In Crispin's Case

For today, the beginning of a new case fiction.

Crispin stormed into Ernestine’s office as though he were leading a band of Rough Riders up San Juan Hill. Or was it the Light Brigade charging blindly into a valley of doom. 

Ernestine’s tranquil office, with its plum carpet and chintz furniture, had rarely seen such a display of masculine bravado. Darkly handsome and intense, well dressed in a gray Brooks Brothers suit, a blue button down shirt, and a pink tie, Crispin was a man on a mission.

Profoundly disturbed by recent events in his life Crispin was enraged with his previous therapist, one Palmer. 

Ernestine felt her muscles tense, almost in fear, but as Crispin started to catch his breath, she planted her feet and stood her ground.

Just as she did, Crispin blurted out. “That irrelevant piece of garbage; that demented lout.” Launching into this story, Crispin poured out his bile. For eight years he, a 34 year old toy manufacturer, had undergone psychoanalytic psychotherapy. For the most part Palmer  allowed Crispin to indulge his imagination, punctuating the flow of his words with an occasional uh-huh or I see, adding an occasional remark that Crispin recognized as a transference interpretation. 

Crispin enjoyed the license to say whatever came to mind. Palmer tended to interpret it in the context of the relationship between the two of them. This was the famous transference and Palmer tried to make it the center of his patient’s life, if not the core of his life’s meaning. 

If the subway had stalled and Crispin was a half-hour late, Palmer saw it as an aggression against his person, which he saw as transferred hostility toward Crispin’s father, a nondescript foreman in a Toledo automobile plant. If Crispin expressed an erotic interest in a woman he had seen on the street, Palmer understood that Crispin wanted to ravish Palmer’s wife, as a surrogate for his mother.

As Palmer saw it, Crispin’s unresolved incestuous wishes had kept him dilly-dallying about whether he should marry his long-term live-in girlfriend, the inimitable Pansy.

Crispin was in no hurry to get married. He did not like abrupt changes. Besides, his business was good. He had developed a toy koala bear, named Kali, that he sold with a dwarf eucalyptus tree. The critter had become something of a rage among the kindergarten set, and Pansy was a living delight. So he was more than willing to delay all major decisions in order to explore his psyche. 

Then things started to go seriously wrong. Pansy was a marketing executive for a company that promoted organic cornflakes and synthetic kitty litter, among other products. She was often out at night entertaining clients. Several months ago she had struck up a friendship with a woman named Blake, a senior vice president at the cereal company. Crispin thought nothing of it, though Blake’s obvious manly demeanor suggested that she preferred women to men. He was not inordinately suspicious; he trusted Pansy. She had survived years of lubricious attention from manufacturers without straying.

Until one night Pansy came rolling in at 1:15 a.m. waking Crispin from his sleep. Peering through his clouded vision he saw a young woman flush with obvious excitement. 

She explained what had happened. After dinner Blake had invited her to have a drink at a place called the Clit Club, a notorious lesbian bar in the West Village. For Pansy it was a revelation. She innocently praised the atmosphere at the club, especially the mix of good conversation and free-spirited conviviality. And there were no drooling males trying to pick her up.

Crispin listened and took it very badly. His imagination went into overdrive. He envisioned Pansy chatting amiably with Blake and her friends. They he saw her dancing with other women, one of them decked out like a reprobate biker. Then the biker started pawing Pansy. He saw Pansy surrounded by women, in a group grope, removing her clothing. 

He was so upset he could barely talk. So he turned over and tried to go back to sleep. When he tried to explain himself to Pansy she accused him of being jealous. She started to laugh and Crispin could no longer get to sleep.

The next morning Crispin lay prostrate on the couch in Palmer’s office. Part of him wanted to fall into a coma from exhaustion. But, Palmer saw it differently. He thought that Crispin was getting in touch with his repressed unconscious desires. So Palmer tried to interpret:

“Your blatant homophobia probably derives from your own repressed homosexual impulses. You know you are especially fond of me; perhaps you are afraid of your own love for me.”

Crispin took those words seriously. He knew that if he objected Palmer would count that as denial. Crispin left his session even more distressed than when he entered, but he knew that Palmer would want him to work through the interpretation, the better to provide material proving Palmer right.

Over the next few weeks life at home with Pansy became increasingly unbearable. Crispin had lost his cheerful disposition and was avoiding her. He refused to touch her and would not allow her to touch him. Pansy tried to reassure him that nothing had happened, and that he was blowing it all way out of proportion. To no avail. Crispin vacillated between anger and indifference.

Worse yet, his business had started to decline. Kali the koala was being bypassed in the normal toy cycle; sales were down; inventory was accumulating. Life had taken a turn for the worse.

Pansy was puzzled, to say the least. She could not imagine that such an absurd overreaction could follow an innocent gesture on her part. Crispin continued to see Palmer four times a week, but the fantasies of Pansy and Blake became increasingly obscene and frankly unmentionable. 

Palmer listened intently, but silently. Forgetting the rules of analysis Crispin began pleading for help; he demanded it as an imperative; in return he received the analytic silent treatment. 

Things were not getting any better at home. Pansy continued to lead her life as she always had, responsibly and lovingly. To Crispin’s increasing distress, she still had an occasional outing with Blake. 

Then one evening, as Crispin was stationed in front of the television watching a Seinfeld rerun, Pansy flew through the door, grinning from ear to ear. She plunked herself on the sofa, and uttered the words: “Don’t you just love Elaine?”

Crispin felt something snap. Then his mind went blank and he felt his right hand rise as though he were turning to caress her. Instead, almost automatically, his arm began accelerating and before he knew what was happening, he had whacked Pansy across the face. Then he blurted out: “Can’t you fucking shut up while I am watching Seinfeld?”

Pansy began to tremble; tears welled up in her eyes. She was speechless for a moment, and then she got up from the couch, walked across the room, took her blue flannel coat out of the hall closet, grabbed her Chanel briefcase, and strode toward the door. As she put her hand on the doorknob, she turned toward Crispin and shouted: “I’ll pick up my things tomorrow.”

The sound of the slamming door aroused Crispin as though from a trance. A wave of anguish suffocated him like a cold blanket; he could not move a muscle. He was frozen in shame. Finally, he jumped up, ran to the door, hopped the elevator to the ground floor, only to discover that Pansy had disappeared. Defeated and dejected, he told himself that it would all pass, that it was just a transitory incident. That night he could barely sleep.

The next morning he dragged himself to his office and began trying to contact Pansy. He left message after message on her voice mail, begging, pleading, imploring her to call him, to talk to him. She was not returning his calls. Anxiously awaiting her call, he was too distracted to work. He was fantasizing about being arrested for battery. He was so distraught that he imagined that he would propose marriage. Perhaps that was what she really, really wanted.

Crispin was so worried that he might miss her call that he forgot his therapy session. He scanned his mind and lit on the excuse-- Palmer had ignored his entreaties and had let him flounder. By the time Palmer called him, two hours later, Crispin was bristling with rage. 

“You incompetent son of a bitch, look what you did, how would you let me go on, didn’t you see what was happening to my life?”

Palmer was nonplussed. He imagined that Crispin would now have an interesting take on his latent homicidal impulses toward his father and mentioned that Crispin should use the occasion to analyze his feelings of hostility. As he heard this, Crispin blew up: “Fuck you, I’m not coming back.”

Within a half-hour Crispin was back to being obsessed with finding Pansy. The worst happened that evening. Returning home depleted, like a balloon that had had its air let out, Crispin imagined that she would be there, as always, ready to forgive and forget. 

As he opened the door to his apartment, the eerie quiet hit him like a gust of cold air. Then, as he walked through the rooms he discovered that Pansy had been there during the day and had emptied it of all her possessions. Crispin had another bad night. He could not even drink himself to sleep.

He decided that he would have to confront her. The next morning he camped out in front of her office. He would catch her and explain everything. Sure enough, she arrived for work at 8:30, only she was accompanied by Blake. He stepped forward to speak to Pansy, but Blake stepped between them. She said: “Why don’t you leave her alone? Haven’t you done enough already?” 

When Crispin then tried to get into the building, the guard stopped him and told him that he was not allowed to do so. Crispin turned away and trudged back to his office. When he arrived, he slumped into his chair, defeated.

That afternoon his secretary interrupted his frantic brooding with a letter that had just been messengered to him, marked personal and private. The return address read: Madden, Lutz, Koren and Sloop, a law firm that Crispin recognized. He ripped open the envelope to read, in stilted legalese, that Pansy Ostler refused to have further contact with him and that if he persisted she would seek a restraining order against him. 

Crispin knew he needed serious help. He was not going to call Palmer, evidently, but he recalled that his friend Keith had praised a life coach named Ernestine. So he called Keith, got the name and number, and left her a message requesting an emergency meeting. She wrote back that she could see him at the end of the day.

Crispin met with her and told her his story. He closed with these words: “You have to tell me what to do now. And don’t bullshit me with any mumbo jumbo about my transference.”

She looked at him intently and said: “I am not going to prevaricate. I will tell you what to do, but only if you agree to follow my instructions.”

“Anything you say,” Crispin replied. “Keith told me you were a master of these things.”

She began: “There is no excuse for your behavior. No insight, awareness or explanation could obviate the fact that you mistreated this woman. You had no reason to torment her with your jealousy.”

Crispin was struck dumb. For all his willingness to hear what Ernestine was saying,he was unprepared to receive such a harsh judgment. By comparison Palmer had been a model of indulgence.

Ernestine continued: “There is only one thing you can do now. Offer a sincere apology for your appalling behavior. Without explanations. You would do best to do so via a letter, not an email or a text. Express your remorse, ask for nothing in return, and throw in a dozen roses for good measure. And show me the note before you send it.”

Crispin then asked whether this ploy would cause Pansy to contact him? To which Ernestine said that she did not know and effectively did not care. She explained that Crispin needed to learn to act with decorum and to take responsibility for his own bad behavior. She proposed that Crispin’s emotional well-being had less to do with Pansy and more to do with his own behavior.

Crispin then decided that he would follow Ernestine’s instructions, to the letter. He did not believe that he really had a choice.

To be continued.