Bleeding Hearts(33)

What complicated this situation was twofold. In the first place, Paul Hazzard wasn’t stupid. In the second, he had his suspicions. His lack of stupidity surfaced in what had become cynicism about the socioeconomic composition of his audience. He hadn’t failed to notice that really poor people had no interest in healing their shame or finding the child within. Maybe they were too damned distracted by worrying about where the rent money was going to come from and figuring out how to get their children two blocks down the street to school without being shot. Maybe they were poor because they were distracted. That’s what a lot of people in the field would have said. Paul had always found meetings of recovery leaders shocking. Paul had been brought up in a fairly liberal family. It was liberalism of a haphazard and unthoughtful kind, but it was liberalism nonetheless. Recovery leaders talking together always sounded like caricatures of Republicans in The Nation. The poor were responsible for their poverty. Bad things never happened to good people. Bad things happened because you hadn’t done your grief work or because you hadn’t owned your anger or because you resisted turning responsibility for your life over to your higher power. Recovery was all about taking responsibility for your life by giving up control of it—and if you didn’t do both those things, it was no surprise if you ended up drinking muscatel out of a paper bag on the Bowery. Anything could be an addiction. All addictions were progressive, incurable, and ultimately fatal. If you didn’t do something about yours, whatever happened to you was your own damned fault. Maybe you were trying to punish yourself.

Paul Hazzard’s suspicions had to do with sex—and he never expressed them to anybody. If he had, in this place and in this climate, he would have been lynched. This did not mean he did not believe his conclusions were true. It did mean that he understood how to operate in his environment, which was what he would have called (in one of his seminars) an “important life skill.” Feminism was everywhere. It would get you if you didn’t watch out. He couldn’t let anyone know what he really thought, which was this: Grief work and healing your shame and discovering your inner child and owning your anger and recognizing your abuse and all the rest of it were very necessary, but they were necessary only for women. The party line in the recovery movement was that women outnumbered men at seminars and in support groups because women were more in touch with their feelings than men. Women were more enlightened. Men had bigger problems and a stronger will to denial. Paul Hazzard thought this was hogwash. Women outnumbered men in recovery because women experienced the world differently than men did. Women found addictive what men could take in their stride. Women were damaged by blows men would hardly notice. Women were weak. Paul Hazzard knew all this because he knew himself. He’d smoked two packs of cigarettes a day for twenty years. Then, on his fortieth birthday, he’d taken all the cigarettes in the house and thrown them in the garbage. He’d had a bad couple of months. He’d been impossible to live with. His temper had been hair-trigger and irrational. Then the couple of months was over and he was fine. He’d never smoked another cigarette. He’d never had the desire to smoke another cigarette. Contrast that to the women in his groups, who talked about their “addiction to cigarettes” decades after they’d had their last smoke and came awake every morning wishing they could light up.

The other way women were different from men was in relationships. Yes, women were often abused. They were abused a lot if you counted the metaphysical level as well as the physical one. Paul believed they brought it on themselves. Women could never decide what they wanted from a relationship and stick to it. They were always changing their assumptions and expecting men to let them change the rules. They said they wanted to be independent, but when they were out of a relationship they were always declaring themselves to be “miserable.” They said they wanted to be strong, but when their men slept with other women or batted them around the kitchen or drank up all the rent money, they accepted the first apology they got and went on trying to “keep the relationship together.” It was enough to make you believe in a hereditary, sex-linked, sex-specific form of masochism.

Actually, Paul Hazzard liked masochism in women. It was useful. He had spotted it right away in Hannah Krekorian, even before he spoke to her. The way she stood. The way she walked. The way she nibbled guiltily on a cookie, as if indulging in chocolate chips were the moral equivalent of working as a camp guard in Dachau. Paul Hazzard knew the signs. And, since he had gone to that particular meeting in hope of meeting someone who would suit his purpose, he had been interested. It was too bad that Hannah was neither young nor pretty. Paul liked his women very young and very pretty. Unfortunately, he also liked them very rich, and the three things rarely went together, at least in women who were available to him. Even at the height of his career, when he had his own series on PBS and his books sold twenty-five thousand copies a week, there were certain women who had remained beyond his grasp. Very young, very pretty, very rich women wanted to marry rock stars. To find someone willing to take on a stodgy old psychologist, he had to make compromises.