“Jack—kooky, comical face, all chin and jaw and nose, hair like an unpruned bush—said last night that he was crazy about me and could hardly sit apart from me in the same room for frustration, that I was incredibly beautiful, and that it appeared to be hopeless, although he didn’t understand why, that when I left, he would need to smoke himself into the oblivion of earphone rock.”

At the high school where I worked as a noon supervisor, I became friends with my male counterpart, a New Yorker and former Spanish teacher named Jack, a seemingly happy-go-lucky guy who couldn’t understand why I took life so seriously. He sent me funny postcards and called me “Punchy” because I got antic whenever I so much as tasted anything alcoholic. When my roommates and I were evicted, I moved to Seal Beach, the small town just to the north. My apartment was dark and gloomy because all the windows faced the neighboring apartment building—which blocked out the light—and it had, horror of horrors, a green shag carpet. (I don’t know who ever came up with the notion that green was a good color for a carpet. It doesn’t go with anything except house plants.) When there was a vacancy in the building next door, Jack moved in.

Reflecting back on this time, I know I must have found Jack’s passionate declaration enormously flattering. Though I didn’t feel the same way about him, I thought about how, in other cultures, parents arranged marriages for their children and couples came to love each other, an outcome that seemed logical to me at the time. I was so dejected about my recent experiences—about not being able to sing or sell my dress designs or create in painting class or perform at my guitar lessons or find a way to make a decent living—that I was desperate to make something in my life work. Feeling so bad about myself, I was grateful to know there was something I could give that somebody wanted, even if it was only myself. So Jack and I became lovers.

GUTTED

“They had told her it wouldn’t hurt much; they told her to breathe normally. But when they started vacuuming out the fetus, she was so crazed with pain she gasped like a creature being gutted alive. Then they honed their voices with exasperation, wounding her. And they clamped their fingers tight with impatience, shackling her. And when they wheeled her out on the gurney, as her head fell sideways on the pillow, she felt a tear slip out the side of her eye. In the recovery room they asked her questions, but they got no answers; all she had left of words were petrified on her tongue.”

This is all I ever wrote about my abortion. I didn’t know until later that it was so painful because the doctor failed to give me a successful anesthetic block.

“I’m having a hard time with my memoir,” I tell Toni. “And it’s not just grief that’s hanging me up; it’s shame too. Every time I start a new vignette, I think, no, I’d better leave this out. But then I feel the same way about the next experience I try to write about…and the next.”

“What are you ashamed of?” she asks.

“That I just kept walking into one situation after another in which I got victimized,” I say. “I can’t imagine why anyone reading my memoir would have any sympathy for me, I was so hapless.”

“And why do you think you kept getting victimized?”

“It’s complicated,” I muse. “I suppose one problem was I didn’t have the ability to discriminate between safe and unsafe people.”

“Well, when you’ve had such narcissistic parents, you’re not going to be able to recognize narcissism in other people,” she says quietly.

“And to the extent that I was able to discriminate, I didn’t trust my own judgment and perceptions.”

“How could you?” she asks. “Who in your life ever validated them?”

“I know I was afraid of hurting other people. I think feeling responsible for my brother’s burn made me hyper-conscientious about that. I’d feel guilty if I thought I hurt someone, no matter what the circumstances or what they might have done to me; I often didn’t protect or defend myself out of fear of doing harm; my childhood experience was that hurting someone else had the potential to be hugely consequential, while my being hurt didn’t—or so I imagined.”

Later in the day I write down more reasons that occur to me. At my next session with Toni I read them out loud:

“Another difficulty was that my feelings were so intense a lot of the time I didn’t think it would be appropriate to express them because I knew they were an over-reaction. And then there was the fact that it was easy for me to empathize with other people and to understand why they did what they did, which, even if it didn’t assuage my hurt feelings, made me feel less justified in having them.

“At the same time, I was reluctant to risk alienating anyone. I already felt so desolated that I couldn’t tolerate any more loss. Besides, my experience was that one loss was likely to precipitate another—and another—like toppling dominos, until I wound up with nothing left, including a sense of self. This happened after my parents’ divorce, after I left Spain, and again years later when I lost my job at Tiburon College. I’m still liable to panic after any significant loss, terrified that it’s going to snowball.

“Which reminds me of something Pia Mellody wrote,” I say, “that some people’s abandonment issues are so crippling it actually may be better for them to stay in a bad relationship than leave it. I appreciated her acknowledging this because, though it goes against the conventional wisdom, in my own experience it’s been true.”

“So,” says Toni, “your writing about the many times you wound up getting victimized just demonstrates what happens to people when they’ve suffered a lot of emotional abuse—they can’t recognize when they’re putting themselves in harm’s way.”

“And it’s not just that you don’t know that you deserve better,” I say. “You don’t know there is better.”

“Exactly,” Toni nods.

I feel tears start in my eyes. “That reminds me of when I was in therapy with Dr. A., the psychiatrist I went to when I got back from L.A.,” I say. “One day after I’d been seeing him for almost a year, I told him about a heart-to-heart I’d had with Ella when she was visiting—and how good I felt about it. He said he didn’t believe it had happened the way I’d described it. When I asked him why not, he said it didn’t fit in his picture of me—he didn’t think I was capable of intimacy. I’ve always wondered if he reached this conclusion partly because I never asked him any questions about himself. I felt so fragile back then, I was afraid if he were to tell me that he was divorced, for example, it would be the final proof to me that love was just a four-letter word, that it didn’t really exist. I was hanging onto the hope that it did by the most tenuous thread, and I felt if it were to break, I would too.”

“Charlie has long, undulating fingers, supple and strong; thin, taut cheeks; and a flash of softness for a mouth. His eyes are clear, intelligent, and drooping, and they look past you when he talks to a thought just behind the door. I’d kept him out of my mind because I couldn’t tell who he was, but as I listened to him last time, I was fascinated by the way he drew his mouth in, thoughtfully, in a funny gesture of concentration, then released it with a sudden pop. How many times have I sought him out as a friend, agitated, full to bursting—for confession or shared thoughts or only to listen—because he was odd, and quiet, because his lyrical music moved me, and then a part of him stayed with me after I left, keeping me company?”

PERFECT TIMING?

“Charlie, in a blue woolen cap, roars up behind me as I stroll across the street towards the movie theater, hands clasped behind my back. Five minutes before, I’d stolen down the narrow corridor between the houses to the alley, just in time to see him reach his motorcycle, guitar in hand. That’s what I’d been hoping for, but I hadn’t expected my timing to be so perfect and, suddenly embarrassed—I hadn’t figured out what to say—I turned and hurried back the other way. I’ll arrange for him to run into me, I thought, and I began to race down the block toward the theater, where I expected his motorcycle to emerge. Minutes passed—I thought he must have gone another way. Feeling a sudden ache of disappointment, I watched the lights of passing cars and began to wander aimlessly. Then, to my surprise, he was there beside me.

“’Hi! What are you doing?’ he asked.

“’Taking a walk.’

“’I’m off to an all-night poker jam.’

“’Well, don’t lose your shirt!’

“Laughing, ‘I probably will.’

“And with that he was gone.”