The Schopenhauer Cure(43)
And the end it was. Johanna lived for another twenty-five years, but mother and son were never again to meet.
In old age, reminiscing about his parents, Schopenhauer wrote:
Most men allow themselves to be seduced by a beautiful face…. nature induces women to display all at once the whole of their brilliance…and to make a “sensation”…but nature conceals the many evils [women] entail, such as endless expenses, the cares of children, refractoriness, obstinacy, growing old and ugly after a few years, deception, cuckolding, whims, crotchets, attacks of hysteria, hell, and the devil. I therefore call marriage a debt that is contracted in youth and paid in old age….
17
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Great sufferings render lesser ones quite incapable of being felt, and conversely, in the absence of great sufferings even the smallest vexations and annoyances torment us.
* * *
At the start of the next meeting all eyes were upon Bonnie. She spoke in a soft hesitant voice: “It wasn’t such a good idea after all to get myself on the agenda because all week long I’ve been thinking about what to say, rehearsing my lines over and over, even though I know that a canned presentation is not the way to go here. Julius has been saying all along that the group has to be spontaneous if it’s going to work. Right?” Bonnie glanced at Julius.
Julius nodded. “Bonnie, try to dump the canned presentation. Try this: Close your eyes and imagine picking up your prepared script, holding it up in front of you and ripping it in half and then in half again. Now put it in the wastebasket. Okay?”
Bonnie, eyes closed, nodded.
“And now in fresh words tell us about homeliness and beauty. Tell us about you and Rebecca and Pam.”
Bonnie, still nodding, opened her eyes slowly and began. “You all remember me, I’m sure. I was the little fat girl in your grade-school classroom. Very chubby, very clumsy, hair too curly. The one who was pathetic in gym, got the fewest valentines, cried a lot, never had best friends, always walked home alone, never had a prom invitation, was so terrified that she never raised her hand in class even though she was smart as hell and knew all the right answers. And, Rebecca here, well she was my isomer—”
“Your what?” asked Tony. He sat slouched out nearly horizontally in his seat.
“Isomer means like a mirror image,” responded Bonnie.
“Isomer refers to two chemical compounds,” pronounced Philip, “that have the identical constituents in the same proportions but differ in properties because of the way the atoms are arranged.”
“Thanks, Philip,” said Bonnie. “Maybe that was a pretentious word to use. But, Tony, I want to say that I admire the way you’ve stuck to your resolution to signal every time you don’t understand something. That meeting a couple of months ago when you opened up about your shame about your education and your blue-collar work has really given me permission to talk about some of my stuff. Okay, now back to my school days. Rebecca was my absolute opposite, in every way—you name it. I would have died to have a Rebecca as a friend—I would killed to have been a Rebecca. That’s what’s going on in me. The last couple of weeks I’ve been flooded with memories of my nightmare childhood.”
“That fat little girl went to school a long time ago,” said Julius. “What brings her back now?”
“Well, that’s the hard part. I don’t want Rebecca to get angry with me…”
“Best to speak to her directly, Bonnie,” Julius interjected.
“Okay,” said Bonnie, and turning to face Rebecca. “I want to say something to you, but I don’t want you to be angry with me.”
“I’m all ears,” said Rebecca, her attention fully fixed on Bonnie.
“When I see you operate with men here in the group—how you interest them, how you entice them—I feel totally helpless. All those old bad feelings creep out: chubby, insignificant, unpopular, outclassed.”
“Nietzsche,” interjected Philip, “once said something to the effect that when we awake discouraged in the middle of the night, enemies that we had defeated long ago come back to haunt us.”
Bonnie broke out into a big smile and turned toward Philip. “That’s a gift, Philip, a very sweet gift. I don’t know why, but the idea of enemies I had once defeated rising again makes me feel better. Just to have something named makes it more—”
“Wait a minute, Bonnie,” interrupted Rebecca, “I want to get back to my enticing men here—explain, please.”
Bonnie’s pupils widened; she avoided Rebecca’s gaze. “It’s not about you. There’s nothing you do that’s off—it’s all me, it’s my response to perfectly normal female behavior.”
“What behavior? What are you talking about?”
Bonnie took a deep breath and said, “Preening. You preen. That’s the way it seems to me. I don’t know how many times in the last meeting you had your barrettes out, your hair down, flouncing your hair, running your fingers through it, but it was more times than I can ever remember before. It’s got to be related to Philip’s entrance into the group.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Rebecca.