His voice grows louder as he drops to his knees on the diner floor in mock prayer, his hand clutching a pile of pink packets.
“Lord, give me the big C! Come on. You can do it. I want the big C!”
“Stop it.” I grab his elbow to lift him back up, but Grandpa Jack ignores me.
He is too busy genuflecting.
“Big C! Big C! Big C!”
“Stop it, you’re making a scene. People are starting to stare. This is not funny.”
“Come on, say it with me. Big C!”
“No.”
“Which way is Mecca?”
He starts bowing furiously.
“What are you doing?”
“Covering my bases.”
“Okay,” I say. “All right. I get it. No colonoscopy.”
“Say it.”
“What?”
“You know what. Big C!”
“Okay. Big C! Now please sit down.” Grandpa Jack stands up and drops himself into the booth next to me, satisfied.
“Cheer up, kid,” he says, and puts his napkin back on his lap. “I promise you that if I live past ninety, I’ll let those doctors rip me a new asshole if they want to. I’ll be so confused by then I’ll be running around with a diaper on my head.”
“Grandpa, you know that’s a load of crap.”
He looks over at me, and his grin stretches slowly from one side of his face to the other. When he gives my hand a little squeeze, I know he has never been prouder.
“No pun intended, doll. No pun intended.”
Twenty-two
Dr. Lerner’s office building is in the West Village, tucked into a street filled with charming New York brownstones. It stands about four stories above its neighbors, ugly and oppressive. The kind of building that you assume houses one hundred dentists (and at least one therapist and two cosmetic surgeons) and makes you wonder what might have been there before; whose home gave way under the burden of commercial enterprise, and how the plans were snuck by the zoning commission. Maybe someone got free braces or rhinoplasty out of the deal.
Based on the replacement building, it looks like the destruction and construction occurred sometime in the 1970s. The lobby’s fluorescent lighting makes the white interior look dingy and forgotten. A security guard watches a tiny TV on a foldout table and doesn’t even look up when I get onto the elevator without signing in.
I am happy not to leave behind a paper trail.
When I enter Dr. Lerner’s office, I am ready for an audience. For people to stare and wonder about what must be wrong with me. I picture a waiting room full of people, one or two of them overmedicated and drooling. As it turns out, I am the only person here. I am not sure if this is a relief or a letdown. I have already practiced my serene facial expression in the mirror, one that says I am only here because I am complicated.
I take a seat on a battered plaid couch and wait. There are magazines on the coffee table, a choice between The Economist and Cosmo, both at least two years old. I assume this is some sort of psychological test, and I decide to go with The Economist. I hope this will make me look like I care about world affairs and the spread of democracy. Like my life is bigger than the problems I intend to dump and leave behind in Dr. Lerner’s office.
I turn the magazine pages slowly. Though I can’t seem to concentrate on the words or even understand the graphs, I pretend to read. I am anxious; the idea of paying someone to listen to me feels somehow immoral and illicit, like paying for sex. It seems fundamentally opposed to the WASP code. I like to think of my people as mute optimists—leave the elephant alone and, eventually, perhaps with the help of a couple mimosas, he will disappear from the room on his own accord.
After about ten minutes, two women come out of the closed door on my right, one of whom walks briskly out of the waiting room. I acknowledge therapy etiquette by not staring at her departing back. Instead, I focus my attention on the woman who stays behind, the woman I presume to be the doctor.
Though, on closer look, Dr. Lerner doesn’t look like a doctor. She looks like a tarot-card reader. Gold gypsy bracelets dance up her arms, and she wears a hot-pink sari. Though the lights are dimmed in here, I am about ninety-five percent sure she’s not Indian.
“You must be Emily,” she says to me, and reaches to shake my hand. “I’m Dr. Lerner.” She leads me into her office, which is even darker and cavelike, and has stacks of books lining the walls. The smell of incense is heavy in the air. It reminds me of my college boyfriend’s apartment, where my eyes would water from candles burned to hide the smell of pot and where the lighting was kept so dull I couldn’t see his acne.
“Have a seat,” she says, and points me to another couch, also plaid. She sits down across from me, in a folding chair with a cushion, and arranges herself into a lotus position. She looks too old to be able to manipulate her body that way comfortably. I sit down too and wonder if I am supposed to copy her. I decide against it when I remember I’m wearing a skirt.
“So, what brings you here today?” she asks in a cheery voice, like she is a saleswoman ready to show her wares. She rests her arms on her calves, palms up, and her bracelets provide tinkling background noise.
“I’ve been going through a rough time lately.” Dr. Lerner doesn’t respond, and I immediately recognize the technique. I have used it often with reluctant witnesses. Nothing gets people to talk like awkward silence. I take the bait, mostly because I am paying a hundred bucks an hour for this.
“I recently went through a depressive episode.”
“I see,” she says. “And what makes you say that? What does that mean, exactly?” Her tone is casual, not clinical or clipped like a doctor’s. It’s like we are girlfriends chatting over coffee.
“Put it this way, I couldn’t get off of my couch. I slept. A lot. For like a week straight.”
I fake a yawn, a bizarre attempt at emphasis.
“And now?”
“Not so much. I mean, I snapped out of it. But now I feel sort of sad. Before I just felt numb. In some ways it was actually better before. Does that make sense?”
“Absolutely. It’s a very common defense mechanism. Lots of people shut down emotionally when they don’t want to deal with whatever is going on in their lives. Some people shut down for years,” she says, which makes me think of my father.
“Why don’t you tell me what’s been going on with you until now? Anything happen or change recently?”
“Nothing much. I mean, I broke up with my boyfriend, Andrew, on Labor Day, but that was a few months ago, and I broke up with him, so really I should be over it by now. And I quit my job, but I think that’s probably a good thing. I hated it there. The only other thing I can think of is that my grandfather has gotten sick. He was just recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. But it has been a long time coming, so it wasn’t too shocking.” I rush the words, since now that I am here, I might as well get the most out of my hour.
“Emily, do you notice that you put caveats on all of your feelings? Emily, it sounds as if you don’t feel entitled to be upset or have a reaction to anything.” I wonder if repeatedly using my name is another technique.
What is Dr. Lerner’s first name? I wonder. She looks like a Peggy. Or maybe a Priya?
“Let me suggest something,” she says. “After I speak, I’d like you to take a moment to think about what I said. To concentrate on it. I can tell your mind is churning, and I want to make sure you hear me.”
Does it look like I am not paying attention? Am I paying attention? Focus, Emily, focus.
Do I put caveats on all of my feelings?
“Why don’t we start with Andrew. What happened there?” she asks, and the question feels violating. I want to tell her to mind her own business, but then I remember that I am paying her to mind mine.
“I broke up with him. We had been dating for two years, and I was worried he was going to propose. So I ended it.” I say it matter-of-factly, like I am a nonchalant heartbreaker.
“I se
e,” she says, though I am not sure what she sees. “Why did you end it?”
“You tell me,” I say. Dr. Lerner doesn’t dignify this with a response, and her silence is chastening. Her look says Work with me here.
“To be honest, I’m not sure. At the time I felt like I had to. I knew I couldn’t marry him.”
“Why not? Why couldn’t you marry him?”
“I don’t know. I just couldn’t. I felt like a fraud.”
“That’s an interesting word choice.”
“I guess.”
“What is a fraud to you?”
I take a deep breath to forestall my annoyance. I am not here for a vocabulary lesson. “Okay, you know, a fraud. Like I was pretending. Like I was there but I wasn’t there.”
“Did you love Andrew?”
“Yes. I did. Love him.”
“And now?”
“Now?”
“Now.”
I take a moment, though I know the answer to this one. I’m just not sure I’m ready to say these words out loud.
“Yes, I still love him. Yes.”
“And the sex?”
“Excuse me?”
“And the sex? How was it?”
I pause again.
“I ask because it tells a lot about the relationship. So, how was it? The sex.”
“Fucking fantastic.”
Somehow talking about sex breaks the ice, and I am more comfortable with Dr. Lerner. I feel sort of like we are girlfriends chatting over coffee, except we talk only about me.
“Let’s discuss your family,” Dr. Lerner says, when we are about halfway through our session. I want to giggle, because I knew somehow it would come to this. The therapist expecting me to rehash all of my childhood traumas.
“I don’t have all that much family, so there’s not that much to tell. I am an only child. My dad lives in Connecticut. He’s a politician. And I have told you about my Grandpa Jack. That’s about it.”
“And your mother?” I knew she was going to ask, of course. And for a moment I consider lying. I could answer that she lives in Connecticut too. I have done that before, since people don’t know how to respond when you say your mother is dead. After the “I’m sorry”s and the “I didn’t know”s, it’s hard to get the conversation back on track. I sometimes lie implicitly and say, “My family lives in Connecticut,” because it is simpler than having to explain. It’s not that I’m uncomfortable saying that my mother is dead out loud, it’s just that everyone else is uncomfortable hearing it.
“She’s dead.” Lying in therapy is a bad idea.
“I see.” This time I know what she sees. She sees that my mother is dead and that this has irrevocably fucked me up.
“Yeah, well, cancer. When I was fourteen.”
“Cancer. Fourteen,” she repeats, as if these are foreign words that sound interesting to her. “Well, that really sucks.”
I laugh, because she’s exactly right. It does really suck.
The rest of our hour together flies by. I forget that we are on the clock, so I spend much of my time talking about random things. Like Marge, and Carl, and what it’s like to take a deposition. Occasionally, I worry that we are getting too off track from the reason I am here—my stint on the couch. I ask Dr. Lerner about that, but she just tells me to “relax and trust the process.” And because I am surprised when our session is over, and because I decide to trust her and the process, whatever that means, I make another appointment with Dr. Lerner for next week.
I take the long way home and circle the neighborhood. The leaves have started to fall and collect in small heaps under the carefully spaced trees. I kick the piles, enjoying the sounds my feet make as I scatter them along the sidewalk, adding a small bit of extra chaos to the city. Every once in a while, I sniff the sleeves of my sweater. I kind of like that they stink of patchouli.
Twenty-three
For me, the calendar can be a minefield. Each year I can expect certain days to be more difficult than others. Most major holidays. Mother’s Day. The anniversary of my mom’s death. Her birthday. Mine. If you were to mark those days out with a black indelible X, it would probably come out to about one crappy day every two months or so. Not particularly bad odds. But toward the end of the year, with the Thanksgiving–Christmas–New Year’s clusterfuck, it’s a grand slam; I barely catch my breath with the first before I get hit with a second, then a third.
By the time January rolls around, I am so emotionally exhausted that I make the same resolution every single year: Get more sleep. As if closing my eyes in a dark room for multiple hours in a row can replenish the little bits of my soul that get eaten every year around this time.
If anything, my week on the couch debunked the myth of the redemptive power of sleep.
I have been dreading today, Thanksgiving, ever since my dad and I made plans, or maybe since this time last year. Let me be clear here. I realize I have much to give thanks for, and I know that relatively speaking, especially on a global scale, my life is pretty damn good. But Thanksgiving for some reason has the inevitable effect of making me take stock of my proverbial half-empty glass. There is only one source of unconditional love for each of us, and I lost mine at fourteen. I don’t mean this in a self-pitying way. I just mean that Thanksgiving reminds me that most of the love I will get going forward is going to have to be earned. And it takes a hell of a lot of work to earn love. I’m not sure I have that kind of energy.
My dad picks me up at the train station, and we head straight to the country club. We don’t stop at his house, because there is no reason to go there anymore. I don’t like to see its transformation: the slow decline in displayed photographs and the replacement of furniture. A testament to the gradual erosion of memory. It is Grandpa Jack as a house.
My father’s country club, or just “the club” as he likes to refer to it, looks like an old plantation estate, with sprawling, impossibly green lawns, multiple porches, and a long circular driveway. High hedges skirt the property, an effort to separate it from the mean streets of Greenwich, Connecticut, and to thwart all of those hooligans just hoping to get a peek at Shangri-la. When you pull into the driveway, after being cleared by a man at the security gate, valets with black faces and stiff uniforms welcome you. Open your car door. Bow. And then whisk your vehicle away to a distant lot.
The entryway is lined with tennis and golf plaques. The winners listed have pretentious names followed by numerals, names better suited for yachts than for people. There are some group photographs of the tennis teams: all white, and, as if to emphasize their uniform whiteness, they wear white collared shirts, white shorts, white socks, and white sneakers, the blinding white you see only in detergent commercials, the kind of white that says We are whiter than you.
The dining room is mock casual, like a lodge and a ballroom smooshed together and decorated with autumnal flower arrangements. A couple of stray pinecones litter the place to add authenticity. When we walk in the room, my dad does a quick visual sweep for faces he recognizes and then nods and smiles and waves like a pageant winner at a local parade. The place is filled with his “constituents,” the people he hopes a few years from now will elect him as governor. Since I have never mastered the long-distance hello, I avoid eye contact and dutifully follow the maître d’ to our seats.
“Do you have anything smaller?” I ask when he places us at a table for six.
“I’m sorry, no. We usually accommodate only large groups on Thanksgiving,” he says, and hands us our menus before walking away.
My father and I sit diametrically opposed, and the four empty chairs stare back at us. We both mentally fill them with our dead. My grandparents on my mom’s side, my dad’s mom, my mom, and soon, possibly, my Grandpa Jack. My dad signals a waiter over and demands the extra chairs be taken away. He doesn’t say it, but his gesture, his gruffness and impatience, are transparent: We don’t dine with ghosts.
“Mr. Haxby, so nice of you to join us today. And this must be your lovely
daughter you are always talking about. Emily, right?” The waiter speaks in a clipped British accent, which has the effect of making our meal seem even more formal, like we flew to London to celebrate the conquering of the New World. I am surprised that he knows my name, and I wonder if they keep a guest roster to make the club appear friendlier. My dad smiles at him, and I reach over to shake the waiter’s hand.
“And will Miss Anne be joining us today?” the waiter asks. Anne is my dad’s personal assistant, the woman he jokes he can’t live without. I am surprised that the headwaiter knows her by name as well.
“No, she will not,” my father says, and his tone scolds the waiter for his indiscretion. But it is my dad who gives himself away. He must be dating Anne, a woman only a few years older than me. She can’t be more than thirty-three, tops. Anne is a compact brunette who decorates herself along party lines—pearls around the neck, small studs in the ears, slim watch, slim phone. I take a moment to process this new information, my father and Anne, and I find that I like the idea. It makes my father seem more human somehow.
The waiter leaves quickly after that, with the extra chairs but without our drink order. He walks away with his head down, like we banished him from our two-man island.
“So you and Anne come here a lot?”
“For business lunches. It’s not too far from the office. I think I see the Pritchards. Shall we go over and say hello?”
“Come on, Dad. I’m not stupid. Are you dating her? It would be fine if you were. She’s a great woman.” In truth, I admire Anne. She turns up the volume on life; her voice, her gestures, her presence manage to command attention without asking for it, to be loud but not crass. If she didn’t work for my father, if she wasn’t sleeping with my father, under different circumstances, I could see us becoming friends.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Emily. I’m her supervisor. It would be inappropriate.” He dismisses the subject with a flick of the wrist. A signal for the waiter to get us drinks. Two martinis, straight up, with extra olives.
The Opposite of Love Page 16
