The Unprofessionals

by Julie Hecht

  Didn’t I know any females I could speak to? The narcissist—I didn’t dare disturb her during the day. She’d be busy with crises connected to sending a cake to her son at boarding school.

  I thought of a plan. I’d prepare people: I’d say, “heroin addict,” “in and out of rehab,” “getting more desperate”—and they’d guess. I wouldn’t have to batter them down with the cruelest words.

  I’D NEVER had a professional assistant. When I first laid eyes on one at her main place of employment—a medical complex, office structure, or bungalow-barracks—she was hanging over a porch rail with a can of soda in her hand. From her appearance I thought that she must be a patient, or a relative waiting for a patient, but because of the proprietary air she had of belonging to the building-bungalow-barracks, it was clear that she had some rights there.

  These rights were hers, I discovered, because she was the assistant for the entire barracks—six different kinds of “medical professional” offices. This most outlandish place is where I’d been referred for psychotherapy.

  I accepted this setup, and continued on at the establishment, in spite of it, for a year of appointments.

  The doctor I saw had mentioned that he had never smoked—that was reason enough for me to sign on there. This was the place to which my friend the boy had referred when he said, “I advise you never to go back there. It’s unprofessional.”

  The same day I saw the manager hanging over the rail with the soda can, I witnessed a more unbelievable display of behavior in the immediate vicinity of the medical bungalow.

  It was a hot day in June, but this place wasn’t far from the water, so a breeze almost blew and kept the heat down in the area, which was surrounded by fields and farms. That was why I went back there—location—weather, fresh air, green grass, wildflower meadows, unobstructed by high buildings and all that went with building life.

  Outside the bungalow office a workman was painting the green trim of the windows. The man was big and hefty. He wore blue jeans, workman style and roomy—lucky for everyone that they were roomy. He wore a tight sleeveless white T-shirt, showing tattoos on his arms. His large midsection and back were partially exposed in the style made famous by Dan Aykroyd on Saturday Night Live, and I thought I spied some tattoo parts on the back area, too, before I looked away. Around his head he wore a yellow bandanna tied over long dark hair and he was smoking a cigarette.

  A short, stocky fellow approached him—I assumed he was the contractor; he was dressed in regular khaki pants and a plaid sport shirt. He gave the worker some instructions and then said in a voice everyone could hear, “Don’t be depressed. I’ll try to get you some money.” Then the stocky, short man entered the building through the medical door. Seeing this was worth the trip there no matter how the appointment might turn out.

  I was waiting outside in the hot air for the doctor because there was no ventilation in the waiting room, which smelled of toxic fumes and was filled with drug-company advertising brochures and the worst magazines known to mankind.

  Some months later, I pointed out the collection of periodicals to the doctor.

  “Yes, well, but how many people would read The New York Review of Books if we had it out here?” he’d said as he straightened out copies of magazines without taking note of the cover lines with the words HOTTER this and that, and even more.

  The short man came out again. He looked at me and said, “Hello!” in a salacious manner. Since my forties were almost completely over, I wasn’t used to the look or voice, and when I got home, I stood in front of a mirror to see what he might have meant. It must have been this: My linen skirt was old and washed thin, and a day like that one was too hot for a slip. Through the thin skirt, once light-green, by then faded almost to white, my two legs were completely visible.

  The next day I went to the one underwear store in the whole town. I bought the thinnest cotton half-slip available and wore it under the skirt, although the two layers of fabric were too hot for the globally warmed-up days. On my next trip to a hot place I stopped near an abandoned farm and, while in the car, took the slip off and used a small scissors from a glove-compartment sewing kit to cut off a section from the knees down.

  When I got into the psychiatrist’s office, he had the window open, since the air-conditioning wasn’t working right, or so he claimed—people use this alibi for all kinds of reasons. Smoke from the cigarette of the worker, who was still painting the windows, was blowing directly into the office.

  “I smell cigarette smoke,” I said to the doctor.

  “No one is smoking in here,” he said.

  I told him about the outside situation. “I’ll go right out and tell him he must stop immediately!” the doctor said. He leapt up from his chair as if he wanted to get outside and breathe some air himself.

  When he returned, I told him what I’d heard spoken between the tattooed one and the stocky one.

  “Well,” he said, and slowly, as if each word had weight and significance: “The…contractor…is…also…a…therapist.” Then he smiled and started to laugh, as if he thought it was one of the funniest things he’d ever heard.

  “You mean he works here—doing both jobs?” I said.

  “Yes, he does,” the doctor said.

  Then I started to laugh. I couldn’t believe I had stumbled into this place of delectable unprofessionalism.

  “See, you don’t know all the things we have going on here,” he said with a mad smile.

  I couldn’t know then that this madness with the psychiatrist would lead to the edge of insanity, or that one day the boy and I would discuss that we’d both been referred to the same sanatorium in Massachusetts.

  “At least we’d have each other to talk to,” I’d said to the boy when we realized we might be in the same place someday, maybe soon.

  “But I’d be in the drug part and you’d be in the psychiatric part,” he’d said. “I was there. I know.” Whenever he said the word “drug” in reference to himself, he said it really quietly.

  “But isn’t fraternizing between the wards permitted?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “The drug part is like a prison. So that’s that,” he said with a sigh. “I advise you not to go.”

  WHEN I thought back to the day of the phone call, I thought I had splashed water on my face, or maybe I hadn’t.

  I remembered that I opened the door and went out to my workroom. The cleaning helper was there. I’d forgotten about her.

  “You know about my friend the recovering heroin addict?” I said to her. “He killed himself.”

  I guess she’d heard this kind of thing before. She didn’t show any surprise. She kept right on working, moving piles of paper around from here to there. “Where?” was always the question after she left, always in a hurry to get to an Italian-named macaroni store on the highway before it closed—she’d said so.

  “This is what they do. This is what happens with a lot of them,” she said as I told her a fact or two. She didn’t look up at me from the stacks of paper. Now he was just one of “them.” He was no longer the person he’d been.

  HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?

  IKNEW THAT I had to stop thinking about him as an eleven-year-old boy, the way he was when I first met him on a hot day in New England. His father had introduced us in his super-speedy way. He was in a rush to a meeting of thirty reproductive surgeons in his living room. I was there to photograph the thirty, and the surgeon dashed upstairs to his room-size closet to change out of his suit jacket. The boy was hanging about idly, having done his easy homework hours before. He stared at me, appearing to take in my whole life story in an instant.

  “You two are going to get along great!” his father had said in a shouting style intended to convey something uncomplimentary. The under-meaning was, You’re both weird in the same way.

  After that, the boy put a leash on his dog and we walked around outside the house discussing which state had the higher rate of Lyme disease, Connecticut o
r Massachusetts. The boy was dressed as if his mother had chosen his clothing, in khaki Bermuda shorts and a polo shirt—luckily for all of us, it was minus the polo player—and he wore Top-Sider moccasins. This was before he cared much about how he looked. His shorts were wrinkled and his polo shirt hung out at a lopsided angle. His thick, wavy Jeff Chandler hair was messed up and standing out in a few directions. I noticed during the evening that his little legs were child-thin and shaped like his mother’s legs, although a slight chubbiness was threatening his midsection and making his polo shirt hang in the crooked way.

  When I waved good-bye to him outside in the dark driveway where he’d stood nonstop lecturing on the history of the kinds of cars his parents owned then, and all the years before, I noticed his little knobby knees below the bottom of his shorts. The messed-up hair, the slightly buck teeth, the deadpan expression, the shirt askew over the baggy shorts, and the thin, delicate legs with the round knees—seeing this was the beginning of my attachment to him and his sad and lonely place in his family and the world.

  NEXT, I’D seen him at a most awkward event in his life, a religious celebration he’d been forced to have for his thirteenth birthday. This embarrassed him, since his plan was to join the conservative Christian Republican world. When he told me this plan at a later age—sixteen—I said, “The religious ceremony of your birthday celebration was videotaped.”

  “No one has it but us,” he said.

  “The FBI could have a copy,” I said.

  “How? How could they?” he asked. “No agents were present,” he said. But he sounded worried.

  He wore a little white tuxedo, again conjured up by his mother, and he was sitting at a table with a bunch of thirteen-year-old kids, all staring straight ahead without smiling or speaking.

  At the end of the night’s toned-down festivities, the boy was pressed into several family-picture-taking episodes by a professional photographer. During this part of the event, my husband and I were taking our leave. I looked back at the boy, who had on his pre-existential expression of good-natured cooperation mixed with the beginnings of the disdain to come, and I waved and smiled in a moment of empathy. To my surprise he smiled back. The smile had a second of happiness in it, meaning, “Isn’t this ridiculous?” or, “It’s almost over.” He did look a little like Alfred E. Neuman, and he didn’t mind.

  I HAD to learn to see him as a college boy/heroin addict. I had missed this whole stage of his development.

  “I saw him decline,” his cousin told me. “It was like a serious, fatal illness. It wasn’t a surprise. I watched it for four years. He looked like a Holocaust victim. He never ate food. He had black circles under his eyes. The drug therapist told us afterwards that he’d used drugs every single day the last year of his life.”

  I KNEW no spiritual counselors. Or any counselors. I knew no one to talk to at all, now that the boy was gone from the world.

  I looked at the valerian tincture and I looked at the Xanax, both in a basket of vitamins on the kitchen table. I’d never taken a pill for daytime problems, but this would be a good time to start.

  I thought of asking someone for an opinion, but whoever I asked would probably say, “There’s no pill for this.”

  I CALLED a medical professor who was a friend of the boy’s father and whole family. He sounded glad when he answered the phone, because the last time we’d met was at a fun-filled event.

  The surgeon’s friend hadn’t an inkling of what he was about to hear.

  I practiced the technique I’d been preparing.

  “Did you know he was a heroin addict?” I said.

  “No,” he said.

  Then I told the story, and as I did, I heard his voice getting ready for the end. The silence, the pause, the yes. By the time I got there, he already knew.

  When he called back later, he said, “They’re cloistered at home. They don’t want to see or talk to anyone.”

  MEDICATION AND work were all I had for the day—maybe the rest of my life. I might end up like Jacqueline Kennedy’s cousin, the younger Edie Beale—if I was lucky. I’d visited her abandoned garden many times, before and after its restoration. In both conditions it was twenty times the size of ours, and filled with flowers, trees, shrubs, old walls, fences, and vines. I would end up even worse without this kind of a garden for solace and peace.

  ON THAT afternoon, the day after the boy ended his life, the hardware-store manager called to inform me that there were no two-line cordless phones in the whole town. They love to give this kind of information. Because if there were such a phone, they might be asked to go to the stockroom and find one.

  In the midst of this situation, the UPS man arrived with a box from J&R Music World. I didn’t remember having ordered anything. I tore open the box with pruning shears. Inside was a two-line cordless phone, a silver phone the boy had advised me to order the week before. “Get the GigaRing,” he said. “It’s the best one if you can’t spend six hundred dollars on a really good one.”

  There it was. I opened the box and looked at the phone. I touched it. You little jerk, I thought about my friend the boy, now we can’t even criticize the phone together—I was alone with the grotesque object. I wanted to know how he could have talked me into buying this phone at the same time he was planning his suicide.

  I threw it, box and all, onto the washing machine in the laundry room. Then I turned around and leaned on the dryer and cried in a new way I didn’t want anyone to hear. It would be too much of a burden to anyone, even the birds I heard chirping outside. The sound of opening a window or turning a doorknob could scare them away.

  The expensive high-tech silver stand-up receiver—I’d never knowingly order such a thing. It was one of his delusions of grandeur to recommend the phone. And on top of that, it wasn’t all silver, it was part black and he knew that I wanted nothing black in my sight, but he tried to train me out of the phobia for the purposes of technology. The phone had the special name, and phones with names were things he knew about.

  I hoped I wouldn’t be getting any mail from him when I saw he could still reach me with a phone. The purpose of this phone was to enable me to do many things out of normal phone range while talking to him as long as he wanted.

  I looked around. I didn’t even have a cat, I remembered. A cat could be there annoying us and getting in the way. A dog would be more understanding. That’s what Andrew Weil had written about dogs, and I believed everything he said, except the part about garlic—that if you eat it all the time it doesn’t cause a garlic odor.

  THE WEEKEND was a time of hot, humid nothingness.

  “What’s wrong?” my husband asked a few times. I’d already told him the news, which he was able to forget right away.

  I reminded him: “My close friend committed suicide. I’m thinking about him.”

  I had to learn that men were a kind of nonhuman species; they were like beings from outer space who needed a form of simple communication. I’d seen this in science fiction movies—earthlings trying to talk to robots and beings from other planets. When I tried it out, it worked and kept down the expectations. Men weren’t like actual human beings, and I’d proceed accordingly. I hadn’t read the Men Are from Mars book, but I understood the principle behind it.

  Anyone who called got the story. Soon I was tired of it—“heroin,” “rehab,” the last phone calls. People didn’t like the story and soon I stopped bothering them with it. I could tell that some people thought it was bad manners for me to tell them.

  The narcissist was a special case. I left a message for her the first night. “Something really bad has happened with the boy.”

  She called back right away. On other occasions she might take a week or a month to return a call—calling only when she was in the mood to talk about recipes or shampoo. I had a two-minute tolerance in my brain for these subjects.

  She owned an art gallery near San Francisco where she showed paintings depicting accidents and disasters. She’d guessed the ending
from my message and wanted to talk about it all night. Like most of my friends, she took antianxiety medication, and the talking had to take place before the medicine kicked in. The time-zone difference made it even more difficult for us.

  All of my friends had this in common—we’d never taken any psychomedication until we were forty-four or-five. We did it as a last resort, pressured by doctors. The whole psychiatric profession was probably sick and tired of hearing problems and just wanted everyone to take pills and shut up. My more well mannered friends would say, “The Klonopin,” “Ambien,” “Xanax,” or even two of the three, “kicked in. I can’t think straight,” or, “I have to go to sleep before it wears off.”

  A psychiatrist had warned me about this a couple of years before. “If you keep doing one more thing, you’ll miss the opportune moment for sleep,” he’d said. He knew I had that compulsion to do more and more things at night, things like laundry and recycling, and he said that he had the same compulsion.

  “I guess your analysis was a failure,” I said.

  “A partial failure,” he’d agreed. “One continues to struggle,” he said, one of his favorite ways of excusing his faults.

  I disregarded his advice and always kept doing the one more thing. I hadn’t really slept since 1983.

  He’d told me the advice specifically about Ambien, but the one time I tried that drug the sleep it produced wasn’t real sleep.

  I’d read a description of the topic in an early story by Marcel Proust:

  “The feebleness one experiences several minutes before sleep induced by a bromide. Suddenly perceiving nothing, no dream, no sensation, between his last thought and this one…‘What? I haven’t slept yet?’ But then seeing it was broad daylight, he realized that for over six hours he had been possessed by bromidic sleep.”