“She’s ready for you,” Alexandra said.
Judith, her yellow hair folded atop her head like a crown or a rope of bread, her mouth slashed with her signature cakey red lipstick, waved a hand to invite Dorothy in. As Dorothy rose, Alexandra made a show of holding the door, which was already open. Dorothy interpreted this action of door-holding, which a stranger would have described, if they noticed it at all, as desultory politeness, as Alexandra’s way of drawing attention to the door itself, i.e., to herself, i.e., to Alexandra, because Alexandra’s research was about doors. Specifically, the function of doors in the Victorian novel. In actuality, Alexandra probably held the door in order to remain a few extra seconds in Judith’s vicinity, to absorb the full glory of her anointing, or perhaps the courtesy of holding the door was an unconscious apology, an attempt to make up for having received Judith’s blessing, which Alexandra would have understood without being told was an act of aggression against Dorothy. But at the time Dorothy had felt that Alexandra, rather than holding back the door, was in fact pointing to it, forcing Dorothy to reckon with its power. Behold, scholarship! Cross ye the threshold of marketable, field-defining monographs!
Since she had first known Alexandra to be a student (soon-to-be teacher) of doors, Dorothy had assumed that she had some theory about the meaning of doors. But a few weeks after the Distinction incident, at a colloquium where Alexandra was presenting the same article Judith had been praising, Dorothy realized that Alexandra was really interested in—doors. Who made them. Out of what kind of wood. Popular designs; the door vs. the folding screen. And so forth.
There had been unusually high attendance at that meeting, either because Alexandra was a rising star in the department or because people wanted to impress Judith with their attendance; Dorothy still recalled Judith nodding and smiling serenely as Alexandra expounded on the subject of—doors. Not what they were about—just that they were. The fact of them. Their bare existence. Whether or not a doorknob was mentioned in relation to the door. Whether a door was pushed or pulled open. Which authors mentioned doors and which took the existence of doors for granted, passing over them in silence, and thus revealing something deeper and more nefarious than those who took the trouble to include them in the inventory of a room. What, Alexandra asked her fellow students in a teacherly tone, are the politics of doors? What power relations do they indicate?
Alexandra, it had to be admitted, was exceptionally beautiful that evening. She blossomed under the scrutiny of the room, like one of those plants that flowers when you talk to it. When she spilled her wine, by flinging an arm out to gesture at the door of the seminar room, not one drop splashed on her shirt, which was silk, and patterned with tiny clocks. It made Dorothy think of Baudelaire and his clock without hands, on which he had written: It is later than you think.
“Take this door,” Alexandra had said, as a master’s student hopped up to mop the spill with a napkin. “We use the door every time we come into and leave this room, and we never think about it. But it has a history, and that’s what my project is about: rescuing history.”
Everything that happened happened in history, so when you rescued history, what did you do with it? Did you put it somewhere else? Where could time be safe from its own ravages? At the end of the meeting Judith held up a plastic cup and offered a toast to Alexandra, who responded with, to Dorothy’s consternation, a blush. A blush was the kind of thing you couldn’t possibly fake. It was an involuntary rushing of blood to the surface, and yet this blush was so perfectly calibrated to win Judith’s affection and to defuse the jealousy of her peers that Dorothy could not help but lean over and whisper to her friend Micah that Alexandra must have taught herself to blush, the way actors can cry, on command. Careful not to look at Dorothy and die laughing, Micah wrote “Work it, girl” across the top of Alexandra’s draft; then he took out his pencil and erased it; he did all this without ever taking his eyes off Alexandra or moving his head. Later that year Micah was sexually harassed by the director of graduate studies and left the program. After a brief stint teaching at a private high school, he sold a television pilot about the sex lives of some minor Victorian poets. Last Dorothy had heard, he was living in Silver Lake. The three of them represented the three potential paths of the graduate student: the one who wins, the one who leaves, and the one who does whatever it was Dorothy was doing.
I expect nothing less, I expect nothing less. She read Judith’s tweet over and over but never would its expectations extend to her. Dorothy had matured since that colloquium. She no longer wondered if Alexandra had taught herself to blush; rather, she was no longer offended by it. She even found it in herself to admire how Alexandra had found a way to use the system to her advantage, to make a place for herself in the decadent twilight of the profession. Was it Alexandra’s fault that she was so finely fitted to the times, so capable of punctually executing the necessary tasks? When Dorothy thought about doors now, she saw that there was plenty to say about their power to include or exclude, their interest as a threshold, the way they could connect insides to outsides and insides to other insides. Without doors there would be no corner offices. There would be nothing special about hopping in through a window, or out of one. But windows were another subject altogether. Windows had to do with transparency, landscape, point of view. Doors had to do with opacity, listening behind, peering through. And of course it mattered how hard they were shut, and on whom.
But Alexandra had never had a door shut in her face, and now she was publishing a book, and would ascend with her iron grasp to the next rung and the next, while Dorothy sat in the waiting room, not working, not writing, bleeding for now the seventh day, wondering if the broker could smell her blood, or only smell her failure.
* * *
—
The door opened and the previous patient, a woman who resembled Dorothy in hair and dress and posture, slunk out, pushing her head forward like a beacon or signal that would arrive in the future half a moment before the rest of her body. Dorothy stood up to take her place, but the therapist, who seemed to materialize from the doorway itself, held up a finger, said, “One minute,” and closed the door again. Dorothy sat down. She looked at the ceiling. She looked at the lock screen of her phone. Bonnard’s young woman was still hunched over, writing, or maybe she was banging her head against the table.
The door opened again. “Come in,” the therapist said, wrapping herself in a huge gray shawl. This therapist always wore this shawl. She was always very cold. It was probably because she was so small—just a wisp of a person, really. She had the full, airbrushed cheeks and the sleepy yet disturbingly penetrating gaze of an eighteenth-century portrait, but if you were to hang her over the mantelpiece in oils, you would want her posed with a hoop in hand or sitting on a pony, like a child. That’s how small she was. Her low stature made Dorothy feel affectionate and protective toward her and also like the therapist was another species of female, compact and contained, who in some critical sense could not understand anything about Dorothy’s problems, which were ungainly, spilling and shedding everywhere.
Like Dorothy, the second therapist had a PhD. Dorothy appreciated the way the therapist wore her knowledge casually, like one of those loose, shapeless dresses that made some women look elegant and free and others, Dorothy among them, appear vagabond or orphaned. There was even some elegance to how the therapist listened while Dorothy complained about Alexandra—head slightly cocked, legs folded like a crane’s. Even more while Dorothy apologized for using their time to talk about Alexandra. The therapist seemed suspended in attention. It was almost as if the therapist were sitting for a portrait, posing for an artist painting the subject of Listening, or perhaps Listening Child.
“I know I’m supposed to talk about my other therapist with you,” Dorothy said. That was the whole point of the second therapist: to talk about why she had sought out a second therapist. “But this just happened.”
/> The second therapist waved a hand—not dismissively or regally, but like she was swatting off whatever guilt was floating around the room before it could become attached to her.
“Since you brought it up,” she said. “What did your other therapist say yesterday?”
This was the part that Dorothy had been dreading. “I had to cancel with her,” she said. “I had a…migraine.” A migraine was plausible. People like Dorothy got migraines. The second therapist looked closely at her. “Interesting symptom” was all she said.
Dorothy nodded. It was hot in the room. Too hot for a shawl.
“I know that you know that you can’t keep this up forever,” the therapist said. Her voice was enticing, like a trap. Then she leaned forward and adjusted the pillow she sat on, shimmying up and gaining an extra half inch in height. “Two therapists,” she said. “Not really recommended. But we’ll get to the bottom of what you’re doing, and then you won’t need to come here anymore.”
It was a sad way to look at the world—that as soon as you understood something, you could be rid of it. Maybe that was what Kafka’s dog meant by freedom.
“But there is something I need to raise,” the therapist said, and catching the startle in Dorothy’s eyes, lifted a hand.
“It’s about me,” she said. “You’re not in trouble.”
The therapist laughed. Dorothy tried to arrange her face. She tried to make the smile that her therapists did, that little pursed smile that signaled neither approval nor disapproval but simply stated the relationship: We are in therapy, was the ultimate meaning of the smile, and I am a therapist. The smile seemed gentle and accommodating but it was actually demented. Only someone who had been trained to suppress their humanity, to never reveal their essential self, could do it well. “My podcast,” Dorothy heard her second therapist say, and then she heard, “production company,” and then, “recording,” and then, “premiere.”
“I’m sorry,” said Dorothy, sludgy in the brain. “Can you say that again?”
For some time, the therapist explained, she had been doing a podcast. On the podcast she talked about the history of psychology and told stories—thoroughly masked and altered, never breaching patient confidentiality—from her years in practice. Dorothy felt like she had just gotten punched in the face. Her therapist had a podcast? How had she not known about this? Did the other patients know? Then more questions: Was she famous? Was she a titan? Did her first therapist listen to the second therapist’s podcast? Or was it an amateur podcast, like the kind Rog’s friends had? Was the therapist a fundamentally unserious joke of a human being, or was she out of Dorothy’s league?
She had come to believe, the therapist was saying, that due to the high cost of individual therapy, she had an ethical duty to serve the public for free.
“Otherwise the profession just becomes helping people who can afford it,” she said, wrapping herself snugly—or was it smugly?—in the shawl, which now, Dorothy saw, might actually be a blanket.
Of course in one sense—the literal one, reality, the material world of the possible—Dorothy could afford therapy. She made the payments; they did not bounce. But in another, deeper and more live sense, the sense of should, of what is advisable or correct, the sense that encompassed her lack of savings and safety net and the ongoing drama of her precarious employment, she definitely could not afford it. Did the therapist not get this about her? Wasn’t this one of the things they were supposed to be dealing with re: the subject of having two therapists? How was she supposed to be helped if she was so hopelessly misrecognized? She nodded to indicate that the therapist could continue talking and before the nod was even complete she regretted it, fearing that it had somehow committed her to the therapist’s false conception of her security, her situation, her life.
Now, the therapist said, the podcast had taken off. The podcast company her agent had paired her with had stipulated that this season consist of recorded sessions with real patients. The market for history, Dorothy thought bitterly, was nothing compared to the market for voyeurism. “Reality” had infiltrated every cultural form.
The word “agent” landed in her ear. Her therapist had an agent.
“You must have questions,” the therapist said. “Ask me anything.”
Dorothy turned her head to look out the window, but there was no window in this office. Where the window should be was an abstract painting, all white lines and splotches of primary color. Dorothy had never been able to decide if she liked this painting or not. She had no idea if it was real art or if it was hotel art. Probably the therapist could afford real art, but she might have hotel art taste. Dorothy resented that the therapist’s painting activated her critical insecurities, not to mention her envy—she had owned many posters but never an actual painting—and she resented that the painting was hung where a window ought to be, so that instead of a hole in the wall granting her the relief/escape of skyline, some sense of life outside the room, she was thrown back in, onto aesthetic questions.
“Do you get paid a lot of money?” Dorothy asked. “For the podcast, I mean.”
“Some,” said her therapist. A pause. “Shall I tell you how much?”
Dorothy admired the therapist’s willingness for candor, but also felt that it was pandering, that the therapist was playing on her financial anxieties in order to distract her from the question they both knew all this was leading to, namely, whether or not the therapist wanted Dorothy to be a guest on the podcast. At the answer—which was, as it could only ever be, “no,”—Dorothy felt a pricking behind the eyeballs. A dopey grin spread helplessly across her face, the clownish tell of embarrassment and rejection. She sat stupidly and silently stumped.
“I’ve recorded most of the episodes already,” said the therapist, proferring what felt like an excuse, and then she pursed her lips in a new way. “Did you want to be on it?” she asked.
“I would have liked to have been asked,” Dorothy said to the wall.
At such candor, Dorothy’s first therapist would have leaned in excitedly, restraining herself from embracing Dorothy and congratulating her on doing the work. Her second therapist stayed perfectly still. Her pause indicated there was something more she wanted to say but wasn’t sure she should, and then she decided to go ahead and say it anyway.
“It’s not that you’re not sympathetic,” she said, “but”—and while she explained something about pathology and privilege and audience and relatability, Dorothy was wondering how many times and with how many other patients the therapist had had this conversation. She was thinking about how much time she, Dorothy, was going to have to waste listening to the podcast, how many hours that she could be reading a book that she would never get back. She felt a burst of anger that they were now going to have to talk about this instead of Dorothy’s real problems. She knew the therapist was just eating this shit up. This was therapy bread and butter, talking about therapy, wallowing in the transference like two fat pigs on a farm.
Dorothy scratched her nose to hide her mouth and stole a glance at the clock. It was later than she thought. It was almost time to go.
“For the record, Dorothy, I find you sympathetic,” the therapist said. “But listeners…”
Dorothy knew that when she told Rog about this, he would be furious. He would think the therapist was being totally inappropriate. He would say Dorothy should never go back. He would say she shouldn’t pay good money to be insulted. But Dorothy wasn’t insulted. She was grateful.
“I get it,” Dorothy said, aware that the therapist always let her have the last word. “I don’t think I’m sympathetic, either.”
* * *
—
No matter how hard she tried to arrive just as class was supposed to begin, Dorothy was always early. There was nowhere for her to kill time; she had access to the shared office, a miserable hovel of random paperbacks, abandoned three-ring bin
ders, and someone’s framed poster of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, a mere two hours a week. Sitting on the bench outside the building made her feel like a loiterer or vagrant. Killing time in the bathroom was an option, but there she risked the forced conviviality of encountering a student at the shared sink, or, god forbid, listening to one of them urinate or worse, or, alternately, knowing that her presence was preventing one of them from urinating or worse. The only thing to do was pass the time in the classroom in such a way that one seemed too loftily engaged in preparation to be interrupted, or to hold oneself so still that one disappeared into the scene, like a hunter in a blind, or a piece of furniture.
The classroom was a modern, largish square that had been furnished by someone who hated wood. The plasticky conjoined desk chairs were organized around the focal point of a whiteboard and eraser (there were never any markers). Dorothy shuffled papers and stared at the highlighted passages without absorbing their meaning while the students rolled in, talking loudly or frantically enjoying a few last minutes with their phones before class began. Today a student named Danielle, a redhead with a greyhound tattooed on the inside of her wrist and a crisp, dismissive style, was presenting on Silvan Tomkins’s concepts of shame-humiliation and contempt-disgust. Dorothy disliked Danielle and was also a little afraid of her. Danielle was always eager to participate, often had her hand in the air before Dorothy had finished speaking, but her contribution to discussion was inevitably deflating. She found most of the readings Dorothy assigned “ridiculous,” a word she said in a tone not of scorn but of exasperated disbelief and pity. Dorothy had met many students who dismissed the assigned work out of insecurity or confusion or insecurity over their own confusion, who hated what they did not understand, but Danielle was different. She was sharp and hostile. She understood the authors’ arguments perfectly well, only she felt sorry for them, to have misspent so much life making them. Danielle was unsparing in her separation of things into categories of useful or useless, and while Dorothy’s whole useless existence, which failed to rise to the glorious level of the uselessness of art, and instead languished in abject futility, was dismissed by Danielle, Dorothy grudgingly admired the surety with which Danielle pursued her passion for utility. Swaggering, superior, confident youth—Dorothy marveled at it. It gave her the feeling she had when she looked at pictures of icebergs. They would melt—they were melting—but oh! They had been glorious in their prime.
The Life of the Mind Page 5