Awash in Talent

by Jessica Knauss

  After grad school I got a two-year residency at Brown, counseling the students and getting a feel for how crazy people really are on the East Coast. I put up a profile on that dating site because I didn’t know anyone in Providence or within a thousand-mile radius and I hoped to make some kind of connection that would help me navigate my surroundings while also not being too taxing on me. I met a stereotypically greaseball Italian with thoughts so weak I hardly knew he was there psychically, a guy who talked about his yacht the entire night with a nearly identical faulty psyche, and a tall, dark man from Nigeria I really liked but who turned out to be too intense with his thought energy. I couldn’t look him in the eye at all and he took it the wrong way. I also received a disturbing number of pictures from men of all shapes and colors who felt the need to show me what they looked like shirtless. And then I got a message from you.

  Your picture (with shirt) honestly looked a little bit like a terrorist because you hadn’t had a haircut or shave for a while, apparently. But I consented to meet you because you wrote about world events and hadn’t mentioned a yacht at all. We went to a screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey at the IMAX in the mall. The choice made some sense for us both because I like cinematic history, while you assumed I liked science fiction, like you. I waited outside the entrance, peering into the faces and souls of people who only wanted to watch the movie. When I was starting to think you’d chickened out, you, almost unrecognizable after a haircut and beard trim, stopped dead in your tracks, unaware of the bottleneck of sci-fi fans you created in your astonishment at seeing me. I could tell it was you and not some other weirdo because you were amazed that I looked as good or even better than the picture I’d sent you (your thoughts, not mine). I didn’t make any sign that I’d noticed you because I was wondering, as I watched the people clamber around you to get to the ticket line in time, whether you were one more of these vapid dates and I should turn and head back down the escalator. But some force greater than me made me smile at you, which gave you the courage to walk up and hold out your hand.

  Your handshake was average, and anyone who was not a psychic might have been fooled. As the evening went on and you bought yourself a slushy as well as a ticket, then sat in the calibrated geometric center of that slanted sea of seats in the IMAX theatre and started talking on and on about the differences between the book and the movie, the author’s bio and his inspirations, everything about you became increasingly, nerdily extreme. It wasn’t unexpected, but there was something unusual going on with your thoughts. I felt urged to figure it out, so I took a walk with you in the September evening around Waterplace Park. You were undeniably there, unlike the greaseball and the yachter, and yet, unlike the Nigerian, I could look into your eyes and not fall over backward with the intensity.

  What I think happens is your thought energy moves outward like most people’s, and I can read it as it whizzes by. But before it gets intense, the thought energy travels back to you. I don’t know how you do it, but it’s kind of like your thought energy goes around on a wheel, cycling through space and my powers before it cycles back into your head, only to cycle back out again. This is why I can’t get overwhelmed, because your thoughts don’t burrow into me like most other people’s. It’s such a relief. I can finally be in the company of someone and still feel almost like I’m by myself. Outwardly, as I mentioned, you’re histrionic: you talk and talk and sometimes shout or throw things. But I can focus on your repetitively predictable thought cycle and tolerate you better than anyone possibly ever.

  Is toleration a basis for marriage?

  It was the basis for my agreement to see you again for Sunday brunch two weeks later. It had been a week of hard practicum fellowship sessions, with undergrads throwing angst at me almost faster than I could process it, so when your invitation came, I imagined being in the company of another person without feeling put upon, and it sounded ideal. The best of both worlds and the worst of none. You gave me the ability to rest psychically without cutting myself off from the world completely. Then, as our dating saga went on, you weren’t too demanding of my time or too unresponsive. You fell in love quickly, but even that was refreshing after the robots I dated in California.

  I think I may have taken my craving for relief a little too far, overlooking the ways in which you are a little too much to handle, because it can’t all have appeared after the wedding. The seed of your cloying personality must have been present, and I must have unwittingly sowed it with my obstinate need to keep the peace. If there were clues that you would become the least tolerable human being I’d ever met as soon as I finished my fellowship at Brown, I ignored them.

  I try to imagine how I would feel about you if I couldn’t read your mind. It’s almost certain I would never have called you back after our first night together. I’m trying hard, but I can’t think of any particular reason we got married. It’s scary to write these words.

  There was a year left in my fellowship, and we had been dating for the entire school year when I walked by what is now our house on the corner of Cushing and Brook streets and saw a “For Sale” sign.

  I grew up with the impression that the only people who built houses during the Victorian period were the excessively rich. In California, hardly anybody ever gets to make a tourist visit to a home older than fifty years, much less live in one with an epically distant date of construction and historical importance. But on the East Side of Providence, you can’t turn around without bumping into a historical marker, and the Victorian homes are the newer ones. I became obsessed with learning all the architectural movements. Vague hopes of one day being a part of that continuing history sprouted in my mind.

  I had often passed by the house on my way from the fellowship apartment to the counseling center in Rhode Island Hall, and occupied the time while I watched my feet by dreaming of the way I would fix it up and start my own practice right there in that house. It’s a three-story Victorian, and I thought it probably had a basement, so I imagined that there might be a back staircase. I could arrange a cozy study/session room on the third floor so that the incoming clients wouldn’t run into the ones leaving. I would lock the doors to the first and second floors so no clients would ever know about the bedrooms, exercise room, bathrooms, and lavish kitchen below us as we did therapy. It would be a new golden age for that venerable golden house.

  It was all a dream. The fellowship in Providence was temporary, with not all that much money in it, and my mother was expecting me back home. I would have to go back to California and see what opportunities there might be to join a practice, maybe get into marriage counseling or group therapy. Until I saw that “For Sale” sign.

  And this is where I made a bad choice, blinded by real estate. I called you up right there on the street. You were disoriented by my calling at such an unaccustomed hour, but perked right up when I asked if you would like to live with me.

  I didn’t have enough income by myself. I thought I might when I started my own practice. But how could I start a practice without a nice house to do it from? That was my quandary as I perceived it at the time. The “For Sale” sign presented you, with your sizable computer programming income, as my best solution.

  We viewed the yellow Victorian on Cushing and Brook, and it was already pretty close to what I needed. We bought it over the summer. The signature pages swam before my dazzled eyes. As my second fellowship year went on, you let me have all the changes I asked for . . . in exchange for the basement, which you converted it into a garage, and a space on the ground floor where you could work from home with all of your books and three or four computers around you, with a wash room on one side and my lavish kitchen on the other. You demolished a Victorian pantry with glass-door cabinets I found delightful and possibly practical for storing china in order to make space for your twenty-first-century pursuits, but I let you because I was too distracted with finishing my fellowship—all those documents for the university—and getting my penthouse suite counseling center in order.
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br />   The first night we slept in our amazing new-yet-historical house, it was a warm January night and the roof wasn’t quite finished. We lay in the bed and you touched me suggestively while it started to rain. You said, “Will you marry me?” but I became aware of a large plopping on my corner of the mattress.

  I sat up. “It’s water.” You were still in your own little world of one-way marriage proposals, so I said the next quite a bit louder. “The roof is leaking!”

  “What? We’re on the second floor, not the top,” you said, always eager to contradict reality.

  “Okay, so it’s not the roof, it must be the wall. There is water falling on this corner of the mattress!”

  You didn’t notice that this was the first time I’d blatantly lost my temper with you, but I did.

  I got up and turned the lights on, and water was coming, about as fast as it would out of the tap, from the top of the wall, where it fell directly onto the mattress. You saw it, finally, and jumped off the bed. We pulled it as far from the wall as it would go and I said, “Are there any buckets we could use?”

  You ran off, and I was left to ponder your proposal while the rain came down around me. I wanted the house, that much I was sure of. Even leaking, my yellow Victorian was a dream come true. I couldn’t say with so much certainty that I wanted you. You have the attention span of a gnat, and between the phone calls and making sleeping arrangements in another bedroom, there was no more talk of marriage that night.

  But for you, the ice had broken. The proposals came thick and fast, about one a day after that, in every boring life situation that presented itself: washing dishes, watching TV, painting over the newly patched bedroom wall, back in bed with aching muscles. The first time I said no, your eyes lit up. You thought it was a game, and you esteemed yourself up to the challenge. You didn’t know it, but there was no way for you to surprise me with the question. Occasionally, I saw the question popping up in your eyes, but you didn’t ask, playing out fantasies filled with images of the two of us exchanging rings surrounded by flowers and relatives. By the time you asked, I was well steeled. Was your strategy to ask so many times that eventually I would be worn down on some random day and give in? Because that’s how it happened. And we were married that June, surrounded by our relatives and flowers.

  Not every relationship has to be a sweeping epic love story. Or at least I don’t think so. But I’m disappointed in our story, and when my relatives asked when they came for the wedding that summer, I made up something about a coffee shop and stolen glances and waiting for you to make the first move. And the proposal took place in the most expensive restaurant on Federal Hill, with a waiter, a tray, and a crowd of people cheering us on. Much more romantic. I think I got that from a movie. Most of the people who heard this rendition regarded me with unspoken disbelief. Well justified. But then I could launch into the charming details and historical import of our house, and that was all true.

  The house gives me the love I can’t feel for you. I take refuge in it, especially in moments like this.

  On Friday, you were chortling with glee, repeatedly going over your triumph, when you learned that a rival coder had turned in a project you had bid on and lost, and his code was full of bugs. Your repetitions inside your mind weren’t enough to keep the enjoyment afloat. You told me about it again and again, using the same words and laughing at the same junctures. “Okay, I got it,” I said on Sunday morning.

  You snapped up a new idea. “Let’s go to IKEA to get a new table for my study. What better way to celebrate?”

  Even this didn’t save me from the constant recital. On the way to Stoughton, your face went through all the permutations of your story five or six times, accompanied by a low hum, the vestige of the words I had asked you not to repeat anymore. You were more distracted from your driving than if you had been texting. By now, I’m used to a certain degree of neck pain after I’ve been in the car with you. I’ve expressed my desire for a smoother, safer ride in the past, but there again you use your circular thinking. “I don’t have to pay attention to the road. I’ve been on it a thousand times.” You’ve never heard my weary reasoning that the traffic changes every time.

  After your usual fit about the impossibly far parking, we wandered around IKEA the way they want you to, looking at big tables and small tables because you didn’t have a clear idea what you wanted. When you had decided, we had to go back up the hard, sharp stairs to verify its aisle number in the warehouse. You wanted to find the elevator, but I encouraged you to get the exercise, so you were bracing yourself to start when a woman came tumbling from the second floor to the middle landing. She looked at me in bewilderment, so I registered her concern for all the small purchases that escaped her oversized mesh bag and the sudden, god-awful pain that shot up through her leg once the shock to her bottom had begun to subside.

  “Call the medics!” I cried, knowing from my internship at the hospital in California that that kind of pain was probably a break. You stood by with an odd smile on your face that I ignored until after the staff EMT came to help the lady down the rest of the stairs, sat her in a little alcove near the children’s play area, and revealed her leg to be multiple shades of purple. I felt her simultaneous horror and disassociation in the deepest possible way. Then I noticed your smile because that’s when you could no longer suppress your laughter.

  It echoed off the hard surfaces, small at first, but growing in uncontrolled gaiety, a reverberating cackle, until I felt myself to be in the heart of Bedlam. I clapped my hand over your mouth and led you away from the scene while you mouthed, “I’m sorry. It’s just so amusing.”

  You suffer from schadenfreude, plain and simple. Of course, this is caused by insecurity, and we all do it a little bit. But yours has become intolerable because I can’t see through the cruelty to any good you may once have inside you to counteract it.

  6.

  My new theory about Emily is that her thought energy is somehow cloaked. All that static is like a scratchy grey wool cape. I’m deeply convinced she could throw it off at any moment. But of course I don’t know how anyone would cloak their thoughts or whether she knows she’s doing it.

  Today was going to be just another unsuccessful foray into Emily’s mind. She walked in with louder static than ever and I had to force myself not to wince the entire time. But, God knows why, she was holding a notebook out separately from her backpack and it all came together in my mind.

  “Do you like to write?” I asked. It sounded a little too much like an adult asking a child about their futile playtime activities. I’m not sure where it came from, but everything’s hanging in this balance right now.

  “I guess it’s okay,” she said, looking at me at an angle so that her cloaked thought energy took on a higher pitch, as if she were pulling on it like a rubber band.

  “Maybe it would help us in our sessions if you took some time outside of here to write about why you came to Providence and how you feel about your parents and Beth coming, too . . .” I wanted to ask about the TA she’d kidnapped, but that might have been too on point for the way these sessions have been going. “Since you don’t like to talk, maybe writing would help you be completely honest with yourself.”

  She tilted her head and squinted, but looked at me straight on, perhaps considering the offer. The frustration, oh the frustration, of not being sure that was what she was doing. I may tell you I’m a psychic to share the burden of this frustration.

  “Dr. Blundt, really? Completely honest? You would read it and judge me, and probably give it to others who’ll read it and make even worse judgments.”

  “Of course I wouldn’t. All of this is confidential.”

  She shook her head vigorously. “You’ve never been in love, so how can any of what I would write make sense to you?”

  I didn’t know what she was talking about. She had never mentioned love before. She’d hardly mentioned anything, so that was no real surprise. But I was caught up in how much what she said
hurt me. It must be true, but I’ve never put it into words. I’ve never been in love. I felt my whole life with you speed away from me, growing smaller in the distance.

  And she kept going. “How can you possibly discern whether I’m telling my truth when your frame of reference lacks the true love that is the defining motive of my whole life?”

  “You can explain it to me . . .” I pleaded.

  What knowledge can I expect from someone with as many problems as Emily? The possibility that at my age I’ve never really loved anyone, ever, beyond family members—and that someone as young as Emily might have experienced more and better than I have—gave me a sensation of plummeting into the kind of darkness no warmth can reach.

  For unknown reasons, Emily has thrown me a bone. She said, “Okay, I’ll write it all down.” Whatever “it” is. “Then at least someone will have the real story.”

  That distracted me from my despair. I was so thrilled to hear that I was finally going to make some progress with Emily that I told her to take whatever time she needed and I wouldn’t expect to see her for our second appointment this week, unwittingly putting myself in more suspense. So much hope wrapped into one document. Must stay positive. Courts and insurance, take notice: a diagnosis is coming your way!

  7.

  In the September following our wedding, you wanted, or needed, to add to our income by teaching programming. You came to me, excited but regretful that you’d been hired for a night class. I didn’t see what the problem was until one of your thoughts went by, containing yourself alone in the car, driving at night. Not only would the once-weekly class start at six and end at nine, but it was also located north of Boston, which meant an hour and a half more time driving, when you wouldn’t be with me.

  “This is a wonderful opportunity,” I said. “Maybe I’ll use the time to take on some later clients.”