The Origin of Species Read Online Free PDF Page B

topic he was thoroughly tired of but was one of the few Dr. Klein seemed to think worthy of his attention. This was a constant tussle between the two of them, what Dr. Klein deemed significant and what he deemed evasion, what he thought was the point of something, and what he thought was beside it. Once, Alex had spent almost an entire session talking about the shoe rack that had stood in the furnace room of his childhood home, a crudely fashioned thing that his father had cobbled together out of old wood scraps: in Alex’s mind it had seemed suddenly like Proust’s madeleine, the nexus of every important question that had ever pressed on him, because it had been so makeshift and dusty and insignificant and yet an integral part of his life for many years, and because now that his father had sold the farm it had probably passed away forever from the world, though his first Sunday shoes had sat there, and the shoes he’d got in Italy when he was thirteen, and then his father’s mud-caked work boots, his mother’s bloated loafers-turned-farm-shoes, the cracked hobnailed boots that his grandfather had brought over with him on the boat, a whole history of work and rites of passage and loss.
    But Dr. Klein, when Alex had finished, had said, “Maybe you’re still blaming your father for the fact that you were poor.”
    Wrong, wrong, wrong, Alex had thought. Why did everything have to go back to some childish sense of grievance? Surely it had to be possible to look beyond your little Oedipal struggles to the occasional bigger question—about the way things were in the world, for instance, and what they might mean. Take that shoe rack: what had become of it? And why did it hold such a numinous place in Alex’s consciousness, as if the weight of existence rested on it?
    “I don’t know why it’s more important to talk about Liz than about this person I’ve met who might be dying,” he said now, surprised at how pleasant it felt to put on this show of indignation.
    “Is she really dying?” Dr. Klein said.
    Too late, Alex remembered he was speaking to someone actually trained as a medical doctor.
    “Well, she does have MS.”
    Dr. Klein relented.
    “I can see how that would affect you,” he said, with what seemed almost like real sympathy, which of course had the result of making Alex feel obliged to speak about Liz again.
    The truth of the matter, which Alex was only sporadically successful at hiding from himself, was that Dr. Klein was pretty much on target where Liz was concerned: the reason Alex didn’t want to talk about her was that he still couldn’t bring himself to face up to the weirdness the relationship had taken on its final awful months. Of course, Alex had more or less admitted from the outset that it was the breakup with Liz that had driven him here, though that had been a whopping evasion in its own right.
    “The thing about Liz,” he said, trying this on, “was that everything about her was a lie. She wanted to be this bohemian, this radical feminist, but underneath that she was just a conservative. Then she hated me because I pretended to believe in this other version of her.”
    “What makes you say that?”
    “I just know it, that’s all.”
    There was a silence while Dr. Klein gave Alex time to ponder the irrationality of his reply. Then, because the silence had to be filled, Alex said, “I saw it all at the end. How she just wanted someone to dominate her. But then she would have hated me for that too.”
    “Maybe,” Dr. Klein said, “you’re inventing a situation that couldn’t possibly have worked so you can feel justified for having ended it. The same issue has come up, I think, when you’ve talked about your dissertation.”
    When had he talked about his dissertation? Clearly, that had been a mistake. There seemed something oddly puritan in the doctor’s take on things, as if to go on with something was somehow always more psychically sound than to end it. In this case he was