Group

by Christie Tate

  Grandma Maggie pointed at the picture and then tapped her wedding ring. “You’re next, kiddo.”

  Alex, who was so comfortable in his skin, made me feel like I could be too. With complete ease, he talked about all the things we would do in the future. A boat trip on the Chicago River with his firm in June. A sprint distance triathlon in July. A trip to visit his sister in Iowa at some point over the summer. A comedy show, a concert, a trip to the zoo. He acted as if we had a future, and I slowly let myself imagine us being a couple for more than a few months.

  “Seriously, what’s the catch?” I asked my group mates and Dr. Rosen.

  “You tell us,” Max said.

  I shook my head. The situation with his parents sounded tricky, but he didn’t come across as secretly hobbled by trauma or afraid of a relationship. His workout schedule bordered on obsessive, but it never depleted him to the point he was too exhausted to hang out or have sex with me. His taste in books struck me as a tad immature, but plenty of people loved Harry Potter—that wasn’t a valid reason to discount someone as wonderful as Alex. I was just afraid.

  One morning, Alex and I stopped at Corner Bakery for breakfast before work. We sat in a booth by the window feeding each other bites of muffin and acting like the kind of couple I would have scorned when I was single or struggling with Jeremy. At one point, I got up to get some napkins, and Alex called my cell phone, buried in my purse right next to him. The voice mail I heard later melted my anxious, defended heart: “Hello, pretty lady in the café. This is your boyfriend calling. He thinks you are quite lovely.” I played it again and again, thinking, It’s going to suck when this falls apart.

  Dr. Rosen became a broken record. “Trust it, Mamaleh. Trust.”

  As the weeks went on, traces of anxiety remained, but my constipation eased, my joy soared. Both groups cheered my weekly check-ins.

  “Stability suits you,” Dr. Rosen said.

  “I hope you’re giving us credit for this relationship,” Max said. “In those other groups, you sucked dirty dick and got dumped for being a shiksa. You’re welcome.”

  Lorne gave me a thumbs-up, and Brad calculated mine and Alex’s combined net worth given our high-paying legal jobs. Grandma Maggie patted my hand, whispering, “I knew it.”

  I beamed and floated. On the July morning that marked my six-month anniversary in the Monday/Thursday group, I announced I was staying. Forever.

  “Oh, goody,” Max said in mock annoyance.

  “You can stay,” Lorne said, “but I’m not dressing up for your wedding. If I can’t come in jeans, I’m not coming.” He winked from across the circle.

  I beamed at them all, my advanced group members. Alex and I had a solid, healthy, sexual relationship, and I gave them most of the credit for that.

  * * *

  “Mom,” I said during a Sunday-afternoon check-in call. “I’ve met someone. He’s great. Really great. We ran a 10K together this weekend.” I danced around my apartment as I told her the news. I’d stepped into the new reality of Christie as a woman who enjoyed her highly hygienic, functional, attentive boyfriend. Christie as a woman worth spending time with and paying attention to. I could leave my dysfunctional past where it belonged: behind me.

  “How wonderful, honey. You sound so happy.”

  * * *

  “Come up for some chili,” Alex said one night. He browned ground beef and emptied canned tomatoes into a small Dutch oven. The smell of cumin wafted through the air. I wrapped my arms around him from behind. He kept stirring.

  “Do you know what the secret ingredient is?” he asked. I shook my head.

  “You really don’t know?” His shoulders slumped, and his face registered confusion bordering on hurt.

  Had I forgotten an inside joke about chili? Did Harry Potter love chili? I didn’t want to let him down, but the only thing coming to mind was a tasteless fart joke.

  “Tell me.”

  “Love,” he said. “The secret ingredient is love.”

  I ate two bowls.

  * * *

  “Oh my God,” Lorne said when I bragged in group about the love in Alex’s chili. “He’s so cheesy.”

  I swiveled my chair toward Lorne and kicked the air between us. “Don’t ruin it! It was so sweet.”

  “Cheesy.”

  “You’re just jealous.”

  “Of Alex’s stupid chili?”

  “You had to buy Renee a giant ring from Cartier, and all Alex had to do was serve me chili.”

  “Can you hear yourself?”

  * * *

  One Sunday, Alex and I woke up at five, before the sun glinted across the lake, to ride thirty miles up and down Lake Shore Drive. We wore bike shorts and pounded Gatorade. When we slipped off our bikes for a late breakfast of eggs and English muffins, our backs were stiff, and our gaits were unsteady.

  “Come upstairs,” he said.

  We kissed on his brass bed, our tired bodies heavy from the early morning and the hours of pedaling. He pulled off my shorts. The noonday sun streamed brazenly across his clean white sheets. His skin tasted like salt, and I wanted to gulp. He filled me up. I came and came again.

  This sweet boy-man who cried through Les Mis. Who showed me how brilliant the sunrise over Lake Michigan could be from a bicycle. Who filled his food with love and offered it to me. This man-boy with no sharp edges that could hurt me. My heart and body leaned into him. In my mind, Alex and my new group formed a double helix that wove around my grooved heart.

  “This guy is ‘The One,’ ” Marnie said after she met me and Alex one night for sushi. Clare said the same thing. So did Patrice and Dr. Rosen.

  “I really like him,” I told my groups and my friends. I said it over and over; I shined my teeth with it. I slept deeply.

  In mid-July we attended the wedding of my friend Kathryn, the Rosen-patient who rented me her apartment in Alex’s building. Kathryn married Jacob, a man she’d met in a Rosen-group. Across the room at table four, Dr. Rosen and his wife ate their steak and smiled as patients streamed by to say a shy hello. By the chocolate fountain, I introduced Alex to Dr. Rosen. As they shook hands, I watched Dr. Rosen’s face fill with warmth and welcome. A swell of wholeness flooded my chest. I’d never been so full. Christie, they said. I heard love and claimed it as mine. An insistent joy spun inside me like cotton candy.

  That night, in my darkened bedroom, Alex slipped my white cotton nightgown over my head. It felt like falling and being caught over and over. He leaned back.

  “You’re so beautiful,” he said.

  “I’m so happy,” he said.

  “I love you,” I said, holding his beautiful head in my hands.

  I sat tall in my Monday-morning group, letting the summer sun bathe my arms from the western window. I wore the million-watt smile. “I told him I loved him.”

  “Did he say it back?” Lorne asked.

  “Not in so many words.” Brad and Max shared a quick look across the circle. Grandma Maggie gazed down at her hands. I chased away the fleeting worry by sinking into my body. I remembered our skin against skin. Of course that was love.

  * * *

  In late July, I traveled to St. Petersburg with Patrice and her family for a vacation planned before I started dating Alex. Our apartment off Nevsky Prospekt was infested with mosquitoes that left angry red marks up and down my legs and arms. I ached for Alex at night as I stared at the moon and scratched the welts. During the day, I stole into cyber cafés to check my e-mail. My stomach twisted when there was nothing from Alex after two days, three days, four days. By then, I could hardly eat a full meal I was so distressed. Why wouldn’t he write? Weren’t we attached? Wasn’t it love?

  “He’s gone,” I cried to Patrice outside the Hermitage. She wrapped her arm around my shoulders and told me to enjoy the view: a street performer with a boom box coaxing a chained black bear to dance to Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”

  “I can’t. My stomach hurts.” I bent low to scratch
at a cluster of bites on my ankle. “I hate Russia, its dumb domes, its mosquitoes, its dancing bears.” In Russia, I was cold, nauseated, and so far away. Lonely and forgotten. I scratched until my ankles bled. My blood and skin mingled under my fingernails. Patrice rubbed my back in a circle and offered me a piece of dark chocolate. I closed my eyes and missed group, where I could cry, gnash, and let all the feeling pour of me.

  * * *

  “I had some time to think while you were in Russia.” Alex and I were walking down Dearborn after a 5K race for the Legal Aid Society. My body was spinning in space, somewhere between Russia and Chicago, throbbing through the jet lag that made me feel drunk.

  “The thing is, I know you’re not the one.” He marched down Dearborn without breaking his stride or looking at me.

  No, no, no. I breathed through my nose to smooth out my voice. “What are you talking about?”

  “I just know. You’re not the person I’m supposed to be with.”

  My arms shook in the humid August air. I tasted the postrace banana I’d swallowed four blocks back. Sweat on my neck turned icy cold.

  In the lobby he stopped to check his mail, while I shivered like a stray cat by the elevators. Did he really need to get his Visa bill and the grocery store circular at this moment?

  When the elevator opened, I shuffled in, but he stepped back to wait for the next one.

  * * *

  I brought the shards of all the dishes I broke that night to my Monday-morning group and dumped them in the center of the circle. Pieces of a ceramic Thanksgiving platter I bought at Walgreens, the IKEA glasses, the pale blue fruit bowl from the Tag outlet that I bought with Carlos. I’d shoveled them into a double-ply Macy’s shopping bag, which I hooked on my arm as I walked the mile from my apartment to group. The jagged edge of a dinner plate pierced the bag and tore the skin on my calf as I crossed Chicago Avenue. A stream of blood ran down my leg and into my black ballet flats.

  “He’s gone,” I said to this group that brought Alex into my life. Now I needed them to catch me because I was really falling. “I’m not ‘the one.’ ” Tears fell, soft and incessant. Patrice got out of her chair and pulled me to my feet. She wrapped her arms around me. “I’m so sorry.”

  Dr. Rosen leaned toward me as if he was telling me a secret. “Mamaleh, he just got scared when you left for Russia.”

  No, he was gone for good. That bomb I’d once imagined beneath his smooth skin and beautiful ribs had detonated. I was in pieces.

  “Aren’t y’all disappointed in me? Y’all thought Alex was my person.” I looked at the faces around the circle. Max’s concerned stare. Lorne’s and Brad’s attentive gazes. Grandma Maggie, who was always flashing me her wedding ring and calling me “kiddo,” now shaking her head with pity. Patrice, who was yet again spending her group time consoling me. And of course Dr. Rosen, who still believed in his little Mamaleh, even though she’d broken all of her dishes (again) and carved up her leg on the walk to group.

  “We don’t know that he’s not.”

  Dr. Rosen, eternal optimist or raving lunatic?

  As I walked out of group after the prayer and the hugs, Lorne, Brad, and Max invited me to breakfast with them. “But you can’t bring that insane bag of broken dishes,” Max said, so I left them in the group room. I ate eggs while they drank coffee. We talked shit about Dr. Rosen’s wardrobe, speculated about his marriage to the stylish Mrs. Rosen, who we sometimes saw walking down the hall after our Thursday group. When I stared off into the middle distance, thinking about Alex, his chili, and his brass bed, Lorne snapped his fingers in front of my face. “Come back, Christie! Eat your eggs. Tell us what you think of Dr. Rosen’s wife!”

  At ten o’clock, I rose from the table. “I have a conference call in thirty minutes,” I said, grabbing a napkin in case I cried on the walk to work. All three of them stood up to hug me. Lorne reminded me that Alex was “cheesy as hell.” Max told me to order new dishes for express delivery. Brad, who’d paid for my eggs, offered to walk me to my office across the Loop. He carried my work bag all six blocks and assured me at every stoplight that I would find love again. He stayed by my side even when I openly wept on LaSalle Street.

  At work, there were no group members to distract or comfort me, so I cried without bothering to shut my door. My coworker Raj stopped by several times to see if I was still blubbering. If I was, he shut the door and speculated about the partners’ sex lives until I let a smile break through. I had a small CD player under my desk that played Riverdance on a constant loop. Billable hours passed as I sat listening to the haunting Celtic songs that matched my mood. I pressed the brass tip of a letter opener into the pad of my left index finger. The skin didn’t break, but the prick of pain soothed me. I could break the skin if I needed to.

  I cried through Tuesday group, barely uttering a coherent sentence. On Thursday, I sat directly to the right of Dr. Rosen with my purse in my lap so I could secretly press the top of the letter opener into the pads of my index finger. Of course, hiding was impossible in that fourteen-by-fourteen room. The entire point of group was to be witnessed, to come out of hiding.

  Dr. Rosen extended his right hand to me, palm flat and open. “I want your weapon.” I shook my head. “I want you to give it to me.”

  I surrendered the blade because I didn’t really want to hurt myself. Dr. Rosen took the letter opener and continued to hold my hand. I let him because I wanted him to save me from myself, from my attraction to sharp objects that made me bleed, from men who didn’t love me, from my mental illness, whatever it was. I wanted him to save my heart, which would never be scored deep enough for lasting attachment. I would die like this: paying someone to hold my hand while my life slipped away. The thing that had always been wrong with me felt worse than ever. I couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes, only their shoes. Max’s expensive broughams, Lorne’s scuffed brown Eccos, Grandma Maggie’s thick-soled white shoes, Brad’s gray New Balance tennis shoes, Patrice’s navy flats. It was the only view I could take in.

  “Do not cry alone. Be with your group members, as much as you can,” Dr. Rosen said. My gaze lingered on their shoes.

  “Renee is being induced this weekend. Come to the hospital,” Lorne said.

  “Come over for dinner on Saturday night,” Patrice said. “You can spend the night.”

  “I’ve got tickets to the opera, and William doesn’t want to go,” Grandma Maggie said.

  I cried in the grocery store. I cried at work. On the train. In group. At home. On Marnie’s couch. On Patrice’s couch. On the phone with Marnie, Marty, Patrice, and Rory. I went to the hospital to meet Lorne’s baby boy and cried up and down the maternity ward, frightening the nurses on call. I went to the gynecologist for a checkup and cried when she asked me if I needed contraception. Concerned, Dr. Spring put down her pen and offered a referral to a therapist.

  Every morning I startled awake with a violent stomach cramp. Diarrhea. One morning I didn’t make it to the bathroom and shit in my favorite cornflower-blue cotton pajamas in the middle of the living room. Dr. Rosen promised it wouldn’t last forever—the crying, the shitting. I believed him one second, but not the next. Shame consumed me. Shame that I was coming undone over a five-month relationship. Shame that I was literally losing my shit over a beautiful man I’d slept with twenty-seven times. Shame that after nearly 380 therapy sessions—more than 34,000 minutes of therapy with an Ivy League–educated therapist—my heart was still defective, could not attach.

  27

  “Is your passport up-to-date?” Jack, a middle-aged partner with thick glasses and a friendly chortle, stuck his head in my office, where I was drafting a memo on my beverage-company case. I paused Riverdance and sat up straight. It was August 2005, and my two-year anniversary with Skadden was two days away.

  “Good until 2014.”

  “Do you speak German?”

  “Nyet?”

  “That’s Russian.”

  “Then, no.”

  “Doe
sn’t matter. We’ve got a new matter. The Department of Justice is involved, so we have to move fast. Can you leave Sunday?”

  “For Germany? Absolutely.” This was the best news I’d ever heard. I’d let my career simmer for months while I biked, ran, and ate chili. Jack was a rainmaker—his star protégée was about to make partner. If I impressed him, I could end up on the partner track. A glow in my chest: I’d been chosen. Never mind that years ago I’d called Dr. Rosen with the express purpose of building a life filled with relationships, not billable work.

  “At the partner meeting, we discussed which associates had no commitments—no spouses or children—and your name popped up first.”

  “Excellent.” My face froze in a smile.

  I showed up at Thursday group two days later, smiling for the first time in days.

  “I don’t recognize you without all the tears and sharp objects,” Max said.

  “My firm is sending me to Germany. I’ll be flying there every other week for the next few months. Maybe longer.”

  Everyone nodded, impressed. No doubt they were picturing me scaling stone steps to a stately German high court building during the day and raising a stein in the Hofbräuhaus at night.

  “You’re getting an opportunity to work on your professional life.” Dr. Rosen nodded approvingly. “Now you can stop pretending you’re not interested in making partner and admit that you want success in both work—”

  I covered my ears. “I hate it when you do that.” Professionally, I was successful and would always be successful because I knew how to work my ass off and get shit done. I’d risen to first in my class before I ever stepped foot in Rosen-world. I’d learned to kiss partners’ asses and knew how to treat the support staff like human beings who deserved my respect. I knew how to laugh with colleagues at happy hour and how to hold clients’ hands when the SEC threatened legal action. Personal relationships housed my stack of failures. “Focus on my personal life, buddy. Eyes on the ball.”