A Conversation Between Two Female Therapists Over Years of Friendship

Somewhere between short stories and poems are other forms, like this vignette. It’s part of a recurring sequence meant to be markers for myself to help digest and keep track of reading I do in the field of psych, particularly the neuro-research that is so striking and particular now.

The most familiar kind of sequential writing is the diary or journal, but blogging really lends itself to related pieces spread out over time but on the same subject. I’ve avoided being too specific by assigning each woman to a different school of thought or even telling too much about them. Maybe that’s a mistake.

12/19/17

“Some things in our lives can be mysterious and private…you can keep your secrets secret.” This was the opinion of one of the two friends who met ever year just after Christmas. They had been playmates in the deep past and one of their most strongly shared convictions was that everyone, but themselves in particular, needs to have some “mysterious and private” time during the darkest days of the year. Partly restoration and partly housekeeping, their shared “overnight” hours were respected by everyone who knew them, but none of those people ever knew what was said.

“That’s a strange attitude for a therapist to take,” laughed M. “So much of what we do is to search for the hidden dynamics that are tripping people up when they can’t figure it out alone!”

“We’re not shrinks,” insisted J. “We’re only garden-variety social workers trying to keep order in the great and problematic public across this country. I wouldn’t have any idea what to do with a Woody Allen kind of dude. Most of my work is just ordinary folks who are ragged and worn out by modern life.”

The two women had rented a “lodge” this year, a place in the foothills that supplied individual cabins meant to be comfy but still seeming sort of rough and rustic. They had pulled the big squashy cushions off the sofa in front of the fireplace so they could sit on the floor with their backs against the sofa, their bent knees holding up woolly blankets though the crackling fire was warm enough. J. had brought along her new puppy, destined to be a “therapy dog,” and it was busily demolishing a chew stick on the thick rug.

“Seems like there were a lot of men this year. It’s been rough on them with both the political scene and then this storm of accusations about guys being hasslers and rapists.” M. was always sympathetic with the men, very politically incorrect.

“Ironic when the client who has troubled me most is so gormless he can hardly bear to deal with a bank cashier.”

“Gormless? You been reading English novels again?”

“Never stopped.” She reached out a hand to ruffle the puppy’s fur but he paid no mind. He was a very single minded pup, at least when it came to chewing. “It’s like dealing with a marshmallow. I can’t get much out of this guy about why he’s even there, except that he claims life is meaningless. He’s so exasperating that I feel like slapping him just to get a reaction. But then I begin to suspect that this is his strategy in life, to force other people to do all the acting out so none of it would be his fault.”

“Makes you wonder what his mother was like.”

“For once, there IS no mother. He was raised by an elderly uncle. I suspect the uncle was abusive, resentful at having to raise a kid, and that’s where the blank presentation comes from. He’s dissociated or something.”

“I never really understood dissociation.”

“The claim now is that it’s not a split personality, but a sort of second identity where everything is safe because it isn’t perceived as reality. Just gray time passing. But not a psych thing — an actual neuron re-organization of some kind.”

They sat in silence for a moment while the puppy gnawed and the fire burned enough for logs to crash together.

M. shifted a bit. The two women had done this for many years and age was beginning to make them ache if they sat in the same position for very long. In previous years they’d indulged in hot chocolate, but this year M. had brought a bottle of very good Scotch. They only sipped it a bit. They were not ordinarily drinkers of alcohol, but this was an occasion to let their guard down.

M. said, “My most troubling client is the opposite of yours. He’s a survivor of just about every dramatic adventure a man can have except for war: punk life, beach living, San Francisco in the plague years, even a reservation where he was a cop.”

“HIV? AIDS?”

“Yeah, but it presents in a very modern and surprising way. Medicine has been able to keep up with his virus, so that he gets sick but then gets pulled back from the edge. He fights hard. Sometimes I think it is his passion that is his survival secret.”

“Why is he coming to you?”

“Why would he pay for an old woman in a small town clinic to sit there and listen? Good question. I hardly even get a chance to say anything.”

“What DO you say? What is there to say?”

The puppy shook himself hard which made his ears flap comically.

“I just listen. He’s so full of hatred and rage . . . he needs to vent. I’m a little afraid. What if he tells me he murdered someone? Raped? I mean, I don’t care if he robbed a bank, but a crime against other persons would be different.”

“That must be hard for you.” Now that the puppy had begun to explore, J. reached out to rescue her Scotch.

“I’m doing a lot of reading — trying to keep distance with theory — but the most unexpected thing is that . . .” M stopped. The puppy had a grip on the edge of her blanket and was towing it off her knees, growling fiercely.

“What? What’s surprising you?”

“I’ve fallen in love with him.”

There was a long silence before J. said anything. “Geez. Talk about countertransference.”

“Yeah, but then what was the original transference? Who does he think I am? Who from his past prompts him to tell all these frightening and tragic things? What does he expect from me? What happened in the past that’s unfinished, insoluble? Am I adequate to guide this?”

Another long silence except for puppy growling over his blanket edge.

“Sometimes you can’t do anything but stay put and see what happens. Not everyone can be helped. I mean, you know I’m a good Catholic — which is probably why I believe in the total confidentiality of the confessional. But we aren’t priests who have their scripts for response.”

“My client was molested by priests.”

“Omigod. I see why you feel over-matched. Where was God?”

“Yeah. Not in the Confessional on those days.” She poured them both more Scotch.

“Do you think it was abuse that made him the way he is?”

“No, actually I think the priest fell in love with him, the same as I am. He’s extraordinarily intense. A magnetic dark star.”

“That’s blaming the victim, my friend.”

“Yes. I think I should find a backup therapist for myself, but I don’t know anyone I could trust. I’m too much the atheist for a Confessional.”

J. stood up. “It’s late. We can’t solve this tonight. We’re a little drunk. We can only name the Devil.”

“Let’s take this puppy for a walk before bedtime.”

It was the deepest velvet part of the night and they were at a high enough altitude to see many stars, but the trees were too thick to see the lights of other buildings. Snow had fallen since they drove up and the puppy joyfully scuffled through clouds of it, then flopped over to roll in it before leaping up, yipping with energy. Lifting his leg here and there, he left scribbly yellow marks along the path.

The two women walked slowly. Instead of looking for their jackets, they had simply thrown their lap blankets over their shoulders, so that they looked classic in the way of women over many millennia in many places. “Maybe we should just get each of these clients a puppy!” They laughed out there in the dark under the stars and bumped shoulders in solidarity.8/5/18

The two therapists were exceptionally close partly because they had been in training together, a time when the disclosures and hardships put a lot of pressure on people, drawing them together. They met as often as they could to share experiences, continuing the work they had begun. Sometimes they had a troublesome problem to solve, not so much about the clients as about their own emotions and standards.

After sharing a movie, they were lucky to find a café with old-fashioned booths, high-backed wooden paneling that felt safe and confidential, whether or not they really were. Anyway, they had grown so aware that all people everywhere were pretty much alike, that they only guarded against breaking client confidentiality. But this was about a movie anyway. The place had set its air conditioning on high, so they had their cardigans over their shoulders.

“How real do you think this film was? Since it was supposed to be drawn from the fellow’s life, his book.” Her face showed real concern.

“It was shocking to see the violence of his father acted out, but you and I know it’s real and happens more often than anyone suspects.”

“Were you shocked by the language?”

Her friend laughed. “I didn’t even hear the swearing after the first dozen ‘fucks.’ Mostly intensifiers, not depictions.” She poked the ice cream floating in her root beer soda to let it melt faster.

“Actually, I didn’t think the whipping by the father was the key, though it was a powerful clue. I was much more interested in the women and the fight between them to control the boy. One was so fancy and the other was so plain.”

“I agree, although it’s almost a cliché that a woman would hate her mother-in-law. In this case it wasn’t just that one was sophisticated and educated from high class society but also the mother had never really known any other world and was terrified of the actual world, though her sisters were not and were able to make conventional achieving lives. She was a failure in her own birth family.”

“Do you think the two variables — that the mother’s mother had gotten pregnant out of wedlock and that the mother-in-law was crippled, in a wheelchair — made a difference?”

“They were certainly intensifiers. Both were desperate for control and clinging to their only sources of income, the same man who was the client’s father.”

She paused.

“Nothing was said about alcoholism, but it was certainly acted out. The actors were rarely without a glass of something. Or a bottle.”

They were silent for a few minutes, partly considering their luck at being self-sustaining, partly wondering what it would be like to have a marriage like that.

Finally the brunette mused, “I think that the father’s violence put a cap on the actions of the two women — in the end the fight was really over keeping him and they didn’t want to drive him off. Maybe he liked the fight because it kept the women paying attention to each other instead of joining up to go after him. That gave him some freedom to escape. After all, he was the most violent of an alcoholic group, the most obvious and dangerous because it made him more violent.”

She paused again.

“And then the boy got pulled in as a witness, though all concerned wanted him, wanted to own him even by pleasing him, praising him, giving him things. But there was no consensus. I was moved that when he finally asked for help, his cover was the infidelity of his father, an immoral but society-known fault.”

“The weights on his shoulders pulled his developing identity in every direction.”

“The aunts intervened, trying to help, but they were mostly a little over-the-top. They did give him respites, hours when they showed him bookstores and movies, trips and parties, even adult ones.”

“It seemed like adults were his real friends — rather than his peers. Certainly his sister was not bonded to him. Some relatives seemed so stoic, so focused on work that they were almost missing.”

“At the same time, you say, one of the strongest factors in the boy’s development was that seducing cousin, four years older.”

“A little more age difference than I’m comfortable with.”

“A gap big enough to qualify for legal definition and consequences in some places.”

“That’s what’s so confusing about the whole thing — assumptions and legal standards are entirely different in different places. Regardless of what the law says, enforcement is so different — beyond the ordinary differences of status, stigma, wealth and so on.”

Moisture had gathered on the table because of the sweating milkshake glasses. They realized that they were both drawing in the water with their forefingers and laughed, then stopped, slightly embarrassed at being childish, but also feeling the pressure of sadness at the fate of a child. Ordinarily they would be taking notes on a clipboard, drawing in theories, making question marks.

The more blonde woman lifted her long hair off the back of her neck where it had stuck and gave her sweater a shake to loosen it. “If only he hadn’t been like most humans, repeating the patterns he had learned in childhood without consciousness that he was doing it.”

The brunette pulled a tissue out of her bag and wiped down her side of the table. The napkins had run out. “I was reading a study of serotonin, the blood hormone, that suggested that a strong supply of the stuff would tilt an aggressive person towards protection of others, a desire to help them.”

“He definitely had that desire. Just a sort of unconventional way of doing it. And he chose carefully who could accept his help.”

“That’s what saved him in the end.”

They seemed to have wrapped up the subject . . . for now.

“So what movie will we see next? I don’t much like what’s playing on the screens around town. I wish they’d bring back drive-ins — it’s summertime!”

“I agree. Maybe we should just have a private film festival on my screened porch. Each bring a video. I’ll pop corn.”

“Done deal.”

???

Morning was a good time to visit the plant nursery when the sun was shining and everything had just been watered so that drops caught the light.

“I’m such a black thumb, but I always live in hope.” M. held up her thumb which looked perfectly normal and pink.

J. was feeling very wise. “The secret to a green thumb is not in the plant but in the native setting of the plant. If you can duplicate the original setting it was developed in, then you’re bound to have success. The problem is figuring out both things: where it came from and what it needs now.”

M. lingered over the giant red geraniums. “I usually succeed with these because I don’t remember to water plants as often as I should. They need a place in bright light and my consulting office is on the north side of the building, so maybe . . . um . . . cactus?”

“While we’re looking, maybe I can ask for advice about my latest new client.”

“Sure. Not that different from thinking about helping a plant thrive!” They laughed comfortably. They’d known each other a long time. “What does he do?”

“He’s a relief from the usual bored woman looking for courage. This one is very complicated. You never know what angle he will come from.”

“Do you mean he has a multiple personality?”

“No, it’s more like he thinks in genres, like books. Sometimes he’s a melodrama, sometimes a comedy. and even a murder mystery.”

“I hope he hasn’t killed anyone!” J. took hold of a rose to smell it and naturally stabbed the ball of her thumb. “Ouch!”

“Well, no. But he’s in a setting that’s always dangerous and he’s known a lot of people who died.”

“What does he want out of therapy? Grief counseling?”

“What he says is that he’s lonesome. he wants someone to understand him.”

“What are worried about for yourself in this dialogue?”

“He’s so interesting and resourceful that he could easily seduce me. He tells the most wonderful stories, but most of them are fantasy, impossible, or obviously meant to beguile and mislead me.” She laughed.

“You don’t really mean sex, do you? You know how easy it for therapists to get drawn into intimacy?”

“No, no, no! But there are many kinds of intimacy besides sex. It’s more like being enchanted or in a movie, but as a critic as well. I mean, the responsibility of knowing what the plot is about, what the endlessness means.”

“So how will you protect yourself?” She examined the hollyhocks. “I’ve tried to start these — they’re supposed to be weeds or nearly. I must be missing something.”

“More water for the hollyhocks. For the client, keep moving. Go on, more more more. The flow can’t be endless.

M. shook her head. “In this case, I’m not sure that’s the answer. Part of the situation is that this man is gay . . .”

“You’ve worked with gays before with some success, I think.”

“That may be what brought this man in to my consulting room.”

The two women had each loaded up cardboard trays with starter plants in 3" pots. M. had an assortment of cactus plants for her window and J. had petunias, some red and some white. She felt a little sheepish about having such a plebian flower, but they were cheerful and bright. Why be a snob?

They went into the nursery’s greenhouse and sat on a park bench under a big ficus tree by a recirculating fountain, enjoying old-fashioned glass bottles of Coke in this pleasant faux garden.

“This patient of mine owns a casino. This is entirely foreign to me. I’ve always opposed and avoided gambling ever since I learned about how easy it is to get hooked for a lot of subtle reasons people don’t suspect at first.”

“I certainly agree. Is your patient a compulsive gambler?”

“He doesn’t seem to be a compulsive anything. But I decided I’d better go see what his casino was like.”

“And?”

“It’s a gay casino. Very noisy, but cushy with a lot of bright carpet and flashing lights. The theme is being underwater but there are no mermaids. Instead there are mermen with fins and gills. Lots of blue-green waves of light. Fake fish on wires cruising through. A mechanical octopus waving its arms.”

“Wow!”

“But there’s a very quiet and elegant back room with no faux fiddle-faddle — just all men, some of them cross-dressed. Sort of European. Sipping drinks from fine crystal. Diamond ear studs. It was the baccarat room.”

“I would have been gawking!”

“Yeah, my jaw dropped and then a butler sort of person gently guided me back out. I have never seen such handsome men in one room.”

“So why did this casino owner come for consultation? It would seem as though he were rolling in clover. Is he losing money?”

The two women pondered their nearly empty blue-green bottles. The air was warm and moist and soft music played, blending with the patter of the fountain.

“He says he is lonesome.”

“Can’t find a partner? You’d think there’d be plenty of volunteers.”

“He says he can’t find anyone who understands him, what he thinks, how he is in some essential way.”

“And he expects you to do this?”

“More like he thinks I can explain to him how to find this mythical person. That there’s a technique or theory structure.”

“So you set about trying to figure him out, so as to tell him what he needs to know, but learning so much about him is seductive.”

“That’s about it, but the rest is how complex and surprising he is. A punk as a kid, then a religious devotee in the Buddhist tradition, a decade-long partnership with an old artist who had once been famous, and even some time in Africa helping kids.”

“Heck, I was going to suggest that last might bring him to reality and get his feet on the ground!” J. made a face.

They put their bottles in the rack and carried their flats of plants to the outdoor marquee where the cash register was jingling. The business of counting and exchanging didn’t take long. They headed for the parking lot.

M. reflected, “I think it’s possible this man may be incurable. This may be his normal nature, being lonesome. Maybe if I managed to explain him out of it, he would collapse.”

“Unluckily,” J. said drily. “In the meantime he can afford to make a friend of you!” They laughed and slammed the car doors, but immediately rolled down the windows. They preferred air to air conditioning.

7/3/20

“What an amazing old stone building!” The two women friends were hiking on the trail through Macleay Park in Portland, a quiet forest walk along a wandering stream. One had left her car at the old Montgomery Ward building, now housing offices, and the other had parked at the entrance to the park on the highway. After days of sitting in small rooms trying to help people survive the culture, which the clients felt they really couldn’t do, they were ready for exercise in nature. They started their walk at the high point, almost at the Audubon reserve. Now they had come to what some people called a “castle.” part of the stonework done in the Depression.

“It was far from being a castle when it was built!” In my childhood it was still a restroom with the traditional two sides, a little spooky to use. Then for a while it was a notorious romantic spot for gay men to rendezvous. To end that, the building was buried in dirt for a while. No one wanted to actually pull it down.”

“Sounds like a good metaphor for the changing sex mores, mysterious and enduring but rejected.” There was a bench nearby and the two sat down to enjoy the quiet green and leafy valley that guided the stream and its music.

“You were telling me about a patient you say is the most interesting man you’ve ever met. Another one! The combination of the stream and rendezvous remind me of what you said.”

Her friend laughed. “True. But I don’t know whether it’s accurate to call him gay. His desire doesn’t seem to be for the flesh but for the mind and — dare I say — spirit.”

“Would you say ‘soul’?”

“Maybe, but he’s not looking for traditional religious terms at all. Instead he’s drawn to cosmic and quantum science, the vast theories of what exists. Not just about who God might be. He hates God.”

“Because he hates his father, I presume.”

“Very damaging figure, a source of trauma and pain.”

“Not unusual. A feature of both myth and religion in Western terms. Evidently comes out of our social arrangements giving the male dominion over children and women.”

“Right, and the women in this case are rigid and slavish in their devotion to male achievement, both insisting on it on their terms, and criticizing it as never enough. Their attitude to religion is the same.”

“Which religion?”

They paused while a rabbit came out of the brush, went along the path a ways, then dodged back into the salal and buckbrush. They held still quietly until the dodging little creature was safely hidden again.

“Interesting. A mix of Christian Science and Methodism. As though the first were an extreme of the other. Both put enormous emphasis on saving oneself, but might have different terms. In this case it was the basis of a deep competition between paternal grandmother and the patient’s mother, so he just rejected both.”

“That’s pretty classic. Maybe it’s the source of the violence of the father — an inability to satisfy his women.”

They stood and began to walk again, the path just damp enough to be soft. Given that it was Oregon and down under the trees, it probably never truly dried out. “Maybe, but I also think a big part is that the father was too powerful and too intelligent for his life. If there had been money for university, it would have been well spent to educate either the father or son. But both women would have balked because they were so dedicated to who and what they were and higher education can change that.”

“Did your patient ever find a way to survive, an occupation? What about the military or mountain climbing? Those often have a kind of spirit component.”

A small flock of birds went fluttering ahead of them and then rose into the blue sky that showed between the trees where the stream below made kind of cleft. It was remarkable that they moved as one, not veering around as individuals. The women knew that the quiet, even idyllic, Macleay Park had been the scene of attacks. But they had happened at night. Nonetheless, they were more alert when the birds might have been displaced by something or someone.

“He found two ways to solve his dilemma and they were entirely contradictory.”

“What can you possibly mean by that?”

“The military couldn’t happen because of the trauma from abuse — real broken bones and other damage. So he devoted himself to helping veterans who had been badly damaged — amputations and so on, but also PTSD.”

They walked in silence, considering how early damage causes lifelong trauma. Their own occupation was based on it. They knew a lot about it, even questioning their interest and whether it was motivated by trauma. Then the listener called for a pause while she looked at a ferny bank and pulled out a small fern root. “It’s a licorice plant!” she explained, and they tasted the little pale twist. Sure enough it tasted like licorice, a taste they both liked.

The listener asked, “Are you aware of the small culture that developed after the Vietnam war around combat veterans? A semi-secret group based on extreme physical eroticism because that’s all the men could feel at that point?”

“Yes, but I never had a client who found it either a problem or a solution. It was a subject for late at night when a little drunk among trusted others. What I know is mostly from books.” She twisted the remnants of the licorice fern in her fingers. “That’s the way I was, too, but this client has developed a practice of what I can only call oral porn. He talks to these men until he understands what they are about — the same as we do — and then he tells them an erotic story that fits their world view. They often cum. Even the ones in wheelchairs. And it gives them some kind of relief.”

“Do you believe all this stuff?”

“Strangely, though it’s preposterous and wicked and transgressive, I do. There’s nothing I know that makes it impossible and a lot I know that makes it possible.”

The listening friend shrugged. ”I guess it’s sort of like women who act as healthy sex surrogates for seriously disabled people who can’t even buy a sex-worker. Or to gestate a baby for someone who can’t. Our 19th century morality doesn’t allow for such things.”

The puzzling woman went on. “It makes sense for a kind of man who lives in the physical, the sexual as well as the violent.” A breeze made the trees rush their sounds into the music made by the little creek, a kind of counterpoint.

“But what did he come to you for? Sounds like he knows what he’s doing.” But the two women were still unsure, uneasy.

“I think he has lost himself. He’s so dedicated to listening and controlling others that he can’t feel much himself. He lives through others and their issues. But what are his? Moral? Spiritual?”

“I can seriously understand this problem! We get a little numbed and needy ourselves. In fact, he sounds scarily relevant.”

The two women had emerged at the end of the path and walked in bright sun to the parked car. “Life is a search, isn’t it?” They laughed and agreed.

“Yeah, a search for a better culture.”

6/19/19

The two women stood just far enough inside the front windows of the café to be safe. It was a garden café, or had been, and they had planned a long lunch at the little umbrella tables under the trees. They came in sunshine and had mostly finished their salads when the sky darkened and a hail storm was upon them. Not just a small brisk pelting, but a roaring avalanche of the kind of falling ice that was compared to golf balls but was even bigger and more jagged.

The onslaught was fast, came quickly and then stalled, so that the canvas umbrellas were torn and chairs were overturned as people scrambled to take cover inside. The wall-sized plate glass windows had cracked, but none had broken, partly because they were retractable and had been pushed mostly into the walls because the weather was so nice.

The electricity had stayed on and now that things had calmed into a chilling cold and the sound of distant sirens, the management had declared hot coffee for everyone, no charge. Most people had left but the two friends lingered, sipping their hot liquid and adjusting to the catastrophe. They were used to facing dangerous things. ”I suppose it’s really local,” remarked M, “I mean compared to the floods and fires that have been in the news.”

“We’ll be dealing with it when our clients come in.” The two were therapists, had met during their campus time when they were earning their doctoral degrees. Across the street a big dog emerged from some hiding place and ran somewhere across the drifts and windrows of ice pellets. “I hope he’s going home,” said J. “I always wonder what the animals think when something like this happens.”

“I suppose they don’t ask questions — just act as the opportunity offers. No existential dilemmas to be answered.” They hesitated to sit, as though there might be a reason to run at any moment. But there was something fascinating about the smashed dishes and scattered flatware. Linen napkins were blown around the patio. Over everything was a carpet of leaves torn off trees at the tips of branches, still attached in bunches to bits of twig. It was only June. There would be more leaves later.

They sipped and pondered. “How is our friend doing?” He was a colleague who had become a patient. His practice had focused on HIV, not research but clinically, and he himself had caught the virus pretty early. No one asked how. They knew that he had stayed state-of-the-art in terms of meds and general health care, but HIV is a vulnerability disease, since it afflicts the body’s self-defense, so that something minor could quickly become major.

To have HIV move from the simple presence of the virus to the distressed state of AIDS was not just physical, but also an emotional and intellectual hurricane. Professionals who had been taught to be entirely rational had to learn a new way of thinking. The difference for this idealist was accepting that people on the fringes of society were often the sickest, the earliest and the most likely to be undetected and die. Most of society just walled them off. He never got over the injustice of it.

“Since he’s needed hospice, he is bitter and wants to be alone. He won’t let anyone comfort him or even remind him of anything positive about his achievements.”

“It doesn’t say much about our own work if we can’t even understand our own people.” M. took their now empty mugs to carry them to the counter. She kept her head down and turned away to hide tears. It wasn’t that she cared more for their friend, but that she had her own vulnerability to loss. When she came back, she said, “We can’t prevent people from having their own troublesome emotions. Just to understand and survive them, find ways to convert them into growth.”

“Sounds damned high-flown to me.” Her thoughts swerved. “I wish I’d put my emergency rain hat in my pocket.” Her light coat was over her arm and she fumbled with it to get a hand into the pockets in hopes that somehow she had stuffed in her hat after all.

“It’s not raining now.”

“The trees are still dripping.”

J. felt the still unfinished business. “How are your so-called ‘Measle Mom’s’ doing now that you’ve organized them into a group? Have they understood that they nearly killed their own children for a fantasy understanding of what nature is — a hard-hearted bitch. And all the time they were protected themselves because they had had the vaccine back in the day when medicine was still a miracle.”

“They’re about to increase their understanding a good deal. I’m bringing in a woman whose child died. She’s low income and delayed going to the doc, but it probably didn’t matter. The child just didn’t have the endurance that others have. Early lack of nutrition, weak genes, who knows? I hope we can come to some kind of enlightenment or at least endurance.”

J. put her arm around her friend. “Some things in life are simply not preventable — the deaths of others and failures of our selves to control everything, to be irreproachable. It’s not just tragedies but how we take them. Clichés. Can’t help it.”

“These other moms have always been ‘above reproach’ as the phrase goes. They thought they were so clever for not believing white old male doctors. They had so much support that when they made mistakes before resisting vaccine, others covered for them, rationalized. They never really had to deal with it.”

“Neither have we.” They half-laughed, bitterly.

The fashionable café was normalizing again as a new set of people came in. Maybe the talk was a little louder and more high-pitched than usual. Even so, the sputter and hiss of the espresso machine continued non-stop. “I hope no trees have crashed onto the roads.”

As they walked to their cars, stepping over an occasional fallen branch but seeing no trees on the ground, their minds went back to the concern that was always there: what to say to their dying friend in hospice. M. ventured, “We’re still able to have an occasional quiet hour together in case he wants to talk, but he doesn’t say much. Sometimes he weeps. I just stay there. To be with him.”

1/14/19

The two friends had meant to fly together to a conference in another state but arrived at the airport early only to discover that because of the government shut-down, their flight had been cancelled. No other flights were available. The distance was too great to drive or take the train. They took advantage of the airport café to have breakfast and regroup.

“Just when I was congratulating myself on not working for the government,” said Adele, as she spread marmalade on her toast, “I discover that a grant for my key project is on indefinite hold until this deadlock is resolved.”

“Won’t you take a hit when clients can’t pay their bills?” Daisy knew very well that Adele had a vast cushion of retirement money which she didn’t often have to touch because she was single with a modest lifestyle. Still, she was being a bit more snarky than necessary. It was spillover from her worry about her husband’s book contract, which was not really related to the government at all, but suffered in the general chaos and uncertainty.

Adele took a bite of her toast, which undercut the threat she expressed. “I wish someone would just go in there and take that coward by the back of his neck and pitch him right on out of Oval Office, out of the White House, out of our lives.”

“It appears that politics has invaded our private psychotherapies and showed us that no one lives truly privately and that money . . .”

“Politics IS money.”

“Most of my clients are so worried and a few of them are so desperate since they were skating on thin ice anyway, that they can’t think straight about their own issues. Attendance at the groups is much less.”

“What I’m seeing is much more suicide ideation.”

The café was busy. Evidently people were still optimistic about flying and hoped that somehow things would work out, but there were also more people at the bar that looked out on the tarmac than usual. The big planes weren’t moving.

“Actually,” said Daisy, slurping her hot coffee which she was taking black to save calories, “I don’t even think this is about any border wall, which is an unrealistic idea at best no matter how much money is involved. There are too many problematics, like crossing private property, being improperly located miles from the border, the river itself going through inaccessible cliffs, biological consequences. It’s like the screen memories and symbolisms we try to sort out for our clients — a vivid emotional idea that stands for something else that is hidden.”

“Right. Like the need for total control and constant focus on the person in order to assure him that he even exists. For a malignant narcissist there is nothing more important than a constant supply of admiration, even if he has to tell them what to say.”

“And it’s important that the supposed demand is for something impossible, because if it were magically granted, then the narcissist would have to go to a new demand to keep his personal need satisfied.”

“Right.” Daisy was using the side of her hand to sweep the crumbs together and dump them on her toast plate. The waiter was slow appearing. Maybe he was an illegal immigrant and had to make a quick run for it. “And so we have this shut down, which is totally unjustified, but behind it is the threat of a state of emergency. But he IS the emergency.”

“And behind that, the threat of war and even atomic bombs, which is a two-edged sword, since it’s a terrible threat but even he knows — he MUST know — that if the country were challenged into non-existence, he goes with it.”

“And all the time the real threat to the existence of the country is climate change which means crop and trade chaos, which could mean famine, and disease arising from weakened people.”

“Water emergencies from the disappearance of the glaciers that were reservoirs.”

“Contaminated air so thick that life is shortened.”

“People with no place to take shelter, no access to ordinary meds, preying on each other.”

“Right now the pharmaceutical companies are racketeering, exploding prices of common meds like insulin beyond comprehension when the percentage of people with diabetes is growing beyond by a third.”

“We could go on for quite a while. It’s terrifying.” Adele, giving up on the waiter, went to the supply sideboard and brought back an insulated carafe of coffee. It was almost full and still more warm than not.

But Daisy put a hand out to wave away more coffee. “In a way it’s almost familiar. My mother talks about past wars when it looked like all civilization would be destroyed. And that was in the days when there really WAS civilization — I mean people had manners and professionals had consciences. Neanderthals were just fossils instead of inhabiting our genomes, implying all sorts of things about how they got there and what they do and how they all got wiped out.”

“Yeah, if we get wiped out there’s no new species to replace us.”

The women sat in silence, brushing off their bosoms and shaking out their napkins. The airport was emptying now as the difficulties became known and people gave up. Taxis were returning to the curb rank, having transported people in more than one wave. The friends began to think about what to do with the rest of the day, having had this little empty space in their work. No pleasure in thinking about the plight of the nation, but some comfort in sharing friendship.

Daisy broke the silence. “Do you read about “deep time” and “thick history”, the new research results that tell about before there was even a solar system, before the earth went through the transformations and the marvelous beings who occupied the space for so many eons, but disappeared anyway?”

“I do.” Adele paused and took a deep breath. “I think that all those things, so incomprehensible, are in us now. The molecules of trilobites and tetrapods have been unzipped, reconstituted, reduced to elements and then reconstituted.”

Daisy nodded. “We’re just borrowing time.” They sorted out the money, rose from the table, and went out to share a taxi.

1/9/20

The two women therapists were standing at the rail of the ferry crossing on Puget Sound. It was a gray day and there was a bit of rain, but they had dressed warmly and it was almost pleasant to have the cobwebs blown away, to be apart from the others who crowded the coffee bar inside. There had been a lot to think about in the news and in their separate practices so they appreciated the support of each other. They tried to convert their justified anxiety by sorting and evaluating. After all, that’s what they had been trained to do.

“It seems to me,” said the first, “That what we’re dealing with is so human that it’s eternal, really impossible to address, only barely possible to survive.”

“Secrecy, lying, transgression — yeah, I think that’s fair.” They leaned their forearms on the rail, their brimmed hats pulled down over their foreheads to deflect rain rather than light.

“I have a client, a favorite, who is an example.”

“What? A favorite?? Another handsome man, I suppose?”

“I admit it. I’m a sucker for the Irish poet types, the rugged face, the nearly bald head, the broad shoulders . . . the romantically troubled. Not someone who cracks up over relationships, but a person opposed to society, standing alone, insightful to the point of seeming dangerous to others.”

“This guy has nothing to do with sex?”

“Less than is thought by the people who write crime novels. He’s just narcissistic and in our culture that’s irresistible enabler-bait.”

“At least it sells poetry and even picks up some bills. Provides a bed for the night.”

“But how does a professional therapist who knows enough to maintain objectivity ever figure out how to get through to such a person?”

“Yet he comes to you for some kind of help or advice. What does he want?”

For a little while they stood quietly, staring out over the water at the dark forests of temperate near-jungle, so far away that the pulsing of the ferry’s engines didn’t really seem to be moving them along. A few persistent gulls swooped past, doubling and redoubling, screaming.

“The next complication is that he’s a sexworker.”

“I guess you can handle that.”

“He’s male who provides his skills to other males.”

“Oh.” More silence. “Is there any literature?”

“The problem is that admitting that this situation exists at all has been intensely secret because of criminalization worries. In England it earned a death sentence.”

“Surely we’re more open about it now.”

“The lingering ideas of the 20th and even 19th centuries are creating forces that make extortion and blackmail possible even now, and the particular demographic that is most affected is the high-level leadership of government and corporations who have enormous impact if they can be forced to do something sensitive. It’s just because they got where they are because they are old, which they call seniority, and wealthy, which they attribute to hard work and deserved. Their ego is bound with their finances.”

“Is your client old?”

“No, no. He’s sort of middle-aged, but he’s the provider and he doesn’t need Viagra or whatever to do what he does. He doesn’t work with lust, but with the need for reassurance and relief.”

“Seems like that’s what we do ourselves.”

“His skills are as major as mine. He doesn’t seem to be asking me for advice about what to do.”

“Then . . .??”

“I think he’s just lonesome.”

“But he can’t really trust me. He keeps secrets and sometimes that information would change my whole understanding of what he’s living through. I know very little about sex work and even less about intimate relationships in that context.”

“It’s only recently that I’ve realized how complex the gay world is and what intense political issues have swept through them. There’s always the great sorrow from losing people to AIDS and the raging fury at a government that escapes from responsibility by citing evil. But then there’s the unresolvable problem of man versus boys, when there is so much variation in both age groups in terms of the cultural background they occupy.”

One gull came so close that they understood it was used to people tossing it tidbits. It hovered uncomfortably near their heads, hoping and crying.

“That adds to the problem of working out a relationship between individual and society, which is not quite so cutting as the relationship of person versus family.”

“And the reorganization of the planet so that social groups are often via internet through diaspora with culture ties rather than one boundaried place. “

The wind had changed direction or maybe the ferry’s route had shifted direction slightly. To protect their faces the women turned their backs to the rail and the view. Now they were looking through the big windows into the lounge of the boat. Some people were in groups, talking among themselves. A man had a guitar and though they couldn’t hear him, it seemed that others around him were singing. Several women sat alone with books but it wasn’t possible to see what the books were. Could they all be reading the same best-seller? Were they sexy books?

“If there’s anything more magnetic to women like us than a client who is lonesome, it’s hard to say what it is. It tempts me to become far more personally disclosive, more conventionally intimate, than is wise or helpful. When I slip into that, this client of mine becomes very angry and reminds me that I’m billing him! He refuses to be my therapist!”

Both women laughed. Then the second woman, who was doing most of the listening, suggested, “Might a group be helpful? One that includes some older gay men or even young professional gay men?”

“I think it runs into the secrecy problem. This is a demographic that thrives on gossip and is often so tightly knit that they need very little information to figure out the names of who is involved or when something happened. One of my advantages as a tolerant but basically ignorant female therapist is that I’m likely not able to do that.”

They sighed. So many limitations to what can know or even suspect when working with human beings. They looked down into the roiling water that parted to make way for them but closed behind them.

“Do you think there’s time for us to go get coffee before we dock? We could finish them in the car before we drive back onshore. I’m just slightly chilled.”