The Unprofessionals (20 page)

O
N THIS HOLY NIGHT
of moonlight, frigid air, emptiness, starlight, and peace, I was still on the way to the waxer-electrologist. She had told me she'd spent years destroying the hair follicles of one of her clients. She'd shared the job with another electrologist in California, where the client lived part of the year. “Between the two of us, it took nine years,” she said. She was serious, but I was laughing.

“People have these problems,” she said. “You don't know because yours is minor in comparison.”

She might start talking about more extreme cases and go on to explaining the meaning of “hermaphrodite.” She liked to explain things even if the meanings of the things were well known. She often told stories with grotesque details I didn't care to know. The cold weather gave her ideas of tales to tell—for example, swans' feet froze the swans into the ponds before they could fly off to safety.

After I threw myself down onto the table, we started talking about other things—in addition to the life of the follicle. During our last appointment, we'd discussed the difficulty in finding medical specialists in the small town where we lived. We got to the specialty of psychotherapy.

“The only good ones are retired or dead,” I'd said.

“There aren't many good ones on the planet,” she said.

This gave me a sudden new respect for her, even as she stuck the electrology needle into my skin, between the eyebrows, at a voltage I'd asked her to lower many times. She was always sneaking it up for a longer-lasting attack on the follicle.

On this visit I told her I had just seen one of the five worst psychiatrists I'd ever seen in my life, beginning at age eighteen.

“Why?” she asked. She sounded fascinated, thoroughly engaged, on the edge of her electrology seat.

I described the office of one of the five worst psychiatrists—a large overdecorated parlor in a big color-coordinated house. Then came the psychiatrist herself, who was dressed in the style of a matron from a suburb. The shoes alone were a bad sign. They were a bad version of Gucci loafers from the 1960s, with a higher heel and shiny gold buckles. Her clothing—if only the boy had been around to hear about this, I forgot to think at the time but realized a few days later. The whole getup was a watered-down copy of something else—so weak a copy you couldn't tell what had been copied. The suit, if it could be called a suit, was a version of a Chanel suit but without anything to mark it as such. All that remained of the style was a short jacket and a plain skirt. The doctor's method of treatment derived from the Daytime TV School of Therapists.

I told the electrologist, “Every few minutes she'd say, ‘How can I be of help to you?'”

“Oh, that is ridiculous,” the electrologist said. “That's terrible! ‘How can I help you?' That's for her to figure out.”

“When someone goes to a cardiologist with chest pains do they ask, ‘How can I help you?' This is what I mean, it's not even a profession. There are no standards.”

She was up to the stage of pulling the wax strips off my ankles and I could see her taking a break to stand still and shake her head back and forth.

The electrologist asked whether the psychiatrist had made any other contribution to the appointment other than “Tell me, how can I be of help?” I remembered the other question she'd begun with. That was the moment I should have left. But it was seven degrees outside and I had arranged to be picked up from the long, ice-covered driveway in an hour. “She started by saying, ‘I'm going to ask you a question that may surprise you.' I was prepared for a real surprise, but she said, ‘Tell me three things you like about yourself.'”

“Oh my God,” the waxer said as she tore another strip of waxing cloth off my leg. “How stupid! What did you say to that?”

“I said, ‘I can't think of any.'”

I was watching her try to get off every last bit of wax. She was patting the skin and dabbing the cloth strips over every tiny spot. She was working so hard I wanted to tell her: Look, it doesn't matter if you leave some wax on. I don't care. I'm not going anyplace. I'll peel it off later, in the shower.

“These psychotherapists have no idea about the artistic temperament,” she said. “They have the most middle-class values.”

“Oh, you understand that.”

“I do,” she said. “Of course, ultimately, we're all alone, every one of us. But we need some guidance.”

 

NOT ONLY
did the waxer know more than most psychotherapists but she could also wax and destroy follicles at the same time. I was lying down—the position Freud found conducive for patients to do their talking—except when turned over to wax the back of the legs, which would be less conducive. The Chinese acupuncturist had told me to lie down on my back after he'd stuck the needles all over, into my shoulders. “My patients do this,” he'd said.

“But what about the needles?” I asked.

“Don't worry,” he'd said. “Fine with the needles.”

Maybe he was from the school of lying on a bed of nails, the way magicians used to do on
The Ed Sullivan Show.
But that technique took years of training. I wasn't going to lie down on the acupuncture needles, that was definite.

“I've written a paper on ‘Creative Genius,'” I heard the electrologist say. “When I was in school,” she said. “Because of my lifelong interest in the arts.”

There were examples of her artwork all around, needlepoint pictures of animals and quilts with scenes in nature. “I love grass and trees, woods and forests, hills and rivers,” wrote Michael Powell, the director of
The Red Shoes,
my other favorite movie, in his autobiography. And the waxer loved these things in nature too, even though she wasn't an aristocratic English film director. She painted and drew; she needlepointed and quilted leaves, grass, rocks, raindrops, flowers, orchids, sand, ice, water—everything loved by Michael Powell, Keats, Wordsworth, Percy Bys-she Shelley, William Robinson, Gertrude Jekyll, and millions of others, including Wallace Nutting and Frederick Law Olmsted, in our own country.

I decided not to bring up
The Red Shoes,
or any movie. She had recommended some foreign-film videos to me when I said we didn't go to Hollywood movies and just watched old ones over and over.

I had reported to her that one of her recommended foreign films was too sad. “You didn't tell me it had an unhappy ending.”

“You need it to have a happy ending?” she said as she got her needle ready. “Why?”

“There's enough misery everywhere,” I said. “You know that I watch David Letterman and reruns of
SCTV
.”

“What about depth?” she said.

“They're deep,” I said.

Then the electrologist said, “What about profundity?”

What about it? Was it a word? “There's enough of that everywhere, too,” I said. It was better to watch Gene Kelly dance in the rain than a movie about poor Arabs collecting flower petals and riding donkeys over bridges in floods.

“What about the visual, the cinematography?” she said.

I thought about the fields of flowers. But I wasn't over the ending and I told her so.

I got up from the table. As I was rubbing on some aloe vera gel, I noticed one of the six old cats sitting all crouched up on a chair. He was looking out at nowhere.

“What must he be thinking is going on in here?” I asked.

“Oh, he's old. He's not thinking,” the electrologist said. “The other cats intimidate him. That's why he's in here.”

I tried touching the cat's head, but he didn't look any happier. “At least you don't have to have electrolysis and waxing,” I said to him.

“Animals get insecure the way people do,” the electrologist said. “That's his problem. They have feelings too.”

A
S I DROVE HOME
, I was thinking about an acquaintance who had cats and dogs she'd gotten from shelters near her house in Maine. She and her children had some other animals they'd found here and there. When I was last at their house, her mutt-like, rough, spiky-furred dog was around everywhere and barking for no reason.

“Look at that face,” she'd said. “See, the face of unconditional love. Isn't it great?”

“I want conditional love,” I said. “I want to be loved only for good things I do.”

“Why?” she said. “Look at that face.” She touched the mutt-face.

I looked at the dog's face. I didn't get the whole picture of the love affair.

On the white armchair was a freaky-looking gray cat with white whiskers. The pet owner said the cat's name. I heard it to be Witch.

“Witch?” I said, looking at the evil witchy-looking little cat.

“Mitch, not Witch,” the owner said while laughing. “Mitch is very old and weak,” she explained. If he was so old, why was he so small? Maybe he was an actual cat midget.

I knew what old and weak meant, but I put it out of my mind and went on to look at the next animal—a huge, spreading, gray, long-furred cat, who'd taken over the territory on the white bedspread.

“Is he blind?” I said, looking at his half-closed eyes that showed cataracts, glaucoma, or eyeliner around the lids.

“No, he had glaucoma when we found him under a bridge. We cured him,” she said in a confident way. The cat blinked those weird eyes. “We took him to a vet and he got every medicine there was.” As I looked at the cat and listened to his medical treatments, I thought about the sick people in other countries and about why people in those countries hated Americans.

 

IN IRAN
,
I'd read, dog owning was a sin or a crime, especially small-dog owning. Dogs were considered to be dirty—one point of agreement with the Iranian fundamentalists. In Reykjavík, Iceland, dogs were banned because of all kinds of problems they caused for everyone other than their owners. But in a film I'd seen on PBS, one of Shackleton's men loved a dog so much he said the dog was a better companion than some humans. I saw the man trying to kiss the dog. That was fun—to watch an Englishman on Shackleton's expedition showing true love for his dog's frozen, furred face. The English would rather kiss a dog than a person in public.

The cat was lying on the bed like a king, as if he owned it. Maybe this was how people came to give their pets those creepy names like Queenie and Princess. The cat owned the bed, the room, the view of the garden, and the whole house, I could tell.

“We love him so much we won't let him go outside,” the cat owner said. She seemed pleased by the situation.

I reviewed relationships I'd known between people and cats—cats wanted food. Dogs, too. You gave them food and touching, they loved you for it. They'd love anyone who gave them food. Pet owners don't want to know that. If they did, they'd have a truthful emptiness the way I had.

Then, as I was seeing this cat and dog picture, I thought about relationships between people. I thought about cooking. I had grown to hate cooking, even though I was learning new vegetarian-sauce tips from the two chefs in Nantucket. The worst part is where pieces of vegetables fall onto the floor and you have to pick them up in the midst of cooking, and also the bent-over searching for things in the low refrigerator drawer. This gave a scullery-maid feeling. The real chefs have people picking up for them after the cooking is done and also preparing and chopping before it's started.

My husband had never peeled a carrot in his life. Whatever work I was doing when he put his gigantic sandwich together with ounces of mayonnaise—at least it was eggless mayonnaise—I had to stop everything to wash and peel a carrot and cut it up. He never got the idea to eat an apple when he was hungry. “If you want me to eat fruit, you have to cut it up,” he'd said about some cantaloupe in the refrigerator when he was forty-four. This applied to apples and other small, easy fruit as well.

I thought of all those carrots. If I didn't have the carrot ready, he'd eat more bread, or a cookie made with hydrogenated fats, a cookie that he'd bought by himself. Once when I put a carrot on his desk, when he was in his last good mood in several years, he said, “The carrot of love.” He didn't care that it was the carrot of lutein-lycopene.

I looked at the two cats and the one ruffian mutt, who was giving a bark here and there while lurching about the room. How exactly was animal loving different from love between human beings, I was thinking. The cat blinked those scary black-lined, half-stuck eyelids.

I thought of the negotiations with my husband over the fruit and vegetables and the doing this and that for each other. I thought of his face. I looked at it—he was standing next to me in the pet-filled room—the face of a kindly stranger. And I was like Blanche DuBois, dependent on the kindness of strangers and unable to stand the sight of a bare lightbulb. It had taken five years to get him to agree to ceiling lamp shades in the laundry room.

I'd been dependent on the kindness of the other stranger, the boy—strange, stranger than anyone, and a stranger to everyone.

I looked at the faces of the pets—are they called faces?—and I wondered what the nature of the relationships could be.

Was this what the boy meant by low self-esteem and pity? I needed his help to remember.