The Good Luck of Right Now (10 page)

“The yellow room is a
safe
room,” Arnie said. “You can speak more forcefully about your feelings if you wish. You don’t have to be polite, like you do outside of the yellow room, in the real world. Remember, this is a word fortress.”

“Fuck cancer!” Max said.

I nodded in agreement.

“How’s it been for you, Bartholomew? Since your mother died?” Arnie said.

“It’s fucking hell, right?” Max said. “Fucking hell.”

“Um . . . it’s been
an adjustment
. I loved Mom. She was a good friend in addition to being my mother. But she wasn’t right at the end. She changed.”

“My Alice changed too,” Max said. “She started to piss on everything. The bed. My clothes. The couch. Everywhere she was fucking pissing, which is how I knew she wasn’t right. It was like she lost her fucking mind, hey.”

“Mom was like that too. She had to wear a diaper.”

“Fuck cancer.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Max, would you like to tell Bartholomew what you miss most about Alice?”

He looked at the ceiling, and I actually thought Max was going to cry.

Finally, he blew out another lungful of air between his teeth, like a leaky tire, pushed his clunky brown glasses up his nose, and then said, “I fucking miss having someone greet me when I come home from work after the late movie ends and my sister is fucking sleeping. Alice always waited up for me. Fucking always. I miss Alice sitting on my lap when I watched television. I miss the way she fucking purred when I scratched behind her fucking ears. I miss how she sat in the window all day, just enjoying the fucking sun.”

“Wait . . . I don’t understand,” I said.

“What don’t you understand?” Arnie said.

“Who are you talking about, Max?”

“Fucking Alice!”

“What relation was she to you?” I asked.

“She was my fucking everything. For fifteen fucking years.”

“So she was . . .
your wife?
”

“What the fuck, hey?” Max said. His face turned bright red, like I had thrown boiling water on it. “Do you think I’m some sort of twisted fucking fuck?”

“It’s okay, Max,” Arnie said. “We never told Bartholomew that Alice was a cat.”

“I said she sat in the fucking window, right?”

“People can sit in windows,” I said.

Max dismissed my words with the wave of his hand and then said, “I fucking miss Alice and I’m not ashamed to say so—especially here in the yellow fucking room, where I’m supposed to fucking grieve openly, hey. She was a calico and more loyal than any fucking person has ever been to me—I don’t give a shit if she was a cat or not. Fuck! I miss her. And I’ll tell you what, hey!”

“Tell us,” Arnie said. “Tell us everything. Let it out. We’re listening. This is a safe place.”

“You don’t fucking care about my dead fucking cat! No one does!” Max said to me and then wiped his eyes. “What the fuck, hey?”

Richard Gere, you whispered in my ear—well, maybe I pretended you were whispering directly into my ear, thinking what would Richard Gere say and do?—
Tell him you want to hear about his cat. Lessen his pain. Be compassionate. Remember the Dalai Lama’s teachings.

I remembered a line I read in the Dalai Lama’s book
A Profound Mind
. “It is important that we understand just how truly all-pervasive suffering is.” I remembered the Dalai Lama saying it is easy to feel sorry for an elderly beggar, but it is much harder to feel sorry for a young rich man. He also said that all “conditioned existence is characterized by pain.” And that all types of people are “enslaved” by “strong destructive emotions.”

And so, heeding your spiritual leader’s advice, I said to Max, “I’d like to hear about your cat. Alice. I really would.”

He examined my face for a second or two, probably trying to decide if I meant it, and then said, “Alice was the best fucking cat that ever lived.”

I began pretending again, and you, Richard Gere, in my imagination you whispered in my ear and said,
Look how his muscles are relaxing. Note the slope of his shoulders. Relaxed. He needs to talk. Listen. Ease his suffering. Be compassionate. And compassion will come back to you. Heed the words of the Dalai Lama.

Max went on to talk about his cat for more than a half hour straight. He told me that he found her in a Dumpster in Worcester, Massachusetts, behind the movie theater where he used to work before he moved to Philadelphia to live with his sister. He was taking out the nightly trash when he heard a kitten crying. He had to tear open “a million fucking bags” before he found it. There were six other kittens inside but all of those were dead. “I wanted to kill the fucking scumbag who put kittens in a trash bag. What the fuck, hey? Who does that?” He was very worried that someone would find him standing next to the dead cats “with fucking trash and dead kittens all around my fucking feet” and accuse him of killing the cats, so he stuck the alive kitten into his coat and headed to the nearest convenience store so he could get some “fucking milk.” It was late at night and the woman working the convenience store behind “thick fucking plastic glass” saw the kitten and excitedly exited her glass box to pet it. She made such a big deal over the kitten and was so nice to Max, showing him where the cat food was and letting him feed the kitten in her store, that Max decided to name the kitten after that convenience store worker. “What the fuck, hey? I thought,” Max said. “So I asked what her fucking name was and she fucking said Alice. So that’s what I fucking named my cat.” Max went on to explain how—using a feather on a string and catnip—he trained his cat to meow on command and also run through an obstacle course full of hoops and mini-jumps “like what fucking horses jump, but smaller for baby cats.” And he said that as Alice became an adult cat, he taught her how to speak to him.

“Really speak to you?” Arnie said. “Or were you only
pretending
Alice could speak with you? Like most people do when they talk to their pets.”

“Yeah, like fucking that, hey. Pretending,” Max said.

I became very interested in Max at this point.

He talked a lot more about Alice, listing what types of food she liked—“Canned fucking tuna was her favorite!”—and how she liked to chase red dots of light that he projected onto the wall with “a fucking laser pointer” and how Alice “jumped and ran and pounced for fucking hours,” how they both enjoyed watching the library’s box-set DVDs of the original
Doctor Who
and how he thought about Alice whenever he was working, ripping “the fuck out of tickets” at the “fucking movies,” because that was “his fucking job”—being a “fucking ticket fucking taker” at the “fucking movies,” and it was “really fucking boring, hey!”

I told him that working at the movies seemed like an interesting job, especially since you could see movies for free, and Max said, “Going to the movies? Fuck that! You have to sit with fucking asshole strangers and you never know which one has a fucking cold or what fuck is going to bring a fucking crying baby. And working at the fucking movies fucking sucks. You end up watching
parts
of every fucking movie and then never seeing the rest. Fifteen minutes of this fucking film, fifteen minutes of that fucker. All the fucking parts get mixed up and make a never-fucking-ending Frankenstein film. You never get to see the whole thing start to fucking finish. Not fucking once. And you know what’s the worst fucking part?”

“What?” I said.

“No cats allowed. What the fuck, hey? Alice loved movies! Why can’t you bring your cat?
What the fuck?
That’s why I always preferred watching fucking movies at home.”

“Do you enjoy Richard Gere movies?” I asked.

“Richard Gere?
Richard fucking Gere?
” Max said. “
Fuck Richard Gere!
What the fuck, hey?”

“He’s actually my favorite actor,” I said, sticking up for you, even though you technically were one of
Mom
’s favorite actors. “And a brave humanitarian.”

“Oh, I like Richard Gere,” said Arnie, who had been listening to Max and me talk with a satisfied look on his face. “He was great in
Chicago
.”

“Fuck Richard Gere,” Max said once more. “Fuck going to the fucking movies. I miss Alice. I really fucking miss Alice.
Fuck!
”

There was a long silence here.

Max looked like he was melting.

You were compassionate
, you, Richard Gere, whispered into my ear.
You let go of the self.

Arnie looked at his watch, and then he said, “I’m afraid our time is almost up, gentlemen. Bartholomew, you’ll be given more time to speak next week.”

I nodded.

“Max, thanks for sharing all that you did tonight.”

“What the fuck, hey?” he said and then shrugged, like sharing was no big deal.

“Can I ask a question?” I said.

“Certainly,” Arnie said.

“Why is everything yellow in here?”

“Psychological research proves that the color yellow—bright yellow, that is—can make people feel more confident and optimistic. This, of course, helps with the grieving process. Ironically, pale yellow can have the opposite effect. So I go with bright yellow. It’s all rather scientific. I am a doctor, you know,” Arnie said and then winked at me.

“Oh,” I said.

“Same time next week?”

Max blew air through his teeth, adjusted his big glasses, and then jumped up into a standing position. I stood, and Arnie walked us to the door. “It was a very good session, boys. I feel like we made great progress tonight. Be kind to yourselves this week. Grieve bravely and openly. Embrace the process. Good night.”

Max and I walked down the steps and into the alley. I followed him to Walnut Street.

“Max?” I said.

“What the fuck, hey?”

“Do you say that to everyone—all the time?”

“What?”

“‘What the fuck, hey’?”

He nodded. “Except when I’m fucking working. They’d fire me. I just keep my fucking mouth shut and rip tickets at work.”

“Could your cat really speak with her mind?”

“Fuck, yeah, she could! Arnie doesn’t know. Arnie doesn’t understand. He doesn’t fucking believe me, but it’s true. We used to talk all the fucking time—Alice and me.”

“I believe you.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a pink circle of plastic. “This was her fucking collar.” Max held it out to me. I took it.

There was a silver heart-shaped tag.

ALICE

“It’s a very nice tag,” I said.

Max took the collar back, wiped his eyes, and mumbled, “What the fuck, hey?”

We stood there looking at our shoelaces for a few minutes.

Then Max said, “Do you want to have a fucking beer somewhere?”

“Like—at a bar?”

“Fuck bars! Bars are where douche bags try to fuck each other. At a pub. A fucking beer at a proper fucking pub.”

I thought about my goal of having a beer at a bar with an age-appropriate friend and decided a pub was even better, because I really didn’t want to be near douche bags trying to copulate.

“How old are you?” I asked Max.

“I’m thirty-fucking-nine. Do you want a fucking beer or what?”

I am also thirty-nine, as you already know, Richard Gere.

Jung’s synchronicity.

Unus mundus.

Unus mundus!

“Yes, I would very much like to have a beer at a pub with you.”

“Okay, then. Fucking follow me.”

Max walked very quickly and I trailed for maybe six or seven blocks before we entered a dark pub with railings around the bar and pictures of Ireland all over the walls.

We sat on stools and put our feet on brass rungs, just like on TV.

It was amazing.

The bartender was a frowning fat man. “What’ll it be?”

“Two fucking beers,” Max said.

The bartender tilted his head to one side, and his eyes narrowed. “What fucking kind?”

“What the fuck kind of beer do you like?” Max asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said, because I didn’t often drink beer.

“Two fucking Guinness,” Max said.

“O-fucking-kay,” the bartender said and tossed two small cardboard circles onto the bar in front of us.

A TV hung over the shelved bottles of alcohol, and on it was some show where people had to run through an obstacle course. A foot-wide path separated a pool from a huge wall, out of which boxing gloves would pop and knock people into the water below if they weren’t careful. We watched a few people try to cross and they were all knocked in. Every time someone fell, there were cartoon noises that sounded like springs being plucked or high-pitched whistles being blown. Then a giant of a woman shimmied across with her arms and legs spread wide like a spider and everyone in the bar cheered.

“Twelve-fucking-fifty,” the bartender said when he placed the dark beers in front of us on the little cardboard circles.

“You owe him seven dollars,” Max said. “This ain’t a fucking date, hey.”

I pulled out my wallet and gave the man seven dollars.

Max and I clinked our glasses, sipped our creamy beers, and watched men and women try to run across twelve or so balls that were floating on water—the goal being to end up on a platform of sorts. Every time someone fell into the lake, there were more cartoon noises, everyone in the pub would cheer and groan, and Max would snicker, raise his beer in the air, and yell, “What the fuck, hey?”

We didn’t talk at all, which was okay with me. I was happy just to check off one of my life goals.

When he finished his beer, he said, “Bottoms fucking up. I have to go home and make sure my sister’s okay.”

I finished my beer and said, “Is there something wrong with your sister?”

“Nah,” Max said. “Except she fucking doesn’t miss Alice as much as I do. She’s sort of fucking weird, but she’s family.”

Ask him
, How
is your sister weird?
you, Richard Gere, whispered into my ear, so I did.

“Ah, she always has her fucking hair in her face. She works at the fucking library. She pretends to be real skittish, and she had some bad shit happen to her a few years ago. But she’s okay now. Just a little fucking off. And she worries if she doesn’t know where I am. I didn’t tell her about having a beer with you because I didn’t even know who the fuck you were before tonight.”