The Moth (27 page)

Sebastian Junger
is the bestselling author of
War, The Perfect Storm, A Death in Belmont,
and
Fire
. As a contributing editor to
Vanity Fair
and contributor to ABC News, he has covered major news stories in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and many places around the globe. He won a National Magazine Award and an SAIS Novartis Prize for journalism. His reporting on Afghanistan in 2000 became the subject of the National Geographic documentary
Into the Forbidden Zone.
Junger’s time in the Korengal is the subject of the documentary feature film
Restrepo
, which Junger shot and directed with award-winning photographer Tim Hetherington.
Restrepo
won the 2010 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. After Hetherington’s death in Libya in 2011, Junger made a documentary about him called
Which Way Is the Front Line From Here?

ANDY CHRISTIE

S
o my therapist, Phyllis, is in her chair on the other side of the coffee table, and she’s got her shoes off in front of the Saul Steinberg lithograph. Her legs are tucked up underneath her in these kind of billowy, white summery pants, and she’s looking at me funny. And I’m on the couch looking back at her funny, because in the middle of the coffee table between a box of tissues and the African primitive carving is a bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon. She’s my therapist; she knows what I drink. And next to that is a bottle of Glenfiddich scotch. She’s my therapist; I have no idea what she drinks, but I assume this is for her. And she’s wearing a little more makeup than usual, you know, enough so that I can notice. And three days ago, the last time I saw her, her hair was brown, and now it’s red. She’s been messing with it for a while. First kind of light brown combed back and then dark brown with bangs, and every time she shows up with a new do she asks me how the change in her makes me feel, like maybe she’s doing it for me. So I spend about twenty dollars’ worth of therapy telling her how great she looks,
because just in case she is flirting I want her to know that I know.

So now she’s a redhead, and there are these bottles and glasses with ice there. And she wants to have a drink with me, right now, in the middle of a session, right here in her office, which is also her living room, which means there is also a bedroom here someplace. I am on the verge of a massive therapeutic breakthrough. After three years sitting here listening to her say “And how do you feel about that?” while I’m trying for one guilt-free second to forget my girlfriend back at home and imagine Phyllis getting up and tiptoeing across the room to squeeze in next to me and ask me, “And how do you feel about this?”—now with the whiskey bottles I feel like it’s my move, although I’m not much of a mover. I’m more the shaker type. That’s why I’m here. And I have a girlfriend, that’s also why I’m here. At the time I was a fifty-three-year-old man who after sixteen years was still calling his girlfriend his girlfriend.

One day my girlfriend and I were home when we had only been living together for about thirteen years. And we’re watching TV, and we’re talking about our future, when she stops and laughs and says, “Forget it. You’ll get married when hell freezes over.”

And I stop for a second and think, and say, “I never agreed to that.”

And she laughs again because, you know, it’s a funny line, and she has a great sense of humor. But after that the conversation kind of fades away and stops. Because it’s time to talk, which for me means it’s time to talk to a mental health professional, which is when I find Phyllis.

Phyllis is probably about fifty, like I am, because she remembers and forgets a lot of the same things that I do. But she
looks a lot younger, and she’s tiny and kind of pretty. So she’s cute enough to inspire my fantasies and old enough so I don’t have to feel like a midlife-crisis cliché. It’s the best of both worlds, really. But the attraction isn’t really a physical thing. I just think we make kind of a nice couple. Unlike every other therapist whose spirit I’ve broken, Phyllis always looks happy to see me, and also unlike those others, she has human reactions. She’s appalled when I say something appalling, like the time I was in the men’s room and a moth flew out of my pants, right out through the fly like it was an empty old purse. And when I say something funny, like the time the moth flew out of my pants, she laughs just like my girlfriend. And because we haven’t been living together for sixteen years, she always at least pretends to be listening, and you can’t expect that from anyone. So I’m kind of in love with her, which is okay because you’re supposed to fall in love with your therapist. And I swore to myself and to my girlfriend that I was gonna do this right this time.

So she started changing her hair, that was the first thing I noticed, and shortly after the hair thing I noticed that she started losing the little midriff belly bulge that she had that you could only see when she wore certain pants. It was like she was working out maybe. Then a little while after that I stopped bumping into her other patients as I was walking in and out of the office. I wasn’t avoiding eye contact with Mr. Handsome with a Chiclet-sized cell phone anymore, and that was okay with me. I didn’t think he belonged in therapy anyway. After a while it was just Phyllis and the Saul Steinberg lithograph and the African carvings and the shark’s teeth and the rain-forest white noise machine. And me. And her place was like my place, like our place, and now she wants to pour cocktails like we’re a couple and we just got home from work and have to unwind before dinner.

And she asks if I want a drink, and I say sure, you know, if you’re having one. And she says, “I know the whole drink thing is totally unprofessional, but I’ve been struggling with a way to bring this up.” And I know what’s coming. I know it’s gonna be big, and suddenly I am terrified.

It’s like when I took a few flying lessons. I was really into the whole idea of it—the green headphones and the logbook and the flight bag and the shrink-wrapped set of instruction manuals. But I always kind of hoped the lesson would be canceled because of bad weather. You know, give me a license, but keep that plane away from me. So now I am kind of nervous about how she’s going to crack open this whole thing that is going on between us.

So I sit back and let her start. She pours the drinks, she looks at me for a while, and she says, “I’ve been sick. I am in the middle of a course of chemotherapy right now. You must have noticed me losing weight.”

And I can’t say anything. I am frozen. I am shocked. I am scared, and I’m whatever a bigger word for sad is. And I’m ashamed about what I was expecting to happen, and I can’t help it, but I’m disappointed and that makes me ashamed again. And she says she’s not saying that we have to stop our work right now, she doesn’t want to. Maybe it’s selfish, but some work is good for her because it helps her forget and stay centered. But even though the treatment’s pretty successful now, things could change anytime without much warning, and I’m the one who has to decide what to do, to stay or go.

I look at her, trying to figure out what to say, still tongue-tied. She says it’s up to me, and she hands me a list of other therapists in case I decide that she can’t help me anymore.

I say, “When have you ever helped me before?” And she
laughs, and it’s great because she gets one of those human looks again. I can’t believe how much I would miss her if I left. And she looks happy about it when I say, “I’m not going anywhere.”

She looks at me again for a second and says, “You’re the only client I’m seeing right now.” And my heart explodes.

She says, “Well, you and one other person, on and off.”

I ask if it’s the handsome guy with the cell phone. She says that’s none of my business, but no. And then she looks at the clock, and she says, “We’ll have to stop now,” like it’s any other session. But I’m not ready to stop; I’m just beginning to think of things to say. I ask her if she has anybody to talk to. And she looks at me funny and says, “Like do you mean a therapist?” and I feel it’s the stupidest question in the world. She says, “I’m fine, you know I have plenty of friends and family.” And I get this quick flash of her real life.

When she gets up to show me to the door, for the first time I see how really thin she’s gotten. Her pants are hanging from thin hips in these loose folds so that her legs barely touch the material when she walks. When I get to the door I hug her. I’ve never done that before, but she doesn’t act surprised, and she doesn’t let go before I do. And it feels the way I imagine it would feel hugging a duckling—small fragile bones under a soft coat. But her hair doesn’t feel soft, it feels coarse and artificial, because it is. It’s a wig—they all were.

Then she kisses me on the cheek, and she says, “I’m sorry this has all been so weird.”

And I tell her, “I’d sit through anything for a kiss.” And I wonder if she kissed the other guy.

So we go on, every Monday and Thursday. Every once in a while her hair changes, but I stop telling her how nice it looks,
because I don’t want her to notice that I’m even looking at her at all, because she’ll think I’m looking for changes, because I am. And after a while I stop asking her how she feels because I just want her to feel like nothing has changed. So she sits there, being dissolved from the inside by chemicals, and I talk about how my girlfriend left the dishes for me to do again. Sometimes we quit early because she’s tired.

Then she leaves a message to cancel an appointment. And I call back, but I get her voicemail. I keep calling back for a couple of days, until I get a phone call from this man with a European accent, and he says his name is Morton. He’s Phyllis’s husband. I find out she is married, and without any kind of preamble, he says she died the night before.

And I knew it was coming, but it feels exactly like it felt when I was five and Dad said that he was leaving. And I tell him how unbelievably sorry I am for his loss and how much I’ll miss her, and he just grunts. I can tell that he is sick of hearing how much strangers are gonna miss his wife.

But I don’t feel like a stranger. I knew her, she knew me, every Monday and Thursday. And I’m sorry now that I stopped asking how she felt. I wonder if she thought I just didn’t care, or maybe she enjoyed the escape from reality twice a week the way I did. And I’m sorry I stopped telling her she looked nice. Morton tells me that she left a list of people that she wanted notified about the service, and I’m on it, and that’s why he called. The next day my girlfriend is ready to go to Riverside Memorial with me, but I tell her, “Go to work instead, I’m fine.” Because I just want to go and be alone with Phyllis one last time.

And I get there, and for about forty-five minutes—like the length of a therapy session—people get up one after another and talk about her. I finally find out little bits about her life now
that she’s gone. She married Morton three years ago, when she was fifty-two, right around the time I started seeing her. He was the love of her life. It was her first marriage. Almost every Friday they went to the theater together. Everybody who goes up there and talks about him calls him Morty, not Morton, because they’re all friends and family. He’s sitting in the first row sobbing through the whole thing, devastated. And there’s an empty seat next to him. And I think that if this were a theater and last week even, that’s where she’d be sitting.

Then this guy walks up to the front with a guitar, and he’s about thirty-five, nervous-looking. And he says he’s grateful for the opportunity to be here. That he’s not a friend or family, he just knew Phyllis as one of her patients, and he just saw her a few days ago. It’s the guy. It’s the other patient. And I wonder which one of us saw her last. He says he’s gonna play a song that he wrote himself, and I’m jealous. I play guitar, I write songs. And he kind of apologizes and says he’s not very good, and he starts. And he’s not very good. And I’m less jealous, and I’m kind of embarrassed for him. And a couple of lines into it I realize, along with everyone else, the song isn’t even about Phyllis, it’s about this guy’s wife, who’s apparently sitting in the back of the room because he’s kind of singing over everyone’s head. My song would have been about Phyllis. He keeps playing and singing as people are shuffling and whispering all around them,
What’s going on? What’s up with this guy?
But he keeps going, and gradually the whispering subsides, everyone gets quiet. And by the time the guy is done, everyone is either crying or smiling to themselves, and I’m jealous again. And he says he had to come to say thank you to Phyllis, that she was the reason he and his wife were here together.

I told my girlfriend to go to work, because I didn’t want my
real life and my imaginary life mixing up in the same room. I mean this kind of nervous, earnest guy saw her to work out his life, whatever problems he had. I saw her to escape from my life, skip out on it. I saw her for almost three years to work on a fantasy with someone that I loved because she was so real.

I squandered her.

The list of therapists that Phyllis gave me on the day she told me she was sick had six names on it. They were all men. And I thought back then, with my last shred of fantasy, maybe she couldn’t imagine me seeing another woman. But now I know that she knew, especially with her life getting realer and shorter—enough make-believe. And I want to tell her that I can see that, and we can work on that now.

But I can’t because it’s too late, because our time is up, and we have to stop now.

Andy Christie
is creative director of Slim Films, a NYC-based animation and illustration studio. His writing has appeared in
The New York Times
and in the Thomas Beller anthology
Lost and Found: Stories from New York.
His autobiographical stories have been heard on
The Moth Radio Hour
and WFUV’s
Cityscape
. He is also creator and host of a live storytelling series,
The Liar Show
(www.TheLiarShow.com).

MALCOLM GLADWELL

M
any years ago, I ruined a beautiful friendship, and it was over a song, which sounds like a strange thing to ruin a friendship over. And what makes it even stranger is that the song was sung with the utmost love and affection.