Great Kisser Read Free Page A

all of his patients.
    He invited Karen and me to spend weekends. And soon he told us of his wife Beth’s lymphoma. He asked me to sit by her bedside with him as he read her Thurber and took care of her with infinite good humor and patience. For the first time, I realized how important my presence had become to him—that he, my therapist, was disappointed if I could not spend the weekend with him. And so when he began to turn the tables and confide in me, at first I felt so special, so privileged and singled out.
    Two things he said in those days had a significance I would only later grasp. “My patients become my rescuers,” he told me one day out of the blue on the way to the synagogue. I didn’t know what to make of it until a colleague of his confided to me: “He’s known for never letting go of his patients.” Shortly after that, Butinsky told me that an essay by Freud had made a lasting impact on him: “Psychoanalysis: Terminable and Interminable.”
    And about this time, his generosity had become acute. He had begun moving his most helpless patients into his large home, the homeless, the jobless. One day a blind girl knocked at his door. The young woman was looking for a room. She wore dark glasses. She came by at the suggestion of a patient, Bob Starr, who said she was a witch. Before Butinsky could decide whether to let her stay, the doorbell rang again, and a bunch of people came in and trudged upstairs with boxes of her stuff. He said “Wait a minute,” and she said, “You wouldn’t want to be known as a doctor who put a blind girl out on the street.”
    â€œNow I can’t get rid of her,” he told me. “She’s taking over the house. She has a malign presence, an aura, and a vast network of people who are devoted to her. I told her she had to leave, and a lawyer’s letter arrived several days later. It had the same refrain: ‘You wouldn’t want a news story that says a noted doctor put a blind girl out on the street.’ Even Bob Starr, who used to hate her, comes to see her now. I see him disappearing into her room. He says, ‘She has a way of moving her body.’”
    Butinsky paused, and said, “I’m not sure that girl is blind.”
    His wife was at a loss to stop the invasion. The patients did small chores, changed light bulbs, unclogged sinks, washed clothes. And then there was me. “Michael,” he said, “you will be my Boswell.” Now I conducted hours of interviews with him for a projected biography, not really listening to the technical details of what he said but basking in the role he had assigned me. Then he suggested that I begin to interview his other patients to better know him by getting to know who he was intent on saving.
    And in order to prepare me for these interviews, and to help me better understand his therapeutic skills, he shared tapes with me of his sessions with these patients.
    That was a kick.
    After his wife’s death, he sat with me, wringing his hands: “She slipped through my fingers. My humanity wasn’t great enough. That great wall went up, the severance of connection. I saw her face in the coffin. She’s lying in the coffin in the cold ground. Why did I fail her? What am I going to do with the rest of my life?
    â€œI think: why isn’t she coughing? The silence, the loneliness. I was there to save her, to get her tea in the morning, to suffer for her. I could be there in the night when she rang for me. I had been resigned to a life of suffering. For many years she was no longer able to do what a wife did. She kept saying to me: ‘I don’t want to live anymore.’ But I breathed life into her. Every breath was painful for her. There was great emptiness and loss for me. My life was so taken up with her needs. I could always anticipate her coming home from the hospital. To go beyond condolence to remembrance—a bouquet of