Many people go about finding love in the wrong way. We meet; we do our best to please and impress our new companion. We tell jokes, laugh at his jokes, try to make ourselves interesting. We keep things light, talk about extraneous things like movies, music and musicians, sports, politics. We discuss our favorite television shows. This has some merit. At least we discover whether we have similar taste and things in common. We avoid being intrusive, by which I mean asking substantive questions that go to the heart of a person’s character. In “Dancing in the Dark” Jennifer is made a bit uncomfortable by Jacques’ probing questions. He wants to get to know her, and she finds that she is doing something usually outside her comfort zone. She is revealing significant facts about her life, in particular her relationships with her mother and father. Eventually she follows suit and questions him about his life. This chapter provides an example of how to get to know someone in an authentic and realistic way. At the end of the evening Jennifer and Jacques learn more about each other than some couples, together for years, ever learn. This I know from decades of work with couples.
Loving someone in a deep and true way requires knowledge. Who is this person that I think I love? What is his character about? How did he come to be the person he is? What do I feel when I am with him? How much do I trust him, his integrity, his veracity, his sincerity? Is he open about himself and does he let me in? If you can’t answer these questions then your knowledge of your lover is superficial, and you have more work to do. It is not enough that he makes you laugh and he is fun to be with. It is not enough that the sex is great, and you can’t take your eyes off of him. Over time other things will emerge that become more important. Can you depend on him when the bad times roll in, as inevitably they will? Is he a good father, patient, understanding, and loving with the children? Is he able to control his temper when he is angry with you, disagrees with you, or is cross about something you said or did? Does he continue to show concern about your needs, about your feelings and wishes, or is he selfish and thinks only about himself? And when there is a conflict, do you both make an effort to listen to one another, and eventually to resolve the conflict in a way that allows you to be intimate again? These are the things that truly matter in a lifetime relationship.
“Dancing in the Dark” is about the struggles of two couples to fight their way through misunderstandings, conflicts, and deeply embedded ambivalences to enduring and genuine love. The barriers and impediments are many, and they all must face the ultimate choice: to embrace or retreat from the availability of love.
“Dancing in the Dark” is quintessentially a novel about the search for love, and the myriad obstacles that couples confront along the way. As a psychotherapist working in the field for over three decades, I have dealt with these problems practically every day of my professional life. But why do they occur with such common frequency? If we all want love, why do we throw up so many impediments that thwart our hopes? The novel seeks to shed light on this mystery. In the two love stories that run side by side throughout the pages of “Dancing in the Dark”, the author endeavors to illustrate why things go awry. No one in love is born yesterday. We bring to this love a long evolution of our character; childhood development, family relationships, friendships, previous loves are all part of the amalgam that comprises the “me” of who we are. Unconscious fears, self-doubts, ingrained attitudes, expectations are all part of this person whom we have become. Relationships with significant others, good or bad, either prepare us to love or not. And what if our earlier experience of love has been unfortunate, or even tragic? How will that affect our capacity to love again?
“Dancing in the Dark” is a psychological novel revealing the inner conflicts of its protagonists. Death and divorce appear to be causative in the difficulties each character experiences throughout the pages of the novel. Unless our lives have been consistently sunny and free of strife, we are likely to enter an intense love affair with a degree of ambivalence and anxiety. We must effectively break free of these emotions or lose the full capacity to love. It is the central drama of love, and of the individuals who dance through “Dancing in the Dark”. The author finds both pathos and humor in the struggles of his creations. Every effort has been made to render them as real people, who demonstrate courage and cowardice, who inspire and infuriate, and, above all, who never bore.
On a clear, sparkling Sunday early in the month of June, a small group of bright and sophisticated young women were seated in a circle on the high roof garden of a doorman building in Manhattan. It was Jennifer Slater’s building, and it was Jennifer’s engagement party for Meg and Dan. As Jennifer’s capacity for preparing food was limited to boiling water, the party was catered. The festivities began at two in the afternoon. By four, most, if not quite all of the invited guests had arrived. About fifty guests sat or stood in small clusters scattered along the length and breath of an extensive roof. The area was fitted with groups of wooden chairs, which surrounded large coffee tables. Each cluster of people, chairs, and tables were separated from one another by a space of approximately thirty feet, far enough in the open air to provide a modicum of privacy to each group. It was the perfect setting for a party, with spectacular views of Central Park and the line of stately buildings that graced Upper Fifth Avenue on the East Side.
The circle of friends consisted of Jennifer and Meg, Hillary and Daryl, and Annie Giraud. With the exception of Annie, introduced to the others by Meg a year earlier and still on the periphery of the circle, the friends had known one another since college, or even earlier. They were familiar with each other’s tics and idiosyncrasies; in short, it was a quite comfortable group of intimates. It was perfectly natural and even expectable that at some point during the party they would congregate and lose themselves in a discussion that, as often as not, would involve men. For the last few minutes the topic of conversation that engrossed the five young women was: why are men afraid of commitment? Annie, the youngest member, happily in her midtwenties, sought information from the one member of the group who wore the mantle of “expert.”
“How did you do it, Meg? How did you convince Dan to commit?”
“It’s a long story,” Meg said in a voice suggestive more of levity than seriousness. “Dan did put up the usual guy resistance. You all know the dreary story—all the crap about needing ‘space.’ Then the answer came to me in a flash—you know, one of those eureka moments. Why not out-phobe the commitment phobe? So I began to ask for more space than he wanted. You see, girls, guys love a challenge. They go for the kind of girl who’s hard to get. The harder she is to get, the more they prize her. After a while I had the poor man in a complete daze. So that’s how I bedazzled him.” Meg deliberately mispronounced the word bedazzled to rhyme with daze.
“But that’s so unromantic. That’s gamesmanship,” Hillary protested. Hillary was the idealist of the group.
“Romance is an illusion,” Jennifer retorted. “It all comes down to power.” Jennifer was the group cynic.
“You’re a cynic,” Hillary said.
“I’m a realist. It’s all about who has the upper hand.”
Annie requested an explanation.
“It’s simple; someone is going to be needier. That’s the person who doesn’t have the power.”
“So why don’t we just withhold sex? That way the guy’s got to be the needier one,” Daryl suggested.
“You withhold sex?” Jennifer said. It was a strictly rhetorical question.
“You know, we never have gotten around to answering the original question,” said Annie. “Which is why men fear commitment.”
Jacques Giraud, long-legged and lanky, stumbled into Harry’s office and marched toward his chair (not the couch) like a man on a mission. Harry was fond of Jacques. In particular he was impressed with the young man’s intensity and how seriously he took the work they were doing together. He was pleased by the obvious influence he had with Jacques, how the young man struggled to absorb the lessons of therapy, which, although not always successful, revealed strong motivation. He liked Jacques’s character; he was not only intense, he was also deeply honest and good at heart. In a world of narcissistic men and women, self-involved and self-aggrandizing—the world that Harry’s profession compelled him to navigate—here was a different sort of human being.
Jacques sat upright in a leather chair opposite Harry. He was so tall his knees were virtually at the level of Harry’s eyes, perhaps partly accounted for by the fact that Harry rarely sat up straight. Jacques arrived with good news. He had just received notice of his promotion to associate professor and his tenure at Rutgers University. Harry offered his warm congratulations.
“You’ve worked hard for this, and you truly deserve it. Even though I know you had your worries, I never actually doubted that they would give you tenure. They were not going to let someone with your ability go.”
“I’m happy about it, of course, but you know, it’s not where I really want to be.”
Harry knew that Jacques had spent his undergraduate years at Harvard and his graduate years at Princeton, and he was motivated to reach higher. “I know that, Jacques, but it’s a significant achievement and a good omen for your future.”
“Well, it’s an achievement. I’ll call it a ‘significant achievement’ when I get to the kind of university I want to be at.”
Minimizing his success was an old, bad habit of Jacques’s, as Harry well knew. “Raining on your parade again? Only a week ago you were fearful of being passed over and having to leave without another position in hand.”
“That’s true. I am very relieved.”
“And Jacques, it’s not Podunk Community College; it’s a state university, and it’s your first tenured promotion. So how is it not significant? Congratulations, man, well done!”
Jacques smiled. “May I change the subject?” he asked.
“No, you may not. I want you to stay with the feeling, ‘Associate professor, tenure, yes!’ At least I’m going to celebrate it.”
“Okay, Harry, let’s open the champagne.”
“Small triumphs are important,” he told Jacques.
“Duly noted, and I do feel happy. But I’ve been thinking.”
How many times had Harry heard Jacques begin a sentence with those words? Harry wished the man would think less and feel more.
“About my relationships with women.”
“Yes?” Harry leaned back in his chair, the fingers of his hands laced together, as if preparing for a long slog.
“I’ve never been close to anyone, not once, not with my stepmothers or any of my girlfriends.”
“You never felt close to Barbara?”
“I suppose over two years there were times … but there was a hell of a lot more propinquity than intimacy. You pointed out how much she resembled my second stepmother, giving me the feeling that I wasn’t her priority, that work, friends, and whatever came before me. Why didn’t I see that? I wasted so much time. “
Harry listened and tried to read between the lines. What was the underlying message?
“Should I have been more direct with you?”
“Why are you always blaming yourself, Harry?”
Actually, he wasn’t. It was a question he could have directed to Jacques.
“No, it wasn’t your job to tell me how to live my life. I just kept right on ignoring what I was feeling, missing the handwriting on the wall, chasing a foolish fantasy that she would eventually come around. My head was up my ass and my brains followed.”
Dr. Harry Salinger, a psychotherapist, looked out the window of his ground floor office as he awaited the arrival of his next patient. The street was empty except for a middle-aged woman walking a small poodle across the way. It was unusual to find things so quiet on a Manhattan street in the middle of a warm sunny afternoon. It was also unusual for Jennifer Slater to be late. As a rule he could rely on her promptness. His thoughts turned to her; he admitted to himself that he looked forward to seeing her and hoped that she would not be too late. Looking nervously at his watch, he realized that her forty-five minutes of therapy were now reduced to just over forty.
He recognized his feelings toward her. For one she was very pretty, and he was too experienced an analyst to believe that it didn’t matter. He pictured her as though he couldn’t wait to see her before him. She would be dressed in tight designer jeans or slacks that accentuated the contours of her long, slender body and ample, well-toned buttocks. He never missed a quick glance at those. They stood out, demanding attention, making a statement.
His fascination left him feeling slightly disreputable, a feeling that he was never quite able to shake. In one of his more self-effacing moments, he’d speculated (to himself, of course) that he had the makings of a first-rate lecher. He reminded himself that sexual feelings were only human, a part of life, even or therapists. He needed to cut himself some slack; a feeling was only a feeling after all. There was nothing wrong with it.
When she arrived, she would be wearing her extraordinarily thick jet-black hair pulled back from her forehead, neatly tied behind by a ribbon and then cascading broadly across the small of her back. Would he call her beautiful? He thought about that. She was certainly unusual looking. He loved her eyes, a shade of gray, or were they actually blue? He wondered why he was having these thoughts now. When he first encountered her some eight years ago, she was just as pretty, but he never gave her appearance a second thought. Of course his wife had been alive then, and perhaps that made all the difference. Were these erotic thoughts simply a matter of horniness, or loneliness, or some other as yet unknown need?
Nevertheless, other pretty women were coming to him who did not engender the same feeling. So clearly there was something else. It’s our relationship, he thought. Over time they had become comfortable with each other, and—especially on her part—quite free. She said whatever came to mind, that little censor that came between the thought and the verbalization of the thought having apparently long since perished. Jennifer had a way of teasing him in a subtle, occasionally not-so-subtle, manner, with just a hint, a suggestion, of possibility. After the death of his wife, Harry had been sexually inactive for years, and it pleased and flattered him that she might entertain, even in her imagination, such a possibility. He was not tempted, but he was titillated. He seemed to need it, although he knew, from a strictly professional standpoint, that it wasn’t a good thing to need anything from a patient except timely payments.
At other times their sessions were like verbal duels. Jennifer could be difficult and combative. At her worst she could be absolutely oppositional, disagreeing with everything he proposed. From session to session his feelings toward her underwent a change. They might be angry or avuncular or sexual. Of course he would never act on the latter. It was also true that he was never bored with her or indifferent.
I never had an ambition to be a writer. I had no experience with it, never studied it, or even thought about it. For three decades I practiced psychotherapy, was deeply absorbed with this practice, and felt a keen sense of satisfaction. Then a colleague and close friend showed me the writing he was engaged in (all fiction), requesting my comments and possible corrections. He was impressed by the help I was able to render him, and suggested that I too try my hand at writing. My unforgettable reply was: “I don’t have anything to write about.” I was so wrong. We all have something to write about, unless we are completely dead to our inner selves, or to our emotions, or have lost all ability to remember anything. Dancing in the Dark, my debut novel, sprang from the experiences, memories, and comprehensions of thirty years of work with people who came to me for help. A lifetime of living also proved useful. Yet it was not autobiographical except in the sense that everything is, that every word emanated from my brain.
I am a relationship therapist having much experience with groups and couples. Even my work with individuals often revolves around problems with relationships. Hence Dancing in the Dark is a novel about relationships. My effort has been to clarify the fault lines that I have observed, that interfere with, disturb, and sometimes derange the love that couples have for one another. However this is not a textbook, or a self-help work; it’s above all a story of individuals and their interrelated lives. I believe that a writer of fiction must be a story-teller above all else; the characters must be real and consistent; the reader must want to know them, understand them, and care about their destinies.
So following my friend’s advice I took up pen (figuratively) and began to write. The experience was frustrating, disillusioning, and utterly illuminating. It was the beginning of a relationship I had with myself. In time I became familiar with two hitherto unrecognized sides of myself. It was a meeting, or rather a clash, which I believe many writers experience. On the once side there was grandiosity; the belief that somehow, without even a jot of experience, I could forge a first rate novel that could capture the imagination of literary agents, editors, publishers, and the reading public. On the other side were the demons, those pesky little naysaying devils that insisted it couldn’t be done. I should stop, they said. How dare you even think yourself capable of such an endeavor? What experience do you have, what knowledge, what skills? Why you didn’t even major in English Lit in college, and have never taken even one single, solitary creative writing course! Stick to what you know, the profession you have chosen to devote yourself to. These were the combatants, and they waged war for many years. Ultimately both sides lost. I must admit though, that initially my mental demons were much closer to reality. I made a good effort; I actually completed a novel about a man who travels through time to find, and fall in love with, none other than Jane Austen. In my less than humble opinion it was quite a feat of imagination, but it was also sophomoric, as you might expect from someone so inexperienced and so naive. Looking back at it now I realize that its structure eliminated the potential for mystery and suspense, qualities that were essential in a story of this kind. Some day I’ll go back to it.
It took a while for me to perceive that writing fiction was a craft, and like any highly skilled craft, it had to be learned. I cut my teeth on Dancing in the Dark, which was begun seven years ago. I wrote it in a year and no one wanted it. Fellow writers tore it to shreds, and my demons rejoiced. Oh how happy they were! “We told you so,” they said. On my behalf I would like to say that I was not defeated. Here is a lesson that I have for all wannabe writers: persist. Over the years Dancing in the Dark evolved. Chapter one was rewritten seven or eight times. Who’s counting? Months before it finally went to print I was still making changes. Throughout the process new thoughts and ideas came to me. There were Eureka moments when I found a way to fit things together, to make elements of the story more plausible, or more consistent, or more suspenseful. My technique improved. I learned to set scenes, to describe locations, to place the reader in a specific time and place. Most important of all, I learned to linger with a scene, to exploit it for all its potential, its inherent possibilities rather than rush ahead as if a deadline to finish was importuning me to complete my work. A protagonist is about to have sex with a woman he has longed for. He has finally summoned the courage to take what is clearly available to him. What is he feeling? He has hesitated for what seemed like an eternity. Why is he hesitating now? As a fiction writer I realized it was important to spend time with this man, to detail his interior monologue, to prolong the suspense of the moment, and to open a part of his soul for the reader to discern. For me a sex scene is about character. Its purpose is not prurient, but rather to open a window, to throw a revealing light on the psychology of the engaged individuals. There were times when I would wake up with a new idea. Was I dreaming of the novel in my sleep? In fact I lived in the novel, lived with my characters, developed real feelings for them. I felt a sadness when I finished, having to say goodbye to them, just like Dr. Harry Salinger felt when he imagined having to say goodbye to his patient, Jennifer Slater, a woman he was half in love with.
My demons also persisted, although their authority was much diminished over time. They showed up each day when I sat down to write. Their appearance was manifested by that twinge of anxiety, which, if it could speak, would have said: “this time you will fail”; “this time it will all fall apart, you impostor.” From this experience, from having to perpetually struggle with those dark, stubborn voices, I can now fully comprehend the meaning of writer’s block. As a therapist there’s a great advantage to having experienced and endured the same problems that patients are encountering. It is the various fears of failure, of learning that one is not so good after all, or even the unfamiliarity of success that thwarts the writer in her efforts to progress; it may also be the ghosts of childhood, the childhood models that have been identified with, their voices, their memories that may interfere and, at its worse, bring the entire enterprise to an abrupt halt. I have worked with writers who have not written a word in years. I can still hear the words of one: “I’d rather believe that I’m a brilliant but tragically flawed playwright, than discover that I’m not very talented at all.” So she stopped writing. We’ll never know just how much she could have accomplished-or not.
In a way I grew with the novel. As I learned to appreciate the immense undertaking of writing a novel, of how much I needed to learn about writing, as my initial grandiosity was swept away by the blows of invincible reality, Dancing in the Dark became more nuanced, more complex. I developed a stronger conviction of my strengths and weaknesses, how to play to the former, and improve on the latter. I am a romantic person, so I wrote a romantic novel. I believe in the necessity of love, that happiness is about loving and being loved, that without it we can never be whole, so Dancing in the Dark is quintessentially about the search for love, the difficulties that must be confronted along that road, and how often we get in our own way. I love irony, so I wrote a novel that is replete with ironic humor. I frequently laughed at my own creations! One character, Izzy, was created almost entirely to add a humorous note, to tone down, just a bit, the novel’s overall seriousness.
So if you’re writing, whether it is fiction or non-fiction, I have one major piece of advice to give you. Look for other eyes that will provide you with a perspective that all writers need. Then listen to them. Unless you’re the second coming of Will Shakespeare, there is always room for improvement. Jane Austen once referred to her novels as her “children”. In fact we are all narcissistically connected to our literary creations, which may cause us to feel hurt when the critics descend. Put those feelings aside and examine the advice you receive. I had some awful experiences in writers workshops, but in the end profited greatly from them. I even hired a writer to deconstruct my work. She took no prisoners, but I’m grateful to her for that.
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