TUNNEL OF LOVE
2017; Wiley; Volume: 105; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tyr.2017.0020
ISSN1467-9736
Autores Resumo1 0 8 Y T U N N E L O F L O V E J E A N M c G A R R Y A She phoned, because they had said, Phone and try out more than one. She heard a recorded message and thought the accent was Freud’s own, so talked into the phone. Next she was sitting in a large, flattish room before a woman like an idol: tall, straight, heavy, and majestic, with legs that pained her and a bright pink face. She was not helpful but brisk, and made room in her week for an hour’s visit. Why are you here? was the anthem for the first weeks, because Madelyn wasn’t sure what to say. B Dr. Bentham-Adam received several such calls a week, sometimes in a single day. She tried her best not to form a permanent impression from the blurt that followed her invitation, and yet, in every case, that impression was right – and even if wrong, it guided the course of what followed. What she heard that day was something di√erent. Each word was like a balloon, tense and fragile, stretched around compressed air, yet pretty somehow. She returned the call and named a day and hour. When the hour struck and she opened the double door, she thought she saw her childhood friend, and the shock made her say too much. 1 0 9 R A Madelyn Ignatius Smith was not going to shop around. It had taken her half a lifetime to find this one, and there was hardly time left to say what she needed to say. And yet, on the second visit she felt her face harden, and the few words spoken were blocks of straw or wax, worthless and even dubious. She saw the doctor squirm in her soft leather chair, and make and remake an expression of receptivity, and yet why did she keep yawning and stifling yawns? B By the third visit and third week, Dr. Bentham-Adam found herself unwilling to open the door that led down to her o≈ce door. She always tracked resistance, but was surprised that the rigor mortis started in her own kitchen, in her own house, decorated as the positive to the o≈ce negative, a di√erence impossible to ignore. She went to the sink and poured herself a glass of water, bathing her eyes, already beginning to sting from an especially flowery spring. The cool water brought tears to her eyes, a relief, assurance that it was safe to go down and make out the necessary referral. B That day, Dr. Bentham-Adam fell down the last steps of her carpeted but steep staircase, bruising her side on the o≈ce door. Her toe was broken, but she had to hobble on it to the waiting room, and then had to usher Ms. Smith, sobbing, into the consulting room for the agonizing hour when the first of the stories poured out, and the two women su√ered in tandem, smiling in accord when the odd coincidence struck them, and gave the session drive and direction. After the patient, for she was now a patient secure in the nest, left, Dr. Bentham-Adam called her husband, busy seeing patients downtown, who told her to call a cab. That hurt, and pain always shredded Sandy Bentham’s supple cone of native capability, which she and her husband, a baby doctor, had grown to protect each and both. ‘‘You’re not going to help?’’ she asked, but Dr. Sam Adam had hung up. He called back and said his assistant would drive her. She was on her way. A The first story Madelyn told was this: on her father’s thirtieth birthday, when she was five, her mother threw a surprise party. All 1 1 0 M c G A R R Y Y the neighbors were silent in the kitchen, a cake on the table and a beer in each hand. ‘‘Surprise!’’ they screamed, and the look she saw on Daddy’s face was terrible. Coming home from work in a raggedy work jacket, his hand on the door, his...
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