Splitting our Differences

And shrinking again

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hunters in the Snow, 1565

After a few unhappy months in Weston, I reminded Mr. Landi of his promise early in our house-hunting to rent a pied-à-terre in Manhattan if we could afford to do so, and it seemed we could. He would be able to write off the apartment as an expense on business trips in New York, and I would use my modest income from freelancing toward what I came to think of as my floating life raft.

He wasn’t too happy about the idea—later I realized he must have had a hard time explaining the runaway wife to the corporate honchos—but this was the only way I could imagine saving my marriage and my sanity.

And within short order I found an adorable little duplex in Irving Place, a small historic district near Union Square. (An unfounded local legend claims that writer Washington Irving, for whom the street was named, lived in the house a few doors down from my building.) Both the upstairs bedroom and the living room, with a brick wall and working fireplace, were tiny, and the bathroom was about the size of a matchbox. Even Sherman, the cat we adopted in Brooklyn Heights, who went back and forth with me on the shuttle, seemed to suffer claustrophobia in that apartment. I can generally remember the kitchens of every house and apartment I’ve lived in, but I draw a blank on this one. Most likely it was just a simple Pullman affair, with a couple of burners and a half-fridge.

The apartment was in one of these buildings—I don’t remember which

But who cares? I was back in the core of the Apple most weekdays, and in Weston on weekends. And Mr. Landi visited often. This seemed to me a workable solution to my suburban malaise, but it was not without a certain psychic toll. And so I decided it was time to see a new shrink. As with Mrs. T, whom I’d split with months earlier and with whom I did not much want to resume therapy, I didn’t shop around but simply went with the recommendation of another old friend from Savvy.

The following account is adapted from an unpublished novel, but is still reasonably true to my first encounters with “Dr. Haim.” (Hey, kids, sometimes we need to recycle material. Every writer does it.)

Dr. Haim’s office was on the ground floor of one of those anonymous dirty white-brick apartment buildings erected in the ‘60s and ‘70s.  There was a reception area, but no receptionist; presumably it was the good doctor himself who buzzed me in at five minutes to ten. I waited, leafing through a year-old issue of The Economist, until he appeared from an inner office at quarter after the hour: a small, slender man, probably in his mid-sixties, with a knobby bald pate and a fringe of reddish-gray hair. He wore a three-piece suit, striped tie, and the kind of slip-ons my dad favored, Hush Puppies. His hand, when he took mine, was soft and papery. He ushered me into a dimly lighted room with a big wooden slab of a desk, a leather swivel chair, and, to my dismay, what looked like the prototypical Victorian shrink’s couch with an afghan neatly folded at the foot. Was I going to be expected to lie on this thing?  Apparently so, as there were no other chairs in the room and he immediately claimed the desk chair. He gestured to the couch. I sat primly on the edge of it as he opened up a spiral notebook.

“So now, Mrs. Landi, what is it that I can do for you?”

I talked about all the upheavals of the last few months, the strain on my marriage, Mr. Landi’s hostile remarks and the ongoing unhappiness of our sex life.

“And so do you want to save this marriage, or are you possibly just running away?”

“Of course I want to save it,” I answered in astonishment. “Why else would I be here?”

“Well, yes, that is what you say, but sometimes the unconscious plays funny tricks on us, and we do not always know how to catch them and sort them through. And that is why you are here.” He smiled, revealing a row of neat yellow teeth. I was still bewildered by the accent—he turned his W’s into V’s—but didn’t feel it was my place to ask how he acquired it. To my ears, it was Vienna by way of Brooklyn. Dr. Haim explained his fee, which seemed reasonable enough, and how he liked patients to pay for each session (“so that you are aware you are paying for services and not dealing with a bill you can allow to sit for a month”).

“And am I going to have to lie down on this thing?”

“That is what most of my patients do,” he answered. “Though if you prefer, I will bring in a chair from the waiting room.” He turned again to consult a calendar on his desk. “So we will start with once a week and see if we need more.”

Zo vee vill start with once a veek und zee if vee need more…

I did lie down on the couch that first session, and after a few minutes of feeling extremely vulnerable—I kept my fingers tightly laced across my stomach—I began to relax and get with the program. A large framed map of the moon hung above my toes, inducing a drowsy-dreamy state, as Dr. Hyman’s pen methodically scratched behind me. At points my voice would trail off, and I hovered on the edge of a seductive catnap, but the doctor’s crisp remarks or questions always snapped me back to full consciousness.

“So tell me about your parents’ marriage. What is that like?” he asked after I’d given him a brief summation of the family situation.

“Well, they are, like, you know, very, very married. They love each other, I guess.”       

There was a silence. “And who has the power?”

“Power?”

“Someone always more power in the marriage. Sometimes it flows back and forth, changes over time, but someone always has the power.”    

I’d never thought of it that way. “That would have to be Mary, I guess.” I’d slipped into calling my parents by their given names, something I almost never did. “She is the goddess, and he is her one and only acolyte. Wade adores her. I just visit the temple from time to time.” I giggled. The doctor’s pen scratched.

“And what about your marriage? Who has the power?”

“At the moment, that would have to be my husband, of course.” And I wondered when and if I’d ever had any “power” at all.

“Huh. And tell me about your dreams,” Dr. Haim, I would soon discover, had a way of radically switching subjects. And he was a big dream man.

I told him one I’d had about Mr. Landi, about losing him beneath the ice on a wintry pond. In the dream, the landscape was remarkably like that in Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow.

“That is a dream about separation and death,” the doctor intoned. “You are afraid of losing him.”

Well, no shit, Sigmund. I suppressed a huge yawn. Wasn’t that, in part, why I was here?

“Give me more details.”

I told him I didn’t really have any, unless he wanted to know about landscape in Northern Renaissance painting. All I could remember was Mr. Landi slip-sliding on ice, and then slipping under. That was it. A mere snapshot of a dream.

“Next time you have dreams, if you wake up, keep a pad and pen by the bed and write down everything you remember,” Dr. Haim instructed. “And bring me some photographs of your family. I learn a lot from photographs.”

Ve vill hear about Dr. Haim next week.

Cheater’s Indian Shrimp Saag Paneer

Once again, you know I really made this because of the crappy photo. But trust me, it looks and tastes a lot better than this would indicate.

I am going to let you in on a delicious secret for an astonishingly quick and easy dinner. Get yourself a package of Saag Paneer, like the one below (there are many variants on Amazon, so I’m not flacking this particular brand).

Then sauté about 2/3 of a pound of shelled deveined shrimp (20 or so to serve two generously). This is my preferred way to cook shrimp for a dish like this, adapted from Cook’s Illustrated.

1.  Toss drained shrimp, patted dry with paper towels, with a generous tablespoon of olive oil and 1/8 teaspoon sugar. Start with a cold nonstick or carbon-steel skillet, and arrange the shrimp in a single layer. Turn on medium-low heat and once the shrimp are pinkish on the edges (about four minutes), cut the heat and quickly turn each piece, letting the residual heat cook the shrimp, three or four more minutes. Set the shrimp aside in a bowl.

2.  Add saag paneer to the frying pan, Cook over low heat until it is gently simmering. Return the shrimp to the pan and heat through once again.

3.  Serve with brown or white rice, or couscous (which is what you see above).

Notes: You could probably make this for a dinner party, doubling or tripling the recipe, and adding other Indian dishes, like curried vegetables, plus chutney, dahl, and naan. No one will know you weren’t cooking your ass off all afternoon.

And of course the saag paneer works well with sautéed chicken or lamb. I’m still eating pescatarian, so I prefer shrimp. Maybe one of these days I will try scallops, too, but they may be too delicate for this sauce.