Mariah: A Love Story
Earlier Adventures of Sid Lehman
186 pages | fiction

Part One
Pamela

Magnetic True North, show me your face
It's only the shadows I'm sure of.
It's been so long now.
Since I've lost my place
And still there's no sign of the dove.
Where can she be?
Where can she be?
Where can she be?
    – Kris Williamson

ONE

In the cinematic adaptation of this story, the Five Towns Inn will play
itself. Located near the water in the town of Stony Brook in Suffolk County
on the north shore of Long Island, the low-roofed, Tudor-style inn sits at
the northwest corner of the intersection of Routes 106 and 84, Piper Road,
Erikson Drive, and Elysium Path. It peers out into the world from the
corner where Setauket, Syracuse, Seaside, Summerville, and Stony Brook come together.

It is nine a.m. Friday, May 1, 1980. It is my fortieth birthday. The day
is already hot and humid. I am checking in. I teach at Stonybrook in the
School of Education. I live in Manhattan. I teach Tuesdays, Thursdays and
Fridays and usually stay over at my friend Harley Silverglate's on Tuesday
and Thursday nights. I do not usually stay over Friday night. I am staying
over this Friday night because Harley is chairing a symposium on the Social
Psychology of Love and has wheedled me into attending it. And simply
because I am staying over Friday night I have asked Pamela Anderson out for dinner. My name is Sid Lehman.

Usually I take the train home after my three p.m. to five p.m. School
Counseling Skills course on Friday. Home is at Five Commercial Street in
Greenwich Village. I had moved to Manhattan in 1972 after two parched years in Setauket, Long Island near the School. I was thirsty for life. And in
New York I had found it. I loved the Buffalo Road House and The Riviera and
the Omnibus with its homemade fruit pies and Chopsticks with its rum drinks and the Bleeker Street Pastry Shop and The Pink Tea Cup and Reno Sweeney’s and Covent Gardens with its birdcage-- and also Show World on Eighth Avenue, Plato's Retreat, and Gay Talese’s massage parlor, Great Expectations.

This was my Manhattan from the early 1970s to 1980-- before AIDS went
public. This is where and when the sexual revolution and I caught up with
each other. The city reeked of sex. And I was getting at least my fair
share. Nan had moved out of the apartment eight months after we started
living there together, but she was just around the corner on Prince Street,
and our carnal relations would go on for another four years. Abigail flew
in periodically from Cleveland. Lucy slept over once a week. There were
others.

Let me back up for a minute.

I remember my undergraduate advisor at Cardoza, Rick Parsons, telling my
parents at my graduation that I was much too good a sociologist to ever be a
good writer, and much too good a writer to ever be a good sociologist. He
delivered this appraisal with an upward tilt of his head and a hearty laugh
that shook his entire Mid-Western, Episcopalian body. Had I been a better
psychologist then, at twenty-one, I would have heard him summing up his view of himself. I did not see that then. Nor did I feel doubly cursed. I
admired the parallelism of the sentence and later that day tucked it away in
the journal I had begun keeping just four months before.

I had graduated second in my class, summa cum laude with honors in sociology and not even my father's "So why only second?" could put a damper on the occasion. I would go on to Harvard, just barely survive Tim Leary and Dick Alpert's explorations with psychedelics, transfer into the School of Education and become a counseling psychologist who wrote only in his journals. I was on journal book number fourteen when Nan and I moved to the city, number fifteen when I started in therapy, and on sixteen when I got my license and began my own part-time therapy practice. I hated teaching at Stonybrook. The Dean and I had taken a near-instantaneous dislike of each other. He was my Ahab and I was his White Whale. And so despite having tenure, and despite having wanted to be a college teacher since my senior year in high school, I had started a small private psychotherapy practice in the city, which provided me more than enough material for the counseling skills class in which I had met Pam Anderson.

Perhaps it was Catholic schoolgirl habit that had led her to begin class in
the chair nearest the door. The class met in the Faculty Lounge, a room
blessed with modern upholstered chairs of a subdued shade but a room that
was so oddly shaped that it was not possible to arrange the chairs either in
rows or a circle. The bureaucracy had struck again. Two classes had been
scheduled simultaneously for the same regular classroom, and it was my
class-- my low priority, unimportant, step-child class-- that had had to
find a foster home. The other class was on Education in the Third World.
The teacher was black. I am white. I had to move.

I was a counselor in an anti-counseling school. Worse. I had come in with
credentials in radical politics. In fact, I had left my position-- at Cardoza-- as part of a deal where the university paid my salary for the year so long as I went away. They even paid my lawyer's fee. They were that eager to get rid of me. I won’t go into why.

Stonybrook was to be a brand-new Radical School of Education. I was hired to teach the Radical School Reform course. It was a time of much intellectual
and actual ferment about education. The book titles told the tale-- Crisis
in the Classroom (Silverman); Death at An Early Age (Kozol); The Way It
'Spozed to Be (Herndon). The negative effects of racism, economic
inequality, prejudice, and bureaucracy on public education was one of the
threads of criticism that had emerged from the 1960s and still had currency
in the 1970s.

The school had a problem. The radical faculty essentially wanted to teach
the politics of education. But the students wanted to acquire the skills to
get jobs in education. They were mostly white women from Nassau County
either divorced or in the process of divorce. They wanted classroom
management skills, social science teaching skills, school counseling skills.
They wanted preparation to take the test that would enable them to get
$20,000-$40,000 a year positions in education-- the very education that the $40,000-$60,000 a year, salaried male faculty was criticizing.

There was also a minority of faculty that actually had degrees in and taught
education. But these M.A.s and M.Ed.s were hard put to compete with the
PhDs in Philosophy and Sociology that the Dean had brought on board.
Actually, it was all even more corrupt, ludicrous, and dysfunctional than I
have hinted thus far. One story sums it up for me. The school's big coup
was hiring away from Yale a Latino professor of Philosophy who had been a
major supporter of the Black Panther party.

Or, so it all seemed. At the end of the school’s first semester, a bunch of
the Education faculty were boasting of this coup to some Yale faculty at a
National Education conference. The Yalies did not find their boasts either
funny or accurate. Emlio Chavez-- the faculty member in question-- was
still teaching philosophy full-time at Yale.

There was an embarrassed silence. The Stonybrook faculty checked the
Yalies' story out. It was so. Chavez had taken a full-time position in
Education at Stonybrook and kept his full-time position in Philosophy at
Yale! The ferry between Bridgewater, Connecticut and Port Jefferson, New
York (adjacent to Stonybrook) had been an innocent vehicle, so to speak, for
this chicanery.

Chavez was suspended. I was amused and disgusted. By this time nothing at
the school surprised me. It was a school that had genuine and important
questions to engage-- questions about, of all things, education. But it was
not engaging them. Instead, there was a bifurcated faculty, a cold war
atmosphere, and a lack of leadership.

The best thing about Stonybrook for me was its insurance coverage, which
paid 80% of my psychotherapy bills. I had started in therapy when I moved
to Manhattan. I was still in a post-operative state after the Cordoza fiasco. The long, slow, and painful process of putting Humpty Dumpty (i.e., me) back together again was begun. For a very long time I was not at my best.

One year of that quite remarkable psychotherapy had changed and bolstered me to the point where I wanted to start doing counseling. I had given up
psychology for sociology in the sixties. I was a part of my times. Then,
presto-- chango. Stonybrook had hired a political activist and now had
another clinician on its hands. My former friends on the faculty did not
know what to make of me. Treason. I had gone over to the other side.
I was in the sixth year of this quite untenable situation when Pam Anderson
sat down in my School Counseling Skills course. I did not pay her much
attention. She was pretty and she was plain. She dressed in muted colors,
mostly beiges. No jewelry. She did not look up from her notes much. She
never smiled. I knew that she was going through a divorce. There was
nothing extraordinary about her and so when in November she exchanged her seat by the door-- near where I usually stood to teach-- for a seat near the far end of the room, I registered the move in the files of my mind and made nothing of it.

It was one of those classes, one of those special classes, where 'it' happened. We clicked. We flowed. Never mind that I had never worked in a public school setting of any kind. I was teaching what the students wanted to be learning. The students were there to connect with people, learn counseling skills, and develop a way to make a living. They craved experience. I gave them experience. There was a spark, an excitement to the class. We read Rogers and Perls and Gendlin and The Therapist's Contribution to the Treatment Process and the play therapy literature. (The latter is the closest I got to school counseling skills.) I wrote out each of my mini-lectures in long hand and left a lot of time for experiential exercises and practice time. The students got to be both clients and counselors, practicing on each other. They loved it. They sensed that I loved them. They loved me. We got high on each other. While learning counseling, we were all healing.

Towards the end of the semester Pam started wearing brighter colors. I had
become more aware of her by then. She volunteered to be a client a few
times when I did demonstrations in class. I was struck by how tender, open,
and vulnerable she could quickly become. It was clear that she was hurt and
that she would not hurt a fly. I looked at her more closely now. Mostly I
looked at her eyes. They were limpid blue and seemed to go on forever.
One moment stands out in my memory. I had shown the class a movie where Carl Rogers does counseling with 'Gloria.' I love Rogers. I love the
respect, concern, and warmth he shows Gloria. So, I am shocked when the
class starts attacking him for being too soft, too non-directive with her.

They want him to direct her. I cannot believe this. At the break Pam comes
up to me and says, "It makes me sad to see them hurt you like that."
I am struck by the acuity of her remark. She is talking about me-- not
Rogers. She sees me. It was after that class session that she moved from
her seat by the door. And now she is deciding where to sit on April 25th,
1980 when I enter the room.

She is the only student present. There is nothing exceptional in the air.
The room is well-lit by both the overhead fluorescent lights and the sun
coming through the windows. I have been toying with the idea of asking her
out, but I have not made up my mind. I do not have it all rehearsed, and
now here she is.

"Hello."

"Hi."

"I wanted to ask you something."

"Oh, what?"

"I have to stay out here next week after class, and I was wondering whether
you would have dinner with me."

I say it all rather quickly, without stopping to take a breath, and with only the slightest hint of nervous awkwardness. I had started talking before I had thought it all through and so my heart only begins to beat more quickly near the end of the question. She hesitates. I wait. It seems like an excruciatingly long time. There seems to be some kind of battle going on inside her, and then, abruptly, it is over.

"I think I would like that," she says.

"Good. So would I," I answer.

We smile. Another student enters the classroom. I start writing on the
blackboard.

It began as simply as that.

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