by Tom Bierdz
Katherine led me through the living room over the worn, brown Oriental rug and past the tan sofa with matching throw pillows that once adorned their Washington home. I fondly remembered the annual parties the Philisteins would throw for the psych crowd. Missing was the full bar stocked with every variety of liquor imaginable, that was regularly replenished for the poor students that imbibed. We were a close group. “Look who’s come to see you.”
Professor Bud Philistein, a once energetic dynamo slowed down by rheumatoid arthritis, sat in a motorized wheelchair with a big grin on his face. He had dressed the part and wore his calling card while at the University, a velvet wine, tired-looking, smoking jacket with dark elbow patches. I pictured him at his old, scarred wooden desk covered with piles of paper he’d never get to. They became part of his decor, standing there like bookends or paperweights. Yet, his keen mind recalled every detail of his students, especially those for whom he supervised directly.
I clasped his gnarly hands in greeting, the knuckles swollen and extended with mine, and detected a wince from the unintended pressure of my enthusiasm. Instead of handing him a top-shelf bottle of scotch, I placed it on the corner of his desk.
He rotated the label toward him. “Thanks, but you didn’t have to do that.”
“I probably owe you a case with all the scotch I drank at your parties.”
Grinning, he said, “My pleasure. Sit.” Dr. Bud Philistein, a victim to crippling rheumatoid arthritis, was a shriveled up version of his former self, stooped over with curvature of the spine. His ugly, monster hands swelled with bulging knuckles and he had bumps on his elbows, knees, and balls of his feet. Still, his eyes beamed brightly and his ample white hair gleamed silver. “As you know I moved out here to get away from Washington’s dampness but it hasn’t helped much. I can still walk. I don’t need this wheelchair to get around, but it’s less painful this way. My doctors claim I’d be in even greater pain had I remained in Seattle. Maybe it was too big a trade-off. We miss our friends and the old way of life.”
“I bet you don’t miss the students calling you an aggressive, warmongering Philistine.”
“Expected when you have a name like mine. Those were the students who did poorly on the tests.” He stared impassively at me, his face unreadable, before crinkling the corners of his lips. “Actually, I do miss them a little.”
We schmoozed a bit about the psychiatry department and people we both knew before I refocused on his health.
“Meds are ungodly expensive. I’m convinced there is not a stitch of compassion with the pharmaceutical companies. We had to wait until Katherine got employed with insurance benefits before we could move here. She’s 63. How long can she work? I can afford a few more years of meds after that and then…” He shrugged his shoulders.
“Doesn’t Medicare kick in?”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t help much with drugs.”
“I’d give you samples if they gave me any for rheumatoid arthritis.”
“Enough about me. I don’t think you came way out here to see how I was doing.”
“Maybe if I had been a better person?”
“Get off it, Grant. You’re no different than anyone else. You think my other supervisees came to visit?”
“Ken Stabile?”
He laughed. “Ken was a lot like you. A good student. He sent me a Christmas card one year. I believe he went into teaching at Stanford.” He wheeled back and slid open a door to his credenza, fished around and came up with one glass. “Shit, only one glass! Yell for Katherine to bring us a glass.”
I did.
“You’re the only visitor who came to see a crotchety, old man,” he said, with a tone of resignation.
“I don’t know if I could have made it as a shrink without you.” I choked up. “And I don’t know if I can make it now.”
Katherine returned with two glasses. “We heard about Kevin. I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks.” I took the glasses, a tear snaking down my cheek.
Katherine disappeared.
“We’ll use these. Both are clean,” Bud said, pouring two-fingers of scotch and handing me one. “Don’t question yourself. Every shrink eventually has suicides.”
“But this was my son.”
“That doesn’t make you infallible. Maybe you were too close.”
“How do you mean?”
He squinted and peered at me as if he were looking directly into my psyche before he said, “Life is life. It’s free-form, with minimal structure as contrasted with the structure of therapy, where somebody comes in for help with an identified problem. Under the best conditions both the patient and therapist consciously focus on solving the problem. Life doesn’t work that way. Life is replete with demands and distractions. The members share some general goals but have their own priorities. You might have been able to help Kevin had he come to you…”
“But I should have seen the signs.”
“What were they?”
I stretched and interlocked my fingers behind my neck. “He sulked, spent hours alone in his room, was short-tempered, didn’t want to spend any time with Hanna and me.” Pausing, I looked at the professor for encouragement to continue. “His grades deteriorated. He was sassy, walked around with a long face.”
“He was how old?”
“Fifteen.”
“Sounds like a typical fifteen-year-old.”
I twisted in my chair. My frustration was growing. I was expecting some magical answer that I could get my head around.
“Did you have patients that were similarly depressed?”
“Of course.”
“Did any kill themselves?”
“No, but…”
“Then, how were you were you supposed to know Kevin would?”
He was reflecting back my thoughts. “I wish you could tell Hanna that.”
“She blames you?”
“She wants a divorce.”
He scoffed. “I can see where she is coming from. We, psychiatrists, have to share the blame for claiming our authority, shouting to the world that we are the answers to whatever ails you, discounting our humanness.”
I could see where I led Hanna to believe that I had all the answers. There were occasions she gave me credit for solving problems that fixed themselves and I did nothing to correct her. I basked in her and my patient’s admiration. “I don’t know if I can do this anymore.”
“Therapy?”
“Yeah.”
“What would you do instead?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought it through. I don’t know if I can handle the pain.”
“I promise you the pain gets better.” Compassion covered his face. “Your quitting would be a grievous loss. You have a gift, Grant. Your experience will make you an even better therapist than you were before.”
I wished I could be half as certain as he seemed to be. At the same time I was comforted knowing he had never failed me in the past. Moreover, he was always honest, and direct, and never equivocated. If he so strongly believed in me, I had to believe in myself.
The rest of the day was more cheerful. Katherine made a delicious pot roast with all the trimmings, and we spent the evening reminiscing about old times at the University. I stayed the night, flew back the following morning with a renewed enthusiasm for psychiatry. I was still hurting, but I was adapting to my losses. Maybe not completely satisfactorily, but still adapting. I knew that a healthy person’s mental status depended upon how well he or she adapted to his or her situation. And, for a brief, shining moment I was a hero and rescued Benny. I felt deliciously good about that. I flew back determined to help my patients succeed even if it required stretching the professional boundaries.
Fatal Analysis
An extract from the first full-length Grant Garrick novel
1
Monday morning. My head hurt. Once more I shut off the alarm for fear the reverberating ring would shatter my skull. I remember reading somewhere about ancient cultures using s
ound vibrations to build and destroy structures. So, maybe, it could really happen. I was still dragged out from the weekend. I didn’t recover like I used to when I was thirty. I wanted to turn over and go back to sleep but I was already late for work.
I was a psychiatrist and had a small, private practice that once was lucrative until patients started leaving me. Normally, I was at work by eight, but today my first patient was due at eleven. The alarm clock showed nine-thirty-eight. Time to drag myself out of bed, which I did grudgingly. I shaved and showered, telling myself I needed to stop my destructive behavior. Since my divorce from Hanna I felt I needed to prove my worth. I knew better. I was just avoiding and masking deeper issues. That’s what I told my patients. I should follow my own advice. My reckless drinking had left me without wheels. I swallowed a small handful of aspirin, dressed in my suit and tie, and delayed breakfast till later, and left for work.
I walked to my office, a half mile away in a commercial neighborhood at the edge of downtown Seattle. It was late spring with a brisk chill in the air that I welcomed as invigorating, helping me to revitalize. The sun had begun to break through the clouds. Cars passed but no one else was on the street of old-refurbished Victorian homes that had been turned into cozy, professional offices. White-collar workers had already begun their day. My practice was on the second floor of a Victorian, handsomely painted in mauve and mahogany, which I rented from attorney Mike McBride. I used to work for Mike as a pseudo private eye before I returned to med school and completed my psychiatry degree. On the block were three other attorney offices, a financial planning firm, a real estate title company, a rare coin shop recently opened to buy gold, and the Noble Company whose purpose remained a mystery. Carrie McBride, Mike’s attorney daughter who worked in her father’s firm and was there more often than he, jokingly said the Noble Company was a front for something nefarious, possibly drugs. But none of us had ever taken the time to find out what they did. Possibly because it was more fun to play conspiracy games, speculating. Yesterday, Bobby, my brother-in-law, suggested they were in the sex trafficking business because he saw a shapely, young girl with well-turned legs in a short leather skirt, enter the building and never come out. Bobby was my ex-wife’s younger brother, but I still called him my brother-in-law because ex brother-in-law didn’t sound right. The words just didn’t flow.
Bobby was twenty and was subbing as my receptionist while my anchor and regular receptionist, Grace, was on vacation in Europe, celebrating her twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Although she was a saver, the trip was mostly on her husband’s dime because I didn’t pay her what she was worth. If she didn’t have the need to mother me, she’d be long gone by now. I demanded very little from Bobby. Simply, that he welcome my patients, handle my phone calls, and perform some minimal secretarial duties like opening the mail, typing an occasional letter, and rescheduling patients when necessary. In turn, he played games and watched movies on the computer. Yesterday I allowed Bobby to bring in his Wii since I had anticipated a slow patient week. Bobby was studying to be a chef at the local community college. The only thing I knew about Bobby’s cooking was that he burned the hamburgers at a cookout at our house last year when I was still married to Hanna. I’ve decided not to judge his culinary skills on that one occurrence since he had had quite a few beers and, I suspected, had been high before he came to the party. I’ve long ago concluded that Bobby will be a success no matter what he does because he was so likeable. I think he got all his family’s likeable genes, but that’s another subject entirely.
Carrie McBride leaned over the railing on the porch smoking a cigarette. Her face lighted up when she saw me. Petite and pretty with olive skin and dark hair that fell to the middle of her back, she was dressed casually in a jacket and jeans, apparently not expected in court. “Off to a late start, I see,” she said. She tossed the remains of her cigarette on the grass, placed her hands on her hips. “I don’t know why you work so hard at getting laid. All you need to do is pick up the phone.”
“You’re assuming I’m late cause I’m hung over from partying,” I said, from the base of the stairs.
“Am I wrong?”
“No, you’re not.” Carrie was divorced, a few years younger than I. She had kept her maiden name. She never let me forget that we had a brief fling some fifteen years ago, before we were both married, after a Christmas party when I was working for her father. She got a kick out of teasing me. Would she jump in the sack with me as she suggests? Probably, but it would take a lot more than a phone call. But I was into conquests, not relationships and she was much too close to home. It was preferable we stuck to sexual banter which I was not up to this morning. “Talk to you later.”
“No come back? You are in a bad way.” Carrie said, watching me enter the building.
As I opened the door and peered into my waiting room a stunningly, attractive woman with long, flowing blonde hair was bent in a crouch swinging her arm as if she was bowling. Her skirt had crept half-way up her nicely toned thighs that drew my eyes before I quickly lifted them to gaze at her smiling face and then at Bobby’s. His was an angelic baby face that was a magnet for summoning the female gender as if he was every woman’s kid brother.
“Strike!” she shouted, raising her arms over her head and leaping. “I win!”
“Hi Grant,” Bobby said, “You have a new patient. Meet Megan Wilshire.”
I nodded and smiled, thinking maybe Bobby was too likeable for the receptionist job and that I shouldn’t have allowed him to bring in his Wii. I could envision him fencing with my suicidal patients, or playing some deadly game with knives or guns.
“I told her you’d be free an hour ago.”
I glanced at my watch. It was just past ten-fifteen. “Did I know, Bobby? Did you call me?”
“I assumed you’d be in by eight o’clock, your usual time.”
I rolled my eyes. Bobby made a lot of assumptions, including one that I wouldn’t discipline him for any wrongdoing. He had me pegged in that regard.
“We got carried away bowling,” Megan interjected, captivating me with her sapphire blue eyes. “If you’d come in earlier I’d never have gotten a turkey.”
Chalk one up for Bobby. “I’ll grab a cup of coffee and then you can come in Megan.”
“Oh, jeez,” Bobby said, slapping his forehead with his hand. “We drank it all. I meant to put on another pot,”
Silently counting to ten to contain myself, I forced a smile and invited Megan into my office, and softly mumbled. “Bobby, knock when the coffee’s ready.”
I required a couple of caffeine-laced coffees to start my engine. With a hangover and no coffee I would have to focus extra-hard to give Megan her money’s worth. I took a seat on a soft chair in the corner of my office, beside my desk. Only with extremely hostile patients did I sit behind my protective desk. I believed the informality afforded a more intimate therapeutic atmosphere, one less authoritarian.
Instead of sitting, Megan wandered about the office, shuffling over the gray Berber carpet, and checking out my wall-hung movie posters: Ordinary People, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Final Analysis, and Primal Fear. She brushed a few strands of hair from her face, formed her lips into a moue. “Interesting. Films with psychiatric problems. Apropos, but where is Psycho, or Three Faces of Eve, or Sybil?”
“Actually, I have them in storage, plus a few more.”
“Why not continue the theme in the waiting room?” She smoothed her ivory silk dress, reclined on the burgundy couch across from me, and crossed her shapely legs. A soft splash of light from the window on her left, fell across her lap and down the floor drawing attention to her legs.
Lifting my eyes, I said, “I don’t want to scare patients away. Here, I can respond to their feelings.”
“Why would they frighten anyone?”
“Well, if someone thought they were going crazy the poster might reinforce the feeling.” She was testing me. The reaction to the posters was obvious.
; She stared at me, giving me an intensive look-over as if she were buying an ensemble off a model. “I see why you needed the coffee. Those bags under your eyes make it hard for you to keep your head up.”
My mouth must have dropped because I didn’t expect her punch. I had a hostile patient but also a clever one. “Tough weekend, but we’re not here to talk about me. How about you tell me why you’re here.”
Ignoring me completely, she asked, “How much do you charge a session, Grant?”
Patients in the initial interview usually call me doctor. That Megan chose to call me by my first name could indicate her comfort level. But I didn’t think so. Her familiarity could also be used to downplay my expertise, which I speculated it was. “Two-hundred.”
She reached in her pocket, pulled out a roll of bills, peeled off two Ben Franklins and tossed them on the coffee-table between us.
“It’s customary to pay after the session. Didn’t Bobby ask for your insurance cards?”
“Money is no object. And, I don’t want to use my insurance.”
“Still,” I said, picking up the bills and offering them to her, “take this. You can give this to Bobby when we’re through here.”
A Mount Rushmore hardness crossed her face. “By paying you now, you have to give me the allotted time. That’s my insurance you won’t prematurely kick me out.”
My stomach did a flip-flop. What was I in for? Despite what she said, I could still toss her out if needed, give her the money back. Just then Bobby knocked with the coffee. Thank God for small favors.
