Group

by Christie Tate

  After every date with Brandon, I left data-filled messages on Dr. Rosen’s voice mail (“we had dinner with his college roommate” or “I slept at his house Friday, Saturday, and Sunday!”). I wasn’t committing the cardinal sin of going it alone. I still called Rory every night to tell her what I ate.

  * * *

  Brandon and I sat side by side at his custom-made oak table, eating steel-cut oatmeal on a Thursday morning. He was in his monogrammed robe, and I was dressed for work. We’d been dating over three months and had a comfortable rapport on weekday mornings. The New York Times was filleted on the table, and we each had a section: Business for him, front page for me.

  “I have to get going,” I said, folding up the paper. “Conference call with a client in an hour.”

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  “Eight thirty.”

  He turned back to his paper. “My appointment’s not until ten.”

  I assumed he was referring to a patient. When I leaned down to kiss him good-bye, he said, “I’m meeting with Dietrich—” He waited a beat, then: “my shrink.”

  “Your what?”

  He laughed, grabbing his stomach right where his robe was tied around his waist.

  “My shrink.”

  He continued to laugh. I suddenly saw Brandon not as eccentric or inexperienced and brainy, but calculating and cruel. I took a deep breath and shifted my bag from the right shoulder to the left.

  “How long have you been seeing him?” He pretended to count on his fingers, still chuckling to himself. “Brandon. How long?”

  “He’s an analyst, actually.”

  “How long?”

  “It’s not group. I don’t know how you do that—sitting around, listening to other people’s problems—” He was chuckling and folding the paper with studied precision. “The group thing would never work for me.” He followed me to the door. “Why are you so mad?” He talked to my back as I fumed toward the elevator.

  “You’re making fun of me.” I stabbed the down button. Brandon followed me with a contrite look on his face.

  The elevator dinged.

  I stepped inside.

  As the doors shut, I heard, “Nine years.”

  I’d thought Brandon was a good person—quirky and a little repressed, but fundamentally good. The mixture of his smile, soft-spokenness, and impeccable manners left me with the impression that he was a gentle soul who, like me, was finding his way. Despite his wealth and privilege, he treated everyone with a quiet respect. He tipped well. When I told him I loved King Lear, he got tickets to see a production at the Goodman. Even when I learned about his weirdo bedroom habits, they didn’t seem like latent sociopathy. He was just socially awkward, like Justice Souter or Bill Gates. Or me.

  But this was too much. He’d asked too much of me—to stop discussing him in therapy—without even telling me that he had a therapist. Not okay. If I could survive the other guys, the ones who made my body zing to life, I would survive him too. I fantasized about calling him later to say, “Have a nice life. Enjoy your penthouse and your money.”

  But I didn’t think I was allowed to let go. That was literally the word in my head: allowed. I’d been bellowing about relationships for years. I’d invested thousands of dollars in therapy. I’d joined J-fucking-Date even though I was named after Jesus Christ. I’d recently been involved with a married man. Therefore, I wasn’t allowed to walk away from Brandon. He was single, solvent, and mostly kind. As the cab roared down Wacker and made a whiplash-inducing turn right in front of my office, I knew I wouldn’t break up with him. The urge to flee was overpowered by my need to prove I was willing to do the hard work I was sure intimate relationships required. I’d learned to hold anger, to face it head-on. I’d had too much therapy to simply cut and run. But now I faced a true dilemma: Should I tell my group what just happened?

  I had four and a half hours to decide.

  * * *

  “Nine years?” Max said. Technically, I didn’t break my promise to Brandon because I’d said, “The man I slept with last night told me he’s been seeing a therapist for nine years.”

  “Yes, almost a decade. Asshole.”

  Dr. Rosen held up his hand. “Can we slow down?”

  I pointed at Dr. Rosen. “He’s known about you for months. You should have seen him laughing at me. And his secrets—”

  “It’s not a secret. He told you about it.” Dr. Rosen spoke in his calming voice, which only made me angrier.

  “Don’t you want more for me?”

  Dr. Rosen raised his eyebrows. “What do you mean, more?”

  “He cut me off from the group and didn’t tell me about his own therapy. This relationship is another dead end. My specialty.”

  Dr. Rosen wore his thinking face and stared at me. He rubbed his chin and started to speak a few times. Finally he offered his sage wisdom: “I don’t know.”

  But I didn’t pay him eight hundred forty dollars every month to not know. I paid him to use his fancy degrees to transform my life by teaching me relationship skills so I could use them in healthy relationships. I asked if it was time to break up.

  “Why would you break up with him?” Dr. Rosen looked as if I’d announced a plan to steal Brandon’s silver.

  “He lied by omission for weeks. I’m going to end up right back where I started. For all I know, he has a wife and kids in Peoria.”

  “That’s impossible,” Dr. Rosen said.

  “Why?”

  “Because Peoria sucks,” Lorne said.

  Dr. Rosen leaned toward me theatrically as if he was going to tell me a secret. “Pssst. Confidential to Christie. This is the best relationship you’ve ever had.”

  I wanted to knock his half-bald noggin off his scrawny neck. This was my best? “Fuck you, Dr. Rosen.”

  “It’s true,” Patrice said. Grandma Maggie nodded along.

  “Reed would never have kept his therapy a secret from me.”

  “He lied to you plenty,” Brad said.

  “Fine. But Alex—we did sunrise bike rides and had sex twenty—”

  Max let out an exasperated sigh. “He didn’t love you, remember? Remember the letter opener and that sack of broken dishes.” Everyone jumped in with reasons Brandon was my best so far. Dr. Rosen broke into a self-satisfied grin. I quit arguing. I’d sacrificed the jolt in my belly I had with Reed and Alex so I could have a so-called real relationship with an available man. But that available man had some deep-seated issues that scared me.

  “You’re sexually attracted to the prospect of being abandoned,” Dr. Rosen said.

  I wanted to argue with him, but how could I? In every previous relationship, at least half of the attraction was the inherent dare to overcome the obstacles—the Intern’s religion, Reed’s wife, Alex’s ambivalence about me.

  “Brandon’s not going anywhere,” Dr. Rosen said. In the silence that followed, I swear I heard him say, “Neither are you.”

  Brandon showed up at my office with a please forgive me smile that night. “It’s hard for me to get close to people,” he said. All my breakup bravado slipped away. Instead of saying, “This isn’t working for me,” I said, “What should we do for dinner?” Later that night, when he flipped me, I detected urgency in his thrusts, and I imagined that he’d been afraid of losing me. It bothered me that we never talked about our sex life—the flipping, the weird silence we slipped into once we were being intimate. I drifted off with a single question in my mind: Could I honestly make a family with this man? Was this better than being alone?

  34

  I tested Brandon. Would I have done it if I’d been free to talk about him in group? Probably not. I wanted to know if he thought he could love me. If he saw a future with me. If he cared about me as much as he cared about those hospital corners on his bed. It felt easier to test him than to come right out and ask him directly.

  The first test: when John, a tall, introverted corporate attorney from work, asked me out to dinner, I said yes. All
I knew about John was that he liked golf, didn’t own a TV, and had a long-winded way of telling a story. I said yes to John because a date with another guy was just the thing to force a so where’s this going? conversation with Brandon.

  When I told Brandon about dinner with John, he didn’t even look up from the newspaper. “Sounds fun,” he said. The next day, I canceled on John.

  One night, Brandon and I ate prosciutto sandwiches and black olives on a ledge overlooking North Avenue Beach after the sun went down. He put his arm around me as we stared at Lake Michigan quietly lapping the sand. He kissed me in the shadow of the trees by the chess pavilion, and I imagined something deep stirring in me. Not the zing or thrill of lust. Something more substantial. Was this how functional adults fell in love? When he pulled away, he stared at me. “You may not know this, but I usually spend the winters in London,” he said. He reached for my hand. “This year, I want to stay here. To see where this goes.”

  Later, when we had sex, he didn’t flip me.

  On a Monday night a few weeks later, Brandon called from the sidewalk in front of my condo. Did I want to go for a walk? Outside, Brandon was typing something on his phone with a distressed look on his face. He started walking without saying a word, and I followed and waited for him to speak. He stopped abruptly at LaSalle Street. A bus whisked by.

  “I want to tell you something, but you can’t tell anyone. Including Dr. Rosen. This is just between us.”

  I stared at the red letters that spelled out Sports Authority. Now I was being tested. Why was he asking this of me? Worse, why would I agree?

  In five years, I’d never shifted my allegiance from Dr. Rosen to one of my boyfriends. Would cutting my dependence on Dr. Rosen help me move forward? Maybe it was necessary to draw a circle around something and keep Dr. Rosen out. But should I really put my mental health in the hands of a guy who gazed more lovingly at his thousand-thread-count sheets than at me? Would saying yes score my heart? Or would saying no?

  Yes. In the time it took for a light to turn green, I officially jettisoned my treatment so I could sequester Brandon’s deepest secret inside me and let it wedge me apart from Dr. Rosen, who was legally obligated to keep any secret I told him.

  Brandon admitted: “I don’t have a libido.”

  I burst out laughing. A real Rosen laugh where I grabbed my belly and folded forward. One, because I already knew that. Two, because who cared if Dr. Rosen knew about his libido? No one expected Brandon to fuck like Mick Jagger circa 1975. Relief coursed through me, and I felt warm and powerful. We could work through this.

  He shook his head. “It might not ever change.”

  “What does Dietrich say?”

  “That I have intimacy issues.” Huh.

  “Anything else?”

  “Not really.”

  Lights from the two-story McDonald’s lit the sidewalk ahead of us. The traffic on Clark Street jammed up by Portillo’s drive-thru. Libido was not a deal breaker. If we stayed together and worked on this—him with Dietrich and me with, well, I had just promised to do it alone—then who knew where we could end up? I wasn’t giving up over his big “revelation.”

  “I should want to tear your clothes off, but I don’t.” He touched my arm and said he’d never felt like that about anyone, ever. His eyes told the story of his self-torture. I knew that story. My whole life I lived in a story that there was something deeply broken in me. I’d searched for years to find solutions to my own troubles. I’d battled who I was supposed to be as a girl, a dancer, a Texan, a student, and a girlfriend, and that battle led me to the toilet for years. Like me, Brandon had always exceled at academics and then rose through the ranks in medicine. But his personal life—how he felt about himself, how he coped with the early loss of his father, and how he interacted with other people, especially women—had been neglected for years. How could I turn my back on Brandon when he was finding his way through the same thicket I was? He requested emotional safety, and I loved him enough to try it his way. At least for a while.

  When I showed up for group the next day, I was skittish as a squirrel. I felt an urge to cross my legs every ten minutes. Fragments of my conversation with Brandon swam in my head, but I said nothing. In ninety minutes, I barely said a word.

  Two days later, the same thing happened in Thursday group. Lorne asked what was going on with Dr. Flipper, and Patrice asked if I was okay. When I refused to give any meaningful answers, everyone left me alone until right before group ended, when Max asked if I thought the secret-keeping thing was working. Patrice said she was wondering the same thing.

  Dr. Rosen started to say something and then stopped. “What?” I asked. I’d left him a message explaining that I’d agreed to keep a secret for Brandon, but I gave no details.

  “Can I say something about the message you left?” Dr. Rosen said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “I won’t tell your secret, but—”

  “Secret?” Lorne asked.

  “Christie,” Max said, drawing out both syllables in a low voice. “What are you up to?”

  Dr. Rosen assured me that I didn’t have to tell Brandon’s secret, but he wanted to be sure I understood how secrets work. “When you agree to keep someone’s secret, you hold their shame.” I already knew this was Dr. Rosen’s philosophy. What I didn’t understand was why it was such a bad thing to help my boyfriend work through his shame? Would it kill me to hold it for him while we sorted out our relationship? Weren’t relationships all about making compromises so you didn’t die alone next to a tin full of baby ashes?

  The group’s appetite for revelation surged. They tried to guess the secret: Embezzling? Bankruptcy? Secret wife? Gambling? Check-kiting? Pedophilic impulses? The very group of strangers Brandon entrusted me to protect his secret from now suspected him of possible money laundering and child molestation. I looked at Dr. Rosen and begged him to make them shut up, but he shook his head and insisted they were helping me carry the shame.

  “They’re showing you the price you’re paying.”

  I looked at the faces in the circle. The levity from moments before had vanished. How I longed to tell them what Brandon had told me. I could tell his secret, and Max would laugh and say something about the myth of the sexually insatiable male. Lorne would say something snarky about the flipping. Patrice would rub my arm and coo soothingly, and Grandma Maggie would point at her wedding band. Brad would work in a question about Brandon’s financial portfolio. I loved my group more than I loved Brandon, but I couldn’t take them all home with me at night. They couldn’t be my date for the next law school reunion. They couldn’t hold my hand at night or start a family with me. They couldn’t keep me from dying alone.

  Dr. Rosen asked me what I was feeling. My voice broke as I said it.

  “Lonely.”

  35

  The Monday before Thanksgiving, I sat through group quietly while everyone discussed the complications of their Thanksgiving plans: Max was in trouble with his wife for not ordering the right kind of bread crumbs for the stuffing. Patrice’s daughters were in town, but spending too much time with their father. Grandma Maggie’s stepson from Arizona violated her house rules by smoking pot in the basement. Dr. Rosen listened and offered feedback to each of them. Several times he looked at me, but I kept my face impassive.

  Max tapped my toe with his brougham. “You’re quiet.”

  I nodded and shrugged.

  “So? What’re you allowed to tell us? Can you say what your Thanksgiving plans are?”

  I swiveled in my chair to check the clock on the wall behind me. Five minutes left. Could I ignore his question for the next three hundred seconds? The truth was, I didn’t have plans. And while there were plenty of people—Clare, Rory, Marnie, Patrice, Lorne and Renee—who would gladly take me in, I was ashamed to have to scrounge for a seat at someone’s table. I’d told my family I was staying in town with the guy I was dating because I assumed Brandon and I would be together. But Brandon had announce
d on Friday night that he was leaving the next day for a week-long trip with his family. There’d been no time to process all of my feelings—the shame, loneliness, hurt, and anger. They sat bundled like a homemade explosive under my rib cage.

  “Where’s Brandon?” Max asked.

  I looked at Dr. Rosen, hoping he knew I was about to blow from the shame of facing another holiday with nowhere to go even though I had a boyfriend. It was Italy with Jeremy all over again.

  “Go ahead,” Dr. Rosen said. He knew.

  I shook my head, resisting.

  “You want to keep it all to yourself?” Dr. Rosen said as he glanced at the clock. Two hundred seconds left.

  “No!” I screamed. NO! NO! NO! NO!

  “No, what?” Dr. Rosen kept his eyes on mine.

  No to all of this—to gagging myself for a guy who didn’t want to spend the holidays with me after months of dating. No to Brandon telling me about his trip forty-eight hours before his flight. No to this loneliness. No to flipping and having no voice and sitting through group, isolated, lonely, and stuffed with secrets. Dr. Rosen was looking at me the same way he looked at me after I got back from the trip to Germany. He was still worried about me, his little failure. He should hate me. I hated myself.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “Stop being nice to me!”

  “I won’t stop loving you and neither will this group.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. I hated all of them for what they had: in-laws they loathed, forgetful spouses, drug-addicted stepkids. Stuffing recipes. Family. Places to be, people to be with. If I opened my eyes, I would see their faces as I admitted I had nowhere to go. I collapsed onto my legs, grabbed my hair with my fists, and pulled. Hard. The sharp, physical pain brought relief. My fists were full of hair I’d pulled out of my head.