The Unprofessionals

by Julie Hecht

  THE NEXT afternoon I called him. It was still his birthday weekend. He answered in a way described as “high as a kite.” His voice scared me.

  “How ARE you?” he called into the cell phone in a wild way, as if we hadn’t spoken in ten years.

  “Where are you?” I said.

  “I’m at the Jersey shore, on the boardwalk. It’s a beautiful day! I’m walking near the water, the air is fresh, the sun is out.”

  Since he’d never talked about the weather or the day with any enthusiasm, I understood it to mean he’d gotten some drug.

  “What happened last night? I was awaiting your review,” I said.

  “I fell asleep. I didn’t see the end,” he said.

  “Did you take your Neurontin today?” I asked.

  “Not yet. Why?”

  “You sound manic,” I said.

  “You’re the first person I’ve spoken to all day! That’s the reason. I’m starved for conversation.”

  “Maybe you should take the Neurontin,” I said.

  “It’s back at the house. I’ll call you when I get there,” he said, and hung up.

  I CALLED him a few hours later. He still had the speedy tone in his voice.

  “Have you taken your medicine yet?” I asked.

  “It’s downstairs,” he said.

  “Maybe you should go get it,” I said.

  “I will when we hang up.”

  During the weekend, I tried to talk to him and finish any of the conversations we’d started. Whenever he answered the phone at the house, he said he was upstairs and that he’d go to the phone downstairs, or he was downstairs and would go upstairs. I took this to be true, because we had agreed how much we hated being on stationary phones, trapped in one spot, unable to do many things at the same time.

  But whenever he got to either phone, something interrupted. He said he’d call back.

  Once he had a free minute and asked with camaraderie: “Have you taken your first Neurontin yet?”

  “No, I’m waiting until Monday in case there’s a side effect and I have to call a doctor.”

  “There are no side effects,” he said. “I’m taking mine now.”

  “It’s a big pill,” I said.

  “It’s easy to take,” he said with encouragement. “It goes down easily.” I heard him swallow something. “It’s coated. You should take it.”

  “Now I’m taking gigantic calcium tablets that I’ve choked on several times.”

  “You should break them in half,” he said like an aficionado.

  “Then when you swallow it, the broken part cuts your throat,” I said.

  “I’ve never encountered a problem with big pills,” he said.

  That was all we talked about. I still didn’t know that recovering addicts love to talk drug talk.

  THE BIRTHDAY

  THE DAY OF his birthday, I never reached him.

  I left a message on his cell phone. As I said the sentence, I felt that I was a fool and my message was like one of a foolish, naïve aunt.

  “You don’t dress or look like an aunt,” he’d said when we’d walked around Beacon Hill and I’d first expressed this aunt fear. “You won’t be suspected of that,” he added.

  “I hope you’re okay and that you had a happy birthday” was what I said into the phone for him to play back when he turned it on, even though I knew that both these wishes were impossible to come true.

  When I didn’t hear from him I imagined him listening to his cell phone answering-machine feature. I could see my sentence mixed in with messages from drug dealers. Maybe he’d get a laugh of irony when he heard it.

  WHEN HE answered the phone, the weekend was over. He sounded fine. “Where are you?” I asked.

  “Back in L.A. Why?” he said casually.

  “I didn’t hear from you. I was worried.” I tried to sound equally casual.

  “What do you mean ‘worried’?” he asked with suspicion.

  “Well, two days went by,” I said.

  “Oh well, we went to Philadelphia.”

  “What did you do on your birthday?” I asked.

  “That was my birthday. Going to Philadelphia and walking around with my cousin.”

  I pictured them walking the hot, sunny, narrow city streets on a day in June. Anytime I saw people on the TV news in a city, especially in warm weather, I felt really sorry for them. I remembered myself in New York City in the hot, humid past.

  The boy said he’d call back when he had more time. When that happened, he was all up again.

  “We walked around the old part of Philadelphia,” he said. “We saw the oldest street in America. It’s all brick, with all these old brick houses. Elspeth Alley. You would have loved it!”

  “Is it like Washington Mews?”

  “Older, brickier, and more of it.”

  “Like Louisburg Square?” I said. I’d told him about that square when he was still in high school, and tried to get him to walk over there when we were in Boston one night. But he said he was too cold, dressed in a gray Chesterfield coat as if on the way to a private club from the 1950s.

  “No, smaller-scale and less rich looking,” he said.

  I wanted to hear the longer description, but he had to hang up.

  “You would have loved it” was one of the only personal sentences the boy had ever said to me.

  He couldn’t even call people by their first names. He carefully avoided saying my name for the first ten years I knew him. Whenever he said his cousin’s name he sounded embarrassed, but sometimes he had no choice. When I brought this to his attention, he said, “I never use names.”

  “How come?” I asked.

  He thought for a few seconds. “Too sentimental,” he said.

  “How do you communicate whom you’re speaking to?” I said.

  “I manage to get around it. Usually I succeed without resorting to saying the name.”

  Before we met, he didn’t know about anything old. His parents lived in a modern house, now called contemporary, the kind of house they show on the HGTV channel, big houses in Arizona and California referred to as “homes” by the announcers. Couples were always buying “homes” on this program. “When they first saw it, the home was in disrepair” was a common theme of the “Restore America” part of the show. Couples would buy wrecked old houses and do them over, making them look worse in a new way. One woman said that she was looking for “pieces that addressed the theme of something like country charm.” It was best to turn off the sound and just look at the houses.

  The boy’s family lived in one of the kinds of modern houses shown on HGTV even when they lived in Massachusetts, surrounded by big old homes. Anything they needed for their house had to be designed by an architect, even a lamp. A small cabinet took years to design and build.

  He had no respect for antiques. On one occasion when we went into an antiques store on Beacon Hill where I wanted to look at a striped velvet bench we saw in the window, the only thing he liked about it was the high price.

  I thought the sentence, with the word “loved,” was a turn for the better. But when I looked back on the tone of voice, I wasn’t sure what it meant.

  THE TWO THINGS

  THE NEXT TIME he called, I said I couldn’t talk long but that I’d call back in two hours. Whenever I called after making this kind of plan, his phone would be turned off.

  “Just tell me two things that make life worthwhile,” he said before agreeing to postpone the talk.

  “If it’s going to be that discussion again, we have to talk later tonight,” I said.

  “See! You can’t name two things,” he said.

  “Of course I can.” I named the same old two things—work and love. Then I said I had to get dinner together. “My husband is pacing around eating a kind of white bread he likes to buy,” I said. “He’ll eat the whole thing if we get into that subject.”

  During the last year, I’d burned pots of brown rice and vegetables and let spaghetti boil past al dente
while talking to the boy about the meaninglessness of life while my husband circled around the room eating bread.

  SOMEWHERE AMONG these conversations he had started to tell me this story:

  “I saw the doctor in Philadelphia,” he said. “I go in, the receptionist is behind a glass window. She has a Philadelphia accent. I give my name and say, ‘I have an appointment.’ There’s this cheap copy of one of those sailboat paintings where the boat sticks out from the background—but it’s like from a five-and-ten. It’s an unbelievably bad reproduction.”

  Then before he could tell the next part, he had to hang up.

  I was glad to hear the way he’d said his name. It seemed much better than my method of stumbling into doctors’ offices—without remembering to say my name. I knew I’d be asked to repeat the last name and spell it, too, and I was tired of spelling it. I was tired of spelling my name and street address. Sometimes when someone spelled them both wrong, I’d go along with the new spellings just to simplify the process. In addition to this symptom, I didn’t have the energy to chew lettuce in salad—both signs of something serious. I wished I’d changed my name to something really easy before the new uneducated generation grew up to be operators and receptionists. People—receptionists, phone operators, catalog-order takers—used to be able to understand names. Now the only catalog operators who understood names and addresses worked for the Vermont Country Store.

  THE BOY had told me that he’d met the son of an illustrious photographer with the same last name as mine. The son was a college friend of his cousin’s, and they’d met when the boy and his cousin were out walking around New York. The student was walking down the street with his girlfriend.

  “There was something surprising about it I can’t remember—either she was black…or she was fat. I know it was memorable in a surprising way,” he’d said. “But now I can’t remember which way.”

  He was interrupted by his mother, his father, or a call from his dealer on his cell phone.

  DURING THAT week, the next time he answered the phone, he was in a rush.

  “I’m off to the psychiatrist,” he said in a happy way, too happy for the situation. Something was up. But what? I thought in the style of private detectives narrating plots in movies of the 1940s. “I’ll call you later,” he said.

  “Will you really?” I asked. “Do you promise?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  I CALLED the next day.

  “I’m in a meeting,” he said. “I’ll call you later.”

  “Will you really?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I’M WORRIED about that boy,” I said to a narcissist acquaintance when we spoke on the phone on the night the boy said he was in a meeting. “He’s not calling back.”

  “I know,” she said. I heard sympathy in her voice, but she quickly switched subjects to how her skin looked. A lime blossom massage treatment gave her skin a glow. She liked to say this to her friends every day, maybe even several times a day.

  I’d decided that I had a narcissistic personality disorder when I read about it in The New York Times in 1984. In my case this was combined or mixed in with a manic-depressive core. I’d read that Brian Wilson had been diagnosed as a manic-depressive-schizophrenic. I figured my own combination diagnosis probably did exist in psychiatry and was being tossed around by psychiatrists throwing terms together for lack of anything useful to do for patients and humanity in general.

  But this acquaintance of mine was a plain narcissist. My condition was preferable, at least for others to be around, I thought narcissistically. Hers was better for her, keeping her from knowing or caring how her behavior appeared to other people.

  We had one thing in common, which I’d discovered by accident: We both had the fear that we were borderline personalities. I didn’t believe in these titles and had no respect for psychiatrists who used them in place of intelligence or skill, but one night I had overheard a psychiatrist showing off at a nearby table in a restaurant. I knew that psychiatrists like to give behavior a name and then apply to the name some medications they’ve learned from drug companies. He was describing the borderline personality to the civilians at his table.

  The few doctors I knew socially—mainly the boy’s father—didn’t go parading medical terminology around at dinner. He, especially, had more entertaining subjects to talk about, and had people laughing when he said any sentence.

  THE DEMON

  The BOY’S FATHER had performed with this talent the night of the photo-book dinner. After the dinner, we’d all taken a bunch of taxis up to Washington Square. He sat squashed into the front passenger seat next to the Arab driver. The driver looked like the kind of man we see on the news rioting against our country. The boy’s father had already told me that every New Year’s Eve, at an annual dinner of surgeons, he was the one who predicted, “The greatest threat to world peace is extremist Muslim fundamentalism.” But I was the one who always said the cabdrivers in Boston looked like Arab terrorists.

  In the back so-called seat, I sat with my husband and, somehow, also my friend the now less-intoxicated landscape designer, and the boy, who was squeezed in somewhere too. People stand for this in New York—filthy, cramped taxis, all their knees crunched together into the hard back of the front seat. Yes, people love New York. They put up with it without mentioning the goings-on of this kind.

  The cab ride took place before the worst era of turbaned drivers and the increasing evidence of their lowering standards of personal hygiene. But the regime of filthy cabs and drivers had been in place for a while and was in David Letterman’s storage of jokes to use every week. It was before the world event that made everyone pretend to love everything about New York. Our taxi had the odor of cigarette butts and general dirtiness.

  The surgeon said he had to fly off somewhere the next morning to give expert testimony at a malpractice trial. He started telling us about the last case in which he’d been called to give testimony.

  Two doctors had been employed by a new multibillion-dollar fertility clinic. The condition of their employment was this: If they left the clinic before their two-year contract was up, they couldn’t open their own clinic. “They’re okay doctors, but in a year they quit and opened their own clinic,” the surgeon said without surprise. He’d heard of everything.

  A patient decided to sue one of the doctors after an expensive technological attempt at the clinic failed to result in pregnancy. One doctor ratted on the other doctor, and the facts of the ratting were these: The doctor in charge had placed the syringe of live embryos down on a table in order to say a prayer over it.

  “They were some kind of Christian fundamentalists, and they believed that pregnancy couldn’t be successful if the doctor doing the procedure was guilty of certain sins—adultery, stealing, murder, of course, homosexuality—probably being a Jew, too, but they didn’t mention that,” the surgeon said in his deep, knowing voice. His voice had a quality that seemed to show he knew about everything in the world—except that one thing, who Keith Richards was.

  It turned out that one of the two doctors in the new clinic was actually known to be guilty of one of the sins, known around the clinic and the town.

  The defense lawyer stood before the surgeon to question him. The surgeon told us, “The lawyer was a sixty-five-year-old short, fat Christian fundamentalist dressed in a brown suit with a brown vest, a white cowboy hat, and white cowboy boots. He had a head of thick white hair and wore a giant gold cross that hung around his neck, down over the brown vest.

  “The lawyer said, ‘You know, Doctor, about saying the prayer over the syringe of embryos?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t know about any prayer.’ ‘Well, you know that a prayer is always said to keep the demons out of the embryo,’ the lawyer said.

  “‘I never heard of any demons getting into the embryo,’ I said,” the surgeon told us.

  By then we were all laughing in the backseat. Each sentence made us laugh harder. The word “conniptions” was used
for this kind of laughing at one time in the history of the world. By the time he said “demons getting into the embryo,” someone was laughing so hard it sounded like crying. We were all wearing thick, sound-buffering winter coats, scarves, and gloves, so the hysteria was muffled.

  As the surgeon continued in his serious, deep, and low voice, the group laughter reminded me of crying I’d heard before—quiet sobbing at funerals in cemeteries. The boy was silent and smiling—he’d heard the story before and he was watching his father’s telling of it.

  The gist of the case was a question: If the syringe of embryos was placed on a table for the time it took to say the prayer, would that hamper the chances of successful impregnation?

  “The lawyer said, ‘You know that the procedure is to place the syringe down on the table to say the prayer over it to prevent the demons from getting into the embryos?’

  “I said, ‘No, I don’t know about any prayer.’ Then he asked me, ‘Do you believe in demons?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t believe in demons.’ And his next question was ‘Then you don’t believe that demons can get into the embryo?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t believe that.’

  “Then he tells me, ‘Well, we’re in the part of America that knows that there are demons and that they can get into the embryos if the doctor is a committer of adultery or other sins. Did you know that?’

  “He held up a white flip chart with a list of the sins—the ten ways demons could get into the embryo. I said, ‘No, I never heard that.’”

  Then the surgeon was asked whether putting the syringe down on a table could weaken the embryos during the transfer.

  “‘Well, maybe if they put it on a radiator, that would be bad,’ I said. ‘But not if they just put it down on a table for a minute.’