my voice. "What was that all about?" "I was angry because he ignored you, that's all."
"So you immediately leaped to my rescue. You saw me as a poor little maiden in distress."
"Well, why not?"
"Did it occur to you that I'm an adult woman and I can take care of myself?"
"But he was annoying me too."
As we were leaving the theater Joan suddenly brightened in recognition and walked over and said hello to a tall man in glasses, and to his plump wife. They embraced, and talked for a few moments. Joan didn't bother to bring them over for introductions. When she got back she told me he was Dr. Berger, her former psychiatrist, and that his reaction to the movie was a curt question: "This is entertainment?" She explained that Dr. Berger treats people like poor David in his practice every day. By now he's seen them all. As for troubled David, well, he's a classic case study. Very clearly "schizo-affective." And she of course agrees with Dr. Berger, wholly, absolutely. "Because he's very nearly a genius," she said. "An absolutely brilliant and insightful man."
"How long were you in psychoanalysis with him?"
"Well, let's see…I began in 1980 and then we concluded in…'85…so five years."
I thought of asking her why such an absolutely brilliant genius took so long to get the job done, but sensibly I kept my mouth shut. But maybe I should have told her what I was thinking. Which was that I was getting totally fed up with her always rattling on about the utter magnificence of the multitude of men in her life.
A few days later I called. As we spoke I heard the loud rushing sound of running water and the clattering of pots, silverware and dishes in her sink. "You're busy," I said, "So I'll give you a buzz when you have free time to talk."
"I'm not busy. Why do you say that?"
"Well, obviously you're washing dishes."
"So?"
"The noisy rattling is distracting."
"Are you feeling that I'm dishonoring our conversation by doing something else at the same time?"
"I said it's distracting."
Why did that conversation only add to my annoyance and frustration? Maybe I was in a bad mood. Maybe I was getting indigestion, or coming down with the flu. Whatever.
* * *
Joan put a log into the fireplace, then sat down with her appointment diary and began flipping the pages, and rapidly scribbling notes here and there. I'd brought with me my book of collected poems of Yeats, and was savoring the lines of one of my favorites…
Fifteen apparitions have I seen;
The worst a coat upon a coat-hangar.
Talk about a strange poem! It fit my odd mood. I was still not feeling quite right. I was jumpy, irritable. Discombobulated. I didn't know why. Then she interrupted my reading with an announcement.
"By the way," she said, looking above the glasses perched on the end of her nose, "I can't meet you Saturday as planned because something has come up."
She had to go to New Hope, Pennsylvania. "You're familiar with that little town by the river, aren't you? It's utterly charming. I'm going to Todd's house for an important meeting. You remember Todd, don't you?"
Oh, yes. I remembered. He's the guy who got her the Allentown School District consultation project, which pays $1,500 an hour. The guy who gave her a sacred pipe to help her get through the terror of sweat lodges and her vision quest in the Canadian wilderness. The guy whose picture she keeps in her purse, who wakes her before dawn in the Allentown Hilton and snaps his fingers over and again, which makes her feel so girlishly incompetent but somehow she manages to produce exactly what he wants from her. Todd, a forceful masculine name, similar to Rod, and we fully understand the phallic implications here, don't we? Yes. Todd is utterly phallic and also incredibly intelligent, dynamic, charismatic, and powerful. Did I mention his intelligence? Yes, he's acutely intelligent. She needs to go to New Hope. To his big, lovely house. That has a splendid view of the canal. That house is enormous, awesome, breathtaking...
"Are you aware of all the superlatives you use whenever you mention your precious Todd?" I asked.
She looked up. "No, do I?"
"Yes. Indeed you do. And, frankly, it's annoying."
"Have you given any thought to exactly why it so disturbs you so much?"
Oh, my. I knew we're were about to really get into it. Her tone and manner suddenly was formal, detached, and clinical. Just like a white-coated lab worker peering into a microscope at some disease organism. Which annoyed me even further.
I launched right into one of my extended rants. Her praise for Todd was, I pronounced, almost pathologically excessive. "And such excesses often spring not from authentic belief but rather from deep insecurity."
"What in hell are you talking about?" she said.
"Your endlessly heaping praise upon him is very much like the stuff those proselytizing evangelicals do. They're so energetically seeking converts not because they're so eager to spread the word of the Lord but rather because they need to attract large numbers of other believers. Why? To make them feel less anxious about the ridiculousness of their belief system. Deep down they know it's all absurd bullshit."
"So my association with Todd is absurd bullshit?"
"Tell me, Joan. Just what is it about Todd's great consulting enterprise that might be troubling you on a subconscious level? Is it perchance the obscenely huge amount of money that he pulls in on schemes that sound like a lot of mumbo-jumbo?"
"What?"
"Yes, mumbo-jumbo. And his calling you into his hotel room before dawn, snapping his fingers, laying all those impossible expectations on you. Now who does that remind you of? Let's see, who could it be?"
"Stop."
"Why should I stop? You keep shoving your need for space down my throat, and if that isn't enough you keep shoving this precious Todd of yours down my throat as well."
"That may be how you perceive it."
"Your obsession with Todd is strange. He's smarter than you are, he's more aggressive, he's much more demanding, and there you are, once again pretending to be enthusiastic about something you really don't give a shit about. That's what it says to me, sweetheart."
"If all that is true then why in hell are you pursuing me?"
"Because," I shouted, "I want to be with someone who LOVES me, laughs at my jokes, appreciates my crazy, complex mind, admires my intellectuality--yes, I'm not ashamed to be an intellectual, because that's just what I happen to be, and I don't have to apologize for it, and I sure as hell don't have to dumb down just to make others feel comfortable. I'm me, goddamnit, and if you don't like ME, then I'll get the fuck out of your life."
"But I'm unavailable. Or haven't you noticed that yet?"
"I suppose I'm pursuing you precisely because you are so unavailable. Which is a replay of my childhood yearning for the mother who abandoned me. I'm trying to finally master something that always mastered me. And why not? What difference does it make why we go after each other? Seems to me that our main job is to find a way to make it work. Agree to love each other, comfort each other, affirm each other. I'll make you chicken soup when you get sick, and you can bring me a nice big chunk of chocolate cake after I eat your pussy. We don't need to analyze every goddamned thing, every comment, every dream. Why don't we just fucking enjoy each other?"
"But I need to analyze things. You're an arty intellectual. I'm a therapist. Why do you insist on the legitimacy of your identity, but then deny me the legitimacy of mine?"
"The huge difference between us is, dear, is that I'm using my intellectuality in an attempt to bring us together, whereas you are using alleged analysis to push us apart. Tell me. Is that a fair characterization, or not?"
I thought what I said would infuriate her. But it didn't. She just stopped. And apparently was thinking about the things I'd said. The wheels of her brain were spinning. She looked to me like an astronomer peering into the telescope, focused on a white dwarf or a red giant. Trying to see something out there in space, a zillion miles away, as clearly as she could.
"I need time to process all this," she said softly.
"Listen. I don't want to hear any more bullshit about that charlatan Todd. Fuck Todd. If you want to make money, fine, you're certainly entitled to make a living. But you don't need to keep bringing that Slick Willy up all the time. I'm sick of it."
"Okay. Okay. I got it."
Joan's unexpected acceptance took the wind right out of my sails. I felt like collapsing in a big heap. I felt like crying. Or hiding in the back of a dark, warm closet, like I did when I was a child. But I was damned if I'd ever let her see that. Oh, hell no.
"Fine," I said. And shut up.
Joan resumed her scribbling. I turned back to my Yeats.
