Trouble (4 page)

“Do you sleep later than Kent as a rule?”

“Well, yes, but I stay up later, working! I like to work at night. He has this whole thing about getting up early, like it’s somehow morally better to get work done in the morning than at night.”

“Are you feeling defensive with me right now?” I asked her.

She looked surprised, started to answer, then thought for an instant and said, “Well, yes, a little.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“Are you asking if I sleep later than he does as a general rule because you think I really am lazy, and you’re judging me, just like he is?”

“Good for you for asking me that,” I said. This was something we were working on: Whenever I said something that made her feel judged, she had agreed that she would ask me directly what I meant and check my answer, which she felt could be trusted to reflect reality, against her own perceptions. “I promise I wasn’t judging you. As a matter of fact, I don’t think you’re lazy at all, I think you’re extremely hardworking and ambitious, impressively so.”

“Oh, thank you!” she said. “That is so nice to hear!”

It was always amazingly easy to reassure Sasha, who soaked up any word of approval or respect. I found it quite touching, really. Was Juliet at this moment in a British shrink’s office, almost weeping with gratitude to be told that she didn’t really smell of BO?

“I’m still curious to get to the root of what he means by teasing you for sleeping later than he does,” I said. “I wonder whether he’s feeling competitive with you in some way.”

“You think?” she said, as if I had suggested she might have been nominated for a Nobel. Her whole body seemed to vibrate with joy.

“I can’t know for sure, of course,” I said. “But I can be more objective, possibly. I see before me a confident young professional woman who’s got her life together. He might need reassurance from you on some level that you don’t look down on him. Maybe he’s not putting you down at all. He might be trying to right a balance in his own mind, trying to impress you, underneath.”

After Sasha departed, burbling, “Happy holidays! See you in two weeks,” I made a few comments in her folder, then reviewed my notes from Jacob Turner’s session from the previous week. As I did so, I remembered the smell of Peter’s apartment—it, like him, had smelled of toast and jam—and gently burped up some red wine-tasting gas. I was a little surprised to realize that I wasn’t feeling guilty; I was feeling more psychically awake than I had felt in a long time and almost dazed with the force of my own suddenly freed, untrammeled anger. I had worked so hard with so many clients for so many years to get them to acknowledge and feel their own anger, and meanwhile I had been containing mine with every muscle and tendon and neuron. Now it was loosened, sparking freely, high-voltage and dangerous. God, it felt good.

The buzzer rang, and with a sigh I pushed the button to let Jacob in. I rubbed my hand over my face. Jacob had made very little identifiable progress in three years. In fact, at times I feared he was regressing. He was a forty-three-year-old Santa’s elf of a man, with a manic, spritely, hectically charming manner that masked a stark and seemingly insurmountable terror of change. Jacob was one of those clients who caused me to question my therapeutic chops, although in the main I still believed we could get somewhere together, someday. His tactic was to keep any meaningful work at bay by erecting a shield of chatter the instant he arrived, which he kept impenetrably aloft for the entire session, every session. I had to force him to shut up and think about what he was saying by interrupting him, catching him off guard with an unexpected question or statement. Sometimes he was startled into a rare insight about himself, which led to a more substantive discussion between us, but this seemed to fade from his brain the instant he left my office and went back to the largely self-generated maelstrom of his emotional life.

Now, because I was going on vacation, he was frantic and babbling.

“And then, of course, I tried Macy’s, but my God, the throngs, it was like trying to see the shit through the flies.” He cackled.

“That must have been stressful,” I said. “How did you—”

“So I gave up and went home and ordered a couple of sweaters for Manny on-line and said screw everyone else and got in a hot bath and had myself a merry little hot toddy or two. It was more like four.”

“And how did you—”

“Dr. Dorvillier, I swear, one of these days I will join AA, but not now, not in the holiday season, please. Do you know I am the only person I know whose therapist goes away for the holidays?”

We went through this every year.

“How are you feeling about that today?” I asked.

“Not good! But not to worry, I’ll survive, thanks in part to my dear friends Jim Beam, Jack Daniel’s, and Johnnie Walker red and black, and Manny, when he bothers to come over. Damn it, I bet he’s going to break up with me before Christmas, the little cunt, and then he’ll get out of giving me a present
and
get hot make-up sex at New Year’s.”

“Do you feel pressure from me to quit drinking?”

“I feel pressure from the whole frickin’ universe! Like the universe cares what I do. Listen to me. But I absolutely do drink much, much, much too much. And I look like shit. Look at me. I’m a fucking crone. Vanity will make me quit eventually, if nothing else does. The liver regenerates, and I don’t need to live forever, but I do want to be beautiful.”

Jacob had been talking about wanting to quit drinking and join AA since he’d started therapy with me.

“Jacob,” I said, leaning forward and giving him my most therapeutically direct look, trying to make us both believe that anything I said would have any effect on him whatsoever, “I think it would be a very good idea for you to try to drink less while I’m gone. I think it exacerbates your mania and panic attacks, and I feel strongly that you’d feel much, much calmer about things like Manny and holiday shopping if you eased up a little on the booze. It screws with your body chemistry. It affects your sleep patterns, your moods, and your ability to think clearly.”

“I know,” he said with a catch in his voice. “Thank you for saying that.”

I held his gaze.

“Don’t go,” he said. He tried to make it sound like a joke, but his face crumpled a little. Jacob was a weeper; he wept openly, easily, like a kid. His face reminded me of a marionette’s; he had pronounced nasolabial lines, a long, thin, comical mouth, glittering, merry eyes, and a preserved, wooden, boyish innocence. He had grown up in a small and small-minded town in the Midwest, the oldest son of an evangelical preacher and his wife. He had been tormented with his terrible secret, feeling that his family would never love him or accept him, and, exactly as he had feared, his parents had cursed him and cut him off when he’d finally confessed, almost ten years before, that he was gay. He had been in constant, terrible emotional pain as long as he could remember, and I could not figure out how to get him to let me help him. I was feeling sweaty and impotent; my underarms prickled. I wished I hadn’t turned the thermostat up so high. I wished he would shut up for one whole session and let me tell him exactly what he needed to do, and then do it. “I’m going to be so lonely without you,” he told me.

“Why don’t you try a meeting while I’m gone, if you feel like it?” I said. “Report back to me when we meet in January. I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts about what it’s like. I think, if nothing else, it would give you a lot to think about. You’d hear a lot of stories that would resonate with you, and you would feel so much less alone.”

“You’re making me bawl, damn it,” he said, bawling. He took a Kleenex from the box at his elbow and dabbed at his eyes.

“Let’s make a deal, Jacob, that you’ll go to one meeting while I’m gone, and meanwhile, you’ll drink half as much as usual for a couple of nights. One meeting, fewer drinks. Do you think you can do that?”

After Jacob was gone, I let out a long breath. Of course he would not do a single thing I’d suggested. He would go to no meeting; he would have several nightcaps every night and fall asleep drunk and in tears and, more often than not, alone. He would let his unfaithful, selfish, sexy boyfriend treat him like shit, and he would buy him a lot of presents he couldn’t afford, and then he would drink even more to drown his sadness, his loneliness, his belief that he was worthless. The answer was right there: Quit drinking, join AA, dump Manny, and be alone until you find someone who respects and loves you. But he didn’t want it. He desperately did not want to change. He wanted to stay exactly as he was and have it all somehow magically made okay. A few times, I had suggested terminating therapy to stop wasting his money and time, but he had adamantly refused. He seemed to think merely showing up to these sessions ought to be enough: Why should he have to do anything beyond talk to me? The answer was that of course he didn’t. It was his life and his decision. I was an instrument he could use, or not, at his own discretion, nothing more. As a therapist, I knew this, but as a person, I worried about him and, at the same time, I wanted to shake him hard.

Two down, two to go: halfway there. I looked at Jacob’s file, holding my pen poised over the empty page dated December 21. What was there to say that I hadn’t said already? “Agreed to go to a meeting,” I wrote, feeling futile and disingenuous. I put his file away and took out Corinne Martin’s. I had a feeling she wouldn’t come; she had been “forgetting” sessions lately, but as I opened her file, the buzzer rang, and I let her in. “Wonder what she’s not telling me,” I had written after the previous week’s session. “Skipped the session, no call.”

I checked my teeth in the little mirror again, took a drink of water from the bottle in my desk, ate a breath mint, then got up and let her in.

She swept in, wearing some new perfume I had never smelled before. She took off her coat and fussed with folding it just so on the couch, then stripped off her scarf. “I’m sorry, Josephine,” she said. “Something came up last week, and I didn’t have my cell phone, and then afterward I just got so busy with everything. I’m really sorry! I know you’re going to charge me, and that’s okay. That’s the deal.”

I waited until she was sitting down and ready to start.

“What’s going on?” I asked her.

She could not meet my eyes. “God, you know, the usual.”

She was silent.

I waited. Normally, I did not purposefully create silence. I was active; I was involved and verbal and engaged. I was never the sort of shrink who presented a blank slate for everyone to project their nightmares and fears and paranoid fantasies onto, which had always seemed to me to be a perverse, inutile form of torture. But now, with Corinne, who happened to be a lapsed Catholic, I had the distinct feeling that I was serving as a stand-in for a priest, as some kind of confessor. I had the feeling she needed me to wait quietly and patiently until she was ready to tell me.

“I don’t know how to say this,” she said.

Corinne was a tall, dark-haired, beautiful but haggard, intellectually brilliant fifty-three-year-old surgeon with a Battery Park City three-bedroom condo, two kids, a lawyer husband who worked insane hours and did nothing to help around the house, virtually no sex life, a strong, healthy ego, an equally strong, healthy fear of intimacy, and various other interesting but fairly typical issues. I enjoyed working with her; she was highly motivated to fix her problems and get the hell out of my office, and we had been making tremendous progress, or so I had thought, until recently. She had sort of disappeared over the past few weeks, either not showing up or showing up and evasively presenting a kind of pseudostory, a narrative of problems that I suspected ran parallel to the real thing she wasn’t saying. I had been guessing she was keeping an urgent secret, something all-important that she could not say aloud to me and possibly, but not necessarily, even to herself.

“I have something I need to tell you,” she said finally.

I waited. Years ago, a client had complained about my goofy, earnest, annoying expression. I had immediately checked in the mirror after the session and discovered that where I had thought I was smiling neutrally, interestedly, with concern and openness, I was actually making exaggerated idiot faces. I had worked very hard since on my shrink face.

“I met someone,” said Corinne. “Met someone, hell, I work with the guy. He’s my colleague, and, yes, we’re fucking, and, yes, I know this is a bad idea, but Josephine, I can’t go back to what my life was like before. I cannot. I feel like I will die if I do. This literally feels like a life-and-death decision to me. I was dead before.”

She gazed in my direction, but she was looking through me, at the man she had fallen in love with. Her face looked naked, her pupils huge. For the first time in weeks, she was letting me see her.

“I am listening,” I said.

“I know you’re gonna tell me I’m making a horrible mistake, I’m betraying Andrew, I’m crashing and burning everything we’ve worked so hard for, what about my kids, whatever. I know it, believe me. It’s like this feels like a catastrophe waiting to happen, but are catastrophes really so bad? Maybe sometimes we need them. You think I’m rationalizing. This is why I couldn’t tell you. I feel like I can’t live without him.”

Our gazes met and held for a moment. Something vibrated in the air between us.

“I’m not judging you in any way,” I said. “I’m not thinking anything at all. I am here for you, for whatever you need. I promise you, Corinne, I have absolutely no agenda at all, none whatsoever.”

She took a deep breath. “Okay,” she said. Then she began to cry, hollow, racking sobs that shook her shoulders hard.

“He seems to be someone you feel very deeply about,” I said. Corinne’s marriage had always reminded me a lot of my own. I was frankly envious of what she was doing; I wished I could do something like that myself. In fact, I was burning to know what it felt like to be alive again, what it felt like to fuck someone you were madly in love with, what it felt like to be willing to throw away everything for that, because I had no idea. I couldn’t say all that, of course. But still, I felt it. “It must feel very strange to be saying all of this here to me,” I added, greedy for details, hoping she would tell me more, tell me all of it.