The miranda, p.5
The Miranda, page 5
“I hear it’s real good for keeping depression at bay.”
“I’ve heard that as well,” I said. “And I know it’s true. But that’s not why I walk.”
“So why do you?”
The directness paid off again, and slightly to my surprise I found myself telling her all about my grand walking project, much as I’d recently told Carole, though a little more eloquently now, since I was doing it for the second time, and I didn’t mention Albert Speer.
“That’s really cool,” she said when I’d finished, and her enthusiasm sounded genuine enough. “So maybe you’ll need me to do more than just grocery shopping. Maybe you’ll want me to go to the hardware store once in a while.”
“It could happen,” I said.
“And you’ll probably need somebody to go to the post office for you sometimes, or take your boots in to be repaired. And what if the washer or furnace breaks down? You’ll need somebody to make phone calls and deal with the repairmen when they come, and keep an eye on them and keep them in line when they get things wrong. I can do all that.”
I didn’t doubt that she could. “Sure,” I said. “Why not.”
“And if you need your car taken in for an oil change or a lube job. I’m there for you.”
She seemed to have understood my situation very well; perhaps she understood it better than I did.
“But no cooking,” she said. “And no cleaning. I’m not going to be a maid.”
“I don’t want a maid,” I said.
“I’m pleased to hear it. A man really doesn’t need a maid.”
“Then it sounds like we’re in business.”
We discussed money: not a lot but enough, and paid in cash, on the nail, off the books.
“OK then,” she said. “So what’s my job title?”
It was a question that surprised me. I scarcely thought this arrangement constituted a job, so why would it need a title?
“You know,” she said, “so I’ll have something to put on my résumé.”
Well OK, I could see that a woman who had made bad choices and was putting her life in order might need to pad her résumé where she could, but I had no suggestions.
“How about assistant?” she suggested.
I didn’t argue. Why would I have? I said, “Sure. That’s fine by me.”
“Fantastic,” she said with an enthusiasm that amazed me. “Let’s make a shopping list.”
ELEVEN
The pace of walking and the pace of thinking fit very comfortably together, it seems to me, and I realize I’m by no means the first person to have noticed this. I know that some people say they do their best thinking while running or swimming or working out—my ex-wife had been known to say that—but those activities have always driven thoughts right out of my head. And for sure there are times when a man wants to have thoughts driven out of his head, but in general, and certainly in my own yard, I did some of my best thinking while walking.
I’ve never claimed to be a “thinker” per se, and I don’t claim to be any kind of philosopher, but I did sometimes think about the “big questions” as I walked: God and death, free will and predestination, war and peace, crime and punishment, occasionally about love and sex. I’ll spare you the results of these ruminations. I’m sure I never came to any very original conclusions. I’m sure I thought what many millions of people have thought before me, which in itself was something to think about. How many people in the entire history of the world have ever had a genuinely original thought? Friedrich Nietzsche said, “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,” to which I would only add, “And a lot of not so great ones are conceived then as well.”
“Hey, you!”
My thoughts, such as they were, were interrupted by yet another head popping up over my neighbor’s fence, the one I’d come to think of as Big Paul’s. A young woman looked at me. The face appeared drained and taut, but she was trying to be outgoing and engaging: a difficult trick to pull off. The eyes were heavy, the hair was straw blonde, the tanned shoulders were bare, and there was an e-cigarette in the corner of her mouth, and you’d have to say she just looked a little trashy, though it’s not a word I like to use about people. A moment later Small Paul’s head appeared beside the woman.
“OK,” she said, “all right, so the kid was telling the truth.”
“Yes?”
“I’m Small Paul’s mother,” she said. “Big Paul’s wife.”
“Oh, OK,” I said.
She didn’t look much like the classical idea of a mother, but I’d learned long ago that mothers come in all varieties. For that matter she didn’t look like the kind of woman who’d be married to Big Paul: but again, I’d learned not to make judgments about people’s choice of partner.
“You can call me Renée,” she said. “You can call me any time. Just joking.”
I introduced myself. Small Paul stood silently, awkwardly, beside his mother.
“Small Paul said you were walking in circles, and I see he wasn’t lying. That makes a change.”
I didn’t want to get into the intricacies of Small Paul’s lying habits, so I said, “Yes, I’m walking.”
I hoped that might be enough of an answer to get rid of her, though I didn’t honestly expect it to be.
“He says you’re trying to save the Earth.”
“He’s wrong about that,” I said. “I mean, I’d be happy to save the Earth if I could, but I have enough trouble trying to save myself.”
She smiled at me. It was a smile that wasn’t nearly as warm and powerful as she imagined it was.
“He also tells me you collect butterflies,” she said.
Small Paul looked thoroughly embarrassed.
“No, I don’t know where he got that idea,” I said. “I only mentioned butterflies in relation to chaos theory.”
Small Paul now looked more than embarrassed. He seemed to be in agony, but his mother was impressed for some reason.
“He gets ideas everywhere,” she said. “Sometimes I wish he’d get a few less.”
We both let that one go. Renée peered over the fence with renewed interest, looking me over, looking around my yard, with a strange mixture of curiosity and mild disapproval.
“I suppose it’s a good yard for walking in,” she said. “Nice round path, and plenty of privacy. You could walk naked in there if you wanted to. Nobody would see you.”
I wasn’t sure this was actually true.
“Unless, of course, they stood on a chair and looked over like I’m doing now. Just joking.”
The joke was lost on me.
“Are you a single man, Joe?” Renée asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“I didn’t really have to ask. I can tell.”
I never doubted that my single or divorced status would be apparent to anybody who was interested, though I didn’t imagine many were.
“You’re a lucky man, Joe.”
“I don’t think luck had much to do with it,” I said.
“I guess married people always envy single people, but let me tell you there are days when I sure could enjoy being a merry widow.”
“Yes?”
“Just joking,” she added belatedly, though this time she hardly sounded as though she was joking at all. After a pause she said, “Big Paul isn’t easy to live with.”
“Who is?”
“I’ve got a favor to ask,” she said.
I groaned inwardly and I may have groaned outwardly as well. I have never been very good at doing favors.
“Feel free to say no,” she said.
“I will.”
“It’s this pet of ours,” and she signaled to Small Paul, who reached down below the level of the fence and came up displaying the small white dog that I’d already seen when I first met Big Paul. It was now wearing a red leather collar spangled with rhinestones.
“He’s part Havanese, part Maltese,” Renée said.
Now that I could get a better look, I might have thought he was also part, or perhaps largely, a failed genetic experiment, but I kept that to myself.
“He’s called Hopeless,” she said. “Small Paul picked the name.”
The boy’s agony hadn’t eased in the slightest. His mother pulled back some fluff on the dog’s head to reveal its face: shiny black eyes, something that sniffled and drooled and made a noise that didn’t quite sound canine.
“Not much of a hound,” she said, “but he still needs a lot of exercising.”
I found that hard to believe.
“And Big Paul refuses to take him out for a walk. He says the dog makes him look like a sissy. And I said to him, ‘Well, Paul, you’re the one who works in security, but it seems to me that if you were a bit more secure in your own masculinity, you wouldn’t be so afraid of looking like a sissy.’ He didn’t like that, as you can imagine.”
I could, and I could also see that it was best to stay well out of that little marital debate.
I said, “Can’t the boy take the dog for a walk?”
“Oh please,” said Renée. “Look at him. He looks like a sissy walking down the street even when he isn’t dragging a powder puff of a dog with him.”
I had never seen Small Paul walking down the street, but this sounded very plausible, if not exactly the kind of thing a boy wants to hear from his mother.
“So I was thinking about you,” Renée said. “You walk all the time, don’t you?”
I couldn’t and didn’t deny it.
“And I’m sure you’re totally secure in your masculinity, but that wouldn’t matter anyway. Nobody’d ever have to see you. I was thinking that Hopeless could tag along with you while you’re walking in circles in your yard. Couldn’t he? Eh? Feel free to say no.”
“No.”
“If you think it’s too much to ask, just say so.”
“I think it’s too much to ask,” I said.
After a pause that I suspected she thought was pregnant, she said, “Mmm, you’re no pushover, are you, Joe?”
“No,” I said.
She looked suddenly sad, though it seemed a very performed kind of sadness.
“How about Wendy Gershwin?” I said. “Maybe she’d like to walk him.”
Renée made a noise of deep, damp, throaty contempt. “Wendy Gershwin is going to be way too busy with her art.”
I couldn’t tell whether it was Wendy Gershwin herself or simply art that Renée held in contempt.
“Or maybe her niece could walk your dog.”
“Niece, my ass,” said Renée.
I preferred not to know what she meant by that. I wasn’t so foolish, at a time like that, to bring up Jacques Lacan, the French post-Freudian psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and deconstructor. But if I had, I’d have referred to what he said about love, neighbors, and Jesus. He took Jesus’s line “Love thy neighbor as thyself” and pointed out that most people actually hate themselves, so naturally they also hate their neighbors. I always had a lot of time for Lacan.
“No, Joe,” said Renée, “you were my only hope. But it’s OK. I like it that you’re no pushover. I like a challenge. I can see I’m going to have a lot of fun changing your mind.”
I didn’t think that sounded like any fun whatsoever. She looked down at Hopeless, and for a moment I thought she was going to hurl the little critter at me, but she didn’t. She placed the dog on her bare shoulder as though it were a parrot, or perhaps an epaulet, and then she looked at me through half-closed eyes, a look that I suspected was meant to be kittenish or even vixenish. I looked back with what I knew to be a neutral expression.
“Ah well, I hear that some new people are going to be moving into the house over your back fence,” she said. “Maybe one of them will want to be a dog walker.”
“Just so long as they’re not riffraff,” I said.
She laughed, but I wasn’t sure what at, and then, before she and her dog and her son disappeared behind the fence again, she said, “Oh, and when you decide to start walking naked, give me a call.”
I wondered if she’d say “Just joking” again, but I wasn’t altogether surprised when she didn’t.
TWELVE
I suppose there must be some people who buy a dog just so they’ll have an excuse to go walking. They exercise themselves as they exercise the dog. The idea of getting somebody else to exercise your dog has always struck me as just plain wrong, not that I know a whole lot about dogs. All the time I was growing up I really wanted a dog, but my father put his foot down and wouldn’t allow it. He said I wasn’t responsible enough to take care of a dog. Maybe he was right, but I don’t think so. Walking it certainly wouldn’t have been a problem. My father and I walked all the time.
I know from my practice and from the literature that a lot of people believe that when fathers and sons walk together, it creates a deep, primary bond, and I’m sure that’s largely true. Not in my own case, however. Certainly there were many times as I was growing up when I went walking with my father, but I wouldn’t read too much into it. I suspect he had some mixed motives. Partly, it now seems to me, he simply wanted to get away from his wife, my mother. More creditably, I think he felt he ought to try to be a good father to his son, felt he ought to do something with his boy, but he didn’t have a clue what. He had no more interest in sports than I did. He’d never dream of taking me to see a movie. If he’d ever set foot inside a museum or art gallery he kept the fact very, very well hidden.
So we went out walking together, not in any very organized way. We just walked to get some fresh air, in the so-called great outdoors, in the so-called wide-open spaces, in parks, woods, hills, forests—all the places that are supposed to be good for you, possibly even good for the soul, if you think you have one. Consequently my father and I spent a lot of time together, but we never got close, never formed much of a bond, primary or otherwise. We definitely never talked about anything important. Sometimes, for long periods, we didn’t say anything at all. I think my father found that very appealing, a way of avoiding noise, and also, I can now see, a way of avoiding intimacy. A lot of the time we might both just as well have been walking alone, although if I’d been walking by myself I’d surely have walked more slowly and over much shorter distances.
My father demanded that we cover what seemed to me at the time huge distances, and I still have the clearest memories of being out of breath, sweating, my lungs and legs aching. I wasn’t especially wimpy or unfit; it was simply that I was trying to keep up with a grown man, and that’s hard for any kid.
Naturally I did a lot of complaining. Sometimes my father tried to encourage me, sometimes he mocked me, sometimes he just ignored me. I can’t say that I learned not to complain, but I did learn that complaining wouldn’t do me any good. Maybe my father was trying to make a man of me, and of course I wouldn’t say that he failed, but the strange thing is that, with a few pitiful exceptions, men are made one way or another regardless of what their fathers do for and to them.
Did these weekend excursions with my father instill in me a love of walking and solitude? In fact, I believe they did, though it’s easy to imagine they might have had the completely opposite effect. Sometimes, though not often, I think about my father when I’m walking, but it’s never a clear or uncomplicated thought.
My father had been in the army, and I know he saw action, but that’s as much information as I have. I have no idea what he really did or what was done to him. He never told me. He never told anyone as far as I know, not even, and perhaps least of all, my mother. Given that he was smart, articulate, and more or less middle class, I’m sure he had plenty of other options. He was a volunteer; he wanted to go to war. I find that the real and unsolvable mystery.
I’m assuming nothing good happened to him out there, though I’m working only with circumstantial evidence. He survived, but he was fucked up by it, as it seems most are to a greater or lesser degree. He’d left the service before I was born and worked the rest of his life in various management jobs for a furniture wholesaler and distributor. It didn’t make him happy. The person I saw as I was growing up was a miserable man: stressed, quick to anger, emotionally closed down, anhedonic. And I don’t doubt that, much as I’ve fought against it, I’ve inherited some of those deeply unlovable traits.
My father died of lung cancer when he was in his late fifties. It was sudden and it made for a horrible end, but it didn’t seem at all surprising. Today I’m sure that even most laymen would be able to recognize that my father suffered from some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Would he have been better off if he’d seen a therapist, gone through some kind of talking cure? Well, yes, how could he not have been? And were my father’s problems instrumental in my becoming, in what now seems like a different life, a psychologist and therapist? Again, surely they must have been, though if my training taught me anything, it’s not to be too glib about connecting causes and effects.
I got into psychology initially because I was “interested” in it, whatever that means, but I was interested in plenty of other things too. Then I studied it at college, and when I started writing essays and taking exams and doing clinical work, it was obvious that I was “good” at it, whatever that means. I liked the subject. The teachers liked me. I liked the theory. I liked reading Lacan, Laplanche, Leclaire—I even wrote a thesis on error and discourse—but at the same time, I found it hard to see how I was ever going to apply most of that stuff. Fortunately I also liked the problem-solving aspect of the subject: looking for clues, solving mysteries, coming up with solutions, then coming up with alternative or contradictory solutions. It took me a good while longer to develop an interest in living, breathing, suffering people. But I got there eventually.
Like the majority of contemporary psychotherapists, I ended up believing in and practicing cognitive behavioral therapy—because it worked. If you have a fear of spiders, we don’t need to put you on a leather couch for ten years and get you to describe your dreams about your mother. We just need to find a way of desensitizing you to spiders.
People exaggerate the extent to which therapy is a luxury of the self-absorbed, self-indulgent rich, but it’s true enough that down in the ghetto, an appointment with a therapist isn’t high on the list of priorities. I made a good living from my profession as a private, licensed psychotherapist, and of course most of my patients weren’t living anywhere near the poverty line. But I tried to ease my conscience a little by doing pro bono work with troubled youth, the homeless, addicts of one kind or another, kids with eating disorders, the occasional “reformed” gang member, and so on.
