The Schopenhauer Cure(49)

“You leave your marriage, and I’ll leave mine.” Who said it first? Neither could remember, but at some point in their second year of team teaching they arrived at this high-risk amorous commitment. Pam was ready, but John, who had two preteen daughters, naturally required more time. Pam was patient. Her man, John, was, thank God, a good man and required time to wrestle with such moral issues as the meaning of the marriage vow. And he struggled, too, with the problem of guilt at abandoning his children and how one goes about leaving a wife, whose only offense had been dullness, a wife transformed by duty from sparkling lover into drab motherhood. Over and over again John assured Pam that he was en route, in process, that he had successfully identified and reconnoitered the problem, and all he needed now was more time to generate the resolve and select the propitious moment to act.

But the months passed, and the propitious moment never arrived. Pam suspected that John, like so many dissatisfied spouses attempting to avoid the guilt and the burden of irreversible immoral acts, was trying to maneuver his wife into making the decision. He withdrew, lost all sexual interest in his wife, and criticized her silently and, occasionally, aloud. It was the old “I can’t leave but I pray that she leaves” maneuver. But it wasn’t working—this wife wouldn’t bite.

Finally, Pam acted unilaterally. Her course of action was prompted by two phone calls beginning with “Dearie, I think you’d like to know…” Two of Earl’s patients under the pretense of doing her a favor warned her of his sexual predatory behavior. When a subpoena arrived with the news that Earl was being sued for unprofessional behavior by yet another patient, Pam thanked her lucky stars she had not had a child, and reached for the phone to contact a divorce lawyer.

Might her act force John into decisive action? Even though she would have left her marriage if there had been no John in her life, Pam, in an astounding feat of denial, persuaded herself that she had left Earl for the sake of her lover and continued to confront John with that version of reality. But John dallied; he was still not ready. Then, one day, he took decisive action. It happened in June on the last day of classes just after an ecstatic love fest in their usual bower, an unrolled blue foam mattress situated partially under the tent of his desk on the hardwood floor of his office. (No sofas were to be found in English professors’ offices; the department had been so racked by charges of professors preying on their female students that sofas had been banned.) After zipping up his trousers, John gazed at her mournfully. “Pam, I love you. And because I love you, I’ve decided to be resolute. This is unfair to you, and I’ve got to take some of the pressure off—off of you, especially, but off me as well. I’ve decided to declare a moratorium on our seeing one another.”

Pam was stunned. She hardly heard his words. For days afterward his message felt like a bolus in her gut too large to digest, too heavy to regurgitate. Hour upon hour she oscillated between hating him, loving and desiring him, and wishing him dead. Her mind played one scenario after another. John and his family dying in an auto accident. John’s wife being killed in an airplane crash and John appearing, sometimes with children, sometimes alone, at her doorstep. Sometimes she would fall into his arms; sometimes they would weep tenderly together; sometimes she would pretend there was a man in her apartment and slam the door in his face.

During the two years she had been in individual and group therapy Pam had profited enormously, but, in this crisis, therapy failed to deliver: it was no match for the monstrous power of her obsessional thinking. Julius tried valiantly. He was indefatigable and pulled endless devices out of his toolkit. First, he asked her to monitor herself and chart the amount of time she spent on the obsession. Two to three hundred minutes a day. Astounding! And it seemed entirely out of her control; the obsession had demonic power. Julius attempted to help her regain control of her mind by urging a systematic incremental decrease of her fantasy time. When that failed, he turned to a paradoxical approach and instructed her to choose an hour each morning which she would entirely devote to running the most popular fantasy reels about John. Though she followed Julius’s instructions, the unruly obsession refused containment and spilled over into her thoughts just as much as before. Later he suggested several thought-stopping techniques. For days Pam shouted no at her own mind or snapped rubber bands on her wrist.

Julius also attempted to defuse the obsession by laying bare its underlying meaning. “The obsession is a distraction; it protects you from thinking about something else,” he insisted. “What is it concealing?” If there were no obsession, what would you be thinking about? But the obsession would not yield.

The group members pitched in. They shared their own obsessive episodes; they volunteered for phone duty so Pam could call them anytime she felt overcome; they urged her to fill her life, call her friends, arrange a social activity every day, find a man, and, for God’s sake, get laid! Tony made her smile by requesting an application for that position. But nothing worked. Against the monstrous power of the obsession, all of these therapy weapons were as effective as a BB gun against a charging rhinoceros.

Then came a chance encounter with Marjorie, the starry-eyed graduate student cum Vipassana acolyte, who consulted her about a change in her dissertation topic. She had lost interest in the influence of Plato’s concepts of love in the works of Djuna Barnes. Instead she had developed a crush on Larry, Somerset Maugham’s protagonist in The Razor’s Edge, and now proposed the topic of “Origins of Eastern Religious Thought in Maugham and Hesse.” In their conversations Pam was struck by one of Marjorie’s (and Maugham’s) pet phrases, “the calming of the mind.” The phrase seemed so enticing, so seductive. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that mind-calming was exactly what she needed. And since neither individual nor group therapy seemed capable of offering it, Pam decided to heed Marjorie’s advice. So she booked airline passage to India and to Goenka, the epicenter of mind-calming.