The Unprofessionals

by Julie Hecht

  “I was dismissed,” the surgeon said. “But first the lawyer said to me, ‘Dr. Loquesto, you have a very strange way of thinking.’

  “I said, ‘There are millions of people on the East and West Coasts who think the same way.’ Then I got out of town.”

  The whole time, I was worried about what the driver was thinking. I was always worried about what these Arab drivers were thinking, and time and history have proved that I was right to be worried. Then we were at Washington Square.

  IN CONTRAST to the evening of the demon performance, when I returned home from the borderline-symptoms-description dinner, a few years later, I felt ill from hearing the description and how it might fit in with my life story.

  I immediately drank some peppermint tea. Then the narcissist called to talk about a bamboo-lemongrass massage treatment. I told her my fear of the borderline diagnosis. “I’m afraid I’m one, too,” she said, sounding disturbed by some secret knowledge.

  We exchanged each symptom we knew of and said to each other, “You never do that,” after each one. We tried to convince each other that we weren’t borderline personalities, but because of her narcissism, she couldn’t listen, and because of my narcissistic personality disorder, any bad description would fill up the place of emptiness. Inside the emptiness there was a magnet that attracted anything negative in the air and attached to it.

  THE PHONE MESSAGE

  THERE WAS a message on my answering machine from the boy’s father. He’d left his home phone number for me to call him back. I knew that the man, the world-renowned reproductive surgeon—professor, dean, and expert witness—would never be home on a weekday. It had to be something really serious for him to be away from work.

  Maybe the boy was back in rehab, or this time in the hospital for an overdose—maybe in a coma, maybe in jail. I started to panic as these thoughts came speeding together while I pushed the buttons of the phone number. All these calls back and forth with the boy, and I had never figured out the speed dial.

  His mother answered. I could tell from her voice that there was no time for chitchat. “I have a message to call Arnold,” I said.

  She said nothing but called him calmly, saying my name, “on line one.” Whatever it was, she must have been all cried out.

  His father said, “Hello.” Just like that. Hello.

  I said, “I have a message to call you.” I knew I was saying it in a trembly voice.

  But still, this is what his father said, and this is all:

  “He killed himself.” He said it in a shouting style. Not too loud. Lower than his usual shouting.

  I tried to understand the sentence, but I couldn’t. An empty space took over, and it quickly filled with those things the boy liked to discuss—love and pity. Love, pity, horror, and then the usual—disbelief.

  I was using the wall phone in the kitchen. I found that I was bent over, leaning on the counter part of the old wall cabinet. In front of my eyes was a white antique bread box from 1930, but I couldn’t quite see it. If I can’t be outside, I always want to be looking out a window, but I forgot to move over to one. I stood leaned over, facing the bread box filled with vitamin bottles.

  Into the silence I heard his father say my name with a question mark, as if he thought I’d fainted, or even died.

  HE WAS another one who avoided addressing people by their first names, and when referring to anyone in the third person, including women, he used only last names, as a form of disrespect for all human beings, especially female ones. But on the day of this news, when I couldn’t speak, he said my name again, this time with an urgent medical sound. The only feelings I’d ever heard in his voice before this were impatience and anger.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Are you there?” he said.

  Was I there? Not exactly. I was nowhere, vanished, dissolved, completely gone from the human form I’d previously inhabited.

  “I have to call you back,” I said. “I can’t talk right now.”

  “Why not?” he said matter-of-factly.

  “Because I can’t believe it,” I said. I started to cry as I said the sentence. The crying didn’t sound as if it would go with talking.

  “But it’s true,” he said.

  “It was an accident,” I said. By then I was crying hard enough to have embarrassed my friend the boy. But as I pictured him and heard the words “it’s true,” I cried harder. I cared about him even more, along with all the sentences I’d heard him say since he was eleven, and the sadness of his whole life. With that came the thought of how he must have felt during the last weeks of his life.

  I thought I had defended myself against this kind of crying after my mother died and then my father. And, before that, President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Elvis Presley. That was it. I’d used it up. I was dead myself—inside, anyway. I was the walking dead.

  The boy’s father continued saying words to me in a coldhearted style he’d learned in medical school and then practiced throughout his career.

  “It wasn’t an accident,” he said. “He bought a rope.”

  He named the method of suicide. “It was premeditated. He was a heroin addict. He loved heroin. He couldn’t give it up. He knew I’d get the credit card bill with the cash withdrawals soon. He’d have to go back to rehab. He’d rather be dead. Now he is.”

  Now he is, I tried thinking. “He didn’t mean to do it,” I said in between crying and speaking. “He loved life.”

  “He didn’t love life!” his father said, ready to argue. “He loved heroin.”

  “He was entertained by life,” I said in a state of remembering what that meant. “He was interested in everything,” I tried to say. “He couldn’t end his life.”

  “He did end it. We went out to dinner. He was in a good mood. He told stories. We came home and he went upstairs. I went up ten minutes later and I found him.”

  Every word he said was a blow. Not just to me but a triple blow, as I pictured it, to him and the boy’s mother, too. Especially her. No, both of them. The scene, the calling of 911. Every word made me cry harder. Then I couldn’t stand hearing the crying. The sound of it shocked me and spread the heartbreak around and out into the room.

  I felt sorry for the boy’s father, having to listen. But underneath the cruel seconds of the moments, I was realizing that he liked listening to it. He didn’t interrupt. He took it in. He needed it. He was a man who needed women to cry in his place, like designated drivers or proxy voters. There must be men who need women around for expressions of all the feelings they can’t manage for themselves. It was like one of those book titles—Men Who Can’t Cry and the Women Who Cry for Them.

  “I tried to resuscitate him,” he said in his matter-of-fact way.

  “Did you call 911?” I asked in my pitiful state of seeing the scene and trying not to see it at the same time. I had somehow moved into the living room, where I leaned on the back of an old armchair slipcovered with faded pink flowers on a spilled-tea-colored background. The chair seemed too beautiful to be used this way. I was looking through the French doors out to the trees and the empty sky as I asked my pathetic questions.

  When the design of the roses was printed on the fabric, I couldn’t help thinking, when these particular flowers were chosen long ago in England—when the designers assembled to choose this rose and this green for the leaves—when discussions took place over this shade of pink or that—did anyone imagine their faded old roses would end up on a chair here in the USA, where the drug laws are such that a precocious boy would become a drug addict, buy heroin in the street, give up on his life, and buy a rope and kill himself in his parents’ house in Beverly Hills, and that one of his remaining friends, a hollowed-out person without a soul, would lean on the rose-covered chair and look out the window and cry?

  Only the loveliest plans must have been envisioned for the flower-printed linen on the curved arm of the beautiful old chair. But probably the British know all the terrible things in life that can happen on
their rose-covered chairs and they take them in stride.

  “I CALLED 911,” his father said. “I tried to save him myself. It was too late. He was gone.”

  I couldn’t get the word “rope” out of my mind, or into it, either. I thought of the Alfred Hitchcock movie Rope, a creepy and least-favorite one I could never watch through to the end.

  “It was an accident,” I had to say again. I was pleading, I was begging. “He meant to be found,” I begged.

  “Maybe,” his father said. He sounded tired. Tired and sad.

  “He was unique,” I said, remembering the ways in which he was. Then I felt the beginning of giving up. “He was out of this world,” I said most pathetically.

  “That, he was. All those things. But now he’s gone.”

  “How could this happen?” I said as I tried out believing the facts.

  “He thought the world was a terrible place,” his father said.

  “It is,” I said. “But he was always working on a way to avoid the most terrible part.”

  “Well, he found a way now,” his father said in that low, deep style he had.

  During this conversation I was understanding the meaning of the word “brokenhearted.” Because when you cry that hard, you can feel the sensation of the heart physically splitting apart and breaking into pieces inside the chest. There must be a medical explanation of how that works, I thought. It must take its toll on the organ. I made a mental note to look it up if it didn’t kill me right then.

  In my brain I heard the sentence “He thought the world was a horrible place”—it was what Teresa Wright says about her uncle Charlie, Joseph Cotten, the strangler, at the end of the movie, when she tries to explain his criminal behavior to herself and to the detective she’s fallen in love with—and he with her, as the boy liked to say. “He thought the world was a horrible place. He couldn’t have been very happy ever, he didn’t trust people, he hated them, he hated the whole world,” she says.

  “The whole world’s hell, what does it matter what happens in it?” he says to her.

  Those who find the world a horrible place—some must kill others, some themselves. But the boy hadn’t watched the end of the movie that night. The drug had knocked him out and put him to sleep.

  And what bad manners, I thought in my narcissistic-personality mode, to promise to call back, to confide, to listen and advise, and then to do this. He took me to the brink with him, then he jumped off. How rude.

  ETIQUETTE COURSE

  IHAD RECOMMENDED he take an etiquette course to help him feel confident and act smooth with the aristocratic class with whom he wished to socialize when he got to college and found out about the Upper East Side. “Sounds like a good idea,” he said. He didn’t know what etiquette was before I explained. Once, at dinner in his parents’ home, he’d reached all the way across the table to get a basket of bread. He didn’t know about not reaching.

  “You’ll feel more confident and your social path will be more streamlined,” I told him. I didn’t mention the bread incident, a minuscule one in the background of his generally all-spooky behavior.

  If that hadn’t worked, at least he would have learned some better manners and prepared for this last act in a more considerate way.

  I had a copy of Letitia Baldrige’s Complete Guide to the New Manners for the ’90s, but I didn’t remember any advice on suicide planning.

  After a few minutes of this conversation with the boy’s father, the same conversation over and over in different versions, we were finished with all the ways we could say the same things. He took advantage of the break to say something else, on the next part of the subject.

  I wasn’t thinking ahead of the moments we were in, because we seemed unreal and outside life and time, like cutout paper-doll people pasted onto a page. In addition to other disorders, I had the obsessive-compulsive disorder. I could have stayed stuck for an hour on that pasted page.

  But there was the next thing: “We’re not having a funeral for him,” his father said.

  The word “funeral”—I couldn’t think of this word in association with the boy. “For him” had an additional cruel sound. I was glad to hear the word “funeral” quickly undone by the word “not” before it was uttered. I was getting more shocks from this new line of thought and all I could say was “Oh,” as I kept crying. I asked no questions. I wanted no answers. Don’t have a funeral—good—because that will keep it in the realm of unhappening, was my reasoning.

  The boy had recently mentioned the word to me in an unfeeling and chatty way.

  “Did you hear about my grandmother?” he’d said.

  I said I knew she’d been in what’s called failing health for some time. “I haven’t heard anything lately,” I said. “Is it the worst?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Except it’s really for the best at this stage.”

  He used to describe her attempts to settle a family dispute over an inherited lamp. “Every night after dinner she says to the sixty-year-old nephew, ‘Now, Edward, about the lamp.’”

  “It’s too bad people can’t live a long time in good health and then wear out and fade away in peace the way they do in Okinawa and some other islands,” I said as I thought of his grandmother.

  “Yes,” he said. “But our comical monkey bodies dictate otherwise.”

  I was admiring his sentence, so I laughed with an extra bonus of appreciation for his talent.

  HE’D MASTERED a combination—coldness and weariness, resulting from heroin use. He mentioned going to the funeral as if he were going out to buy a new cell phone.

  His grandmother knew enough to be worried about him when he was twelve. She said he was like a fifty-year-old man the way he walked aimlessly through the room with his hands in his pockets while jingling the change around inside the pockets. She smiled, but behind the smile, or above it, in the area of the eyes, she was worried, and she said the boy’s grandfather didn’t think being precocious was a completely good thing. The grandfather was known for his wisdom, but by the time I met him, he was sitting and playing solitaire at the kitchen table while eating fruit salad.

  “I was reading the evening paper,” the boy had said to me when he was twelve. I told this to his grandmother and she laughed, but not wholeheartedly. Good that she wasn’t around for the last activities he’d gotten into.

  “WHO’S THERE with you?” I asked the boy’s father.

  “No one. Just us,” he said.

  “Just you two?” I tried to see them alone together in their large house with this having happened.

  “Yes. Some people were here, but they left.”

  “What will you do now? Are your relatives coming?” I said.

  “I don’t know yet. We have to go to Philadelphia.”

  I asked why. I didn’t know what I was asking.

  And then he said in his dark, low voice, “I have to bury him.”

  Another part of the subject I wasn’t following. There was no future for me in the conversation if it was going to go this way.

  “I can’t talk about this,” I said.

  “Why not? We have to face it.”

  “I’m not good at facing things,” I said.

  “Well, okay, we’ll talk to you later. I’ll call you.”

  “Is there any way I can be of help?” I asked, with that etiquette book in the background, but I didn’t know what I meant.

  “Not now,” he said. “There’s nothing left to do.”

  AFTER THE PHONE MESSAGE

  SHOULD I TAKE a Xanax? Should I drink thirty drops of valerian in an ounce of warm water? Should I take half of a Klonopin? Should I eat a peach? They weren’t in season yet, at least the organically grown white ones, and regular peaches were on Dr. Andrew Weil’s list of the dirty dozen most pesticide-sprayed fruits.

  I’ll have to stop crying at some point, so I should stop now, I thought. Because outside, in my workroom, I had no assistant to come and organize papers. My former assistants used to come and do every
thing wrong, partly on purpose and partly unconsciously, in the style of passive-aggressive experts.

  The assistants would stay in the workroom, mixing things up, misfiling papers, writing with cheap mechanical pencils they’d ordered by the boxload so that their spindly writing in the light, thin pencil lead would be illegible. They’d put cards in the Rolodex without phone numbers, or write phone numbers without addresses, write names of people without the names of their businesses, or businesses without the names of anyone who worked there. Or one of their favorite techniques was to take contact sheets and negatives and pile them together under catalogs from Office Max, phone books, and sheets of bubble wrap, old copies of Vegetarian Times, and requests for money from Doctors Without Borders. It was all the same to them.

  The papers never moved off the desk. The clock never got a new battery. It was always one o’clock during the years they worked there.

  I SHOULD wash my face, splash water on it without looking in the mirror. I expected the face would look like one of those inflatable red rubber pancakes used for physical therapy, exercise, or swim therapy. I’d been told by a facialist hundreds of times that Paul Newman put his whole face into a bowl of ice water when he got up in the morning.

  I had only this one day to get organized without an assistant’s help, or hindrance, because I had only four days to pack up and leave for the summer. I had to go on a work project for Look at the Moon—photographs of the sky and other natural wonders visible only on that island. And I’d be staying in the rented house where the boy had first called me the summer before to say he wasn’t a drug addict.

  Any friends of mine who’d met him were all at pressure-filled jobs and it would be bad manners to call them with this news.

  At an antique-folk-art show on a New York pier in the 1980s I saw a wooden man-statue once used outside a men’s haberdashery store in 1920. The man was an idea of a man, not a real man—the blue suit, the tie, the white shirt, the decent face many men had before our society became filled with the thugs and goons David Letterman mentioned while speaking to Letitia Baldrige the time she appeared on his show in order to promote her book. The men I knew were like that wooden man.