Great Kisser Read Free

need to stay awake; he can analyze me while asleep. A remarkable gift. But then, of course, came along the sneaky second thought: or can he?
    For twenty-five years he was the shrink one dreamt of having. I met him in Boston in 1965 when I was attending college and dodging the draft. I was living with the secret that I had laughed at JFK’S assassination, that was my state of mind, the hate within me. Butinsky didn’t even charge me for sessions, making it possible, after graduation, for me to travel to Boston to see him. He was always accessible, day or night.
    I left him for two months for that summer in Israel. One day, as I was picking berries high in a tree in the Galilee, he walked towards me, beaming, with his family. He had come to visit me in Israel without telling me. It was like a benediction. I kept seeing him, traveling to Boston by train on weekends, until 1972, when I went to Vancouver to get my graduate degree.
    I resumed seeing him in 1978, when I returned from Vancouver, and I kept seeing him, on and off, for another 12 years, with Karen the last 6 years.
    To settle in Israel is to make “aliyah,” which means to ascend to something higher. For me, traveling to Boston to see Butinsky was my aliyah. Coming to Boston meant for me walking in the Boston Garden and by the Charles, climbing the winding streets of Beacon Hill and walking along Commonwealth Avenue listening to music wafting from windows, and reading and studying in the Copley Square Library and at Harvard. And then, on Sunday mornings, waiting to see him before my appointment, I would sit in the field (traces of remaining forest and old trolley lines between gnarled branches of trees) near Butinsky’s baronial house, smelling the burning leaves in late fall, or sit on benches in winter as the snow fell, or watch the children playing in spring and summer, music spilling from the open windows of the beautiful houses all around me. As the hour came closer, I had a brownie and coffee in the candy store nearby, the sweetness of the brownie a prelude, and then walking over to Powell Street to see the man I loved more than anyone on earth.
    But this was 1990, and I was paying the price. He had saved me. But now I needed to save myself from him.
    The reversal of roles had begun four years before, when he ushered me and Karen through his massive office door into the actual living room, the magic carpet of his home. He introduced me to his wife and daughter. Teacups, honey cake, the Talmud. What a feeling. A patient’s fantasy come to life. For years, I had listened to the happy sounds of his household while sitting in his office, his wife playing the piano or the Boston Symphony playing on his turntable, peals of laughter coming from his daughter. Butinsky would lift his head to the sounds. I had devoured every detail about him from afar, seeing him around Boston, playing basketball with his daughter, bicycling with his wife, cocking his arm for his wife to put her hand through as they entered a theater. That combination of gentleness and strength that would endure as a model for me of how one should live—even if I couldn’t do it myself.
    Or visiting me summers in Oak Bluffs, this courtly man in white knee socks and shorts, chasing butterflies with a net. I would walk with him, and he would turn our walks into brief therapy sessions, interspersed with bird-watching. Butinsky alert, as we walked, to human grief, a gobbler of life with his Batman card that he gave as his I.D. at stores. This physically mammoth, personally shy man with hooded eyes, his unmistakable Boston accent, came from the ghetto of Blue Hill Avenue in Dorchester and loved the streets and parks and alleyways of Cambridge and Boston and Brookline. He once told me he considered himself a hedonist. I wondered what he could have meant: that he ate a lot of plums? I had written some of this in a story I’d published about Butinsky in 1986, a story he showed to