7–98 Sleep cycle problems. Try melatonin again. Pt still separated/ cont with wife in couples sessions. Lots of situational stress. Marriage, career, apnea…8–98 Couples session re brother abuser/molestation. She still defends despite conviction…Pt will attend writers convention Baltimore…
— Ish’s therapist’s notes
The ghosts of forgotten actions…Came floating before my sight,
And things that I thought were dead things… were alive with a terrible might…
— Charles William Stubbs
Chapter 56: Ghosts of Forgotten Actions
When I was a boy the matriarch always was quoting tag-ends of poetry. One of the most unsettling was about ghosts of forgotten actions. She never told me what terrible actions she recalled. My curiosity was tempered by an uneasy feeling I didn’t want to know, because my peculiar memory would make me unable to forget.
Now I have ghosts of my own, ten bleak years dating from the penultimate year of the last century. Medicated for clinical depression, separated from my wife, involved with other women. When my son asked me to explain depression, I concealed my shrink’s opinion I was bipolar. Despite her reassurances, the harsh older term for this condition, manic-depression, made me think maybe I was crazy. Just as my wife had alleged.
My shrink said I evidenced few signs of full-blown mania. She substituted terms like “hypomania” and “agitated depression.” But Mr. Jazz Musician called me manic, which he characterized as Talking very rapidly or excessively in couples sessions. Other symptoms they gave worried me: needing less sleep than normal ( I never had normal sleep in my life). Feeling agitated, irritable, hyper, or easily distracted; check, check, check and check. Especially since the incest surfaced.
But the depressive side of the bipolar coin they described was far more familiar:no interest in activities once enjoyed (think duck hunting); loss of energy; difficulty sleeping (already mentioned) change of appetite, and difficulty concentrating or remembering. Which left engaging in risky behavior such as lavish spending or impulsive sexual encounters. I wasn’t clear which bipolar category the last two fitted. Maybe because of my difficulty concentrating or remembering.
Whichever category, the Baltimore writer’s convention that autumn exhausted the last of my book money. Certainly that was lavish spending in my unemployed state. And my real reason for going in the first place was impulsive sexual encounters.
Concentrating or remembering definitely was worse. My dog was back at the boarding kennel, my bags packed — but I could not remember where I put my plane tickets. When my daughter arrived to drive me to the airport I was in full-on panic. She said calm the hell down, Dad and walked the house like a detective. Found them in the pocket of the jacket I had selected to wear. Laughed at my panic and got me to the airport on time.
My flight ended in Harrisburg, not Baltimore. I had a wheeled suitcase tall enough to heel like a Labrador with my hand on the handle. But forgot the key. Had to use my rental-car tire tool to break in, and buy a luggage strap to hold it shut. And boy, did that make me agitated, irritable and hyper. I had meant to nap in my motel before driving. I couldn’t. I showered, brewed coffee in my travel percolator, put together my travel gun and hit the Turnpike. My old-fashioned “dumb” pager had buzzed while I fought the suitcase; Cynara’s confirmation she expected me.
Despite my aborted Ohio road trip and Cynara’s pain when her dying husband learned she planned to meet me, we were trying again. My shrink already had categorized previous trysts as “self-destructive behavior.” Hypomania, or depression, to press on anyway? Damned if I know. Nor did I know that trip marked the start of my descent into darkness.
My dreamer girl’s husband now spent painful bedridden hours as his body failed, no longer working. Massaging his aches, tending him constantly, supervising his caregivers was taking a toll. Still, she was determined to see me. I believed she really did love me. That outweighed therapeutic concern, and probably common sense.
Fragments of memory remain: the Alleghenies in gray dawn, the fall morning crisp and calm, surreal to my bleary eyes. Eating dreary Turnpike food. Knowing if I’d ever had a comfort zone I was far outside it. Going to meet a woman who loved her dying husband, and loved me. Wondering what punishment awaited me for daring this love in the ashes. But not imagining it would include the acquaintance of Lethe, mythic spirit of forgetfulness and oblivion.
It was years after the end of my dark decade before my shrink’s notes raised ghosts of forgotten actions: checking into the designated motel; showering again; pulling on a pair of sweat pants, ingesting a blue pill and going to sleep without unpacking my CPAP. That was the year Viagra hit the market. Wondering if it would work. Given the Ohio fiasco, what if she didn’t even show? A knock on the door woke me. I shambled to open it, and there she was.
Surprisingly vivid in recovering memory: five-foot nothing, trim and lithe, cascade of dark hair, dressed in a crisp business suit, short skirt, heels. Me in nothing but sweat pants. I didn’t have time to be self-conscious before she was in my arms, tiptoeing to kiss me, pressing me back, shutting the door. I collapsed in a chair with her in my lap, arms around my neck, our tongues entwined. No time to worry I hadn’t brushed my teeth.
Talk about ghosts of forgotten actions…I just stood up with her in my arms and took her to bed. My dreamer girl in the flesh. Pushed her short skirt up and her size-two bikini briefs aside with fingers and tongue. She was drenched. She came quickly as she did in cybersex and telephone play, and kept coming. In our early cybersex days she had been startled when she began to “flow” to my words. Not even touching herself, just gripping the desk and reading. Under my actual touch she flowed now. I drank her in. The memory burns.
She’d told me she never experienced an uncircumcised cock. She pushed my sweats off and knelt above me, stroking and licking. Only my miraculous Israeli, a hundred lifetimes ago, had been so fascinated by the hood. She ran the tip of her tongue under it before baring and engulfing the head. My heart damn near stopped as my Cynara made sedulous love to me.
To hell with the bipolar catalog for mania. Abraham Maslow and other students of the human condition defined “peak experience” as complete mindfulness of the moment without influence of past or expected future experiences. Warmth. Pleasant vibrations emanating from the heart outward into the limbs…transcendent moments of pure joy and elation…a heightened sense of wonder, awe, or ecstasy….
Intellectual-speak for what the matriarch called little moments of happiness. When I undressed Cynara and entered her, we fell into each other in perfect harmony with Maslow’s description. Some old writer — could have been Hemingway — said a man and woman are the same size in bed. Despite our disparity of height and weight it was true. It is painful to recall that of all the women I loved before she was only the fourth like this. My Israeli. Chloe when we met. Giselle always. Now Cynara. The irreverent part of my twisted psyche, determined to make light of long-buried emotional things, whispers that given my past and future failures, the fact I never softened that whole long day meant a single blue pill gave me better life through chemistry.
Mutually stunned to finally be together in the flesh, we did everything for each other we ever wrote or talked about. Only D. H. Lawrence could do our day justice. Eventually we admitted hunger of another sort, and reassembled ourselves to go out. I dressed to complement her sexy suit, and she treated me to a steak dinner. She brought in her briefcase as camouflage, since her cover story was conducting business interviews. Noting covert male glances, I had a hunch no one was fooled.
She was insatiable. In the parking lot before I could start the car her arms came around my neck. I pleasured her with my fingers. Back in the room she wanted me astride her lean middle, cock squeezed between small pert breasts, then in her mouth. Our exertions pushed her to the edge of the bed, hair cascading all the way to the floor as she took me deeper than seemed possible while I strummed her Mons. Another mutual cataclysm.
But the autocratic clock called time. Her husband’s caregiver would be off-shift. She had to go. It was heartrending to watch her dress and tidy herself. Her smile was radiant when she said:“Not gone yet. I have something to give you.”
She went to her car and came in with a box: a brand-new laptop computer.“Now I’ll never not have a way to reach you again, like last year. I know you got that crappy pager afterwards, but this is better.” I was speechless at the extravagance of her gift, then worried if she could afford it. She rolled her eyes.“You always worry about everything! Take it! Figure out how to use it. Get online so I can tell you I got home okay, and when I’m coming back tomorrow.”
In the dark years following, when my old slow desktop units failed, her gift was my constant companion. With no money for lawyers I used it to write thousands of words of legal arguments about my divorce, the fight over my father’s estate, and my appeal for Social Security Disability. As I began to emerge from the darkness I wrote thousands more of fiction, and had books published again, before I could afford a new one. Her gift survived through my dark decade and past it. My relationship with Cynara did not.
