Great Kisser Read Free Page B

remembrance. There had been breath between us. It suddenly stopped. There’s such silence in the house. I nursed her for twenty-four hours. She would wet herself from coughing and I would be able to help, to clean her. How could she want to leave me alone?
    â€œShe was my patient.
    â€œI don’t want to live.”
    A year later, Butinsky showed me the naked pictures of his patient/girlfriend: “She wants to be a human skeleton,” he said. “She seeks her greatest bliss. Eats only tofu and vegetarian food. I specialize in borderline cases. Janice is a challenge to me. If I end the relationship, she’ll crack up. If I can get her to mature, there’s a chance for us.”
    â€œIn the long run, you’ll get sick of her,” I said.
    â€œAlso in the short run,” Butinsky said. “This is the last fling of the rescue fantasy.”
    Karen and I sat with Butinsky in front of the TV set hour after hour watching public broadcasting. He was getting frail, he had diabetes and a bad heart, and he didn’t want to do much else.
    But when I write now that Butinsky has a stroke, or a bad heart, or diabetes, it is not true that I was aware of these things then. Yes, he told me. But I barely noticed. I didn’t have space for it. It’s only the tapes I listen to now—fourteen years later—really listen to now—and learn what Butinsky was going through. At the time I only knew that I was no longer the center of attention. It really pissed me off.
    When I began to bring up recent crises, Butinsky sighed. “You promised me.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œYou promised you wouldn’t talk about your problems anymore,” Butinsky said.
    â€œI’m thinking of going into psychoanalysis,” I told him.
    â€œI hope you survive it.” Butinsky kept talking. “I was always shy as a young man. My father would say that suffering is the law of life.” Spotting Reagan on the tube, he said, “All therapy is pointless until we get rid of him.”
    I cannot forgive him. I cannot be his Boswell. I have to get away. He calls me in New York. “She’s pressing charges. She’s very bitter. She could wipe me out.” He asks me to call Janice and plead with her to leave him alone. I cannot do it. He keeps seeing patients for some months, but he gets steadily weaker. Then he has another stroke. He tells his daughter, “I think I’m dying,” and he does.
    I remember his voice and the gentle way it imparted reason and high expectations for me. In 1965, in 1985, and almost up to the end.
    There was a time when for me he was all the radiance of the world. A patient searches for clues about his shrink. For me, in the early days they were the plaque on his wall with a quote from Maimonides: “Here I am preparing myself to engage in this craft. Help me O Lord in this work so that I may be successful.” And the map of Jerusalem on his office wall and his bookshelves lined with the work of Thomas Mann—the writer who embodied the nobility of reason for a generation. When Butinsky lost his mind, I couldn’t stand it. Sure, he saved my life, but did he have to go crazy on me? And I lost my love for him for a long time.
    III: Vancouver
    1970: I remember Vancouver as a dark place. The rain constantly fell. I was a graduate student in creative writing at the university on a fellowship. I lived in a boarding house. The ex-hooker in the room above me told me she heard the clink of my glass as I poured whiskey.
    I had fallen off the face of the earth.
    The chairman of my department, Bart Stevens, became obsessed with a story I’d written: a very lonely story about New York and a black maid, Willie Mae, who cleaned my room, confided in me, and tried to seduce me. It went back to my earliest college days, before Julie. The story was an early instance of my constant pattern of deflecting all fucks—all opportunities for fucking