The Escape Artist

by Helen Fremont

  “Where’s Dad?” I asked my mother now.

  “He’s fine. He’s at home.”

  “And Lara?”

  “She left for Burlington this afternoon. She’s going back to medical school.”

  My mother set two cups on the table and poured the tea. “You see, darling,” she said, “last week with Lara, it was very touch-and-go. You know how hard it’s been for us.”

  I nodded and leaned toward her, a flower to the sun.

  Mom cut two micro-slices of lemon and dropped them in our teacups. Lara had intended to return to medical school for the fall semester, Mom said, but last week she suddenly took a turn for the worse. So my parents and Lara’s shrink came up with a plan: they decided that my mother would have to leave the house. “As long as I was there, we knew Lara wouldn’t leave for school,” Mom explained. “So we told her that I was going away.”

  “What do you mean? You told her you were coming to visit me?”

  “Oh no!” Mom said. “She would have been furious! No, she must never know that I’m here!”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “You must promise never to tell her!”

  “Okay, okay,” I said.

  It seemed so bizarre, so crazy, the lengths to which my parents went to keep Lara out of the hospital, and now en route to medical school.

  “And the plan worked,” my mother said proudly. “Dad called me this afternoon and said that she had just left. She’s gone back to school.”

  “So Dad knew you were coming here?”

  “Of course! But he couldn’t tell Lara. Otherwise she wouldn’t have gone back to school. She must never know.”

  This is nuts, I thought. My mother always insisted on secrecy, as if we would all die from the truth. “So where did she think you were going?”

  “We wouldn’t tell her. Just away.”

  My mother left the next morning, once she’d gotten the all-clear signal from my father. Lara had started her third year of medical school.

  * * *

  Dr. Flak asked me to join a new group he was starting that fall. On Tuesday and Thursday evenings, we sat in a circle on hard plastic chairs. The good thing about group therapy was that it was cheap. The bad thing was that it didn’t work. Each of us went up in flames that fall. Terrence had a psychotic break and landed in a mental institution, Edgar wound up in the ICU after a near-fatal car crash on the Mass Pike, and Gwen wrestled with her husband and manic depression. I was fine, I decided, and I spent weeks listening to everyone’s woes, believing that I would win Flak’s love and respect by helping them with their problems.

  But in the quiet of my apartment, I started having completely random bouts of shaking and hyperventilating that brought me to my knees. I didn’t know what to make of them. In the beginning, they always struck when I was alone—usually at home, or sometimes outdoors at night. After the initial few minutes of slam-dunk terror, they felt strangely reassuring to me—at least they signaled to the tyrannical Helen sitting at the switchboard of my mind to back off; I was suffering enough already. In the aftermath of the attack, I didn’t hate myself quite so much; I treated myself gently, with care. I was ready to be a little nicer to myself.

  I kept meaning to bring this up in group, but I could never find the right moment. We spent our evenings talking about Gwen’s husband who had grabbed her (we agreed it was good that she’d told him, “You’re hurting me!”); we questioned Terrence about his plans to marry his girlfriend, and the pros and cons of paying for sex with men. We tried to help Edgar, whom we considered boring but not utterly undatable, and we offered strategies for meeting women.

  None of these seemed like a natural segue to a confession like, “I collapsed on the floor and hyperventilated this afternoon.” So I stayed quiet.

  One night as I was driving home after group, the attack hit like a karate chop from God. I was suddenly doubled over at the wheel, shaking uncontrollably. I managed to pull over to the side of the road. When I finally calmed down, I turned the car around and gingerly drove back to Flak’s office. His little VW Bug was still in its spot in the parking lot. Through the bay windows, I could see that he was running another group, and I decided to wait for him. It would probably go till eight-thirty or so.

  I walked around the block and tried to figure out what was wrong with me. I could not make any sense of my distress. I decided to ask Flak for an individual appointment. I rehearsed what I would say: “Doctor Flak”—I was very respectful—“I’m sorry to disturb you so late, but I just wanted to ask if I could make an appointment with you sometime this week. A private session.” I ran these lines over in my mind, and waited.

  It was almost eight-thirty; I watched the door to Flak’s office open. His patients spilled out like supplicants after communion with heads lowered. One by one, they filed out, climbed into their cars, and drove off. But the parking lot was still pretty full. To my amazement, Flak’s office door remained open, and another seven or eight patients from the waiting room piled into the room for the next group session. I looked at my watch. Flak wouldn’t get out till ten. The guy was practically working around the clock, a real-life Energizer Bunny for mental illness.

  I stood on the sidewalk, trying to make myself go home, but my agitation was too great. I was afraid that if I waited till tomorrow morning to call, I would lose my nerve. So I walked out to the empty soccer field, and practiced my lines. The more I walked, the more anxious I got. “Doctor Flak,” I repeated over and over. “Doctor Flak…” My hopelessness finally knocked me down, and I found myself on my knees, heart racing, unable to catch my breath. The earth was soft, and I felt momentarily comforted by the fact that I was a complete wreck.

  I finally walked back to Flak’s office at ten and stood outside the building. I was too ashamed to go inside and wait in the waiting room. I did not want to be seen by the other patients. I checked my watch. Five after ten. Nothing happened. Ten-ten. Nothing. Was he going to keep them there overnight? What if he literally never stopped working?

  Suddenly the door opened and people came out. They were a livelier group; they chatted with each other as they tramped down the three stairs to the parking lot. I waited for them to sing their good-byes before approaching the door.

  My hands were sweating, and I had trouble turning the knob. Once in the foyer, I heard Flak straightening chairs and turning out lights. Before I reached the hallway, he was right in front of me, and we both jumped back, startled.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you,” I blurted, staring at my feet. “Um, I know it’s late, I was just wondering if I could make an appointment for a private session with you.”

  Having recited my lines, I looked up. Flak was slowly shaking his head. “What’s this about?” he said coolly.

  His reproach threw me off; I didn’t want to get into it now. I didn’t even know what it was.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just that…”

  “Well you need to bring this up in group. Talk about it on Thursday.”

  “But I can’t,” I said. “I can’t talk in group. I mean, it’s like everyone has worse problems than I do. Compared to them, you know, I don’t feel like I have the right—”

  “Whoa,” he said, holding up his hands. “You’re making this larger than life.”

  “I know! I know I am! It’s just—” The words caught in my throat. I felt tears on my face, and I quickly wiped them away with my sleeve. It had never occurred to me that he could just say no like that. After all, I wasn’t asking for free advice. I was asking for an appointment. During normal business hours. He couldn’t even give me that?

  And then, to my horror, I started shaking. The shame and frustration were a brushfire in my chest, rising, heating my face. My lips started quivering, and soon my legs and shoulders were shaking, and I couldn’t stop. “Sorry!” I mumbled, and started to run out the door, but Flak grabbed my wrist.

  “Wait a second,” he said. His tone was completely changed. He sounded warm, caring.
His hand on my wrist sent a shock wave through my arm. I looked up at him now with uncertainty. Tears were pouring down my face, and I wanted to wipe them away, but Flak was trying to hold my hand. Despite my humiliation, I was stunned by his sudden change, as if a light had switched on behind his eyes. He was smiling and looking at me with genuine concern. I stood shaking before him for some time, unable to speak, trying to catch my breath.

  “You’re feeling scared,” he said quietly. “You’re very frightened.”

  And I thought, No, I’m not frightened, I’m frustrated.

  “You’re having what’s called a classic panic attack,” he said.

  The term was new to me. I was pretty sure I felt no panic, but now was not the time to quibble. His eyes gazed into mine, a calm, heroic beam. “It’s all right.” He adjusted his grip on my hand. He cared. He actually cared! I felt slightly dishonest, knowing I didn’t feel the slightest bit of panic or fear—just shame at being so out of control.

  But I let him talk on in his soothing voice, and he was so gentle and kind, and the touch of his hand was so warm, I was reassured, even if his words didn’t exactly make sense.

  “And I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize it was so bad. How long have you been having these?”

  I rolled my eyes. “All along,” I squeaked. It was true—not only did I have them at home, but I’d started having them at moments when I was about to get on the T, or sometimes in the hallway outside court. I was working as a student defender that semester, and I liked my clients who were charged with breaking into houses, beating up their girlfriends, or slashing tires on police cruisers. But I had problems with my heartbeat. Sometimes I would step into the hallway on the thirteenth floor of the Cambridge District Courthouse and stare out the window, at the wild expanse of the city spread like a series of dioramas below me—the Necco factory and the triple-deckers of East Cambridge, the river beyond, and the skyscrapers of Boston. And I thought about soaring over all of those chipped rooftops and rusted handrails, the poured concrete and the nailed porches, how pure the air would be and how soft the landing.

  Then my case would get called and I would return to my life as a baby lawyer, a buttoned-down, briefcase-toting kid playing grown-up.

  “And you’re right,” he continued. “We should set up an individual session. Let’s meet tomorrow, okay?”

  I nodded, unable to take my eyes off my sneakers.

  “Tomorrow, two o’clock?”

  I nodded, but still couldn’t look at him.

  “You going to be okay?”

  I nodded again.

  “Okay, then. I’ll see you tomorrow at two.”

  I flew out the door. When I got around the corner, I fell to my knees by the side of the street, unable to breathe. My heart was pounding as if it would gallop out of my chest and down the street. I curled into a ball, clutched my head to my knees, and waited out the storm.

  Suddenly I heard footsteps behind me. “Helen?” It was Dr. Flak.

  I leaped up and tore down the road as fast as I could. When I reached my car, I fell again, shaking and sobbing, and waited a long time till I felt calm enough to stand. Then I opened the door and slowly drove home.

  What had just happened? What a pathetic ruse to get attention! How wonderful Flak was! What a worthless fuckup I was! My neediness was an oozing wound, and because of my failure to control myself, I had snared the god’s attention. What a manipulative bitch. What dreamy eyes he had! What was wrong with me? Jesus! But how lovely to feel his gaze on me, to feel him hold my hand.

  I fell into bed, but couldn’t sleep. I kept replaying those few moments over and over in my mind. It seemed important, a breakthrough, as they said in the movies. Everything would be all right, I thought. I would place myself in Flak’s hands. He would take care of me. Everything would be fine.

  Flak and I met the next day, and he persuaded me to tell everyone in group about my attacks. I even gave them a demonstration, since it took almost nothing to set me off. I think I scared the shit out of one of Flak’s new recruits, a pretty young Harvard boy whom Flak seemed crazy about. But the whole thing felt fraudulent somehow—a little performance that Flak and I had staged for the others. I was so removed from my own experience I had trouble feeling anything but disgust at the entire charade of my suffering. Group, it seemed, was just another dysfunctional family in which I didn’t know who I was or how I really felt.

  twelve

  The Confusion of Sex

  Years earlier, when I was still in college and things had been good between Lara and me, we never talked about boys or romance or sex, perhaps because the topic was just plain taboo in our family. Besides, I didn’t really know what to make of romance. When I was a junior in college, almost all the women on my rowing team were paired off with one another. Even our pixieish coach lived with another woman. Through the powerful magic of denial, I never realized that these relationships could be sexual in any way. It was as if gay sex were an insoluble solid suspended in the solution of my mind—it was right there in front of me, but I couldn’t absorb it. Sure, my friends cuddled and hugged and wrestled with each other, but I never saw anyone kiss or act in an explicitly sexual way. So it never dawned on me that my friends might be lesbians.

  I only knew that I felt terribly lonely my junior year. Harriet had graduated the summer before and moved back to Minnesota, and Emma was at Berkeley. All my other friends seemed to be involved in passionate friendships that made me feel left out. I had no words for this, just a vague sense of loss.

  I decided to go on exchange to Dartmouth College in the spring of my junior year, and over the summer I met Philip, a tightly muscled, curly-haired guy in the Outward Bound program. We spent ten weeks learning to rock climb, to portage canoes across miles of muddy bogs, and to survive alone in the wilderness for days without food or shelter. Although I was much more drawn to my roommate, Claire, it was Philip who kissed me at the end of the summer.

  A few months later, with grim determination, I decided it was time to lose my virginity. Philip and I succeeded at this task in workmanlike fashion, and we more or less stayed together for two years, portaging our relationship like the bulky canoe of good intentions that it was. I found sex a colossal disappointment. The entire human race—centuries of literature and art—had led me to believe that sex was this thrilling experience of galactic proportions. Instead, the best thing I could say about sex was that it was mercifully quick work. I managed to fake my way through it, which was how I got through much of my life in those days. I didn’t talk about this with any of my friends. I simply decided that romantic love and sex were ridiculously overrated and unimportant to me. I liked Philip well enough; he was a Russian studies major, and he was fascinated by my father, with whom he conversed in Russian when I brought him home for Thanksgiving. I, in turn, was fascinated by Philip’s tales of working on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, and his love of Texas, a place as remote as Siberia to me. Philip and I protected each other from loneliness. But over time we got on each other’s nerves, and I refused to move in with him after college. He went to Germany for the summer and had a fling with a girl, which gave me a legitimate excuse to stop seeing him. I still didn’t know I was queer; I just knew that I didn’t care for Philip nearly as much as I did for my girlfriends.

  I never brought any of this up in group, because the great landmass of my family seemed to block out whatever other problems I might have.

  Fall Semester 1980

  In the evenings that fall, after I’d prepared my cases as a student defender for the next day, I found myself getting into my Plymouth Duster and driving aimlessly through the dark residential streets of Newton and Chestnut Hill. Usually I would stop at a convenience store and pick up a package of chocolate chip cookies, which I would then eat methodically through the western suburbs, while trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I was too depressed to talk to my law school friends; I had to figure this out for myself. Eventually I would
turn over in my mind the magic card that Flak had given me. It had his telephone number, and he had encouraged me to call him anytime I needed to.

  Problem was, that word need. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, I was a strict constructionist of the word. As my father had always told us, all one really “needed” was:

  food and water

  shelter

  clothing, a means to stay warm

  I had yards of everything I could possibly need. I fairly reeked of privilege. So why, in the midst of my riches, did I still hold out my beggar’s bowl for some unidentified “more”? After all, I thought, sizing up my circumstances, I already had a heated apartment, a closet of clothes, a refrigerator of food, a registered car, a right of free speech, a right to bear arms…

  Don’t think it didn’t occur to me.

  Inevitably, thoughts of what I needed led me to consider what I would do with a gun. Every morning in court, I watched the slow shuffle of prisoners in and out like cattle before the auctioneer in the black robe. Evidence: all the pretty guns, assault rifles, sawed-off shotguns, .45s. All the ways to bear arms and bear them poorly. If I had a gun, I would be efficient. I would not fall into that unseemly, bogus bucket of would-be suicides. I would distinguish myself from Lara. No half-assed cutting up my arms or swallowing a bottle of pills. This is how you commit suicide, you dipshit, I would say with my elegantly dead body, a single breathtaking bullet to the skull.

  But I knew I would never get a gun.

  All the guns in court were sealed in clear plastic evidence bags and fondled by cops; I was certainly not going to get my hands on a gun in court. And I would never ask a client for a gun. I had a hard enough time convincing them I was their lawyer. Besides, like most law students, I had an exaggerated sense of professional ethics.

  Buying a gun legally was also out of the question—I had no patience for applying for a license and registration, the sheer bureaucracy of preparing for violence. I could not picture myself walking into a gun store, asking for advice from the sales clerk at the counter, discussing different models, making sure I would get the best quality for the lowest price. All of this was too mundane, too public, too time-consuming. But I also knew I’d be inept at getting a gun on the street—I would get one that malfunctioned; I would get arrested before I could use it; I would not know how to load it properly, or how to release the safety.