“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.”

Intuiting that my fear in painting class wasn’t just a temporary problem I was going to get over any time soon, and knowing it wasn’t healthy to live with so much anxiety, I set out to learn to paint on my own. I soon discovered, however, that even though I might experience a measure of confidence about a project while I was in the flush of creation, when I finished it—if I finished it—I invariably became so doubtful about its merit, I wound up either convinced it was worthless or so unsure I didn’t dare show it to anyone. Without positive feedback or guidance, I seemed doomed to repudiate everything I created. Looking back on it now, I know that my insecurity was a function of a larger self-doubt. If you’ve been made to feel you don’t have any value, how can you believe that anything that derives from you does? It was many years before I was able to sustain a sense of satisfaction in anything I created, and I still have trouble believing it could be of interest or value to anybody else.

“The next assignment, an abstract, was even more baffling to me than the previous ones because I didn’t have a clue about what a good abstraction was. Some of my classmates liked what I came up with halfway through the assignment, but my teacher thought it was trite. Frustrated, I broke up the picture into formlessness, and when he came around again, he said, ‘Better.’ I took the painting home over the weekend—by now I was working and worrying over my paintings at home as well as in class—and though I stared at it all weekend, I was so utterly at a loss about what more I could do that I never even picked up my brush.

“I carried my abstract back to class just as it was, only now it was heralded by my teacher as a finished piece (?). At the next critique, however, he called it an accident, a fluke—and laughed about it. The painting that he really raved about was done by one of his protégés. This student had poured greenish-brown paint over a canvas and driven his car tire over it, leaving a muddy track. I’d once written, ‘My aspiration has always been to make beautiful things—simple and spare, like a Japanese flower arrangement or a Shaker chair. I think of creative work as an act of spiritual devotion—that what you make you should invest with all your ability, with care and reverence.’ Now I began to feel like some weird throwback who was hopelessly trapped in an outmoded aesthetic.

“For our fifth assignment we were allowed to choose our subject. I hadn’t been able to come up with anything in class, so I set a blank canvas against the wall of my bedroom, waiting for inspiration. When it didn’t come and I found myself on a Sunday night with nothing to show for my Monday class, I cut out a newspaper picture of Cat Stevens, and, in a towering fury at my own impotence, I painted for an hour or more like someone crazed, never pausing or standing back even once to evaluate what I was doing. When my anger was finally spent and I did step back, I was dumbfounded by what I saw, the portrait looked so alive to me. It was then that I had one of the strangest experiences of my life. It seemed to me that until that moment I’d only imagined I knew my own dimensions, but now a trap door had opened beneath my feet and I was falling through depths I hadn’t known existed before. I started to shake uncontrollably while the painted face I was looking at metamorphosed back and forth from Cat Stevens’ bearded face into my own.

“The next few classes I missed because I was sick, but I took my painting to the next critique, even though it wasn’t quite finished—I couldn’t get the hand that was resting on the guitar quite right. Also, as I was well aware, the whole composition was skewed to one side.

“When I arrived, I saw the paintings everybody else had done in my absence stacked against the walls—abstracts created by pouring paint on the canvas, the assignment I’d missed. They were all so bold and vibrant, my own painting seemed to me murky and flawed alongside them, and suddenly I felt a terrible vulnerability about showing this particular picture. In the end we never got to the critique—I don’t remember why—so I never received any feedback on my portrait, and I took it home relieved, knowing I’d never go back to class again.”

About my painting class, I wrote later:

“I remember only dimly the quality of anguish I felt as I drove off to my first class—and every one after that—a stomach-churning anxiety; I had to muster every ounce of determination I had simply to hold myself together. My teacher was dark, wiry, in his thirties, and I might have even found him attractive if the set of his mouth and chin hadn’t reminded me so much of a sleazy guy I’d met recently.

“For our first assignment we were directed to paint a monochromatic still life of a bleach bottle and some other mundane objects. I felt like a blind man who’d been abandoned in a city and left to find his own way around. I didn’t even know how to hold the brush. The teacher sketched out a composition for me, basking in my mute admiration, and showed me how to stand back to do the strokes, Actually, I felt so paralyzed with bewilderment, I let him paint most of the picture for me.

“At the next class I was frantic and angry at my own helplessness and fear—I felt I’d be humiliated if the same thing were to happen again. So I dashed out a picture with a vengeance, as though I were slashing my way out of nets of inhibition that ensnared me. It’s true that he needed to stop me—I might have gone on to ruin my painting—but as it stood, it was a success, although I didn’t know this until the ‘crit’ (critique). I thought it was a failure because it was a circumvention of the reality I couldn’t paint—light and shadow, three-dimensionality. But my classmates and teacher saw it as a unique vision—although flat, more colorful and lyrical than life. ‘Where did you get a technique like that?’ the teacher asked about my brush strokes. ‘Use it to death.’

“Our next assignment we had longer to work on. I was attending class three times a week, toting the canvases I’d learned to build and a cake pan full of acrylics, and wearing a huge doctor’s coat for a smock, trying to look cool and savoir-faire, but I was scared stiff the whole time. I painted a magical glade I’d photographed alongside the road to Cuenca in Spain. Again the teacher had to stop me before I painted out the best part of my picture, suggesting I use the airy technique in the upper corner throughout.

“This picture, also, was a success. At the crit he described it as having ‘delightful’ parts. In the meantime, however, I’d begun to notice his flagrant favoritism towards his two pets—both men. I would hear him, bent head-to-head with them, giving them pep talks about their gift and mission, etc. He set up a competitive spirit in the class that I didn’t like, and eventually we locked horns. He insisted that I come to all the critiques—I’d made up my mind not to because I found them so gut-wrenching. He chewed out people who hadn’t managed to produce a finished painting and expected us to analyze each other’s work, which I felt totally unequipped to do. He got angry at me when I tried to explain that I wanted to learn something about painting for my own edification—I didn’t care about getting the credits—and hoped to go about it the least stressful way possible. In the end I capitulated and attended the critiques, not wanting to antagonize him further.

“Dear Linda,

“I’ve tried to start this letter three times. I’m finding it very hard to open up and talk about my life just now, I’ve been feeling so moody and strange.

“Suddenly I’ve become seriously committed to the guitar. I’m studying with a sweet guy named Charlie, who’s just about my age. I’m teaching myself to read tablature, writing guitar accompaniments and song lyrics, and looking for a voice teacher. Somehow the ambition, anxiety, and determination involved have made me very sober. Also, I’ve started painting classes. I frankly don’t know what I’m doing in there, but I figure I’ll catch on eventually. Then I’m low on cash again and feeling the pinch, and job hunting is getting me nowhere.

“I’ve had my share of odd experiences lately. I was picked up hitchhiking by a sexy older man who had just produced a movie. He took me to see 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with his ‘daughter’ Kelly, whom I didn’t—to my red-faced chagrin—find out was his son until the end of the evening, when I referred to him as ‘her.’

“I had a pelvic at the Free Clinic, which might as well have been Grand Central Station. Various interns and nurses hustled in and out during the proceedings, casting sidelong glances at my crotch, while another inexperienced doctor tried to find the whereabouts of my right ovary. Finally everybody donned a glove and joined in the search.

“Then I went to see Cat Stevens perform and was so smitten that I decided to try to meet him. I called his recording company and pretended to be a representative of the Unified Churches of Long Beach who wanted him to make a personal appearance at a charity concert. All I found out was that he was on his way to New York. (Don’t ask me what I would have done if they’d said yes.)

“Also, I unofficially joined the Unitarian Church down here, tried without success to sell my dress designs, and went to the track with Monk, a cheery eccentric who studies the horses, bets judiciously, and invariably wins something. He did this time too—but the filly he told me to bet on lost. So I’m out $12, which I needed for groceries.

“How about you? Any fascinating new developments in your life? You ask about leaving Berkeley. Judging from what I’ve seen down here, Berkeley is as good a place to be as any—I’ve almost moved home half a dozen times. Somehow it’s your life style that makes the difference. Write! I luv to get letters.”