Some things, you wait to talk about. I’m maybe better at this on the stack than with people in life. I found a review of How I Learned to Drive I’d written in The Nation in 1997. It concerns sex between a girl and an older man. The piece seemed alive, so I rewrote it, as I do everything I publish again. Then I thought, tell the story of you and André. Tell something of it, in the way it relates to Paula Vogel’s play.
It seems to me, together, we’ve become a thing with growing trust. You trust me, I hope, to entertain you and stir feeling. I trust you to be entertained by anything that makes you feel more alive. The piece I’m posting about André is part of longer story, and you may have questions about its contents. I’ll try to answer them. My hope is you’ll want to know how to write about stuff that seems in a category of its own. I think in every life stuff happens that makes you feel separate. Sometimes, you have been made separate. Not to be too cold-blooded about it, that experience is a subject and a vantage point. The absence that keeps on giving.
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How I Learned to Drive
In 1997, I wrote a piece in The Nation about Paula Vogel’s play How I Learned to Drive. It went on to win a Pulitzer, many Obie awards, and later Tony Awards for the 2022 revival on Broadway, with the original stars. Here’s my Nation, updated, as always.
In How I Learned to Drive (Century Theater) Paula Vogel thinks about sex that is shaming and irresistible between an older person and a young person. Some contradictions, the play says, even contradictions with costly consequences, can’t be resolved. That’s the truth of our lives and a reason the child molester in her play remains in some ways endearing. We don’t all slide into life unharmed. Some of us slide into life saying to ourselves, Can this really be happening? What are we going to do with lives like that? Lie about how it feels to live in them?
Drive is structured as an imitation performance piece, narrated by Li'l Bit (Mary-Louise Parker), who chronicles a sexual involvement she had with her uncle Peck (David Morse). She’s 11 when it starts, and he’s 43. Through quick, pointed scenes, directed with flair and finesse by Mark Brokaw, cast mates Michael Showalter, Johanna Day, and Kerry O'Malley round out the world of this family. Li'l Bit's clan are boorish and depressed, white “crackers,” in the language of the piece—dead-eyed rather than mean. Li'l Bit has no father. As she develops, she feels reduced by boys her age to a walking pair of breasts. When Peck, the husband of her mother's sister, tells her she has a mind, she moves toward him. He also says she can call all the shots.
Li'l Bit wants you to know her experience. She’s not asking you to tell her how to judge it. In a sense, Vogel taps into the thoughts Nabokov neglected to invent for Lolita. Li’l Bit’s not in it for the thrill of bashing taboos. She doesn’t feel guilty about being aroused because aliveness isn’t available to her anywhere else. She says she’s been harmed, yes. At 11, when her uncle first touches her, she stops living in her body and goes to live in her mind. In college, she drinks too much, like her uncle, and she flunks out. People who grow up in circumstances like Li’l Bit’s don’t like thinking of themselves as defeated. It’s a reason some of them don’t want to reduce their predators to the fact of their unfair advantage.
Making the most of a measly deal, Li'l Bit says she was turned on by turning on an adult male, and she was turned on by controlling him. Starting at 13, she forms a pact with Peck. He’s allowed to touch her one night a week. She likes the power, even though one minute Peck is teaching her how to drive, so she can steer her own life, and the next minute he’s taking pictures of her for an imagined future in Playboy. "I thought you wanted me to go to college," she says, coming to see his attraction as at best a shabby prize.
Parker, with her rabbitty twitchiness, perfectly embodies a child with a nose for the hustle and the grope. And Morse, with his liquid drawl and clean-smelling affect, is brilliant as a man who makes his passivity seductive, a man who can wait forever to fulfill a fantasy because fantasy is where he lives. He’s the assaulter as plastic man, not limp but vastly malleable. The actors show the way unwelcome knowledge slides again and again under the heel of need.
In this weirdly captivating play, Vogel exposes the permanent bruise of inter-generational sex and the creepizoid shape of those who exploit the trust of children, but Vogel stands apart from advocates of victims' rights who don't admit the erotic nature of such connections or whisk it quickly away from sight—an allure adults who feel responsible to children limit, if they feel it, to fantasy. Perversity, Driving says, is less in wishes and in acts than in burying a piece of truth where it can jump out and bite you.
Dear André
When my sister was dying, we got in touch with a cousin we had known when we were young. There she was on Facebook with her thick blond hair and shy smile. A few days later, on the phone, our cousin asked my sister if anything funny had ever happened between her and André. She was talking about the shrink/guru who, in the 1960s, had treated my mother, my sister, and me—as well as other members of our family, including the cousin, her sister, and both of her parents. We were part of a cult of sorts, a gaggle of rich Jews, some schooled, some unschooled, under the influence of a smart man, a doctor, a sad man, a lonely man, who loved the people he treated and also took them for all they were worth.
Our cousin called him Glaz. My sister said to her, “You should speak to my sister.” I was the one André had touched. This thing my sister and I did, this digging around to find our cousin, was our last adventure together, and thinking of it makes me see her. She’s right here.
On the phone, my cousin said André had had his pick of nine or ten women every night. She called it his “harem.” I hadn’t talked to her since we were children. I remembered a little girl with peachy skin, two years younger than me. In childhood, everyone younger than you is a baby and everyone older is an ocean. She said, “André shaped my life.” I said, “Mine, too.”
She had a whiskey voice, a smoky, New York voice. She said, “André started having sex with me when I was eleven. He had sex with my mother and sister too.” She said that, near the end of his André, he had asked her sister to sleep in his hospital room. He had accused a woman of killing her young son, and he feared the woman had put a hit on his life. I tried to imagine his large, gray head at the end of a killer’s gun, and I laughed. He would die in the hospital of something else.
The day André touched me, he lifted my sweater and said, “Your breasts are fine.” It seemed an old-world thing to say, and I felt embarrassed for him. I was fourteen. I had already kissed boys and knew the difference between kissing boys and this. He put his hands in my underpants. He circled my nipples and asked if it felt good. His breaths speeded up. I don’t know what I said.
On her bed, my sister says, “André didn’t mean that much to me.” What we remember is not the past. She’s too weak to move without assistance. Starting in 1958, she saw André five days a week after her classes at NYU. Each session cost $50. She says, “For the first six months, it was a standoff, and neither of us spoke.” I say, “You’ve said he helped you.” She looks into space and says, “He did.”
In the middle of her freshman year of college, she returned home from Boston, sad and anxious. It would turn out she had stolen a wallet from a girl in her dorm and left it on her dresser in plain sight. That’s when André entered our lives. He was already treating our cousin’s father—a furrier, a gambler, a charmer with a permanent tan. André treated the furrier’s wife, their two daughters, and another forlorn brother of our father.
I’m writing this from the home of people I don’t know well, minding their property and cats. I’m perched on a deck, overlooking a pool, surrounded by flowering plants. Green trees rise up fifty feet around the land. In the distance are rolling hills. I move from house to house like the swimmer in the story by John Cheever, who swims from swimming pool to swimming pool. Summer rain interrupts bursts of sun.
According to my cousin, André told his patients that sex with him was part of their treatment. Another woman he had sex with told me this as well. André had touched her for the first time when she was four. Her parents knew. He was having sex with her mother, and her husband knew. The husband remained loyal to André. There is nothing about André I wouldn’t believe.
Before he led me to his bed, he didn’t speak. Maybe he did speak. I don’t remember any words. I suppose we all make calculations about who to advance on. I had arrived at his country house by train in the afternoon, and the light was golden, streaming through the windows of the room we were in. I heard birdsong. He took me to his bed again that night. Every time a man has put his tongue in my mouth when I did not invite him to, I have felt bad about something in the world I cannot put my finger on. Yesterday, I wrote a letter to a friend I have known for forty years and told her I was stepping back from our friendship. It wasn’t her fault. Many times she had shown me I wasn’t a first-rung friend, and I had gone along with it.
André was an awkward, gloomy person, and he spoke with a thick accent. He read all the time and collected art and rugs. I’d never known anyone like him. The second time he took me to his bed he went further, and I felt something. I was interested in the feeling apart from the man. It was possible to be in two places at the same time, and I don’t think this was a new sensation for me. No one had touched me that way before. I hadn’t touched myself that way. I didn’t feel beautiful. I thought my mother and sister were beautiful.
When he asked me to touch his penis, I said, “I’m tired and I want to go to sleep.” I didn’t sleep. He didn’t try to overpower me. Perhaps he feared I’d make noise. There were others in the house. There wasn’t much he feared. He’d been a Jew in occupied France and gotten out. I wouldn’t have made a sound.
I didn’t know where André slept that night. The next morning, he said, “Don’t tell your mother.” He didn’t need to worry. He didn’t mention my father.
He didn’t make sexual advances to my mother or sister. On her bed, my sister says, “Why didn’t you tell me?” I say, “I don’t know.” It’s not the truth. The truth is I thought she and my mother wouldn’t believe me. I thought they would think I was hurting the person they looked up to more than anyone else in the world. His name was on their lips all the time. They believed he knew better than they did how to live. I wanted to believe that. You can’t imagine how much I wanted to believe it. I didn’t believe it.
What I thought on André’s bed is: If this is happening, then anything is possible. When, three years later, JFK was assassinated, I was sad and shocked the way other people were sad and shocked. Also I was not shocked. I was unable to be shocked. I mean, the planet had already been tipped on its axis. You mean to say, a man touches you in his bed is a bigger deal than the president being shot? No. It isn’t a bigger deal. It’s that when Kennedy was shot, I hadn’t yet told anyone what I understood.
I knew something I couldn’t share, and that truth was connected in my mind to how the world worked. The world appeared to be A, and I knew it was B. I didn’t want the world to work the way I knew it worked, but I did know it worked that way. Doubt is the beginning of freedom and loneliness.
My sister is breathing okay if she doesn’t move. She says, “It’s hard to get up from the toilet. My arms are too weak or maybe it’s my legs.” I say, “Try using your abdominals.” She says, “Mom kept us apart.” I say, “She did and she didn’t.” Ellen says, “I will miss you.” She doesn’t believe in anything after death. I say, "I will miss you, too." I miss her every day. Sometimes all I do is miss her.
Eight months after she began seeing André, my mother became his patient. Two years later, I began treatment. Richard says, “What did you think you were going for?” I say, “To be part of his world.” He says, “But it was therapy. You must have thought you needed to have a problem.” I say, “My problem was not being inside this world.”
I’m beside Ellen on pillows. I sit forward and say, “Suppose everyone felt trapped in their relationship with André, and they were all carrying around the same secret. This thing they were doing, this man they were trusting they didn’t really trust. He was a manifestation of the chaos we can’t escape.” She says, “I didn’t cry when he died.” I say, “I wish I knew more about what made him tick.” She says, “He had nine sisters.” I say, “I wish I could ask what he was thinking when he did what he did, although I don’t think he’d tell me the truth.”
To enter André’s world, all I had to do was ask. Before I met him, I imagined someone kind and generous, who would teach me about life. Do you know how, when you meet certain people, you feel an immediate desire to speak to them? I felt none of this with André, and I didn’t know what to do with my disappointment. He was aloof and bored in my sessions. I pretended to like him. It was not my first lie to myself.
My sister lived seven years longer than André. I remember my mother calling me to tell me he’d died. She was crying and smoking. During her treatment, he’d urged her to travel and take classes at the New School. She began to read books, and her life was changed. She lost weight and bought stylish clothes at Bergdorf’s. André died in 1969 at age seventy. Child abuse became a crime in the US in 1974.
André published two essays about Shakespeare in the psychoanalytic journal American Imago. The journal continues to promote him on Google. I wonder if they know about his life. How many psychoanalysts have had sex with children? It is currently a crime in a number of US states for analysts to sleep with patients of any age. I’m not in favor of criminalizing sexual behavior between consenting adults.
One of the essays André wrote is called “Hamlet, Or the Tragedy of Shakespeare” (1961). The other essay is called “Iago or Moral Sadism” (1962). In this essay he spends time contending that Desdemona is really a “whore.” One time he spells it “wore.” He quotes Goethe in German, Dante in Italian, Dostoevsky in Russian. He makes references in French. During a recent rereading of this essay, a sentence about Iago jumped out at me: “He sees in his victims their motives and acts on them.” André seems to be describing himself. He gave me copies of the articles at the time they were published, and I have kept them. He gave me books, among them The Frog Pond, an autobiographical novel by Joyce MacIver, a pseudonym, about a woman who is attracted to violent, sadistic men. Some of the men are her analysts. I remember reading the book as a child and becoming aroused. It was amazing that language, alone, could do that. I’m still amazed.
Before my sister died, she wrote letters to the people she loved. They were neatly stacked in a drawer beside her bed. She said, “I became obsessed with writing them. It was focusing to think about my relationship to each person.” She looked off at a small statue of a horse that had sat in our parents’ living room. She said, “When you read your letter, promise me you won’t correct the spelling and grammar.” I said, “I’m a lousy speller.” She said, “The grammar. An ly will be missing.” I said, “I promise.” I said, “I would like the horse.” She said, “Tell my daughter. She will take everything that’s not nailed down.” I said, “I would appreciate it if you would let her know.”
My sister was nearly six when I was born. She would drink my bottles, and I would cry for food. She says, “I can only be my real self with you.” I said, “Keep talking. You’re still here.” She said, “Except I can’t move.” She asked me not to leave her. I fed her, cleaned her, gave her medications.
After she died, I met my cousin at a restaurant on the Upper East Side. We hold each other. I sit across from her and look at her face. She wears a ring with a diamond on her right hand and a series of thin gold bands on her left hand. I want to think they belonged to her mother and sister. We are the last members of our families.
Here are some things she told me. André left Europe for the US in 1942 with financial aid from American Jews or American psychoanalysts. He arranged marriages and divorces. He died of prostate cancer he would not have treated for fear of losing his erections.
I say, “Your mother pimped you to gain favor with André. She pimped your sister, and she pimped me.” My cousin nods. I say, “As a kid, I couldn’t understand why she let it happen.” My cousin takes a deep breath and says, “You were strong.” I say, “I didn’t stand up to him directly.” She says, “You got him to stop. No one got him to stop.” I say, “He aroused me.” She says, “He aroused everyone.” I say, “How did he convince so many people?” She says, “He made you feel you had been singled out for the honor of being with him.”
I like seeing my sister through the scrim of childhood infatuation, looking up to her, wanting to be her, wanting to know the everything she knows. I like seeing André through the scrim of childhood incomprehension. These are times of hope. After my sister died, for a while all other people looked the same to me, the way a traveler from outer space would see human beings.
Today I brushed the cats I am minding and formed a gray fur mouse out of their hair. I took a picture of the mouse and wanted to send it to my sister. Then I remembered she is dead.
The way that you woven together the experience with Ganz, How I Learned to Drive, and a sister's death is mysterious and powerful. And then: the frame of living in someone else's house with someone else's cats... and the conclusion of creating a mouse out of cat fur and wanting to send the photo to the sister no longer on earth. Damn! "Made separate," yes. And also linked, connected, unified. Gorgeous collage.
Riveting, distressing, while encompassing many perspectives. Thank you for sharing this and for giving us all permission to be kinder to our younger selves who unwittingly or wittingly trusted and longed for adults who too easily took advantage.