Getting away

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 Getting away 

Roz thinks Dr. Feight looks like Bob Newhart in Elf. I haven’t seen the movie, so I don’t know. There is something elfin about him, though, a puckish wit he ought somehow to have outgrown but did not. It shimmers even when he is only listening – so there isn’t anything “only” about it. He is listening almost all the time we’re together. He says little, very occasionally asking a question I don’t realize the ramifications of until much later, after our session is over.

     Yesterday, for example, I was telling him about a dream I’d had the night before. I said first, “Can I tell you a dream? Is that fair?” He said, “Mmmm,” meaning (I took it) “Go on.” So I did.

     “I have this kind of dream,” I said, “all the time: I’m lost, or I’m in the wrong place; and I can’t get unlost or away.

Quentin Crisp again.

   “Last night – this is just an example – I was the ‘poor relation’ at this huge, luxurious, elaborate wedding party, a full weekend of it. Clearly I didn’t belong. I didn’t have the clothes for it. I kept unpacking and unpacking my suitcase onto the bed, while the old man I was sharing a room with, festively but precisely overdressed, was watching me. For the first night’s dinner I had an almost acceptable pair of slacks and a navy blazer that fit well enough; I had a shirt and a choice of ties, but whoever had packed for me – I hadn’t packed for myself: I had a dozen ties, most of which I’d never seen before, and two-week’s worth of underwear and socks; I kept pulling things out of the suitcase and onto the bed – it seemed bottomless. But whoever had packed for me hadn’t put in my black shoes. All I had, however much I might look, were these beaten-up brown clodhoppers. The old man was shaking his head, mocking sympathy - so sad, disappointed, confounded - as I decided what choice did I have? and put on the shoes.

     “Some young boys, brothers of the bride, burst out of the hallway into the room. They were perfectly dressed: their slacks were perfect, their blazers perfect, their ties perfectly knotted, their hair cut and combed as by professionals, their shoes a gleaming black - stairstep versions of Barron Trump in the inaugural parade. They looked at me, then at the old man - they knew each other, they all belonged; he shook his head. They looked again at me; they laughed and ran out.

     “I looked at the old man, tiny and bright in a huge burgundy-leather Queen Anne lounge chair. He laughed. The dinner bell rang.

     “I was thinking – in the dream – I was thinking, ‘I don’t need this.’ As we went out of our room and he turned right, I turned left: There had to be back stairs – I would go down them and out the back door and . . . away.

     “‘Hey!’ he said. I waved without turning around. And I woke up.”

“Mmmm,” Dr. Feight said.

     “For once,” I said, “I was getting out of this wrong place – I was getting out. Then I woke up, so I didn’t. The dream ended before I got away, so I got away but I didn’t.”

     “What woke you up, do you think?” Dr. Feight asked.

After our session, I took Uncle Albert for a cup of coffee as I’d promised. I can have a second cup of coffee at two in the afternoon; and it was past two by the time we got to the coffee shop. My appointment was at one.

     “He was wearing a scarf,” I told Uncle Albert – I was talking about the man in my dream – “and a matching pocket handkerchief, a black felt hat with an enormous brim forward and back but narrower, it looked like, on the sides – what would you call it? - and glossy-black Chelsea boots.”

     Uncle Albert, who knows almost everything about everything, said he thought he knew what kind of hat I was talking about, but he wasn’t sure what it was called: “Slouch?”  

02.17.17