The Golden Condom (16 page)

Over time, I realized in more depth why he seemed so surpassingly disintegrated and peculiar. For Peter, caring for anybody was a danger to be avoided at all costs, because if he noticed or responded to another's needs, he would feel compelled to put his own needs aside entirely and do whatever that person demanded of him. Reciprocity and naturally maintaining boundaries were both inconceivable to him; where would he have seen either (or would it have registered if he did see) before we met? An impossible bind loomed before him: he was unable to live with people or without them—and this included me. His dreams revealed this to both of us with compelling immediacy.

THE FIRST RUNG

Dreams, I told Peter, tell the truth—particularly truths about ourselves that we would rather not know but need to know; they have fascinated me my entire life, and I taught dream interpretation for many years. Luckily, he grasped this principle intuitively and took his dreams seriously from the start; he knew they were his and his alone. Until our last couple of years together, he hardly remembered any, but then, when he was finally ready to attend to them, they started to reveal his emotional life with astonishing clarity. He saw that each was an eloquent and poignant metaphor for his existential predicament. Psychoanalyst and animal researcher John Mack, in his profound book
Nightmares and Human Conflict
, says that these terrifying dreams are “involuntary poetry,” and Peter's certainly fit this description.

In the first dream he recounted to me, he was living in an underground bunker in a war zone and only dared to stick his head out periodically before retreating to save his life. The meaning of this siege mentality was obvious to both of us: his carapace of imperious indifference served the same function as a turtle's—to protect the vulnerable creature inside. It had formed so early and covered him so completely that he could not conceive of surviving without it. He feared that feeling anything, let alone caring about what others felt, would deplete his precious, limited resources. He carried his bunker on his back.

But Peter was not yet ready or able to give up his refuge—he had nothing reliable with which to replace it—and so this dream and his insights about it led exactly nowhere. At my wit's end, I tried another tack, more behavioral: I went on a campaign to get him to do little things at home, at work, and with me—like taking out the garbage (he kept himself magisterially aloof from all household chores), initiating the briefest personal conversation with his wife, going to the company coffee shop, e-mailing me any thoughts he had between sessions—but to no avail. Even when he did a little something—he actually took the dog for a walk once—it was always a one-off. Whatever we accomplished during the hour he unwove like Penelope during the week by very active inattention and grimly determined inaction.

A combination of willfulness (his only means of self-assertion was to refuse to do what was asked of him) and terror of the unknown still kept Peter locked in place. He neutralized my every attempt to nudge him forward. I felt like I was the psychotherapist of Bartleby the Scrivener, the tragic hero of Melville's story who responded to every request by saying, “I prefer not to.” He accused me of only doing it for the money, and I began to wonder if he wasn't correct.

But on rare occasions (but on more occasions than ever before) there would be flashes of another Peter. He would answer some inquiry of mine seriously and passionately with the impacted intensity of years of suppression. When James, his former tormentor, lay dying, Peter wrote him a poem declaring that he loved him, recalling this tragic man's aesthetic gifts and the good moments they had shared that had been unknown to me until he read it to me. The poem was found next to James's deathbed; Peter had gotten through to him at the end, something I had been unable to do with my own brother, and he knew I was glad for both of them. At the same time, Peter also threw his considerable expertise and energy into charity work. His efforts garnered millions of dollars in contributions that strangers admired and were touched by. Was he beginning to open himself to self-expression?

Then, just when I started to believe that we were actually making inroads and no longer had to start from scratch repeatedly, he did something so chillingly detached that I was unprepared for it even after long experience: I was hospitalized unexpectedly—and for an extended period of time—with a serious illness. I informed all my patients and received many touching responses. Peter reacted to my announcement without a word of concern, only an awkwardly worded question about whether his next regular session time would still be available, which of course was impossible under the circumstances. His utter lack of empathy shocked and hurt me, although on some level, I realized that he was denying my vulnerability and the anxiety that my unavailability and possible loss stirred up in him. I berated myself for grandiosely thinking—and not for the first time—that I alone could unlock his hidden heart. Had he regressed with a vengeance to his familiar aloofness because he was panicked by the fear of losing me—or was he simply showing his true colors? Had I barely made a dent with all my efforts? I berated myself for my blindness and egoism at having cherished the fantasy that in extremis I would be exempt from his withdrawal. However, when I confronted him with his behavior and told him how heartless it seemed—I did not hold back how hurt and angry I was—he sincerely apologized.

Shortly after this highly charged exchange, Peter surprised me by informing me that he had reinitiated a relationship with his aged mother (his father had died years before). He had been visiting her regularly. The more feeble and demented she became, the tenderer were his attentions; he actually talked to her with great patience. He was such a good son that the attendants of the nursing home constantly remarked on his devotion and told him that they wished others would emulate him. He even recalled, and discussed with joy, good times with her that he had never mentioned before, when they were alone together on summer weekdays without James. He could embrace her wholeheartedly because he knew there was a time limit on what could be expected of him—he would have a reserve left after she was gone—so he gave his considerable all. This inspired me to go on with him. When she finally died, Peter delivered a loving eulogy in which he revealed for the first time publicly what his family life had been like. (“The undercurrent of disruption and the threat of violence consumed so much of my mother's life that it would be a dishonor not to acknowledge it at the end of her life,” he said. “May the unrelenting, enduring, and shocking suffering that our family had to privately endure be released on this day.”) The mourners wept and embraced him.

In his next session after this apotheosis, however, he fell completely and totally silent as soon as I picked up the phone, and he stayed silent. Shaky starts for these encounters were typical of him, unused as he was to conversation in the world outside our calls, but now he said not a word for the entire forty-five minutes, which he had never done before. This would have been awkward in person, but on the telephone, it was unbearable. I felt imprisoned in the empty air space, and his withdrawal now felt like a refusal, not an inability, to make the effort. Had I convinced myself—I had certainly done it with other men—that he had more to give, that he had the capacity to feel more, than he really did? At this point, he was capable of knowing what he felt (frightened of intimacy? hopeless? furious and under my thumb?) and of expressing it; not doing so was willful. At the end of this interminable session, I gave him an ultimatum in my calmest voice: “If you don't make the effort to talk to me, I won't continue to work with you. Otherwise, we're wasting my time and your money. I'll give you one more chance in our session next week, and that's it.” I was not at all sure that he would even bother to call.

I had no idea what he would do; was it really over between us—and in this lousy way? I was wary about how the next session would unfold and was prepared to make good on my word to end the charade; part of me even anticipated breaking up with a touch of sadistic pleasure. I had an urge to retaliate for all the disappointment and frustration he and every unrelated boyfriend in my past had caused me and I had not-so-patiently borne. I took a perverse fantasized pleasure at finally having the power to end a frustrating relationship—a power I had never thought I had in the past.

I braced myself for his next call. Something in my voice must have told him that I'd meant what I'd said, because he broke his silence at the very start by telling me a dream in anything but his usual monotone:

“I'm climbing a cliff, a vertical cliff. It's so real. I'm looking up to see where I can grab next. It's so windy up here that I could drift away. I can't go up or down safely—if I move at all, I'm going to fall to my death. I'm frightened, but I say okay, I'll try to let go.”

He understood that this dream was a topographical representation of his existential dilemma, and he promised to think about it. I was hesitantly pleased that he took it seriously and had read the metaphor accurately. I decided to bide my time. Still, I worried, was this another fencer's feint to get me back in the match?

But Peter was true to his word and began the next session by recounting, in a voice full of feeling, an even more powerful dream:

“This time, instead of being up high, I was down low—I was at the bottom of a body of water. My feet were stuck on the bottom. I couldn't stay there any longer, but I couldn't get up to the surface. I realized I'm going to run out of breath here. I can't float—even gravity wasn't working in my favor. I'm going to die. Then I see that there's a wall on the side, like a ladder with grooves for my feet. I grab it, I hold on, I go up it, and I make it.”

The threat of losing me and not being able to do anything about it had caused him to fall from the height of arrogance to the depth of despair, and from either place, there seemed to be no way out—until he saw the ladder and grabbed on at the last minute. He asked to continue for another six months, and I agreed, on the condition that he never again give me the silent treatment. My reactions were a complex mixture of professional gratification, genuine caring for him, and a touch of pleasure that I had “won.” This I accepted as a normal human response; a saint couldn't do this work.

Then, just as we were ending, he added something poignant and revealing. “I'm afraid if I'm cured, I won't be able to see you anymore.” This was the first time he had ever admitted that I mattered to him. I promised, holding back tears that luckily he could not see, that we could still be in touch even if he was no longer my patient.

Somehow I wasn't dismayed or offended at his initial backtracking the next week, when he suggested, as was his wont, that I must have felt happy not to lose the income. I expected it and saw through it and called him on it; I felt convinced that too much had changed for him to revert utterly. I said, “You know it's not true that I just see you as a revenue stream. You pay me for my time, but you can't pay me to care about you—that's freely given. What's the real reason for your discomfort?”

“If this works, it means that I've been wrong all my life,” he said. “I thought of throwing you out to prove it hadn't been a waste.”

Then, unprompted, in a quiet, intimate voice I had never heard before, he talked about what his last dream meant to him:

“There were iron bars cemented into that wall. It's strong. I realize you are that ladder—my path out of this. It goes far beyond the surface of the water. It goes all the way to heaven, for the rest of our lives—we've really got something, you and me. I'm so afraid to say it, but we've done something together that's wonderful. We've made both of us better. It's been mutually beneficial. We've gone through things that could have ended our relationship, but we've gotten through them. You're someone I can really count on. It's like a marriage; this is a third thing we've created. Why would I want to throw that away? It gives me a comfort that my parents couldn't give me. Holding on to the rungs of the ladder is like a child holding on to his parents' hands. But they never held my hands.”

Through the lucky convergence of his needs and my own and a mutual willingness to continuously repair the unavoidable ruptures in our trust of each other, the man who could not love was finally ready to take a chance on the real thing.

*   *   *

In the last paper he wrote before his death, Heinz Kohut described how he offered a desperately suicidal patient two of his fingers to hold on to. Why did he violate a boundary that many analysts consider sacrosanct? He explained that he felt that an interpretation would not do; he had to give himself—and the patient didn't kill herself. Because of different interpretations of the appropriate physical boundaries between patients and therapists and the loaded symbolic nature of touch in a therapeutic relationship, psychoanalytic theorists of various persuasions have debated this act ever since. Did he go too far when simply telling her “I'm here” would have done the trick, or did he hold back too much by only giving her two fingers when he should have extended his whole hand?
4
Based on my experience with Peter, it's clear to me that he did exactly the right thing; he was giving her what she had needed as a baby, when two fingers of a loving, sustaining parent were all she could grasp. I was struck that even though I did not (and could not) literally give Peter my hand, he described our work together with the same image; he had finally learned to use me as a physical source of consolation and stability, a pathway out of terror.

I had no illusions that what lay ahead for us would be a straight route up to earth and air, let alone to the stars, but he had reached out and grasped my hand. We were on the first rung together, at long last.