Baltimore Page 2

  I blurted out, all in one breath, a few hundred of my faults. Then I stopped myself halfway through because it was clear that the surgical removal of just the first half would mean a great deal.

  “You know,” she smiled, “those who love themselves are inclined to forgive themselves for their faults. I wouldn’t want you to have unrealistic expectations regarding therapy. Therapy may not be able to help you fix everything you might consider a fault, but it can help you to accept it. To be at peace with it. To discover things about yourself that are unique and then embrace them, love them, and live with them.”

  I wanted to jump up and kiss her.

  However, my time was up, and while I was getting ready to get up and leave, she began telling me about how we were going to start with about ten sessions and then see how we were getting on, and whether or not all this had any sense.

  “Actually,” I said at the door, “that would be really devastating, to hear you tell me after a few sessions that you no longer wish to be my therapist because I’m a lost cause.”

  She laughed, honestly, as she was showing me out.

  You idiot, why do you feel the need to make your therapist laugh?

  As I was driving home, my cheeks were burning and I had a minor headache, but I kept thinking about how absolutely wonderful her last comment was. She is someone who gives me permission to be who I am. No better, no worse. I don’t think I’ve had anything like that with anyone in my entire life. Even if she wasn’t one-hundred-percent honest, even if there was a hidden motive behind her permission, it was still nice of her to say it. It was as though she told me I was just fine, no matter what I was like. The point was to find out what I was really like. This, perhaps, didn’t have to be that difficult?

  A situation like this one:

  It’s almost midnight. I get into bed wishing to forget everything about the day as quickly as possible. Tomorrow everything will reappear, there’s no doubt about that. Still, I’ll be safe for a few hours. Sleep is awesome. Insomnia is one of the rare things I’ve never had trouble with. I sink into a deep sleep as though it were a pleasant thought. As though I were going under anaesthesia. I just choose to sleep and, there I am, on the other side, already gone.

  The remote is in place. I usually flick through the channels a little before falling asleep. Might as well be honest, I know only too well that porn movies start a quarter after midnight on cable. I don’t know how you feel about them, but they always do a good job of putting me to sleep. Ten minutes of porn; oh that’s plenty! More than enough. They can go on to develop their plot for as long as they like – I’ll be fast asleep. And so, while flicking through the channels, because the porn movie won’t start for another five minutes, I come across my old love. There he is, walking around in a hat and long coat, the same Bogart wannabe from fifteen years ago, the one I was so crazy about and the reason I imagined I was the victim of Jupiter gone mad, Hank Chinaski’s mistress, Ingrid Bergman herself, while also being ugly, like the famous hunchback of the even more famous church in Paris, the reincarnation of Ernest Hemingway, born only to amuse and mesmerize him, just like Aska enchanted her wolf, which I did well for a while. But only for a while. Wolves are there to eat you, no doubt about that. They’re not there to bake cookies with you for the rest of your life, or hold the yarn for you while you wind it into a ball.

  Well, that’s the guy walking across the TV screen and talking about how this city has been destroyed by vulgarity, the invasion of primitive people, and the lack of taste of nobodies who were born to this world due to a mistake of nature. And he’s saying all this right when I want to watch my ten minutes of porn, do what’s supposed be done during this time, and then calmly and peacefully fall asleep.

  It’s not too pleasant when you realize, with your hand down your pajamas, that you had spent half your youth loving a trained fascist, disguised as a man of renaissance beauty.

  What do I watch now?

  A little of both?

  Channel one: He’s reciting some sort of self-loving monologue in front of a mirror in the last remaining watering hole in the old part of the city, whining over the bulldozers that are going to tear everything down first thing tomorrow, after which someone else will come to cover the demolished shrine with modern and estranged chrome.

  Channel fifteen: They don’t have a problem with bad taste here. They’re all wearing tiger and leopard print lingerie, together with 12-inch heels, the most horrible wigs ever, silicone breasts, and they’re ready for action.

  Channel one: He’s walking along a river and grieving for the fish that are slowly losing their habitat because, alas, all of the remaining embankments have been occupied by boat restaurant owners. I have no intention of thinking about this now, the subject is boring and not at all erotic, but, damn it, we spent so many hours on these boats, arguing and making up. I recognize the hand motion. Even though he has aged. Both he and his hand. And my hand, probably. He once told me that I had child-like hands, that he noticed this while we were making love; that he looked up at my hands and thought: My God, I’m making love to a child. And now look, that child and that hand are cheating on you with third-rate porn, click, go away….

  Channel fifteen: Not fair. Whenever I switch to them, she’s giving him a blowjob. Why is all porn made only for men?

  Channel one: He’s wearing his wise-disgusted-embittered expression. An expression of a man who knows something others can’t see yet. An expression of a man who has already endured Weltschmertz in place of all those living in ignorance. An expression of a man who was aware of the beauty of unformed stone before Michelangelo and who had grasped the horror, which was to follow, before the mayor of Hiroshima. The million dollar question is: Why does this expression still mean something to me even though I’ve been aware of its fraudulence for more than a decade? Is there a way we can ever truly get over an old love?

  Channel fifteen: That’s better. They’re lying on a bed and kissing. I try to ignore the fact that she’s still wearing the heels. And that she has long, purple nails. Because, if I focus on the details, there goes the fun.

  And then, like in a bad SF movie, the painting on the wall above their bed takes me straight back to….

  Channel one: Do you remember? Of course you do. You can use that expression of disgust to show off till your dying day. But such things are never forgotten. Who cares about the fate of a tennis court built in the wrong place. I’m asking you, do you remember the hotel room with the same cheap painting on the wall. Aha?! I got you now, Romeo.

  Fifteen: He has grabbed her from behind and is holding her breasts firmly while thrusting himself into her, and thrusting and thrusting. Now their phone is going to ring, I’m sure of it.

  One: And then the phone rang, remember, and you wouldn’t stop, you just answered it and spoke to the woman from the travel agency while I thought I was going to have to bite into the pillow if you didn’t hurry up and end the conversation.

  Fifteen: Their phone didn’t ring.

  One: …threw the phone on the floor….

  Fifteen: He is turning her around and looking at her and spreading her legs.

  One: …he is turning me around and looking at me and spreading my legs….

  A little bell in my head is screaming that he never even loved me the right way.

  But too late.

  Too late.

  I fell asleep.

  Get lost. All of you. Leopard prints. Clever. Culturally enlightened. Filled with silicone. His silicone vanity. Sticking out abnormally above all the other heads that naturally tilt downwards. His built-up ego wrapped in a perfectly pressed shirt. And why do they always smear the sperm all over their faces and breasts in the end? Are they marking their territory? What is it, damn it? I’ll never be able to understand.

  Click.

  Go away.

  There is an old photograph of my mother and me: We’re sleeping, both with curlers in our hair. She’s wearing a thin, summer nightgown, which is roll
ed up around her thighs considerably, and I’m only in my bathing suit bottom. We’re lying on a king sized bed in some rented room at the seaside. I’m, let’s say, five or six-years-old. This means my mother is barely thirty. At that moment, my father is also thirty and he is watching us taking an afternoon nap in a house on the seaside, tired from swimming all morning and being out in the sun.

  I try to picture him: A thirty-year-old man watching his wife and daughter. A scene both tender and erotic. And comical, of course, because of our curlers. He’s probably bored. He reads the newspaper and then takes out his little magnetic chess set and plays out the game published that day. Now he’s sitting there, waiting for us to wake up so that he can take us out for ice cream. What made him want to take a picture of us? What were his feelings at the time? Did he wake us up as soon as he took the picture? Were we awakened by the sound of the camera? Did my mother look at my father sleepily and say something like:

  “Are you crazy? Taking a picture of me half-naked?”

  But still, more than anything I would like to know: What was he feeling while he was taking our picture? For, if he took the picture because of something other than mere boredom, then I’m inclined to think that maybe we could have found a way to be happy after all. And we weren’t. I hope you’re not going to say he took our picture only so that he could make fun of my mother later? Or so that he could, from that moment on, claim that the two of us were only different versions of one and the same principle?

  If this were a movie, whose main concern was for the characters to ultimately find peace, I would go to my father, reconcile with him, after so many years, and ask him about the photograph. And he would remember everything. He would say something like:

  “Yes, I remember. Dubrovnik, 1966. The blinds were half drawn and the two of you looked so beautiful and peaceful in your sleep. I wanted to eternalize that moment of beauty because I knew it could never be repeated in the exact same way again. You were there, the two people I loved more than anything in the world….”

  We’ll stop here. Both you and I know things like this don’t happen in real life. Not in your life, right? Nor in mine, believe me.

  In real life, I will never find out even the basic facts like: Where we were vacationing; what year it was exactly; whether or not the break-up was already a subject of conversation, or if it just hovered over our plastic plates on the beach.

  In real life, I certainly wouldn’t go to my father. And if I did, a conversation about an old photograph would not be possible.

  In real life, we would only get into another argument, over something trivial and with a certain outcome.

  I remember there was a dirt road near that house, leading down to the beach, and that all the shrubbery was dry and scorched by the sun. I remember the small branches of these bushes were completely covered in miniature snails, which were hanging on the twigs like buds. I remember taking one of those branches back with me to the room and how, by the next morning, the little snails crawled all over our beds, chairs, the floor, our clothing. And I remember my parents being extremely angry with me because of this. That photograph and those snails, I could almost swear it all happened precisely then, that summer. They were angry the entire time. And it was always my fault. And from then on, whenever I go to the seaside and I see small snails stuck to dry twigs, the same feeling of sadness comes flooding back.

  And since you insist, I also remember this:

  Last summer I was tidying up my garden. It was one of those ordinary summer days. A Sunday, probably, because only on a Sunday can I be compelled to take a broom into my hands and clear the fallen leaves for lack of a better idea.

  I wandered a little deeper into the grass. I took one wrong step. And then I heard: crack!

  A broken snail shell was right under my foot. Half of the shell was smashed. The snail, which was most likely injured, was curled up in the remaining half. What would you do with a broken snail? How would you feel? Do you think this is a good enough reason to shed so many tears? And did I really solve anything by picking it up and throwing it far into the neighbouring backyard? All right, it’s not going to die at my door, but does that really change anything?

  This was one of those arguments my husband could not explain. He reconciled himself to the fact that this was probably one of those days of the month when women go mad.

  I burst in there with a fury, straight from an argument with my mother. The lady whose session, as I’ve now come to realize, regularly runs into mine, is in there and once again I have my fifteen minutes on the little bench. But that’s all right, I’ll be taking fifteen minutes from the person who comes in after me and we’ll be even. We all get our share, only with a slight delay. This reminds me of something, but I can’t deal with that now, I’m too angry.

  I know exactly what will happen. If I tell her I got into an argument with my mother just before coming here, she’ll think this definitely wasn’t a coincidence. Allowing my mother to get me so upset before leaving for my session? Maybe it isn’t a coincidence? I could have simply cut short our phone conversation and stopped insisting to that nonsense. But no! I couldn’t make myself stop until the whole thing turned into me screaming into the phone and her whining on the subject of why I’m so rude to her and why I’m torturing her. Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! I’m sitting here and gasping for breath and waiting for them to let me in so that I can start complaining about my mother. Outside, it’s the most beautiful spring day imaginable; I could be doing so many other things instead of sitting in the waiting room of a therapist, anxious to start beating on the one who gave me life. I remember the dark spots that are starting to show on my mother’s face. They’ve become larger over the years, and I always look closely to see if they’re getting bigger too quickly or as quickly as they should. I remember how concerned I am about her well being.

  Unless my concern is also a mask for something else, something I don’t even dare say out loud.

  Here they are, they’re coming out, and now I already know where to sit. This time, I won’t be examining the Japanese violets. While still at the door, she asks me how I am and I start talking before I even sit down. I tell her this visit is like going to an emergency room. She looks at me, uncertain as to whether she should smile at this remark or not. I smile, to let her know it was a joke. An exaggeration. All right, you can smile, it won’t hurt my feelings. I say:

  “Shortly before coming here, I got into a terrible argument with my mother.”

  She looked at me curiously.

  “It’s obvious, of course, that we’re going to have to talk about it, because now my mood is tainted by this, and I doubt I could talk about anything else.”

  I’m grateful to her for not asking what the argument was about. One single argument isn’t important. They’re all important, I guess. I say:

  “She always manages to push me into the same state: I start screaming at her like a child, and I don’t know whether I’m more angry with her for doing this to me, or with myself for always reacting in the same way. Why can’t I tell her what I think in a nice, calm, adult manner and leave it at that? Why?”

  She gets up and takes a sketching pad and some magic markers from the table. She places them in my lap and says:

  “Imagine this situation with your mother was a comic strip. What sort of comic strip would it be? Draw it!”

  “But I don’t know how to draw!”

  “It doesn’t matter, draw it any way you can.”

  “I draw like a three-year-old.”

  “That’s not important. Draw the first thing that comes to your mind.”

  And here I am, drawing: A big elephant and a small elephant, and a bucket of water between the two.

  At first she thinks the small elephant is me, but I explain to her it’s the other way around. I’m the big elephant. The small elephant is my mother. The small elephant is standing behind the big elephant.

  “What are the two elephants doing?” she asks.

&nbs
p; “The big elephant performs in a circus. It’s very busy, the audience is waiting for it, the circus is packed and it needs to get ready for its big act. The small elephant is getting in its way, it’s pushing this bucket filled with water under its feet, it wants to give it some water, it’s going to trip it….”

  “What does the small elephant say to the big one?”

  “It says: Take the water from the bucket, it’s good for you, it’s the only thing that’s good for you, all the other things people will try to give you are no good, I know some of the people from the audience will offer you candy and peanuts, but you shouldn’t take it because it’s not clean. Only the things I give you are good for you.”

  “What does the big elephant say to this?”

  “The big elephant says: Leave me alone, you pesky little elephant! I have a serious job ahead of me, I have to work; the whole circus is waiting for me, while you’re pestering me with that bucket, which is, by the way, bigger than you. You can’t even move it and still you won’t let it be! There’s no way you’re going to make me drink the water, you’re just getting in my way.”

  “If this comic strip had a name, what would it be?”

  “A Useless Attempt!” I replied, right off the bat.

  I had no idea where this was coming from. Any of it. Those elephants, that bucket, or the “useless attempt.” It just burst out of me all at once. And the worst part of all was that I didn’t feel any shame whatsoever.

  “Whose attempt was useless?”

  “Well, the small elephant’s attempt to make the big elephant drink from the bucket was useless.”

  “All right, what does the small elephant say next?”

  “It says: If it wasn’t for me, you would never have become such a big elephant, you wouldn’t be performing in a circus, you would never have come this far, never stood under a spotlight as people applaud you… and now you’re pushing me away.”

  “The big elephant?”