“It’s ten after nine,” he spat.
He was hurt, she could see it. Her lateness told him that she had not taken him into account, while he had fully considered her.
“Sorry.”
He was insulted, put-upon already, and it was not even 9:15. “You should have texted.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry that I am ten minutes late, and I am sorry that I didn’t think to text you, and I am sorry that even it if had crossed my mind I wouldn’t have been able to, because I still don’t have a cell phone, and I haven’t even checked to see if the landline is working because, I am sorry, I forgot about it.” Was she sincere? Did it matter right now? Better to get in the habit, and maybe taking responsibility would become part of her new life.
He stared at her.
“I am very, very sorry, Craig, and this is all entirely my fault.”
Maybe the Program was working. She didn’t have to hide in a bottle. She could just say it.
“Here.”
He handed her a bunched-up plastic bag, the kind that ecologists know kill birds, but that people use anyway for some unquantifiable reason.
“Is this trash?”
“Open it.”
“Now?”
“YES, NOW!” He hit his palm on his forehead and looked to the sky. She could see him mouth the words Praise Jesus.
Inside the bag was a little red flip phone, the kind that an eleven-year-old might carry, or maybe some kind of burner. In fact, since it had no packaging, it probably had belonged to one of his children who now were in possession of a far more sophisticated piece of technology.
“I programmed my number.”
“Thank you, Craig. That is very, very sweet.” Her Higher Power had partnered with a control freak to help make her minimally functional. And she realized that for the rest of her tenure at Fitzgerald & Robbins, which could be a matter of minutes unless one miraculous morning she woke up perfect, Craig Williams would be correcting her, fixing her. He would be right up her ass.
But, she did know enough to understand that he did this for himself. He just wanted to be able to find her. It wasn’t sweet, it was just practical. He’d probably grown up with a disorganized parent and had to wash his own towels from before he was old enough to take the subway by himself. He had to control in order to survive, and in fact, her lack of responsibility in the face of this was doubly pathetic. But if she wasn’t capable of buying tea bags, how would she ever figure out how to get a telephone? So, despite it all being highly dysfunctional, it was a good thing he was controlling her. It helped.
Craig started walking toward the office. “So, how did it go?”
She ran to stay within earshot. “Oh, the usual. Pain, resistance, self-deception, effort.”
“No, the case!” Craig sighed. He’d had it.
Should she recount the long, tortured evening with Steven Brinkley? Keep It Simple.
“I have a lead. Jamie’s therapist. I made us an appointment for this morning. Here is her card.”
Craig took it and typed the address into his phone. “Seven blocks south,” he reported.
She looked up. The street sign said Sixteenth. “Well, her office is on Ninth Street so that sounds about right.”
Craig didn’t even wince, that’s how much she bothered him.
“What kind of effort?” he asked abruptly.
“To participate.”
“In what?”
“The world.”
“I get it.”
He seemed interested. In fact, in his ever overly critical way, he was very supportive. Maybe she had been right about his parents, one dysfunctional and the other always compensating.
“I shared.”
“What does that mean?”
“I told them about my problems.”
They crossed the River Styx otherwise known as Fourteenth Street—impervious to the chic and rife with chicanery—and descended into the calm of Greenwich Village, where the 1950s bourgeoisie had seized the nineteenth century from the impending claws of Jackie Bouvier–style boxy, white-brick buildings, guaranteeing calm side streets for the very private wealthy, even though they no longer had a hospital or any place to do the laundry or buy shoes or a hamburger that was under twenty dollars. For someone who lives in a fifteen-million-dollar brownstone, that may not matter, but even those people want to go for a walk amid the hoi polloi from time to time.
“Is that what goes on in there?”
“Yeah Craig, struggles and hopes.”
“That keeps you sober?”
“So far.”
Was he being deadpan or sincere? “If I had to listen to other people’s problems day in and day out, I would need a drink.”
“Everyone says that.”
“Obvious, I guess.”
“Yeah, only I need a drink even if I am not listening to anyone.” Maggie coasted beside him. “That’s the difference.”
She filled him in about Florence, the hack shrink, condensing the report to Brinkley’s description, not describing Brinkley much at all. Why was she protecting him? They turned off Sixth Avenue and down Ninth Street.
“Hard to believe this used to be cheap.”
“Yeah.” Craig nodded. “Hard to believe this whole city used to make sense.”
Maggie thought back to the days before her days, of single lady poets and youngsters with acoustic guitars making their own way. People ran into each other, and ignited a collective leap forward. Now it was filled with people no one would want to be stuck with in an elevator.
“Here,” he said, following his phone.
Feeling a familiar old itch, Maggie looked up and was startled by the building’s facade. She had not expected to be back at this address so soon. Or ever.
“It’s the shrink building.” She had been there with Frances. Twice.
“Whatever.”
“The whole building is filled with shrinks.”
They had tried couples counseling with a stupid dyke who had no idea of how to talk to either of them. She would throw everything back, and they just didn’t know what to do with it. It didn’t help. They needed more guidance. They needed the shrink to be the boss. Their stuff was too tough and they needed to be told how to fix it. Then Frances got desperate and wouldn’t just wait for a breakthrough; instead she changed her tune. She seemed to be getting advice from somewhere else, someone Maggie didn’t know. Weird words would come out of her mouth, words Maggie had never heard before like visual information or no, no, no and wagging her finger. Someone else’s voice was getting into Frances’s head. Suddenly, one session, Frances walked in and said, “I want us to both drop these repetitive stories that we hide behind. No, no, no.” She wagged her finger. “Let’s use some visual information to help us through this, look at us! We are both wrecks. We have to come to a new understanding or someone could die around here.”
“Die?” the therapist repeated, nervous it could be her.
“Maggie is a police detective. She is going to work drunk. Something terrible could happen.”
Whoa, that was really playing dirty. What was Maggie supposed to say? This was a new gambit: that unless Frances got her way, someone was going to come in DOA.
“What do you suggest?” the therapist said, always throwing it back on them.
“We both need to stop drinking so that we can figure this out,” and then Frances looked down at the floor, because it was sooooo obvious how manipulative she was being.
“That is not going to happen,” Maggie said.
“Just try.” Frances was pleading. Now, of course, Maggie realized that Frances had been lying. She now knew Frances had a plan B, named Maritza. But Maggie didn’t know that at the time. So, really it was a solution used as a smoke screen for a threat. “We’re here together, baby. Let’s both adjust.”
Her desperation made Maggie so uncomfortable, and she did not want to be uncomfortable. It was a trick, to make Maggie be the problem. If she conceded one littl
e thing, then suddenly it would all be her fault. That’s how those games were played. So, Maggie refused.
Finally, after a few expensive months they were both so exhausted from the struggle, they sat back for a while, overlooked it. Both hoped that the next time this pain came to a head, each of them would deal with it differently. But a few years later, things got hard again and someone referred them to another gray-haired Jewish doctor who turned out to be in the exact same building.
Shrink Number Two was a true disaster. Frances tried to tell Dr. Edith Rosenblatt that Maggie was a drug addict. So, Maggie told Dr. Edith Rosenblatt that Frances was a drug addict. Since the doctor’s futile strategy was to not take sides, she simplistically said, “Let’s not make accusations,” instead of listening close enough to find out that Maggie was in fact an addict and that Frances was not. Bad doctor.
Craig scanned the names on the buzzers.
“There it is. Florence Black, Energy Counselor.” He pressed the button. “Okay, here we go.”
“Hey Craig, have you ever been to a shrink before?”
“No.”
“Okay, just be yourself.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
10:00 AM
Florence’s waiting room was a cramped, depressing hallway with no windows and unwieldy wicker chairs that had never been comfortable, which is why they had been on clearance in the first place, decades past. Florence was a person who could not replace bad furniture as long as it wasn’t broken. In her magazine rack was Yoga Journal, a year-old copy of Psychology Today, and an out-of-date edition of Us Weekly opened to the horoscope page.
Maggie looked at Alina’s sign, Pisces. Conflict will not resolve until your birthday. Today was July 6. There were a lot of months ahead until February 22. Then she looked at Frances’s, Leo. Don’t let another person’s agenda interrupt your own. Then Maggie looked at her own sign, Leo. Don’t let another person’s agenda interrupt your own.
“Craig, what’s your sign?”
“Scorpio.”
“Family members will come to stay.”
“I know.”
On the wall was a framed photograph of naked white children playing on the beach. They both stared at it.
“Something about thinking of one’s self as innocent,” Maggie mused.
“Off-putting,” Craig said.
There was something interesting about Craig, beyond his disapproval of everything. What did he actually like?
“What do you like?”
“Chris Rock.”
“Is that a joke?”
“He’s not that bad. Whatever. What am I supposed to say? Who is the new PC black person we’re all supposed to want to be? I’d say Obama, but that’s like nostalgia for utopia.”
“Do you ever think about starting your own firm?”
He nodded six times. “Twen-ty-four-sev-en.”
There was something about that waiting room that made people so bored, they became disoriented. It provoked a desperate need for distraction. Presiding over the magazine rack, taped to the wall, was a small framed postcard with some saying on it, but the letters were too small to read. Maggie got up, walked over and read out loud, “What is most important is how you see yourself.”
“Well, that’s wrong.” Craig was over everything about this office. “In fact, that attitude is the big problem. People only think about themselves, not how they are affecting others.”
“Pretty deep.”
“I have a family,” Craig said casually, like it explained, excused, organized, and informed everything.
And Maggie was destroyed.
When Florence opened the office door flipping her one-shade-of-brown dyed hair with gray roots, in a billowy olive-green blouse and hideous necklace of what looked like dried cow ears but turned out to be shells, she found a devastated Maggie and a shut-down, angry Craig. A typical couple. She smiled, in the satisfaction of familiarity, and silently waved them into her office.
Inside, the decor revolved around a little electric waterfall, tumbling endlessly into a pool. A tired motor cycled the water up through a plastic tube so that it could come flowing down once again, and then again. The gears growled, crying out for upkeep.
“Please.” She pointed to a battered couch underneath a large pink conch shell affixed to a faded white wall. “Take a seat.”
Maggie sat first. The couch had been too soft for too long, so when Craig followed suit, the flattened cushions forced them into an intimate proximity.
“I can help you with your marriage.” Florence lit two white candles and brought her hand to her heart. “If you wish it so.”
Craig sighed, but Maggie didn’t dismiss people that quickly. If Florence had managed to stay in business this long with such a clumsy setup, she must have something to say that felt meaningful to other people. It didn’t have to be a lot of other people, just enough to pay the clearly stabilized rent. Maggie’s job here was to listen closely and figure out what had felt so compelling to poor Jamie Wagner. What did Jamie need that Florence had? Or perhaps, more likely: What did Florence never say that kept Jamie coming back? After all, as Maggie eventually learned in rehab, therapists organize the therapy around what they think the patient can actually accept, not what they perceive to be true. In order to help them, the therapist has to create an environment the patient will not flee. And some people who are very, very hurt will flee at the first sign of a fact. So far Maggie did agree with Florence about one very important value: any conflict could be resolved if everyone wanted it to be resolved. If Frances wanted to solve this custody impasse, she could. But the problem was that she wanted revenge. She wanted to get back at Maggie over and over, day in and day out, for how much time she had wasted trying to get Maggie to really connect, really love. And that was why she wouldn’t work it out now. The custody.
“Great,” Craig said. “Because my wife Maggie here is tormented. She’s depressed, shut down, can’t handle basic life tasks, and is overall out of it.”
Florence reached out and took both their hands.
“You can’t communicate with each other, but you can communicate through me.”
Maggie imagined Frances at the other end of this human chain of contact. If someone had done this with them, it would have helped.
“Maggie, what Craig just said, is it true?”
“No,” Maggie replied. Just as she had said to Dr. Edith Rosenberg, Rosenblatt, whatever, so long ago. “No, Craig is the one who is sick.”
Florence squeezed her hand, like a reminder, a reminder that she did not have to play it that way. She had choices, lots of choices. She had the choice to be a flawed person in the world of others who were in exactly the same boat. She didn’t have to be right and she didn’t have to blame and she didn’t have to punish. She could heal instead.
“Honey.” Craig was playing it to the hilt now. “I’m on your side.” It was like he had been in this game before, somewhere, the games that people play to stay sick when they have a chance to get well. When they’d come all the way to couples counseling and only one person is there to negotiate, ready to give in and also to be given in to, while the other squanders every opportunity for change. “Maggie, your father is sexually invasive,” he said. “I am not blaming you. I am blaming him.”
Craig was good at his job. He had instincts. He wasn’t just a tech wonk; he could smell a wound.
“No,” Maggie said, like it was an obvious and classic case of gaslighting, yet another man trying to silence his wife by claiming that she was crazy. “It’s you, Craig.” Frances. “You are the cause of the problem. It’s your fault.”
Craig threw up his hands to illustrate his helplessness. Yes, Maggie was sure now. He had definitely been here before.
“See, Doc . . .”
“See what, Craig?”
“Can you see, Florence, that I don’t know what to do?”
“Yes.”
Florence closed her eyes. She brought her hands to her lips. She wasn’t exact
ly praying, just waiting.
“Maggie,” she said finally. “What do you wish?”
“I wish that Craig would stop saying anything that upsets me.” That was the truth. It was the truth about Craig, about Frances, about every fucking doctor, cop, and social worker who had been in the way of her not changing her view of herself.
“How can the world leave you alone when you are in it?”
Ahhhhhhh.
“You, Maggie.” Florence had a bland singsong quality. She was not a distraction. “You want Craig to stop thinking those things and feeling those things? You want to change his interior life? Or, do you just want him not to express what he feels and thinks, sees and understands. Do you want him to be controlled by your weaknesses? Or do you want him to be real?”
“He should fix himself,” Maggie said. That was it, wasn’t it? Everyone was blaming Maggie and no one was blaming themselves. But she didn’t do all these bad things on her own. That would be impossible. There was the liquor industry, for one.
“Craig?”
“Huh?” Craig had been Craig and wandered off into his anxiety about what was waiting for him in his email.
“Craig,” Florence said, and then she waited. “It is your job to make Maggie’s wish come true.”
“What?” Craig threw his hands up in disgust. Being a short, rotund fellow made that hand-throwing thing rather animated. “You call this therapy? Making ridiculous demands that aren’t going to help anybody?”
Florence smiled. This is exactly what she wanted from them: a reaction on her terms. “With six months of dream work I can make your wish come true, Maggie. Craig will stop saying things that upset you, and Craig, I can make your wish come true as well. Maggie will stop being upset by the things that you say.”
“Okay.” He got it. “You don’t change what we do, you change how we feel about it, and then we don’t need to do it because it won’t have the same meaning.”
Maggie Terry Page 11
