And so Marie and Dr. Z. were locked in a complex dance, whose steps included a spurned surgeon, a million-dollar lawsuit, a broken jaw, several fractured teeth, and brushed breasts. It was into this extraordinary tangle that Mike—of course, knowing none of this—had dropped his innocent, rational suggestion that Marie seek her doctor’s help in understanding her pain. And then it was that Marie smiled.
The second time she smiled was in response to Mike’s equally ingenuous question, “Would you feed your dog poisoned dog food?”
There was a story, too, behind that smile. Nine years before, Marie and Charles, her husband, had obtained a dog, an ungainly dachshund named Elmer. Though Elmer was really Charles’s dog, and though Marie had an aversion to dogs, she had gradually grown affectionate toward Elmer, who for years had slept in her bed.
Elmer grew old, crochety, and arthritic and, after Charles’s death, had commanded so much of Marie’s attention that he may have done her a service. Enforced busyness is often the friend of the bereaved and Elmer provided blessed distraction in the early stages of mourning. (In our culture the busyness may be supplied by the funeral arrangements and the paperwork of medical insurance and estate settlement.)
After approximately one year of psychotherapy, Marie’s depression lifted, and she turned her attention to rebuilding her life. She was convinced that she could attain happiness only through coupling. Everything else was prelude; other types of friendship, all other experiences were simply ways of marking time until her life began anew with a man.
But Elmer loomed as a major barrier between Marie and her new life. She was determined to find a man; however, Elmer apparently thought he was sufficient man for her household. He howled and nipped at strangers, especially men. He became perversely incontinent: he refused to urinate outdoors but, waiting till he had gained entry to the house, drenched the living room carpet. No training or punishment was effective. If Marie left him outside, he howled so incessantly that neighbors, even several doors away, phoned her to plead or demand that she do something. If she punished him in any manner, Elmer retaliated by hosing down carpets in other rooms.
Elmer’s odor permeated the house. It hit the visitor at the front door and no amount of air, shampoo, deodorizing, or perfume could cleanse Marie’s home. Too ashamed to invite any visitor inside, she tried at first to repay invitations by entertaining in restaurants. Gradually she despaired of ever having a true social life.
I am not a lover of dogs, but this one seemed worse than most. I met Elmer once when Marie brought him to my office—an ill-mannered creature that growled and noisily licked his genitals during the entire hour. Perhaps it was there and then that I resolved that Elmer would have to go. I refused to allow him to ruin Marie’s life. Or mine.
But there were formidable obstacles. It was not that Marie could not be decisive. There had been another odor polluter in the house, a tenant who, according to Marie, dieted on decomposed fish. In that situation, Marie had acted with alacrity. She followed my advice to have a direct confrontation; and when the tenant refused to alter her cooking habits, Marie scarcely hesitated to ask the woman to move.
But Marie felt trapped with Elmer. He had been Charles’s dog, and a bit of Charles still lived through Elmer. Marie and I endlessly discussed her options. The veterinarian’s extensive and expensive incontinence diagnostic work-up was of little value. Visits to a pet psychologist and trainer were equally fruitless. Slowly and sadly she realized (abetted, of course, by me) that she and Elmer had to part company. She called all her friends to ask if they wanted Elmer, but no one was fool enough to adopt that dog. She advertised in the newspaper, but even the inducement of free dog food failed to generate a prospect.
The inevitable decision loomed. Her daughters, her friends, her veterinarian, all urged her to have Elmer put to sleep. And, of course, behind the scenes, I was subtly guiding her toward that decision. Finally, Marie agreed. She gave the thumbs-down signal and one gray morning took Elmer on his final visit to the veterinarian.
Concurrently, a problem on another front had developed. Marie’s father, who lived in Mexico, had grown so frail that she contemplated inviting him to come to live with her. This seemed to me to be a poor solution for Marie since she so feared and disliked her father that she had had little communication with him for years. In fact, the wish to escape from his tyranny had been a major force in her decision, eighteen years before, to emigrate to the United States. The notion of inviting him to come live with her was spurred by guilt rather than concern or love. Pointing this out to Marie, I also questioned the advisability of yanking an eighty-year-old, non-English-speaking man out of his culture. She ultimately concurred and arranged residential care for her father in Mexico.
Marie’s view of psychiatry? She had often joked with her friends, “Go see a psychiatrist. They’re wonderful. First, they tell you to evict your tenant. Next, they have you put your father in a nursing home. Finally, they make you kill your dog!”
And she had smiled when Mike leaned over to her and asked gently, “You wouldn’t feed your dog poisoned dog food, would you?”
So, from my perspective, Marie’s two smiles had not signified moments of concurrence with Mike but were instead smiles of irony, smiles that said, “If you only knew . . . “When Mike asked her to have a talk with her oral surgeon, I imagined that she must have been thinking, “Have a long talk with Dr. Z.! That’s rich! I’ll talk all right! When I am healed and my lawsuit settled, I’ll talk to his wife and everybody I know. I’ll blow the whistle on that bastard so loud his ears will never stop ringing.”
And certainly the smile about poisoned dog food was equally ironic. She must have been thinking, “Oh, I wouldn’t feed him poisoned dog food—not unless he got a little old and bothersome. Then I’d knock him off—fast!”
When, in our next individual session, we discussed the consultation, I asked her about the two smiles. She remembered each of them very well. “When Dr. C. advised me to have a long talk with Dr. Z. about my pain, I suddenly became very ashamed. I began to wonder if you had told him everything about me and Dr. Z. I liked Dr. C. very much. He’s very attractive, he’s the kind of man I’d like to have in my life.”
“And the smile, Marie?”
“Well, obviously I was embarrassed. Would Dr. C. think I was a slut? If I really think about it (which I don’t), I guess it boils down to an exchange of goods—I humor Dr. Z. and let him have his disgusting little feels in exchange for his help in my lawsuit.”
“So the smile said——?”
“My smile said——Why are you so interested in my smile?”
“Go on.”
“I guess my smile said, ‘Please, Dr. C., go on to something else. Don’t ask me any more questions about Dr. Z. I hope you don’t know about what’s going on between us.”
The second smile? The second smile was not, as I had thought, an ironic signal about the care of her dog but something else entirely.
“I felt funny when Dr. C. kept talking about the dog and the poison. I knew you hadn’t told him about Elmer—otherwise, he wouldn’t have picked a dog to illustrate his talk.”
“And——?”
“Well, it’s hard to say all this. But, even though I don’t show it very much—I’m not good at saying thank you—I really appreciate what you’ve done for me these last months. I wouldn’t have made it without you. I’ve told you my psychiatrist joke (my friends love it)—first, your tenant, then your father, then they make you kill your dog!”
“ So?”
“So, I think maybe you overstepped your role as a doctor—I told you it would be hard to talk about this. I thought psychiatrists weren’t supposed to give direct advice. Maybe you let your personal feelings about dogs and fathers get out of hand!”
“And the smile said——?”
“God, you’re persistent! The smile said, ‘Yes, yes, Dr. C., I get the point. Now quickly, let’s pass on to another subject. Don’t question me more about my dog. I don’t want to make Dr. Yalom look bad.’”
I had mixed feelings about her response. Was she right? Had I let my own feelings get in the way? The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced it didn’t fit. I had always had warm feelings toward my father and would have welcomed the opportunity to invite him to live in my home. And dogs? It is true I was unsympathetic to Elmer, but I knew about my lack of interest in dogs and had been carefully monitoring myself. Every person who knew about the situation had advised her to get rid of Elmer. Yes, I was certain I had acted with her best interests in mind. Hence, I was uncomfortable with accepting Marie’s protection of my professionalism. It felt conspiratorial—as though I acknowledged that I had something to hide. I was also aware, however, that she had expressed gratitude to me, and
that
felt good.
Our discussion about the smiles opened up such rich material for therapy that I put aside my musings about differing views of reality and helped Marie explore her self-contempt for the way she had compromised herself with Dr. Z. She also examined her feelings toward me with more honesty than before: her fears of dependency, her gratitude, her anger.
The hypnosis helped her to tolerate the pain until, after three months, her fractured jaw had healed, her dental work had been completed, and the facial pain had subsided. Her depression improved, and her anger lessened; yet, despite these developments, I was never able to transform Marie in the way I had wished. She remained proud, somewhat judgmental, and resistive to new ideas. We continued to meet, but there seemed less and less to talk about; and finally, several months later, we agreed that our work had come to an end. Marie came in to see me for some minor crisis every few months for the next four years; and, after that, our lives never crossed.
The lawsuit dragged on for three years, and she settled for a disappointingly small sum. By that time, her anger toward Dr. Z. had rusted away, and she forgot about her resolution to raise her voice against him. Ultimately she married a sweet, elderly man. I’m not certain whether she was ever truly happy again. But she never smoked another cigarette.
Epilogue
Marie’s consultation hour is a testament to the limits of knowing. Though she, Mike, and I shared an hour, each of us had a vastly different, and unpredictable, experience. The hour was a triptych, each panel reflecting the perspective, the hues, the concerns, of its creator. Perhaps if I had given Mike more information about Marie, his panel would have resembled mine more closely. But of my hundred hours with her, what should I have shared? My irritation? My impatience? My self-pity for being stuck with Marie? My pleasure with her progress? My sexual arousal? My intellectual curiosity? My desire to change Marie’s vision, to teach her to look within, to dream, to fantasize, to extend her horizons?
Yet had I spent hours with Mike and shared all this information, still I would not have adequately conveyed my experience of Marie. My impressions of her, my pleasure, my impatience are not precisely like any others I have known. I reach out for words, metaphors, analogies, but they never really work; they are at best feeble approximations of the rich images that once coursed through my mind.
A series of distorting prisms block the knowing of the other. Before the invention of the stethoscope, a physician listened to the sounds of life with an ear pressed against a patient’s rib cage. Imagine two minds pressed tight together and, like paramecia exchanging micronuclei, directly transferring thought images: that would be union nonpareil.
Perhaps in some millennium, such union will come to pass—the ultimate antidote for isolation, the ultimate scourge of privacy. For now, there exist formidable barriers to such mind coupling.
First, there is the barrier between image and language. Mind thinks in images but, to communicate with another, must transform image into thought and then thought into language. That march, from image to thought to language, is treacherous. Casualties occur: the rich, fleecy texture of image, its extraordinary plasticity and flexibility, its private nostalgic emotional hues—all are lost when image is crammed into language.
Great artists attempt to communicate image directly through suggestion, through metaphor, through linguistic feats intended to evoke some similar image in the reader. But ultimately they realize the inadequacy of their tools for the task. Listen to Flaubert’s lament, in
Madame Bovary:
Whereas the truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes over flow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
Another reason we can never fully know another is that we are selective about what we choose to disclose. Marie sought Mike’s assistance for impersonal goals, to control pain and stop smoking, and so chose to reveal to him little of herself. Consequently, he mistook the meaning of her smiles. I knew more about Marie and about her smiles. But I, too, mistook their meaning: what I knew of her was but a small fragment of what she would and could tell me of herself.
Once I worked in a group with a patient who, during two years of therapy, rarely addressed me directly. One day Jay surprised me and the other members by announcing (“confessing” was his word) that everything he had ever said in the group—his feedback to others, his self-revelations, all his angry and caring words—everything, had really been said for my benefit. Jay recapitulated, in the group, his life experiences in his family, where he yearned for his father’s love but had never—could never—ask for it. In the group, he had participated in many dramas but always against the horizon of what he might get from me. Though he pretended to speak to other members of the group, he spoke
through
them to me as he continuously sought my approval and support.