Only Children by Rafael Yglesias

Author:Rafael Yglesias
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Families, Family, ebook, Fiction, New York, General, New York (State), book
ISBN: 9780688072193
Publisher: Morrow
Published: 1988-05-14T10:00:00+00:00

10

PETER WENT for a consultation with a psychiatrist. the doctor was a squat old man whose big, watery eyes stared back, unmoved by Peter’s attempts to be, by turns, witty, earnest, lively, calm, self-confident, querulous. Peter hinted at a full deck of childhood traumas for the psychiatrist to choose from, and none was taken. The enervated listener didn’t push Peter to give more particulars. He watched Peter coldly, a reptile observing prey with unblinking eyes. When they did move, it was to the clock on his desk. The sight of time prompted the doctor’s longest speech. He suggested analysis. That, in practical terms, meant five sessions a week on the couch at a hundred and fifty an hour.

Peter said he’d think about it, and he did, only with outrage and despair, and then went on, at Rachel’s insistence, to see a mere psychotherapist recommended by a friend of Rachel’s. This time, maybe because this doctor, or Ph.D. anyway, was a mere female, an elegantly dressed, heavily perfumed nice middle-class lady in her late forties, this time Peter blurted it all out, his parents’ divorce, the child molestation, the affair, his sexual numbness with Diane, and even his elaborate fantasies, admitted to no one, that Diane and Byron would die in some accident and leave him free, tragically and gloriously free.

“Free of what?” Kotkin, Ph.D., asked.

He was so sure of his answer—the tedium, the responsibility— that Peter was surprised to hear himself say instead, “The guilt.”

“What are you guilty about?” Kotkin asked.

“I don’t know. Of the affair?”

“But you said these fantasies started when you had stopped seeing Rachel. Before you resumed the affair.”

“That’s true. I don’t know. The guilt of failing them?”

“How have you failed them?”

“The affair?”

“But the fantasies started while you weren’t having the affair.”

“Right. Well, of not loving them.”

She nodded, almost bored. “What can I do for you?”

This question baffled him. Somehow, he realized, he thought he was supposed to do something for her. “Cure me?”

Kotkin smiled. “You’re cured. What else can I do?”

He stared at her and then laughed. Her flip answer made him replay his confession and hear how solemn, how dreadful he had made his life sound. But was it really? “I don’t know,” he said at last.

She said she thought they could work together, that she could help him explore his past. My bothersome past, he thought, and missed hearing the rest of her soothing vision of their future. Twice-a-week visits to this nice lady to chat about his feelings. That’s somehow the way it came out. Her perfume, her long dress, the quiet earth tones of her furniture— the reality was softer than the cement blocks of abstract words she spoke.

He suspected this feeling was transference. Because he knew both too much and too little of analytic theory to be sure if he was right to prefer her to the psychiatrist, he ignored his doubts and let the abrupt suffusion of protection and warmth he felt afterward flow into his chilled, timid arteries.

Peter went

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