Identity Thief (4 page)

“Bring her in.”

“It’s a
he
, remember?”

“Oh, right. Bring
him
in.” I turned to my female patient who had occupied the past hour of my time. “Same time next week, Mrs. Goldstein?”

“Yes, Dr. Falcon. Thank you. I’m really making progress.” She winked at me. It was such an obvious, arch wink that she might as well have put up a billboard announcing to the world that we were fucking. Fortunately, my receptionist was one of those modest, not very bright people who had the decency to realize she wasn’t very bright, so she never paid attention to anything that wasn’t part of her job description.

My next patient was the biggest schmuck I had ever met in my life. It was always the same song and dance about how nobody liked him because he was superior to other people. “My good looks intimidate people,” he would say. “And my intellect.” I’m not the best judge of male looks, but he seemed to me to be pretty much an average looking young man, and as for “intellect,” he read science fiction. Big deal.

Yet even had he been the most riveting conversationalist I had ever encountered, my mind would have been elsewhere. Mrs. Goldstein was becoming a major pain in the ass. My wife, Esther, said she would leave me if I cheated on her again—and what is more, that she would take me for every penny I was worth. Esther herself made good money as an interior designer. In the year since our hasty move cross-country, she’d already landed several upscale clients. But, she said, it was the principle of the thing. The principal of the capital interest was more like it.

What Esther didn’t realize, of course, was that when you make an adult feel like some teenager on probation, it isn’t long before he starts doing exactly what he isn’t supposed to do. She thought she was being
so patient and understanding
to give me another chance after I got in hot water for having an utterly consensual affair with one of my graduate students back at the university. The school wanted the whole thing kept quiet, naturally. No college wants to advertise: “Come to Acme U., where the professors have sex with students.” When they fired me, the cover story was that I wanted to “pursue other opportunities.” I thought about suing them since I had tenure, but the father of the grad student was a real blabbermouth, and it would have ruined my reputation forever if I made even the slightest wrong move.

Esther and I decided to make a fresh start cross-country. I’d set up a private practice as a psychologist, while Esther would build a design clientele. Fortunately, money was not an issue. We sold our home and income properties for a decent profit, and I also had a solid monthly allowance from my trust fund. It wasn’t enough to buy Esther the Hope Diamond, but if business was slow, we could still get by. And, as it happened, business had not been slow at all for either of us. I’d invested my inheritance from my father wisely and conservatively. There was a handy retirement to look forward to. Our one child, Sabrina, recently finished her MFA and was teaching sculpture at a rarified liberal arts college. Finally, she was off the family payroll. Esther may have seen herself as Mrs. Martyrdom, but even when we first dated, I was never faithful to her. She knew what she was getting into. I happened to love sex. Excuse me for breathing. As a psychologist, I knew as well as anybody that supposedly this was indicative of deeper issues, and some people even would’ve called me a sex addict. But I didn’t buy into all that addiction talk.
Everything
was called an addiction. For openers, if there were three hundred million people in the United States, then logically it would follow that there were three hundred million television addicts.

Really, the only problem was Esther. If she wanted to fool around with other men, I wouldn’t have minded at all. Occasionally, I wished for a different wife who was into couples swapping and that kind of thing, but that wasn’t for me, either. I liked casual sex, and I liked having mistresses. I didn’t want Esther involved in what I did with other women. In some cultures, that’s considered perfectly normal.

However, mine was not one of those cultures. After years of suffering in what she erroneously called “silence,” Esther made her ultimatum. We would start over in a different place, and I would keep my pants zipped up at all times. Literally, at all times. Esther, you see, didn’t exactly suffer from nymphomania. She could’ve worn a T-shirt that read: “I have a headache.” We hadn’t shared the same bed for years. She claimed it was because she couldn’t be vulnerable with me, knowing what I was really like. Vulnerable, schmulnerable, if you ask me. Sex is ecstatic. It’s
fun
. What did being vulnerable have to do with it? To me, vulnerable was when you got robbed at gunpoint or had a fatal illness.

I was a good boy for about two weeks. Soon, I started having lunch-hour quickies in hotels with girls who hung around hotels. I fooled around for a month or so with a divorced woman who lived in our neighborhood. One of my patients made a play for
me
, which I resisted for about five minutes before succumbing to my natural urges. Naturally, I did not neglect to say it was a normal phase of the process to be attracted to your therapist. She sensibly decided to terminate treatment, though in a mischievous moment I referred her to a lesbian therapist. (I later saw them holding hands at an outdoor table of a wine bar.) There also was another patient who ended her first session early because she said she felt attracted to me, which was flattering. And another who, after we got it on, threatened to blackmail me, which was not flattering at all. In the end, she said the whole thing was boring her, and she wanted to go live with some guy in Barcelona. She settled for a few thousand, and Esther was none the wiser.

Enter Mrs. Goldstein—or should I say Linda? We had similar marriages, and we also had similar sex drives. I did manage to interject some actual therapy, and anyway, her insurance paid for her visits, so what was the problem? Linda, of course. She started saying how it was hard to have sex with someone without developing deeper feelings, etc. And somehow I was supposed to do something about this. Like what? Divorce Esther and let her take me to the cleaners? And who said I wanted to marry Linda Goldstein? Certainly not I. In her delusional state, Linda believed that the only thing standing in our way were our marriages. That kind of monolithic thinking is never a good sign. The tepid affair was like a snowball rolling down a hill, getting bigger and bigger until no one could control it. Life as I knew it would be over.

“So, Dr. Falcon,” said my boring male patient. “What do you think?”

“About what?” I had no idea what he’d been talking about.

He laughed. “You headshrinkers are all the same. Always bringing it back to the patient. Oh, I’m wise to you, all right.”

I feigned a cough, for want of anything else to do. “As you were saying?”

“I think I was right to say that if she didn’t go out with me, it was her loss.”

“Yes, good for you.”

As we shook hands good-bye, he reached to give me a hug. I stopped him by patting his shoulder.

My next patient was like an X-ray of the patient before. All his morbid doubts and fears were right there on the surface, all gooey and quasi-suicidal. Everything was always
so
serious. “I honestly do believe in God,” he said, in something less than a convincing tone. Unless believing in God made people into zombies.

“Just the other day, some old lady at the pharmacy was screaming about how she was ninety years old, and she shouldn’t have to pay for her twenty different prescriptions and how she couldn’t open the bottles herself and how nobody cared. And I thought, ‘There has to be something more to life than this. There has to be a God.’” After an interminable pause, he added. “What do you think, Doctor Falcon?”

To be honest, I had no idea if there
was
more to life than either dying too young or dying too old. But when you’re a shrink, you’re supposed to act like you’re president of the Life Fan Club.

“What matters is what you think,” I offered pleasantly.

“I don’t know what to think.”

The way he said this, you’d have thought he was saying, “But the sun will be going out for good in a matter of minutes.” Maybe what made me a good shrink was this element of detachment. I honestly didn’t know why people believed that what they thought was so damn important.

“Well, you’ve posed the question to yourself. That means you’ll find an answer.”

“
I want my life to mean something, to make a difference
.”

“It will. Be patient.” I smiled warmly. “I’m afraid we’re out of time.”

Driving home, the traffic was impossible as always. It was well after six by the time I walked in the front door. Our house was spacious and got a lot of sun, and Esther had decorated it with her fanatical good taste. Everything was white or else a very pale color, as if every room was coated in talcum powder. But you couldn’t touch this and you couldn’t break that, so I never experienced relaxation when I came home.

Esther, who worked a good deal of the time at home, was there to greet me, if you could call it a greeting. “Hello, dear.” She smiled as if her teeth were ice cubes and condescendingly offered me her cheek to kiss.

I kissed it. “Hey, babe,” I said.

“I already ordered dinner,” she said. “Take-out Thai.”

“You and your coconut sauce.”

“Sweet and savory go well together.”

Esther was one of those people who thought every decision she made had to signal her superb taste and urbane demeanor. If she went to heaven when she died, she’d rearrange the clouds. There were times I wished I could analyze her to see if there was a human being beneath the millions of pronouncements she lived by. But there was no way into her. Even if she sat there humming while reading
Architectural Digest
, she seemed to be someplace else.

“Fine. Thai, whatever.” I hung up my coat and rummaged through the mail. There was a letter from the grad student I’d left behind, which I was sure Esther already noticed. Not in the mood for rehashing all that, I tore the unopened letter to pieces, which I tossed in the wastebasket like confetti. “Sorry to disappoint you, Esther,” I said.

She shrugged quizzically. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Okay, fine. I was too drained for an argument. Besides, I noticed that a letter from some unfamiliar lender company had arrived by certified mail.

“What’s this?” I asked Esther.

“Oh, I signed for it. I have no idea.”

Thinking that the certified element was a publicity gimmick—to make sure you would read the contents—I tore open the envelope and read the somber letter within:

Dear Dr. Falcon:

Your current balance of $20,000 plus $1,500 in late penalty fees is now past ninety days overdue. This means that payment is due in full.

You have made no effort to contact us, and we had to locate your new address ourselves. To avoid further action, please pay the amount due in full today. There is a $10 service charge for all payments made online or over the telephone.

“Esther, did you do this?” My day-to-day business matters were handled by my accountant, who happened to be my kid brother. I knew I could trust him. Every business quarter, he sent me a breakdown of my finances down to the penny.

Esther reached for her designer reading glasses and studied the letter. “Of course not. You know I don’t spend that kind of money without talking to you first.” That much was true. Maybe because it was her job to buy other people pretty things, Esther shopped for our own home only as needed. Once a room was done, it was done. And she wasn’t extravagant when it came to things like travel, clothes, food, or jewelry, either. She didn’t live like a pauper, but she was the same sensible girl I married straight out of prep school twenty-five years earlier. Having grown up around money—and a family who conservatively hoarded every penny—she found extravagance to be vulgar.

But you know? I couldn’t help noticing the unusual satisfaction she took in the letter—the way she scrunched her mouth to keep from smiling. I was a bad person in her eyes, so I deserved to have bad things happen to me. Hers was a classic passive-aggressive personality. She left it to the rest of the universe to condemn me for my wrongs against her. Over the years, I occasionally dreamt that she’d poisoned me, and then I’d wake up and see her at the breakfast table, drinking her coffee and staring into space.

The Thai food arrived. I didn’t feel like eating. I called the credit company instead.

“Hello, my name is Tiffany, may I have your account number please?”

“Good evening, Tiffany,” I said. “I’d be happy to.” I thought I would keep things as friendly as possible, to get them straightened out quickly. I always imagined people who worked at these kinds of jobs to be like nasty kids in a reform school, who would do all sorts of nonsense if they didn’t like you.

After I rattled off the incoherent account number on the letter, Tiffany read what was obviously a generic message on her computer screen. She read aloud in a choppy, phonetic style, over-pronouncing her words as if she had no idea what they meant. “Please be informed that your account is over ninety days past due. If you do not make a payment immediately, legal action may result. The total amount you owe is—”

“Yes, but you see, I don’t owe this money. It’s a mistake—”

Tiffany would not be deterred. “The amount you owe is twenty thousand dollars, plus one thousand five hundred dollars in late penalty fees, plus a fifty dollar service charge. How will you be making a payment this evening?”

“I won’t be making any payment because I never spent the money. I don’t even know who you people are. And I’ve never been late with a bill in my life.”

“Are you saying, sir, that you are not Dr. Jesse Falcon?” She read off my social security number, my former address, and my current address.

“Yes, but I sold that other property
before
you say my account was opened. I can prove it. Really, it wasn’t me.”

“One moment, please.” She put me on hold. Annoyingly, there was a recording of someone like Robert Goulet singing, “The Impossible Dream.”