Part I: I Think, Therefore I Cannot Swallow
Chapter 1: Sweet Sticky Serendipity
It was like something out of a Freudian case study, I swear; the result of a repressed memory of choking on Herr so and so's semen at six months of age or something insane. But I'm a lawyer, and have always operated in the realm of logic: never have cared much for the repressed memory thing, or for the idea that everything is sexual. Which is why I was so nervous about seeing a shrink. But they weren't all Freudians, I tried to reassure myself - only the psychoanalysts, right? It didn't matter anyway; I was rather desperate at that point. Just focus on the "positive," I told myself: with a nutty food neurosis and a psychologist, in your measly nine months here, you're on your way to becoming the consummate New York woman, Sophie Hegel!
Two weeks after the ball, as I would call it, emerged, I stole into our office library and surreptitiously filched the NYC Public Defender's medical insurance directory, chose a random name under "mental," and ended up with Dr. Ames. He seemed like a very decent guy. At least he didn't mention semen or repressed memories, although he did elicit a slight clarification when I'd told him I was having problems swallowing: "Food, you mean?"
Dr. Ames was fortyish, a bit pudgy, with a round cherubic face that emanated contentment. And he had an eye like Sartre's - I always forget the exact term -- lazy eye, wandering eye? -- hmm, I resigned to call it his "Sartre eye." At first it threw me a bit because it didn't seem like he was looking directly at me when he talked. Then, for that very reason, it began to make me feel more at ease. Like he wasn't staring me down or sizing me up.
I told him about the ball. It was a seemingly normal Saturday evening back in the spring of 2001. I'd graduated from law school the prior May and was about half-way through a year-long public interest fellowship I'd managed to win from my school, representing indigent defendants in appealing their convictions in the P.D.'s Appeals Department. My boyfriend Stephen had surprised me with a phone call from work. A senior litigation associate trying to make partner at ginormous Manhattan firm Briede Swynne, Kniphkin, Larks and Nutley, the man was always at the office, and reminding me ad nauseam when I objected to weekend hours, that they didn't pay him half a million a year for nine to five. I wondered why he couldn't ask them for a quarter of a million for a normal life, but I was young and naive and unschooled in the ways of New York meta-firms. He wanted to take me out for a nice dinner; nothing special, he was just in the mood for some "bistro" food, meaning his favorite, Café Des Artistes - a capital-lettered entry in the Zagat's guide whose poshness sometimes unnerved me but that did have amazing food. He told me to wear a dress with a wide neckline or strapless - said it would nicely complement a "tiny little something" he just picked up for me at -- Tiffany's of all places!
I knew something was up. Stephen could have moments of ostentatiousness, but Tiffany's was definitely out of the ordinary. So there I was, a tangle of nerves in a pink discount Betsey Johnson slipdress I'd bought at a Woodbury outlet, sitting at our usual candle-lit table below a mural of a blonde Tarzan beating his chest for a naked blushing nymphet, opposite my ocean-eyed, urbanely bald, chiseled-jawed former "judge."
I'd met Stephen a couple years earlier, in law school. We weren't students together; he was 37, 11 years older than I. At the end of my first year, I was required to give this horrendously nerve-racking oral argument for my Appellate Advocacy class -- I was a pretty hysterical wreck throughout my entire first year at Yale; I considered it a minor miracle I actually survived the place. They wanted people other than the familiar profs on the mock judicial panels, so Stephen, who graduated years earlier, returned to his alma mater and sat as a "judge" on my "court." My trembling voice and jittery stance made it quite clear I was vomitously nervous throughout the entire thing. It didn't help that I was assigned the conservative side, and had to argue that protestors against the NYPD's treatment of African Americans didn't have a Constitutional right to hold a candlelight vigil for a slain innocent suspect in a public park after dusk. Of course the whole panel was dead-set against me, not that I could blame them, I was pretty dead-set against myself as well. But the "presiding judge" - one of our Family Law professors -- didn't have to harangue me so.
© Swallow is the copyrighted material of Tonya Plank.