Too Much Rain, Chapter 136
I am finally able to post this on my own LJ. Lots of troubles with posting in the last few weeks. Sorry.
Chapter 136
A Therapist’s Office
March 2000
London
*****
“It’s been a long time,” Paul told Marc. “I don’t know where to start.”
“Did you have a good time away?” Marc asked, providing a possible topic. “You have quite an attractive tan.”
Paul smiled as he remembered his “time away.” Marc saw the smile and was inwardly glad for his patient. Obviously, he’d had a very good time.
“It was really special,” Paul finally said, meeting Marc’s eyes with a little uncertainty, his fingers unconsciously playing with his new ring.
“I’m quite envious of you,” Marc chuckled. “Getting away for two whole months would be impossible for me.”
Paul said, “It’s sort of impossible for me, too, because I enjoy working, but once I get there I find the craziness just shedding off me.”
“You look very relaxed, and that is important. So. Did you give our last sessions any thought while you were away? Or was that part of the ‘craziness’ you shed?” Marc’s eyes were dancing with gentle mischief.
“I wasn’t going to,” Paul said honestly, “because I felt as though I needed a break from it all. But near the end - the subject of my lack of trust came up.”
“Oh? How?”
“John brought it up.” Paul suddenly felt reluctant to go on, but he forced himself to proceed. “It was near the end of our stay. He asked me if I trusted him.”
Marc was intrigued by John’s gambit. “And what did you say?”
“I told him that in my mind I knew I could trust him. I mean, we’ve been through everything together and back again. But part of that ‘everything’ was pretty hurtful. He guessed right away that I was avoiding telling him the whole truth.” Paul leaned back in the sofa, finally getting comfortable in Marc’s presence again. “So I admitted to him that I struggle with trusting him on an irrational level.”
“You called it ‘irrational’?” Marc asked, surprised.
Paul thought about that and tried to remember. “No, I think I called it an ‘emotional’ level. But to me they often are the same thing.”
Marc made a note of this comment. It didn’t surprise him that Paul equated ‘irrational’ with emotions; it just surprised him because Paul had said it out loud. “What makes the lack of trust in John ‘irrational’ to you, Paul?” Marc asked.
“The stuff he did to hurt me - I mean, it was years ago. He’s actually been very steady and loyal to me for several years now - certainly since we found out that Linda was ill. So that’s almost 5 years now. Intellectually, I know at some point I have to stop waiting for the other shoe to drop. I guess I just can’t get over that expectation that he’ll go off sideways on me again.”
“You’ve never really shared with me what ‘stuff’ he has done to hurt you. It is difficult for me to help you sort through it if I don’t know what it is.” Marc’s face was serious, but gentle.
Paul made a face. He knew this moment would come - the moment he would have to expose the deep humiliation he had felt each time John had betrayed his friendship over the years. He’d already put his toe in the water when he brought the Stu thing up with John, but the water had been ice cold. He looked at Marc with a shrewd, assessing expression. Is now that moment? He wondered. It was a twenty-second break, but Paul made a huge step forward in that short time period. “I told John about the first time he betrayed me; it didn’t come out the way I intended it to.” Paul’s tone, expression and body language were the epitome of the term “desultory.”
“When was the first time he ‘betrayed’ you?” Marc asked, studying his pad intently.
“It sounds so stupid when I say it out loud,” Paul admitted sheepishly. “You know, when it is in my head, and I’m remembering it, it’s like I’m 16 again, and it feels really really bad. But when it comes out my mouth - well, later, when I think about what I said, I realized how childish it sounded.”
“Sixteen year-olds are technically still children,” Marc pointed out logically. “Your brain at 16 is not fully formed, and you are far more sensitive about issues such as being accepted or rejected. It isn’t surprising if you still hold those memories so close if you were hurt then.”
Paul had been listening very closely to Marc’s words. His chin was down, and he was staring up at Marc surreptitiously through his long eyelashes. “My mother had just died when I met John.” Paul said this seemingly out of nowhere - an unexpected and out of context switch of topic. It had been a strange zigzag, but a telling one for Marc.
“How old were you when your mother died?”
“I was 14 ½.”
“That is a very difficult age for a boy to lose his mother,” Marc opined. “And you met John shortly after that?”
“About eight months later.” Paul’s eyes were staring at his hands, which were in tight, white fists.
“Were you the kind of friends that felt as though you’d known each other forever when you met? Or was there a warming up, getting-to-know period?” Marc was, of course, curious, but he also needed to put the meeting-John comment in context with the being-hurt-by-John comment.
“Both,” Paul decided, after thinking about it for a moment. “Part of us knew each other instantly. But that other part of us, it was like we were each a mystery to the other.”
“Tell me more about this,” Marc urged quietly.
“Well, the music thing. That was instant rapport between us. But it was also competitive. I was asking myself if John was better at it than me, and he was asking himself whether I was better at it than him. We were very competitive about that. So, for a while there, we each kind of see-sawed back and forth on whether we even liked each other.”
“What other examples do you have?”
“At first, the first few months, maybe even the first year, our friendship was all about the music. We were in this band together, and we were teaching each other how to write songs, and how to play chords. We spent much of our free time together with our guitars.”
“Did you do anything else together?” Marc asked.
Again, Paul had to think for a while. “Not really. Not often. Sometimes we hung out in John’s little group of friends - John always had a bunch of guys he was leading about by the nose.” Paul chuckled at his own imagery.
“Were you one of them?” Marc asked.
“No!” Paul reacted strongly. He then softened his response. “John probably thought I was, but I wasn’t.”
“Why weren’t you one of the gang?”
“I’m not a joiner kind of person. I always like to have one or two friends I really like, but I also like my own company, and I enjoy my friends, generally, one at a time.” Paul shrugged as he said this. He wasn’t 100% happy with his answer. He added, “I also don’t like to be told what to do.”
Marc laughed. “Very few people do,” he responded.
Paul said, curiously, “You think so? I have a different opinion. I think most people do like being told what to do, once they have found a person or persons who they admire. At least teenagers are like that: they hang together in groups, and like to exclude others so they can feel important. I wasn’t interested in any of that. But John was.”
“So that was one way in which the two of you were not alike,” Marc said, making a note.
“Yes. I preferred his company when we were alone. He was always kind and warm to me when we were alone.” Paul got a dreamy look on his face.
“And how did that differ from when you were with other people?”
“He was often mean to me when other people were around. He would put me down, and pretend he was joking. But I knew he wasn’t joking, although I pretended like it didn’t bother me. He was still being mean to me in front of others as late as 5 years ago. He doesn’t do that anymore.”
“Why do you suppose he was mean to you when other people were around?”
“I guess,” Paul started, truly unsure about his answer, “I guess he was so competitive with me, that he had to make me look smaller in front of other people, so he could look bigger. It was always important for him to be seen to be the boss, the leader, the genius, the most talented one. With me he was willing to say he was 51% and I was 49% of our success. He could never accept that we were 50/50. And even the 51/49 thing bothered him. He resented that I was so very close to him in ability in his own estimation. He told me once, in the ‘60s, that he had given serious thought to kicking me out of his band after I first joined, because he feared that his friends in the band would like me better, or that others might think I was the stronger performer.”
“Were you aware that he had these feelings at the time?”
Paul sighed and propped his chin in his hand as he stared out the window. He finally said, still looking out the window, “I think I always had this little warning sound in my head - you know, like the sound a truck makes when it is backing up to warn people behind it - only it was very faint. But it was ever-present. I think I’ve spent most of my years with John constantly on my guard.”
“That would be hurtful,” Marc commented.
“But I got used to it. People think I have thick skin. And I guess it’s thick enough. I came to understand John - how insecure he was, and how he had that really messed up childhood. I had a great childhood, and so I felt as though I had to be the mature one.” Paul laughed. “Well, I was the mature one for a teenager. I was still very callow, of course, but compared to John - I was wisdom personified!” Paul managed a grin, and Marc chuckled. “Anyway, the summer after we met, John’s mother was killed in a car accident. He was devastated. I was the only one of his friends who had been through it - who had lost his mother. We became very close as friends, as opposed to band mates, that summer. We spent nearly the whole summer together.”
“That was the summer you were 16?” Marc asked, realizing he was getting close to the ‘betrayal’ in the timeline.
“Yes.” Paul had a flashback to the day of his 16th birthday - a party at his uncle’s house, and an inebriated John Lennon had shown up with bootleg beer and he and John had ended the night singing drunken songs to each other in his dad’s back yard...
“And this was around the time he first ‘betrayed’ you?”
Paul nodded silently. He was picking his words carefully. “He started art college that fall, and a few months in he met two people - his first wife, Cynthia, who was a year older than him, and another student named Stu, who was also a year older than him. They were both art students.”
“How old was John then?”
“He’d just turned 18.”
Marc could see it now. The sixteen year-old grammar school boy juxtaposed against the new college student, excited by the heady first months of being amongst other adults, and out from under the thumb of parental influences. He almost didn’t need Paul to tell him what happened. But it wasn’t for his benefit that Paul had to tell it; it was for Paul’s benefit, who needed to get it out and look at it in the clear light of day and through the eyes of a very successful adult who - in the end - had ‘won’ John Lennon hands down, no matter what the earlier competition. Marc smiled encouragingly at Paul, who accepted the silent prompt reluctantly.
“It was like I no longer existed,” Paul finally said, looking almost like an ashamed sixteen year-old.
“It was almost inevitable, given the circumstances,” Marc pointed out gently.
Paul nodded. “Yes, I know that now. But at the time - well - I have to go back again. After my mother died, I was at a total loose end. You know how it is - you’re going along, and you have a structure to your life. You know what you’ll do in the mornings, in the afternoons, in the evenings, at night. You know what you’ll do on school days and on the weekend and the holidays. You know when the meals will go on the table, and when the linens get washed. It’s a routine, but it is comforting. Or at least - while you’re in it you don’t know it is comforting. It’s just your life. And then one day, seemingly out of nowhere - although looking back I could see there were a number of warnings had I been old enough to interpret them - the rug is pulled out from under you. And all those routines are upended. Now there’s no one home when you get back from school. Now it’s you putting the dinner on, because your father has to work longer hours to make up for the loss of income. Now it’s your aunties coming over and doing the laundry and making the Sunday roast. And now your father, who had always been a light-hearted person, looks as though his chest has been crushed. I heard him crying in his room at night. It frightened me.” Paul stopped for a gulp of air. Where did this all come from?
Marc had been holding his breath. In his mind’s eye, he could see the young boy coming home to an empty house. It made his heart ache a little. But more than that, it was beginning to explain a number of things... “This loss of your comforting routine - this was a dark time for you,” Marc prompted.
“Very dark. Anyway, when months later I met John, and I joined his band, I felt as though I had created a new safe routine. I knew what I was doing in the morning - going off to school. I knew what I was doing in the afternoon - hanging out with John and playing guitars. This would go through to the evening. Then I’d have dinner with my father and brother, do my homework, play my guitar a bit, and then go to bed. Anyway, you see, my life had settled back into a comforting routine, and by the end of that second summer of our friendship, I relied on John’s company and his friendship to see me through the day.” By this time, Paul was twisting his new ring around and around his finger, although he didn’t realize it.
Marc said, “And then John entered college and everything changed again.”
Paul sighed with a kind of relief. “Yes. And I was filled with anxiety all the time. I had too much free time, and nothing to do with it.”
“Did you have anyone to talk to about it?” Marc asked.
“No. I didn’t want to upset my father, and my brother and I never had that kind of relationship.”
“What kind of relationship did you have with your brother?”
“I was the older one, and very bossy. But Mike is a McCartney too, and he didn’t like being told what to do any more than I did. We were and are very fond of each other - we love each other - and we shared a whole lot of fun and heartache together growing up. But we kind of communicated with each other by making fun of each other. Like, I was fat in my early teens, and he called me ‘Fatty’ along with some of the other kids. I wasn’t going to open myself up to ridicule. I mean, what would I say? ‘I’ve been dumped by my best friend?’ Mike would make a full dinner out of that.” Paul actually chuckled as he said this. “When you’re a teenager you take yourself so seriously,” he added.
“So you didn’t share these feelings of anxiety with anyone. How did you cope?” Marc asked.
“I did what I always do. I kept myself busy. I worked hard at school. I worked an afterschool job. I made the dinner for my dad and my brother, I did my homework, and I spent hours alone in my room with my guitar.”
“Did you not see John at all?”
“Not much. After his mother died, John lost interest in the band for several months. He still wanted to meet with me and play guitars and try to write songs, but now it was rare, and only when neither Cynthia nor Stu were available. Or else he’d insist that Cynthia or Stu come too. We did a few gigs that year, and Cynthia came, and I brought my girlfriend, and that was okay. But then John asked Stu to join the band.”
Marc could see that this was not going to end well. “How did you feel about that?”
“Well, John sold the idea to me. Stu had won prize money for a piece of art, and with that money John had talked him into buying a bass guitar. The way John sold it to me was that Stu could play the bass, since neither he nor I nor George Harrison wanted to, and it was all going to be so rosy golden.” Paul snickered. “I honestly didn’t want him in the band, but I figured if Stu was around, John would at least be more interested in the band again, and we’d spend more time together, even if it wasn’t like it was before - just the two of us.”
“You were jealous of John’s friendship with Stu?” Marc asked.
After a few pregnant seconds, Paul said, “Very.”
Marc wanted to ask if these young teenage relationships were sexual, but decided not to push in that direction just yet. Instead he recapped, “So this ‘betrayal’ you felt was John switching his main friendship interest to this Stu person.”
Paul grinned. “’Stu person.’ I like that. The sad thing is, the few times Stu and I were alone together, we realized we had a lot in common. He was as dedicated to art as I was to music. He practiced, and studied, and had a strong artistic vision. I treated music in the same way. But John would not let us be friends, and Stu and I ended up hating each other as a result.”
“He was too threatened by the idea of the two of you being friends, I suppose,” Marc summed up.
“He was so insecure. He’s gotten so much better.” Paul fell into a thoughtful silence. “It was a weird few years - the two years or so that Stu was in the band. Sometimes John was joined at the hip with Stu, and then other times he’d be closer to me - and it went on and on, back and forth. Neither Stu nor I ever knew where we stood. I think John liked to keep us off balance because it made him feel more in control.”
“John must have been a very attractive personality to maintain friendships with two such gifted young men while being so thoughtless and cruel at times to both of them.”
Paul’s face lit up. “John was amazing. He still is, but when I was young - he was a breath of fresh air. He was the best company. Anyway, he was the epitome of ‘cool’. It was like having your own superstar in the band.”
“So this would make it all the more difficult to find yourself left out of his company,” Marc commented softly.
Paul looked up. “You know, he told me something while we were away. He said that when I go off and lose myself in my head it feels to him like the sun going behind the clouds. Do you know that is how it always felt to me when I was on the outs with John? Like the sun was behind the clouds, and nothing would be sunny again.”
*****
Another Day
Another Therapist
“You don’t know how happy I am to see you!” John announced to Fiona, as he gave her a big hug. Fiona’s face was smashed up against John’s chest, and she found it a little difficult to breathe for a few seconds.
“You shouldn’t go away from therapy for two whole months then, John,” Fiona lectured when she was finally set free.
“Blah blah blah,” John said to her, flapping his fingers at her like a bird’s beak. Fiona had to laugh at that. John plopped down on the sofa and stretched out comfortably, making himself totally at home. “So. All kinds of exciting stuff to tell you.”
“Oh?” Fiona asked. “Like what?”
John thrust his left hand out and waved his fingers around. “Like this!”
Fiona scooted forward in her seat so she could see John’s hand better. A ring. It was a rather unusual and attractive ring, with the yin/yang symbol on top. “That’s very nice,” she said, confused.
John laughed at her face. He took it off, and handed the ring to her. “Read the inscription,” he directed.
Fiona did as she was told. She read out loud, “Always.” Her eyes beetled together a little and then suddenly she issued forth a strong “Ohhhh!”
John laughed at Fiona’s face.
“Did Paul give this to you?” Fiona asked, her happiness for John not at all hidden.
John said, “No, I gave one just like it to him, and he accepted it.”
“So what does it mean to you?” Fiona asked. “Friendship? Devotion? Marriage?”
“To me - all of those things. Not 100% sure Paul is all the way there. I think for him maybe friendship, devotion, and engagement?” John chuckled. “It doesn’t matter. He isn’t going anywhere, and he knows it.”
Fiona was staring at John as if he were a stranger. “Who is this well adjusted person, and what have you done with my patient?” Fiona teased.
John’s face grew more serious. He sat up and forward again, and reached down under the neckline of his t-shirt and pulled out a chain from underneath. On the end of the chain dangled two rings. “These are Paul’s wedding rings from when he was married to Linda. He gave them to me for safekeeping when he accepted my ring.”
Fiona was dumbfounded. Words failed her. She was finally able to say, “What a profound thing to do.”
John’s eyes met hers and they teared up a bit. “I never expected it. I was so afraid he would refuse the gesture, or tell me it was too soon. But his response was almost automatic. It was so fucking beautiful.”
“That’s a major step forward for both of you,” Fiona said seriously.
“Yeah - and can I have my ring back?” John joked. Fiona handed him the ring back, and watched John slip it on his left hand ring finger.
“What other ‘stuff’ happened? You said there were ‘lots,’” Fiona reminded him.
“I brought up two touchy subjects with him, and we managed to get through them without ruining our stay and without hurting each other.”
“What subjects?” Fiona asked. She was feeling very good about John’s mental health at the moment. He had come an enormous distance, even if it had taken years to get there.
“Well, you know how I complain all the time about how he goes off into Paul Land? I always feel so left out. Well, I told him I didn’t like it when he did that. And you know what he said?”
“No,” Fiona said automatically, eager to hear the answer.
“He said he was very sorry but that was part of who he is, and I might as well accept that he isn’t perfect.” John was looking at Fiona with an awestruck face. “Isn’t that fucking amazing?”
In truth, Fiona thought it was amazing, considering Paul’s allergy to speaking blunt truths.
“Except he said it nicer than I did,” John added.
Fiona thought, figures.
“But still - he didn’t say what I wanted to hear, he said the truth. And I didn’t have a tantrum afterwards! I accepted his view of it. I don’t think I’ll be as bothered by him doing that ever again.” John paused. “He also told me he was never sure if I wanted to hear what he really felt, or if I just wanted to hear what I wanted to hear. He said he was always worried I’d go into a tear if I heard something I didn’t want to hear.”
“How did you respond to that?” Fiona asked.
“It was a miracle,” John said, his face very pleased. “I said I saw his point, and I would try not to do that if he told me the truth.”
Fiona, on one level, was thinking how elementary these accomplishments were. Normal people automatically handled tricky transactions this way. But neither John nor Paul was a ‘normal person’, and the way they handled these reactions were therefore - on another level - truly miraculous. “Was it hard for you to admit that he was right about that?”
“It might have been,” John said, “but somehow it wasn’t.”
“What was the other subject?” Fiona asked.
“I asked him if he trusted me.” John looked up and his eyes met Fiona’s, and they exchanged a very serious look. Fiona looked very impressed.
“Just like that, you asked him?” She prompted.
“Yeah. And he got very uncomfortable. He didn’t want to talk. But then I kept telling him we had to talk about it, and he admitted that he has a hard time trusting me on an emotional level. Not on what he called an ‘intellectual’ level - on that level, he said he trusted me. I thought what he meant was his conscious mind trusts me, but his subconscious mind doesn’t. I thought that was a very deep statement.”
“Did you explore what he meant about the ‘emotional’ level?”
“Yeah - with him figuratively kicking and screaming the whole way.” John smiled his kooky smile. “But it was weird. It all came down to something that happened when we were teenagers.”
“Teenagers?” Fiona asked. She had not expected that.
“I know. You’d think a smart, practical, pragmatic guy like Paul wouldn’t hold on to slights from when he was a kid. I certainly had no idea he felt that strongly about it.”
“What was this ‘thing’ that happened?” Fiona asked.
“About a year and a half after we met, I was starting art college, and Paul was only 16. He was living in his dad’s house, and he was still in school. I met this other art student named Stu, and I became infatuated with him. I didn’t spare much time for Paul. I guess I thought Paul was so self-sufficient. He was a bit of a loner, and he was still very young. I figured he wouldn’t mind. Anyway, his father ordered him about, and he usually obeyed his father, which was a major drag. I was dying to be free of my aunt, and of being told what to do, and everything was so refreshing living in a flat and hanging out in clubs with all these other young adults. I still saw Paul to work on music, and for occasional band gigs, but it wasn’t like it had been before, when we’d spent hours and hours alone together. Anyway, apparently he was terribly wounded by that. And he accused me of lying to him about the nature of my relationship with Stu.”
“How so?”
“He thought I’d lied about having a sexual relationship with Stu.”
“Did you have one or not?” Fiona asked, a little confused.
“I was deeply infatuated with Stu. I used to sit on the sofa in our flat while he was painting and just watch him. He had the physicality of a small jungle cat, like an ocelot. He was tiny - he had tiny hands and feet. His voice was a disappointment, though. It was kind of tinny. But he had exquisite cheekbones, and deep-set blue eyes, and looked a lot like James Dean, who was all the rage at the time. I fancied him very much, and wanted him for a lover. But I was just coming to terms with it - you know - the urges I had for men as opposed to women. He seemed a lot ‘safer’ to me than Paul. He seemed like a bohemian to me, and we sometimes did kind of stare at each other too intensely. I think now if I had been courageous enough to make the first move that he would have agreed. But it was all so scary and I never made a direct approach. And this was more like a crush, you know. Once he was in the band, and he was such a bad musician, and he didn’t take it seriously, and then we were in Hamburg and he fell in love with this German woman, well, it all kind of petered out.”
“So you didn’t have a sexual relationship with Stu, but you wanted one.” Fiona summarized.
“I told Paul that. I thought it was better than what he was already thinking - that I did have sex with Stu. But he seemed even more upset when I told him the truth. He clammed up and didn’t want to talk about it anymore.”
“He was jealous that you might have had a sexual relationship with Stu 40 years ago?” Fiona thought this sounded very unlikely for some reason.
“I figured it out while he was talking. He wasn’t worried about the sex so much as the loss of my friendship, and the time we spent together writing music. He thought that the reason why I abandoned him for Stu was because I was having sex with Stu. I’m not sure he believed me when I said I don’t ever think about it, and I don’t regret how it played out, although of course I am sorry that Stu died.”
Fiona had read about Stu Sutcliffe when she had read about John. She had wondered herself if that relationship had been sexual. But apparently it was not. “So Paul says it was the fact that you abandoned your friendship with him that hurt him so badly?”
“Yes, and to be fair, I have done this to him many times. But all the other times - I either was lobbying for a preeminent position in the band, like with our manager Brian, or I was trying to fill the time when he was doing other stuff, or I was trying to make him jealous. He saw these as betrayals of our friendship, I believe, although he only spoke about Stu and Yoko.”
“It is positive that he is at least talking about it,” Fiona said.
“I think so too. I made him promise he will address the ‘trust’ issue in this therapy. I hope he will. But you know, it doesn’t feel as life-or-death as it once did. I know he loves me, I know he wants to be with me, and as he pointed out - he’s not perfect. He is who he is. And ever since I put that ring on his finger, I’ve felt a lot more secure about everything.”
“This is good, John, but I caution you not to become complaisant. There will be ups and downs, and there will be more challenges. Life is like that. Don’t build yourself up for a disappointment, expecting everything to go smoothly from now on.”
John was blinking at her. He finally said, “I’ve been coming here for how many years to deal with my insecurity and depression? I’m finally seeing the bright side, and now you want me to see the dark side?” His eyes twinkled.
“No, John,” Fiona said softly. “I want you to see both - the light and the dark - and be able to handle them both as need be.”
*****