In Session, (19): Don Juan
The Lay Psychiatrist meets the greatest lover of them all
I heard the beating of hooves on cobblestone. Don Juan was dressed in black, though there was an enormous red plume in his hat that seemed unaffected by the surrounding air as he thundered up and reined in the white stud in front of a tavern. When I awakened from this dream I knew the name of the tavern. Such details often slip away, which is unfortunate because in a dream, names are chosen for a reason.
The dream was a heads up about the new client, Juan Donaldson
He wasn’t dressed like Don Juan, at least not the one who’d been in my dream. He wore a lightweight wool suit, dark gray, with a subtle pinstripe. It was expensive but probably twenty years old. He had on a blue oxford cloth shirt with a contrasting white collar, like a man on the verge of priesthood, and above it, a boy’s face grown old. It was an old man’s face in some respects, the sag under the chin, the twin lines, like curved sword blades, demarcating the mouth. The lips were full and moist, and he habitually kept them moistened with the tip of his tongue. Obviously they were dry. He was stoned. He was also bald on top.
“What can I do for you Mr. Donaldson?” I gestured for him to sit in the yellow chair, and when he’d sat, I continued, “I hope you don’t think of me as a doctor, because I can certainly cure you of that misconception.”
“I chose a Lay Psychiatrist because I don’t want to be cured,” he said, “I’ve got my pattern to bear: a mother complex, to be clear, but it’s not curable.”
“We all have one because we all have a mother,” I said. “My mother dealt off the bottom of the deck and always had an ace up her sleeve. But I loved that woman, and not just for the milk. She said her mother told her, ‘When you feel blue, just remember that you’re sitting on a gold mine.’ She used to tell me the same thing.”
He chuckled, started to say something, then thought better of it -
After a pause, where he tried to decide if I was trying to be funny, and I didn’t help him out, he said, “I loved my mother, but she was a married woman, so what could I do? Her husband was in a different weight class. I didn’t understand the pattern until I saw Don Juan de Marco. I got split in two when she had the affair. I preserved her as a saint on the far side of that, when I was a child, and as I headed out into the world, I was the lover. He was the one she preferred. I didn’t want to be my father anymore.”
He was silent now, looking at me as if expecting some advice, or confirmation that I understood the elements of the Don Juan pattern.“I read that the screenwriter was a real psychiatrist,” I said.“The man who loves all the women is a man with a beautiful soul. He sees it in all those women, but at some point Don Juan has to die. That is to say, he has to finally realize that what shines so beautifully in these women is his own soul, and he has to own it.”
“I remember Martin Mull,” he said. “A song that I can’t get out of my mind. It called, I’m Every Woman That I’ve Ever Loved.”
“I’m Charo, with the brains of Irene Dunne,” I quoted. “I know his work.”