Salter, Anna C (5 page)

He looked startled and began to speak. He checked himself and looked more closely. He had told me once he had counseled a cross-dressing client who had determined not to go to any therapist who didn't realize he was male. The guy had interviewed six previous therapists before he found Marv. Marv spotted him immediately by the size of his wrists. I couldn't have hidden what shape I was in from Marv if I tried.

"I was wondering . . . ," I started in lamely.

"Wondering, nothing," Marv said, putting his arm around me. "Come on in."

"Have a seat," he said pointing to the couch. "Let me stoke up the fire a bit and put on some hot tea." I didn't even drink hot tea, but I knew he was right. "Now." he said, when he finished with the fire, thinking out loud. "Before the tea, a blanket—how about an afghan from Albania?"

It was the first thing all night that had made me smile. Somehow you just knew Marv wouldn't come out with an army surplus blanket. I must be getting punchy. I had an image of some natural disaster—a hurricane maybe —and Marv running around putting Albanian and Russian and Spanish afghans around the survivors.

Marv fetched the blanket and the tea and just sat down on the couch and drank his tea quietly staring into the fire. He didn't say anything at all.

"You can go on with whatever you were doing," I said. "I just want to hang out for a while."

"I'm fine," he said. "Am I bothering you?"

"No," I said honestly. "On the contrary."

That was it. He never asked a question. I never volunteered anything. I shook for a while, despite the fire and the blanket and the tea, and then slowly I drifted off. I knew what would happen. It happened every time. I'd wake up thinking she was alive for a second and then realize she wasn't. I hated that fall more than anything in the whole world, but there wasn't anything I could do about it. Marv's was a better place than most to ride it out.

Circle of life bullshit. Death was an ugly business. The New Age philosophers chirping that everything happened for a reason made me want to vomit. Jordan's death had pretty much eviscerated me just like a child's death eviscerated every parent I had ever met who had lost one. It didn't make us wise or deep and appreciative of life; it made us hurt.

Adam didn't have a clue what I was really afraid of. It wasn't that Willy would torture me to death. That was flat-out horrible, even though I wasn't all that afraid of dying—people who had lost children never were. But what I was really afraid of was that Willy would know enough to use Jordan against me somehow. But irony of irony, it was Adam who did that. Serves you right, I said to myself as I drifted off. Serves you right for letting the son-of-a-bitch get under your skin.

When I awoke there was a fresh fire burning in the fireplace and a small coffeemaker set up on the end table beside the couch. All I had to do to get fresh coffee was to flip a switch. There was a cup with milk in it next to the coffeemaker and a single crocus in a small vase next to the cup. It was still early. What time did Marv get up to do all this?

I looked at the crocus. I'd have bitten off Marv's head if he'd told me that things would get better or the darkest day was just before dawn or any other such drivel. He hadn't said anything. He just left a crocus —the first flower in the spring and the only one that will stick its head up through the snow. Hard to argue with a crocus, even for me.

I thought about it. I was more on the Carlotta and Adam side of things than I cared to admit. If I had a friend who was on some kind of stupid collision course, I'd have ranted and raved, cajoled and persuaded, probably with less an than either of them. I wouldn't have handled things the way Marv did last night. Yet what could anybody have done for me that was better? I thought guiltily of my battered women clients. Maybe I ought to argue less and put out a few more crocuses.

Of course, I wouldn't have been stupid enough to use a dead child against anyone. The day after, I still felt emotionally stiff and sore —as though I'd taken a bad beating, which I guess I had.

I had woken with my worst nightmare, as I knew I would: a comfortable sense that Jordan was in the next room and I just needed to get up and check on her because she was sleeping so late. Then the crash —all of which happened, as usual, while I was still in a twilight state. By the time I was fully awake I was pretty much through it.

I got up and padded into the kitchen looking for Marv. He was gone, but there was a note on the table. "I'm off to the jail to do a consult. Suicide attempt last night. Stay as long as you like. The place is yours. Love."

If Marv ever came to my door, not a single question, I admonished myself. Not one. But would anyone come to my door who didn't want a single question? The whole thing was a little uneasy-making. I was like a surgeon whose answer to every problem had been to cut it out. Only now I was the patient, and I had developed something that couldn't be cut out.

The only person who could help turned out not to be a surgeon at all, but a chronic disease doc who knew how to manage the kind of things that didn't kill you and didn't go away. I had learned something from Marv, but I doubted I could use it. Surgeons make bad chronic disease docs and vice versa.

I went out to the car to get my travel bag. I had a habit of traveling impulsively, and a packed bag, as always, was in the car. I don't own a lot. I make a point of never owning more than two hundred and fifty things total in my life, but one thing I never skimped on was the travel bag. It had everything I need in it to stay a weekend or even six.

What do you really need to travel: two pairs of shorts, three T-shirts, one bathing suit, two pairs of long pants (one of which you wear), two shirts with collars, one dress, ono sweater —if you needed a coat you shouldn't go there —five pairs of underwear, and two bras. A few toiletries, and that was it. Everything was wrinkle-free, everything went together, and everything washed out in the sink and dried before morning. What else do you have to have? I was never trapped as long as I had my travel bag and a credit card, which I also kept in the bag.

I retrieved my toothbrush from the bag and the only dress: a generic stretch-velvet, long-sleeved, black turtleneck that came down to mid-calf It was modest enough to wear in the Vatican or the Middle East, shiny enough to wear to a symphony, and plain enough to wear in the daytime. I don't believe in single-purpose items.

I had no sooner arrived at the Department of Psychiatry, where Marv and I both worked, when Judy, Marv's secretary, sought me out. "Do you know where Marv is?" she said.

"Actually," I said, "I do. He's at the jail. Someone made a suicide attempt last night."

"Oh, dear," she said.

"Why, what's wrong?"

"There's a woman here who thinks she has an appointment to be screened for his new group." Marv was starting a new interpersonal therapy group, and like most therapists, he screened people in individual interviews first. Otherwise, someone could join who was far too ill for a group and who might attempt suicide the first time someone confronted her. Or he could end up with a stalker in the group who would immediately pick up on the most submissive female and make her life hell. Groups worked when the people in them were reasonably well-functioning. Even in a single screening interview a therapist could weed out the folks who were wildly inappropriate.

"So? Can't you reschedule her?"

"I could. I guess I will. I just don't think she'll come back. She seems pretty nervous."

Clearly, I owed Marv, and while Marv's ability to calm down a nervous client was probably far better than mine, it was probably better for her to see me than be rebuffed and told to come back later. "Okay, I'll screen her for him," I said.

"I put her in his office," Judy said. "Ginger's in the waiting room again, and she freaks new clients."

I almost changed my mind. I didn't want to see Ginger. Ginger wasn't my client anymore, and my plan was never to see Ginger again in my lifetime. Unfortunately, Marv's office was down the hall on the other side of the waiting room, and if I saw his new client, I would have to cross the waiting room and go past Ginger. I started to tell Judy that hell would freeze before I voluntarily walked into a room with Ginger, but I stopped.

What cowardice. After all, I was the reason Marv had to deal with Ginger in the first place. She had walked into my office a couple of years ago saying she didn't have any huge problems, she just wanted a little help with some issues on the job. This is called telling the big lie. She had immediately locked into a symbiotic, fused, hang-on-me thing that had nearly suffocated me.

Ginger was relentless. She came to my office when I was seeing other patients just to be near me. She called my answering machine to hear my voice. She showed up hours early for her appointment and slept in the waiting room. She refused to leave after her appointment. She called every day and demanded callbacks. If I couldn't or didn't get back to her she threatened suicide. If I went away, she tried it and then blamed it on me for abandoning her.

If it had gone on, I think I would have ended up on the inpatient unit myself—committed, no doubt, for killing her. Finally, when I found myself dreading to go to work every single day, I had transferred her to Marv. I had consulted him regularly on the case already, and both of us had hoped it would be different with a male therapist. It hadn't been, but I hadn't offered to take her back.

Ginger was sitting in the waiting room, dressed entirely in black. She was in her thirties, but her face was so angular and lined she looked older. She was small with dark hair cut severely short, and she was curled up in a fetal position on the couch. There was no peace in Ginger, and everything about her reflected it.

What she lacked was an ability to self-soothe. She felt at peace only when she was around whoever she was attached to at the moment. Outside that person's presence she fell into the abyss. Marv was better than anyone I knew at teaching people to self-soothe, but it looked like he wasn't getting too far with Ginger.

I don't believe in diagnosing people by what colors they wear, but in Ginger's case you could always tell what her mood was by what she had on. When she felt neglected by her therapist—which was frequently—she always wore black.

Ginger looked up when I came in, and I stopped. I had to. "How are you, Ginger?" I asked.

"Well, things aren't going too well right now."

"I'm sorry to hear that. Are you waiting for Marv? I don't think he'll be in for a while. He had an emergency. What time is your appointment?"

"Oh. I don't have an appointment until one. I just thought I'd come a little early. Do you have time to see me? You know, I really think I did better seeing a woman therapist." Whoever Ginger's therapist was at the time, he or she was always faulting her, and whoever her last therapist was, that person always walked on water.

There was a major unempathic part of me that wanted to scream, "NOT ON YOUR LIFE. NOT UNTIL THE BULLS TRADE MICHAEL JORDAN. NOT UNTIL THE CELTICS OFFER ME A SPOT. NOT UNTIL THERE'S PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST. NOT UNTIL THE FALSE-MEMORY HIRED GUNS TELL THE TRUTH IN COURT. THEN I'LL SEE YOU-THAT IS, IF I'VE HAD A LOBOTOMY IN THE INTERIM." I had paused too long, and Ginger looked up hopefully. Maybe she could even see two therapists at once.

"I don't. Ginger," I responded calmly. "And I don't really think it would help you to go back and forth between therapists, Anyway. Why don't you talk things over with Marv and see what he thinks? I have to go, but I hope things get better for you."

And all of the screaming in my head aside, I truly did hope she'd get better, but it didn't seem likely. Ginger had no clue how to feel good without sucking the breath out of somebody else's life, and I doubted she'd ever figure it out. And worse, almost, she had no idea how hostile her leechlike behavior was. She just felt entitled.

I felt like a criminal escaping the scene of a crime, which was a big part of the problem. No matter what you did with Ginger, you never escaped the guilt trip she soaked you with.

I closed the door to Marv's office and tried to put Ginger behind me. The woman Judy brought in didn't look like the type who usually showed up for interpersonal growth groups. She had a tiny, sharp chin —far too small for her face —and it spoke not just to malnutrition in her childhood but to generations of her ancestors never having enough. Her shoulders were thin and hunched over. When she smiled nervously at me I could see several missing teeth and several darkly stained ones. She was wearing the kind of cheap polyester that mimicked the latest style but was so poorly made it seemed more mockery than mimicry. Far better, I thought, would be an honest pair of jeans and a workshirt.

It was simple: She was poor, and the teeth and the chin said she and her kin had been poor for eons. I couldn't tell how old she was: Poverty ages people so badly they are always younger than they look. I'd have said mid-fifties, so probably she was in her early forties.

My lawyer Daddy had come from people who had a little money, but my intrepid Mama had come from people who made their living from the sea. Some of them had been as poor as church mice all their lives. I had been too young to remember any of them clearly, but I had heard stories that made the Depression sound pretty watered-down in comparison. When you live off the sea, and the sea doesn't produce, and there are no societal safety nets, and your neighbors are in as bad shape as you are, you just go hungry, and some of them had.

Dresses had been made from the feedbags for the animals, which wasn't as bad as it sounds. Actually they looked a lot better than the polyester in front of me. The feedbags came in soft floral print cotton, and I had vague memories of those small floral print dresses on elderly ladies sitting on porch swings. Somewhere in my genes I knew poverty, even though I'd never seen it in my lifetime, and the woman in front of me felt like some kind of relative.

"Hello, I'm Michael Stone," I said and extended my hand. She stood up and held out her hand awkwardly, but when she took mine she surprised me with the firmness of her grasp.