Tea

I cannot do anything without a cup of tea, it seems, certainly not writing.  And a quadriplegic with a half-paralyzed bladder needs a diuretic brew the way Boulder Dam needs a leak.  Tea may or may not be one of those British habits I got into and never abandoned.  Or it may be something a bit more complicated.

Certainly tea marked the progression of the 1970s British day.  First thing in the morning.  Then, 'elevenses' if you worked anywhere, and then, of course, around four o'clock.  All this required a level of bladder control that was way beyond my neuromuscular capabilities.  Elevenses would have pushed me over the edge, if I'd had an office job, which I didn't.  This was the custom, in those days remarkably pervasive, of the 11 a.m. tea break.  London office workers assured me that big companies had staff, a whole crew, devoted to the pushing of tea trolleys up and down corridors and aisles, handing out steaming cups and, doubtless, biscuits.

It is just as well that I escaped this.  I brewed a cup in the morning, one Typhoo bag, sugar cube and a splash of milk, and hoped for the best.  The hope was that I could do this early enough to be done with tea elimination before setting out to the morning psychoanalyst appointment.  My session usually begin just after 11 a.m., which was also when the pubs opened and men's toilets suddenly became available.  Otherwise, my options were limited.  One day, taken by surprise near the Holland Park tube station, I desperately pounded on the door of a not-yet-open pub.  The publican opened the door, listened to my plea and motioned me down the hall with barely a shrug.

In the mornings, the sense of pre-psychoanalyst fear was palpable, yet so pervasive that it followed me around like an extra limb.  Routine was good for this.  Up to make the tea.  Down the stairs to have a shower.  Back to get dressed.  A bowl of breakfast.  And out the door.  Activities of Daily Living, according to the occupational therapists who had taught me to do these things in the hospital.  However routine, all this took a nonroutine two hours, invariably.  The metal leg brace, a mass of straps and stainless steel, took forever.  Still, the regularity calmed me.  I had something to do, utterly involving and distracting, before I hit the road, then hit the couch and relieved myself of the day's emotions, the night's dreams.

At session's end, I was glad to be gone.  The day's work was over, or so it seemed.  The emotional cauldron had been stirred, the soul prodded, and by the time I got to my feet, at once relieved and churning, there was nothing on my mind but the stairway down.  Actually, this wasn't quite true.  My mind was very aware of my bladder, and I had been away from my bedsit long enough to need the toilet in my analyst's anteroom.  But something in me was too proud to linger another moment.  The session, with its keen reminders of how much of my life was out of control, left me wanting to feel mastery over something.  My body was a start.  Logic, a quick inventory of bladder contents with a gentle press to the abdomen, either or both would have sent me into the loo.  But most of the time, with barely a thought, something else sent me down the stairs.

There was a pub near the Marble Arch tube station.  The problem was that it was a good quarter of a mile away.  In those days, I could limp the distance in perhaps 15 or 20 minutes.  The time, coupled with the physical exertion, often filled my bladder to the danger point.  I sometimes swallowed my pride and popped into the pub.  Sometimes I didn't.  The whole bladder thing, perhaps the loss of bodily pride, perhaps the psychodynamic sense of smelly stuff coming out of me...something made this quadriplegic determined to power through the experience.  Which often sent me straight down the escalator toward the tube trains, down and down, the wooden steps rattling, moving rubber railing singing.  To the platform, or the stairway leading to it, where too often, I ran straight into urinary reality.  Pinging, filling, whatever it was, it was only a matter of time.

I looked urgently down the tube tunnel.  I tried to calculate.  The time and effort to go back up the stairs, wander through the underground warren to the bottom of the escalator, then through the ticket area and up another flight of stairs to the street, and around the corner to the pub...well, it was all unthinkable.  And there was this other unthinkable thing.  It was the thing that had to happen, it seemed, and could be reasonably accomplished, if one had the nerve or the finesse, and that was to wait until the train had come and gone, then wander into the white tiled corner and unzip one's pants.  An overcoat provided cover, or an illusion of cover, in the winter.  In reality, there was no concealing anything.  The rivulet of pee went rolling across the platform, darkening the hard floor, and in full view of anyone on the opposite platform.  Here class distinction operated with its usual force.  Middle-class Britons said, and pretended to see, nothing.  Working-class observers either cheered me on or lightly scolded.  It was not impossible to understand why some London tube rider occasionally threw himself on the tracks.

At other times, the opportunity wasn't there, or the overcoat wasn't there or the nerve wasn't there, and things took their urinary course.  My pants wet, a dark stain down a trouser leg, I boarded the tube.  At Holland Park station, I made my way up the stairs and waited for the lift.  The lift attendant, usually a West Indian man or woman, held out his hand.  I extracted a sodden piece of cardboard from my pocket and dropped it in his palm.  The accordion door closed.  The lift ascended.

For some reason, one morning I made it out the door too late to take the bus or tube.  I hailed a cab on Holland Park Avenue.  An expensive ride, a budget-busting mile and a half into Mayfair, but what the hell.  It was such a relief.  Traffic in the Bayswater Road was badly backed up.  Foreign dignitaries and their entourages had a way of making a grand show of things with a procession of diplomatic vehicles on Park Lane, and this was such a morning.  The driver asked if I minded going through Sussex Gardens.  Why not?  I didn't drive in London, and his guess was as good as mine.  

Bam.  A collision, and enough force to knock me off my seat and onto the cab floor.  I lay there on the hard rubber, stunned more by the implausibility than the fall.  Cabs simply didn't do this.  One could count on this fact, which was no longer a fact.  The door of the cab flew open.  You all right, mate?  Sure, I told him.  He helped me onto the pavement, asked me again if I was okay then ran off to talk to the driver.  A cab driver.  My cab had hit another cab.

Tell you the truth, mate, I didn't see the bloke.  The cabbie and I were under way again.  Within a couple of minutes, we had stopped at the familiar house in Montague Square.  Incredibly, I offered to pay him.  No, no.  I made my way inside.

The cab wreck had unnerved me more that I grasped until, now, in the emotionally heightened office with the high French doors, and the day streaming in from the balcony and my analyst sitting in her accustomed seat, the reality settled in.  It was only a fender bender, of course.  But anyone attuned to trauma only needs a shove to slip toward the dark and dire.

"Would you like a cup of tea?"  Mrs. Strauss looked very much like Virginia Woolf.  More precisely, she looked like a Leonard Woolf remake of Virginia, that is to say, a Jewish version.  Mrs. Strauss had a German Jewish accent, of course, making her superficially a sort of analyst cliché.  It was the resonance in her voice, and the calm, that suggested something more.  

Tea.  The question stunned me.  She was the analyst, I was the patient, and this wasn't tea time.  Yes, I said.  Mrs. Strauss walked to the door, her servant arriving moments later with a small pot and cup.  Mrs. Strauss smiled at me warmly, expansively.  Drink it, said her expression.  I did not quite know what to do.  I had had thousands of cups of tea by then.  But this one confounded me.  Mrs. Strauss had a smile that I now recognize as deep with weltschmertz.  Years later I learned that she had gotten out of Germany very late, in 1940.

I drank the tea.  No more was said of the cab wreck.  The topic was certainly open and more than ripe for discussion.  But we had had enough discussion by now, it seemed.  Things in life came at one with brutal suddenness, followed by a fearful awareness.

Mrs. Strauss wielded her cigarette holder, her constant prop, whether lit or not.  She smiled again, her eyes heavy lidded.  'Sometimes,' she said, 'we need a warm drink.'