For Margot, it had been quite a display. Although she could be attracted to males or females, she had little luck with either; her shy flirtations tended to be muffled failures, which started, then ended, with puzzled indifference, embarrassment, and trailing irresolution. It was almost a relief for her to witness romantic shenanigans, just to know that they actually happened. At least that was how she had felt at first.
The rest of the day she had an intake phone shift. It was an uneventful few hours, except for a slightly unusual call from a young man who said he was phoning not because he had a problem but to ask for advice about a disturbed woman who was harassing him. She had been calling him and writing rambling, nonsensical letters, and finally he’d had it out with her on the phone. He was worried, he said, about what she might do next.
“Let me be sure I understand,” said Margot. “Does this woman want to make an appointment, or . . .?”
“She was the girlfriend of a friend of mine, and then they broke up and I started fucking her a little bit.” He appeared not to have heard her question. “And then I realized she was really sick—she was on all this medication and shit. I thought maybe it was the medication that was making her weird, so I told her maybe she should stop. She did stop, and she got so fucked up she couldn’t get out of bed. Then I got interested in somebody else, and so I told her, and she just wouldn’t leave me alone. First she sent me this crazy letter, and I just went and put the envelope she sent it in on her mailbox.”
“You . . . wait. If you could tell me what you want me to help you with, I could—”
“I’m trying to! So then she called me, really mad because I left her an empty envelope, and I just—”
“Well,” said Margot, “it—”
“I didn’t have a pen! I didn’t want to be rude to her—I mean, she’s so sick already. So I left the envelope so she’d know I’d gotten her letter.”
Margot was eating dinner when Patrick called, but she picked up the phone anyway. His voice was shy and warm. “I’ve been thinking about you all day,” he said. They talked while she ate with one hand, intermittently tucking the receiver between her shoulder and her head so that she could carve and salt her fancy take-out chicken thigh.
“I was remembering how we used to talk,” he said. “It always made me feel better talking to you, especially about relationships. And I wondered if you knew that.”
Margot mumbled how she’d been thinking about him too. Her mumble was also shy and warm. It was unusual, her thing with Patrick, she thought. But it was good.
“You always helped me figure out what I was really doing. Guys sometimes aren’t very clear about that.”
She hadn’t remembered doing that, but she liked the idea that she had. As if to reinforce the idea, Patrick began describing in further detail the relationships he had mentioned while they were standing on the street. It wasn’t entirely true that he’d broken it off with the masochistic phlebotomist, he said. Tricia still called him in the middle of the night when she was “in crisis” and came by his office in sexy dresses for free Prozac. Last week she’d sent him a birthday card that had a picture of an emaciated kneeling woman with her head thrown back and a tortured look on her face. “God knows where she found the thing. It was repulsive, actually. But still, it hit me right in the gut. I even brought it to the couples therapy that Rhoda and I are doing.”
“Why?”
“To illustrate what I’m not getting from Rhoda.” He paused self-consciously. “It may’ve been an unkind thing to do. I mean, I don’t want that from Rhoda, but I want her to understand that need in me because it’s part of who I am. And she just can’t. I mean, her card was generic flowers and a love message.” He sighed. “Underneath all the New Age goofiness, she’s just totally suburban, you know?”
“So are we, remember?”
Patrick was silent for a moment. Margot salted her oily tomato salad.
“You’re right,” he said. “That sounded ridiculous. What I meant to say is, she’s really conventional.”
“Patrick,” she said, “how’s Dolores?”
“Oh.” She almost heard him wince. “I don’t know. Isn’t that awful? We haven’t had much contact over the last five years. I know she’s living in some slum in Miami, probably working as a waitress. She’s a total alcoholic. Last time I talked to her she was having an affair, if you could call it that, with this fourteen-year-old Latin kid who couldn’t speak English. She rear-ended somebody because she was driving around drunk with her pants down and the kid’s face between her legs, and I mean so drunk that when she got out of the car, she forgot to pull her pants up and she fell and broke a tooth. That was the last time I talked to her. Since she stopped speaking to my dad, I’m not even sure where she lives. It was just too much, you know? It was painful.”
Margot remembered Dolores sitting at the table, affixing her false fingernails, holding her hand at a distance and appraising it with an arched, theatrical brow. She remembered Patrick’s attention on her, a drop of traveling light. “Could you get her number for me?” she asked. “Could you try? I don’t know what I’d say to her at this point, but. . .”
“Of course.” The loyalty in Patrick’s voice was like a muscle that’s gone flabby but is still strong; it was loyalty for her, not Dolores, and it both flattered and troubled her. “It’s probably time for me to check in anyway. Who knows where she is now. Spiritually and emotionally, I mean.”
Margot thought of something Dolores had once told her. They had been sitting at the kitchen table, drinking sweet coffee and smoking. “When Patrick was a baby, I used to do this really mean thing to him,” said Dolores. “He was just learning how to walk. All by himself, he’d struggle to his feet with this earnest frown and start slowly fighting his way forward with his little hands balled. He’d be in this nightgown our mom used to put him in, and it would trail out behind him. I’d follow along and I’d let him get so far and then I’d step on his gown and he’d fall over with this cute little ‘oof.’” Dolores drew on her cigarette and left a wet red lipstick mark on it. “The funny thing is, he never cried. He’d just set his little face and slowly get up and toddle on. Sometimes I did it just ‘cause it was so cool to see him get up again.”
Patrick was saying that while he had enjoyed being a psychopharm, he was tired of it now and was looking for a way out. With this end in mind, he was working on a CD-ROM about depression, in which psychiatrists would appear on a tiny screen to explain to viewers what depression is and how to get treatment. “It’s going to be complex and layered,” he said. “Like performance art.”
Margot agreed to meet him for dinner that weekend, even though she wasn’t sure she wanted to. Their conversation had made her feel passive and nonplussed. When they hung up, she sat for a while and stared at the spray of greasy salt scattered across her plate, at the tidy little snarl of chicken bones and the minute pistil of broccoli. Her tabletop was red Formica. On the table she had a salt shaker in the shape of a mournful sheep and Magic Markers in a row and a dish of colored rocks mixed with cheap jewelry she’d worn when she was a kid. She liked her things, but now the sight of them made her sad. She always had arrangements of bright little things on her walls and furniture. Roberta had made fun of them, mildly at first.
Late one night, a woman Patrick didn’t know had called him and asked if she could come over. He told her that she could, but when she got there he didn’t like the way she looked, so he made her tea, conversed for as long as he felt etiquette required, and then asked her to leave. Margot had been asleep and, to her regret, had not seen the girl. She was fascinated by this story and by the casual way Patrick told it at breakfast; without knowing why, she found herself imagining, repeatedly and in varying ways, the girl’s face when Patrick told her to leave. She could not imagine calling anyone and asking if she could come over late at night, no matter how much she wanted them, nor could she imagine letting a person who made such a call come to her home.
She
and Dolores had analyzed the incident at length, sitting on Dolores’s big bed in a flood of sunlight, eating from a box of dime-store chocolates. “Patrick has always had these things with women,” said Dolores moodily. “And being a guy, he can’t help but take advantage of them. Like, that girl put herself in a situation where he might tell her to go home, you know? What do you expect if you call up strangers in the middle of the night?”
Margot supposed it was true. “But still, something seems gross about it. Like, maybe he could’ve told her that he might ask her to leave.”
“Oh, come on, how could he have done that? That would really have been gross.” Dolores took an open package of cigarettes and a silver lighter from her bedside table; she manipulated the small objects with the grand, suppressed languor of a person moving underwater. “In his own way, Patrick is an old-fashioned gentleman,” she said. “He likes things to have a certain decorum, a certain . . . gracious style. He’s a romantic.”
Dolores’s hands were crossed at the wrist, a fresh cigarette inserted between two slightly puffy fingers. Margot wondered if the medication she took made her hands puffy. “But it doesn’t seem gentlemanly to let a stranger come over,” Margot persisted. “I mean, he was allowing a situation that would probably not be very gracious, whether she stayed or left. Don’t you think?”
“But the thing is, she probably really wanted to come over. She probably had extremity in her voice, and any extremity is potentially very romantic.” She brought the cigarette to her lips and Margot noticed that her hand trembled. “People often want something from Patrick, and he has a hard time saying no. It’s our family and this awful boundary crap. Our mom was all over Patrick, physically and every other way. She let him get away with anything because he was beautiful, but then there were all these other ways she had him by the balls. She was obsessed with him. The sick old bitch. She called him ‘my orchid.’” Dolores imitated her mother with fine, slippery malice. “My orchid.”
They sat in silence for a moment. Dolores’s bed was covered with an old quilt made of meticulously color-coordinated shapes sewn together with the pretty humor of a child. A strip of pink cloth decorated with abstract roses was sewn next to a triangle of blue and white stripes next to a lavender oblong with green and yellow polka dots on it. At the head of the bed were Dolores’s pillows, in faded yellow slipcovers. She had lace curtains on her windows. Her room did not look like the room of someone who had recently torn the hair from her head.
“People get fixated on Patrick,” said Dolores. “When he was in high school he actually had a female fan club. It was embarrassing. He encourages stuff like that because it flatters him, but in another way, he knows it’s not about him at all. I think he’s pretty lonely, actually.”
“Yeah,” said Margot. “I can see that.” Thoughtfully, she ate a caramel; it was slightly, sensuously stale, and she chewed it with contented vigor.
Work the next day was like running a relay race through a rabbit warren while pranksters blew horns, banged cymbals, and set off sirens. The morning began with the arrival of a mother and son who had come in on an emergency basis because the son, a sixteen-year-old who attended a school for the gifted, had pierced his nose and inserted a ring through it. His father had committed suicide when the kid was ten, and his mother was convinced that the nose piercing was an indication of “suicidal ideation.” It took an hour to convince her otherwise, which made Margot an hour late for her appointment with a family that had just been successfully “reunited.” The daughter in this family was having suicidal ideation, and Margot scarcely blamed her. Her father beat her up and her mother, a hot-wired piece of bone and muscle with a face-lift, complained constantly that the kid wasn’t happy.
“I mean, I know he shouldn’t hit her, but just look at her!” She gesticulated at her drooping child, a pale fifteen-year-old with dyed black hair and black lipstick. “I don’t mind the black thing and the tattoos; we did stuff like that too. But we were happy! We did things! The people we knew were cream of the crop, the best and the brightest! She just lumps around with losers and doesn’t care about anything.”
“I think Lalena cares about her poetry,” said Margot.
“Yeah—it’s all about suicide!”
“But I see a lot of intensity in her poems,” said Margot. “Even if they are about suicide, they feel intensely alive and fierce. They aren’t fierce the way you are. But she’s a different person.”
The mother started and blinked. The girl glanced at Margot. Margot met her eye and held her. With an abrupt emotional cramp, she remembered Patrick sitting in the diner, holding her with his eyes.
All her morning sessions ran late, and Margot had only ten minutes for lunch. She ate her dried apricots and pecans out of a Baggie in the ladies’ lounge, where she paced before the smeared mirror, furtively abusing her clients. “You wonder why she’s writing suicide poems?” she muttered. “Take a look in the mirror, you deranged cow.”
She looked at herself and remembered something Roberta had said. “You’re a stereotype of a social worker!” she’d yelled. “You go in there like you’re healing the world, and you’re just as screwed up as they are! You’re really trying to heal yourself, and it’s not working, Margot!”
Near the end of the semester, she’d met an astonishing girl, a freshman named Chiquita. She was a giggly little thing, who painted her fingernails with a different color on each short, chewed nail and who, at the end of orgasm, would reach greedily between her legs with both hands, sighing and twisting her head as Margot’s tongue played over her fingers. Margot would return home with light, bright eyes, and sometimes Patrick would see her and his eyes would light in response. She would talk about her date, and he would listen with an avid regard that felt almost like love. His voice lost the teasing, seductive quality that had so flummoxed her, and he would look at her as if she were an especially honorable enemy soldier meeting with him in an established neutral zone, a place where, unencumbered by the need for strategy, he could see her as a person and have a moment of expansive feeling that was indirectly erotic.
“When you talk about her, you get this look on your face that’s just exquisite,” he said. “It’s so brittle and tentative. It’s like you think you might be almost happy, but you’re afraid to trust it.”
“Patrick,” she said, “the girl’s got nipples you could hang shit on; of course I’m scared.”
They were walking to the Brown Jug. The spring day was an exclamation point of radiant abundance. Vulgar little flowers burst from the ground like bright hiccups. Crabgrass was everywhere. Patrick wore a tan beret at a sideways angle that made his beauty a silly exaggeration.
“What about you?” she said. “Don’t you ever feel that way about girls?”
“Oh, all the time. I’m always afraid to trust love and happiness. And that feeling of not quite trusting but at the same time trying to trust is the best.”
The words had sounded ludicrous in his affected voice, and Margot slapped him on the butt. But now, as she stood in the ladies’ lounge at work, it occurred to her that the first part of it, at least, had been true.
In mere months, Chiquita had dumped her for a particularly tedious law student. Stupid with grief, she had gone upstairs to Patrick’s room. He sat up and opened his arms without a word. She stayed outside his blankets, safe in her ugly flannel gown, but he held her close and stroked her hair. His tenderness was like a secret thing he had always craved to show her. It was open, raw, almost female, but there was a boy’s spirit in it, sparkling, resilient, almost cutting in its resolve. She imagined Patrick the baby, falling down with a little “oof” and getting up again. She looked up at him; his eyes were clear and deep, as if he were looking at her all the way from the bottom and, even more, inviting her to look in.
The bus home was crowded, but she was able to sit, quietly enjoying the animal comfort of proximity to strangers that she didn’t have to talk to. As the bus roared forward, its machinery gave off
a freakish, surging whine that, for a piercing moment, Margot heard as a smothered soprano chorus singing desperately through a distorted medium from very far away.
On the evening of her dinner with Patrick, she found that she was looking forward to seeing him; she was disappointed when he canceled. He was worn out, he said, from overwork and romantic problems. He’d broken up with Rhoda and begun seeing Tricia, the masochistic phlebotomist, again. It was all so exhausting he didn’t even want to talk about it. “So,” he concluded, “how was your week?”
“Well,” said Margot, “I don’t have girlfriend problems, but one of my clients just tried to castrate himself. Do you think that counts?”
“No!”
“I guess technically he was just indulging in a little erotic cutting. But he damn near took the whole head off. The emergency room report says that after they stitched him up, he woke and immediately started whackin’ the ham.”
“So debased. Just so sad and debased.”
“He’s just one of the people you’re, um, helping. The guy’s got Haldol coming out his ears.”
“Margot, are you pissed at me for canceling on you? First you talk about castration, and then—”
“Patrick, not everything is about you. Anyway, you know what I did when I heard the whacking-off part? I punched the air and said, ‘Yes!’ Because for that guy, it was like a triumphant cry. It was beating off in the face of adversity, goddammit.”
Patrick giggled.
“No, really,” said Margot. “You know how sometimes you see something that looks really gross or stupid? Like a big fat guy walking down the street wearing a shirt that says ‘I Like It Doggy Style’? Or a forty-five-year-old woman in a bouffant wig and purple eye shadow and it actually looks pretty good? It’s that person’s way of saying, ‘Here I am.’ Or you go into a really bad immigrant neighborhood at Christmas—these people just got here, everything’s against them, they don’t totally know what’s going on. But you’ll always see a few houses covered in lights and crèches and reindeer—they’re giving it everything they have. It’s a triumphant cry. And beating off after he damn near lost it—in that guy’s cosmology, it was a triumphant cry.”
Because They Wanted To: Stories Page 8
