Free Essays After Eighty by Donald Hall Page A

that whenever I smoked coronas at her cocktail parties she sent her drapes to the cleaners. Of course I didn’t inhale—I didn’t know how—but when I blew out a lungful of cigar smoke, I choked on the murk around me. Everybody did. I even smoked cigars during psychotherapy. Dr. Frolich was a psychoanalyst, the only one in Ann Arbor who did therapy. (There were seven analysts in the city, seven more than in Vienna.) Therapy instead of analysis kept the two of us face-to-face—I didn’t lie on a couch—and we met only three times a week, for only four years. While I sat with a smoldering Judges Cave, Dr. Frolich smoked Camels, sometimes lighting a new one from the butt of the old. He had smoked from early adulthood through four years of medical school, while a medic in World War II, during an internship, two years of psychiatric residency, analytic training for five years at an institute, and decades of practice. He was seventy and told me that he finished three cartons a week. During a session late in our progress I noticed that he was not smoking, and remembered that he had not smoked for days. I asked him why, and he told me that his elder son had asked him to stop. Dr. Frolich answered that it would not help him after all these years. When his son replied that he was thinking of secondary smoke and himself, Dr. Frolich stopped smoking. He told me it was easy. He lived to be ninety-two.
    Like all smokers I quit from time to time. Once in my sixties I stopped for good, as it seemed. Someone told me about a hypnotist in Concord who cured smokers. I’ve always been easy to hypnotize; if you have an overdeveloped ego, you are not scared of surrender. The moment I met the doctor, I knew he was a fraud. With a starched white coat, he was as handsome and suave as the model who recommended Old Golds for your health. (I expected him to offer me shares in his Bernie Madoff investment firm, annual dividends guaranteed at ninety percent.) But what the hell? I decided to go ahead and try. In a small room he spoke to me soothingly, his tone impersonating a hypnotist’s. When I felt sleepy he turned on a tape of his own voice and left the room. When the recording finished, I knew I would never smoke again. I left his office feeling ecstatic. Illicitly, I threw a pack in the gutter. For seven weeks I continued to feel blissful without nicotine. Then one night at suppertime, before I would fly to Arkansas in the morning, the phone rang. My dearest friend from school and college, best man at my first wedding, had dropped dead at the age of fifty. Driving to Logan Airport on my way to the reading, I stopped at the first open shop and bought cigarettes. A week later I returned to the hypnotist and told him I had failed. He put me under again, but nothing happened. He told me, “If this doesn’t work, we’ll try psychoanalysis.”
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    I was forty before I smoked a cigarette, about the time the surgeon general issued his fuddy-duddy warning. I was a college teacher, separated from my wife, and had entered a fringe of the counterculture that took over the sixties. My students’ greatest sport was to turn a professor on. Never did I need to buy a joint, and unlike Bill Clinton I accepted instruction in inhaling, learning to enjoy the pain. Alas, I had another, deeper reason for seeking humiliation and harm. I endured a volcanic love affair with a beautiful young woman who was not psychotic but whose utterance sounded like surrealism. She had other attractions, of which she was aware, but she felt devastated by one unforgivable flaw: she could not stop smoking Kents. In our assignations the foggy air trembled with erotic joy. She adored our sex but abhorred her own fog. Then, viciously, she dumped me. I went crazy, I daydreamed suicide, I took up Kents for revenge. I have not seen her for decades, and at eighty-some I am still proclaiming, “
Look what you did!
”
    If my tender father