The Unprofessionals

by Julie Hecht

  When I was in the Armani dressing room waiting for a shirt to be brought to me from the secret closet of other styles and sizes, I didn’t like looking at my reflection in the mirror—myself without a shirt on, my chest not as flat as in the past, a grown-up-looking bra reminiscent of the foundation garments my mother wore. I reached for my old beige cardigan sweater, the one I’d been wearing at the discount drugstore. I pulled it on without buttoning it and held it together with one hand while I took the apple out of the bag with the other hand.

  The salesperson was taking a long time to find one white shirt and would probably appear with six or eight satin things—blue, gray, and tan. I was never prepared for this moment; after I said white or off-white, they always brought blue and gray. They must not know that color affects the mind. Then I saw myself in the mirror. I was holding the sweater closed with one arm and holding the apple in the other hand. The look was one I’d seen in photographs of European refugees on a roadside after the war, half clothed and eating a scrap of bread given by rescuing soldiers. At the same time, I saw a tinge of slight glamour in the mirror. It startled me, because I’d never wear a V-necked cardigan sweater without a shirt underneath, and it had the look of a pinup girl from 1948.

  IN THE boy’s case, I thought Los Angeles had its own kinds of stores, stores I’d heard mentioned in reruns of the George Burns and Gracie Allen show.

  But I was worried about why he was resting. I pictured him recovering from a drug and gearing up to act like a normal boy.

  “She’ll be calling me any minute,” he said. “I can’t be caught on the phone.”

  “It’s good for you to have friends. They know that.”

  “They’re suspicious of all calls,” he said with resignation.

  “I thought that was in the past,” I said.

  “It is, but they’ll never trust me again. She’s coming upstairs. Yes? Mom? I’m here. I’m ready. It’s on the kitchen table. Okay, I’ll call you later,” he said, and hung up.

  THE POINT OF LIFE

  THE DAYTIME CALLS stopped for a while and then changed into sadder conversations when I called him. To distract him from his problems, I told him about a disagreement I was having with a publisher. He loved to solve problems of commerce and money.

  “I realize no one can be happy!” he said with a deep new misery. “All people are unhappy.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “It just seems that way because you talk to people my age. You have thirty more years of fun ahead,” I said as a lie. I knew that things could boomerang back in the fifties.

  “Like what fun?” he said.

  “Like everything.” I was thinking of a television biography I’d seen about Elvis Presley. A fan, now a grown-up woman who looked older than my age, said that Elvis “like everyone else does, got to be middle-aged, and at that age, worn down by the burdens of the world, he brought a different talent to his performances than the one he’d had as a young person.” As the woman said this, photos were shown of the overweight drug-puffed-up Elvis with his sideburns and white satin jumpsuit, in the 1970s.

  I didn’t tell the boy what I was thinking about. I tried to change the subject. First I said, “I thought it would be amusing for you to hear about a financial dispute, but you have your own serious situation.”

  “I do. They’re insisting I go stay with my cousin in Philadelphia for the weekend. And it’s my birthday on top of everything else. I have nothing to say to him. He’s the one who started this. He told my parents about the drug suspicion. I regret coming out here. I regret telling my parents and family anything! It’s a year of my life wasted.” Then he said, in the saddest voice, “A lost year.”

  “One year now will seem like a week when you look back on it,” I said with false knowledge.

  “I used to think, How can I mine this experience for something?” he said. “But now I see it’s hopeless.”

  “You can. Did you ever read A Mother’s Kisses?” I asked one more time. “He mined a terrible year of life into a great book.”

  “I read a little. But this is worse than that kid’s situation.”

  “Why are you going to Philadelphia?” I asked.

  “For fun. Can you believe that? We’re supposed to have fun together.”

  “It is the city of brotherly love,” I said.

  “Right,” the boy agreed with a new kind of cynicism. Because he used to love his family and to like going places with them. There was the time he went to a restaurant in New York and he’d been given a pieful of leeks.

  “What will I do in Philadelphia? Then we’re going to the family beach house. What will I do there?”

  “What did you do before? You had fun.”

  “That was a different time. And I’m expected to start graduate school soon!”

  “How soon?” I imagined the mess and pressure of his life.

  “August!” he said with dread of a new kind, though I knew it was a dreaded month for many reasons. “I can’t do it! I’m trapped!” he said.

  “You can go to another doctor in Philadelphia. Wasn’t that the plan?”

  “I have an appointment. But I have to see a second one for drugs.”

  “That’s the way it goes,” I said. “You can describe the doctors and their offices to everyone.”

  “I don’t have time for all these appointments!” he said.

  “Join the club,” I said. I thought of my friends in this club. First the psychotherapy, then the couples’ therapy, then the separate psychotherapy for the spouse. Then realizing there was too much of this, too many appointments and too much expense and time—to say nothing of the crew of unprofessionals. Then came giving it all up and having to be whatever you were.

  THE BIRTHDAY WEEKEND

  OVER THE WEEKEND I forgot about the Philadelphia plan. He’d said his parents were going away to a medical conference in Nantucket.

  “Why don’t you go with them?” I’d said. “June is the best month, along with September.”

  “I wasn’t invited,” he said. “It’s all meetings and conferences.”

  I remembered the drug scene I’d read about on the front page of the Nantucket newspaper. It seemed as if people died of heroin overdoses every week. Or there were arrests and drug busts involving a big cache of heroin. I could see him slinking around at night buying some.

  On Saturday night I called him on his cell phone.

  “This is weird,” he said. “I was lying on the bed and the phone was in my jacket pocket, in the closet. I thought it was vibrating, I looked at it, I heard it ring, and it was you.”

  “Where are you?” I said.

  “In Philadelphia. In my cousin’s apartment. It’s a nightmare. I’m their prisoner.”

  “Why are you in bed?” I asked.

  “I’m tired. The hellish nightmare of coast-to-coast plane travel wears me out.”

  “What’s the plan for the evening?” I asked.

  “Oh, they brought in a horrible dinner I couldn’t eat. I said, ‘Let’s go get ice cream!’ So we did that,” he said with strange satisfaction. “But then I wanted some Coke to drink and my cousin said, ‘No more caffeine today.’ I’m treated like a child.”

  But first there was the candy insult. He said his parents had been suspicious when he asked his mother to get more of the green-tea candy she’d bought him. It occurred to me that it was the only form of green tea she’d ever bought. The whole family drank diet soda and ate food of the style of the 1950s.

  “She’s bought me candy my whole life!” he said. He named the candy, all kinds of candy I’d seen around at drugstores during my lifetime. “And now she’s suspicious.

  “Then after the ice cream I bought some chocolate-covered apricots,” he said.

  “Chocolate-covered—dried?” I said.

  “Yes, do you know them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you like them?”

  “Not ‘in conjunction with each other,’ as you would have said when you wer
e eleven.”

  He laughed a weak laugh. “What would I say now?” he asked, as if he were trying to think back kindly of himself as a child.

  “Something more elaborate and exact,” I said.

  “But why is it suspicious—the candy?” he asked.

  “Well—the ice cream, the Coke drinking, the candies, and now the chocolate apricots. No food, all sweets. It adds up,” I said.

  “There’s nothing to eat here! I’m hungry!” he said in a new, belligerent style, as if he’d been cornered by the evidence.

  “You can go out and buy something,” I said.

  “It’s not New York. Everything is closed.”

  “You’re a grown-up. You lived on your own,” I said, still trying to believe the story.

  “I know, I’m an idiot!” he said. “I can’t do anything anymore.”

  “You’re just in difficult circumstances,” I said. “They must have some fruit. And bread.” I still believed him, and that he might be hungry.

  “I ate some peanuts I found in the cabinet. Now I’m thirsty.”

  “Drink some bottled water,” I said.

  “I want a Coke!” he said, sounding like a child. “If they hear me go out, they’ll suspect something.”

  “Ask them to go with you,” I said.

  He tried to laugh. It was more like a smirk I could hear. “I can’t give him the satisfaction…Okay, I’m looking in the kitchen, I see they have bananas.”

  “You could eat a banana. And toast,” I said.

  “Okay, good idea,” he said. “They have bread. Marble rye.”

  “Marble rye!” I said.

  “What’s funny?” he said.

  “It’s the worst bread, a joke bread, always left over in all-night delis. It’s dyed with caramel color to get the dark part.” I’d seen this bread when I’d had to go to these kinds of delis to buy chocolate late at night when I was in college.

  “I’ll make some toast,” he said, as if he’d solved a difficult problem.

  “Then you’ll have what Elvis ate—peanuts, bananas, and bread—his sandwich.”

  “But he fried it! I’m not starting crashing pans around now!” he said in his funniest way. “They’re asleep in the next room.”

  After his dinner of bread and bananas he would call back, he said. “Or you call me on my cell phone. I can’t talk in the kitchen or I might wake them.”

  I WAS thinking that underneath this conversation of mixed phone babysitting and friendship he meant he needed his drugs and couldn’t figure out how to get them in a city where he was unfamiliar with the drug scene. Or he had some with him and couldn’t use them in such close quarters with his cousin and cousin’s wife. A young couple, working diligently in promising careers—one involving Beowulf—and they had this situation in the guest room, I was thinking at the same time.

  He had described the apartment to me: In order to open the door to his bathroom he had to sit on the bed, there was so little room for a person in the room—a former maid’s room. There were no windows to be seen or looked through unless he put his head at the foot of the bed and twisted himself around.

  When I called him back, he seemed to have calmed down. But he said he hadn’t eaten the toast or the banana. He said he’d fallen asleep. He could hear his cousin talking in the other room. The close quarters infuriated him. He had planned to live in a large mansion by the age of twenty-five. Now he was living like a twenty-one-year-old junkie, eating peanuts in a tiny room.

  “I’m trying to find something on television,” he said in a voice of resentment of his state. We had the same channel on, without any sound, and a piece of phony-looking black-and-white film was on as part of something else.

  “I’m in the mood to see an old black-and-white movie,” he said, still in the belligerent voice.

  “What’s that on now?” I asked.

  “I can’t tell, but it’s what put me in the mood,” he said.

  “Let’s see what’s on AMC,” I said. There was no point expecting anything good when it was usually that colorized one with Rock Hudson as a doctor and Jane Wyman in the blind-patient romance part.

  But there was my favorite movie, next to The Stranger—Shadow of a Doubt.

  “We’re lucky,” I said to the boy. “But it’s half over.”

  I saw Teresa Wright walking down the most pleasant American street, in Santa Rosa, 1941, on the way home from church. She was wearing white gloves and a hat with a gingham-and-white dress with a gingham Peter Pan collar. Whenever I watched the movie, I wished I owned the dress. In early childhood, in the fifties, I did own hand-me-down dresses similar to one the younger sister wore in the movie.

  I wished I knew the families who lived in those houses in that town with sidewalks and trees and libraries and policemen on the corners. I was a sucker for all those things. When I first saw Thornton Wilder’s name in the credits for the screenplay I understood why. His contribution must have given the movie the pure and unrealistic feeling of small-town life I knew to be an unattainable fantasy.

  “I can’t go on baking cakes,” says Teresa Wright’s mother, Emma Newton, in the movie when a photographer wants a photo of her mixing ingredients. She’s already finished that stage of the cake, but he wants photos of normal American families doing their normal American things.

  “Who’s the man with that hat men wore?” he asked.

  All the years I’d known him, he’d been fascinated by the 1950s and the brown felt hats that men wore in that decade and the two decades before. He’d seen the hats in movies and I’d seen the real hats during my childhood. But now he seemed too tired and weak to get into the subject. He asked no questions about the hat-wearing era he wished he’d lived in. This time he volunteered no stories about his relatives’ hats, which hats he’d been offered, and which men he’d seen still wearing this kind of hat. “Rabbis,” he once said. “They’re the only ones who still wear them.”

  “That’s the detective sent to investigate Teresa Wright’s favorite uncle, Joseph Cotten,” I said.

  “What did he do, what crime?” he asked.

  “They think he murdered wealthy widows for their inheritances.”

  “Did he do it?” he asked.

  “You should watch the whole thing,” I said. “I watch it at least once a year.”

  “The way some people watch It’s a Wonderful Life,” he said.

  “Better, because it has the reality of evil. The other is too perfect.”

  “But you like that,” he said, trying to get the energy to converse the way he used to.

  “I like the beginnings of the Alfred Hitchcocks—the wholesome American family in the small town—before the bad thing happens. And also The Stranger. I love the part where Loretta Young is hanging up the white organdy curtains when the Nazi war criminal knocks at the door.”

  “I can see why you’d like that,” he said, sounding weaker.

  “Should we watch it?” I said. “Or do you want to watch by yourself?”

  “I’ll do that,” he said.

  “Call me when it’s over and give a review,” I said.

  “I will,” he said. “Why are they in the garage?” he asked wearily.

  “They’re in love. He has to tell her the truth about her uncle, Joseph Cotten.”

  “Okay, I’ll call you after,” he said, and hung up.

  When I didn’t hear from him, I tried to believe he’d fallen asleep right after the movie ended.

  I WATCHED the movie while the memory of the boy’s situation was still pressing into my brain.

  The characters in the movie had ideas similar to his. That was a part of the story I’d forgotten. Teresa Wright, about his age in a beginning scene, in a bad mood and appearing to be suffering from PMS—fortunately unnamed and undiagnosed at that time—is complaining, “People don’t have real conversations. They just talk.”

  But before that scene, down in the big living room, the precocious younger sister says, “When I have a home
of my own it’s going to be full of well-sharpened pencils.” That sounded like him, too, when he showed me around his well-organized room with tidy desk and supplies. Since the computer era had already begun, that many pencils were no longer necessary, but he did have quite a few, in addition to several pens in a special pen-holding jar. He supplied his parents’ desks with pens, pencils, and paper for notes and messages, and he’d even organized this setup on the kitchen counter.

  But soon Joseph Cotten enters and spoils the sunny picture by complaining about the state of the world. It’s only supposed to be 1941 in the movie, but he’s complaining that it’s not the better world of his childhood.

  After he shows his sister an old photograph of their parents, Teresa Wright looks at it and says: “How pretty she was.”

  “Everybody was sweet and pretty then,” he replies in a scary way. “The whole world, it was a wonderful world, not like the world today, not like the world now. It was great to be young then….”

  Next he’s lying down on the bed in the room of the beautiful old American house in the beautiful old small town—they’ve got those white organdy curtains, they have the flower-covered wallpaper, the wide hallways, the space for everything in every room—and he’s looking back, he’s ruminating in the style of the boy. I did this for years, too, until my exercise teacher told me, “Get up. Do something. Do anything.”

  Teresa Wright’s mother is talking about Joseph Cotten—her brother, Teresa’s uncle—what he was like when he was a boy. “He was such a quiet boy, always reading.” After a bicycle accident in childhood where he fractured his skull, he was in a coma. “They wondered if he’d ever be the same,” she explains.

  By the middle of the movie, he’s sounding just like my friend, the boy. “The world’s a foul sty, the world’s a hell. If you ripped the fronts off houses, you’d find swine…”

  How could the boy have missed this movie? Especially because Joseph Cotten had just come from Philadelphia, where he’d been lying in bed in a rooming house, ruminating there, and smoking a cigar.