I retreated emotionally. The apartment became my cocoon and I grew very quiet, speaking to Eli only when absolutely necessary. I preferred to be alone with my thoughts. The kids tiptoed around me as though I were a victim of shell shock. In a way, I was.
Where I fell apart was on the couch. The analyst’s couch, I mean. Figuratively speaking. Anna had given me three names: two women and a man. I preferred to work with a woman, given the nature of my major issue. One of Anna’s recommendations I knew by virtue of reputation, so I phoned her first. She had absolutely no openings in her schedule for the foreseeable future. On to option two: the other woman. Her voice mail indicated that she would be out of the office (probably on St. Barth, guessing what she usually charged her clients) until February first. I couldn’t wait more than a month. So I called the third referral, a shrink named Alvin Lee, who slotted me in. We had our first appointment on January second.
I had wondered what Dr. Lee would look like. His surname was a common one: he could have just as easily been black, white, or Chinese. Turns out, he was Chinese, and much younger than I had expected. His office, located in one of the grand prewar apartment buildings on West End Avenue, was paneled in blond wood and crawling with family photos and expensive Asian antiques. His three degrees from Harvard had pride of place on the wall behind his desk. His clients didn’t recline, actually; they sat on an original Eames chair that was probably insured for more than it would have cost to feed a family of four for a year. I felt very intimidated. Now that I was about to take the hot seat, I had an even greater understanding of how my laundry room clients felt, being put at ease by the spectacularly low-key atmosphere down in the basement where the scent of soap and fabric softener were often as effective as aromatherapy.
“How are you doing this morning?” Dr. Lee asked, smiling pleasantly and shaking my hand.
“As well as can be expected,” I sighed, “having spent the last couple of days being unable to shower!” Dr. Lee gave me a quizzical look. “The boiler in our apartment building fritzed out on New Year’s Eve, so we’ve had no heat or hot water since then. My husband is having an affair with the super’s wife, and when he found out about it—the super, I mean—he disappeared. So no one’s minding the store. The tenants are up in arms, completely livid. They’re practically ready to take up torches and pitchforks—”
“Mrs. Lederer, I asked how you are doing?” Dr. Lee gently said, motioning me to the Eames chair. “Not the tenants. Though I’m sure they have reason to be upset about the loss of services.”
“Loss of services,” I echoed mockingly. “Do you know that’s what they call ‘no sex’ in lawsuits? One spouse gets injured or has an accident and is unable to make love, or can’t do it the way they used to, so the uninjured spouse puts in a legal claim for ‘loss of services.’”
Dr. Lee rolled his desk chair onto the Oriental carpet and seated himself, favoring me with another of his kindly, though I thought somewhat condescending, smiles. “You’re being a bit evasive, you know.”
Good God…I say the same thing to my clients. I hadn’t been in therapy since I was a doctoral candidate, when it was part of my training. Funny, how you sometimes forget that people walk funny when the shoe is on the other foot.
“I feel…I feel…Angry. Bereft. Betrayed. Blindsided. Confused. Duped.” Was Dr. Lee smiling at my pain? What was up with this guy?
“Do you realize that you listed your feelings in alphabetical order?” he said to me, folding his hands in his lap.
I blinked a few times. “No, I hadn’t realized that. I was too busy feeling angry, confused, whatever it was I just said.”
“You told me over the phone that your husband had no wish to attend couples therapy.”
“Yes. Eli doesn’t see the point. He thinks he’s in love with this woman and wants to give it a shot.”
“So have you been able to have a dialogue with him at all during the past few days?”
I shook my head. “I’ve been giving him the silent treatment, mostly. I’m afraid that if I say what I’m feeling, it’ll all come out in some incoherent rant and I’ll sound like a banshee and it’ll end up reinforcing the decision he already seems to have made.”
“Mrs. Lederer…let’s do a little role-playing. What would you say to your husband if he were in the room right now? This room is like a safe house. You know that, of course. You can let all your emotions go, uncensored, without fear of embarrassment or censure. Allow yourself to work out your anger and your thoughts in here, so that when you eventually do approach your husband, you will do so from a more confident emotional place. Go ahead,” urged Dr. Lee gently. “Use me. You know what to do.”
I looked the baby-faced Asian analyst in the eye and envisioned Eli: pale skin punctuated by dark circles under his eyes from all those late nights at the drafting table—or not—ever-so-slightly receding hairline, runner’s build. “Why, Eli?” I said, immediately bursting into tears. “How could you throw away more than twenty years of our lives together? Do they suddenly count for nothing to you? Are they bullshit? When did you become so dissatisfied with our marriage? With me? Why did you never talk to me about what the hell was going through your head? You said you ‘couldn’t help it.’ That you’d approached Mala Sonia to help you with your Gia book research and after a while one thing led to another…that you ‘couldn’t help’ yourselves. Of course you could! That’s what being an adult is all about, Eli. Boundaries. Common sense. Restraint. Actions have consequences; every kid who’s ever been punished knows that! So now you want to ‘try it’ with Mala Sonia, to see what you really have. And what about the collateral damage from your little domestic experiment? Did you even consider how it might affect me? And how your actions could damage your relationship with Ian and Molly? Or weren’t you thinking that far ahead? You just went on and did whatever the fuck you wanted, like a self-indulgent little boy. You’re a brat, Eli, d’y’know that? You’re a brat. All these years I thought I’d been married to a man who was more in touch with his inner child than many; but in fact there was no man there at all, just an overgrown boy with secondary sex characteristics! And what if things don’t turn out so well with Mala Sonia after all? What if her kids end up despising you as much as your own flesh and blood does at the moment? You’re even allergic to ferrets! Are you planning to come crawling back to your family, red-eyed and wheezing, expecting us to take you in again and forgive you? It’s not that easy. Eli…? Do you even love your kids? Do you love me?”
Dr. Lee allowed me to vent for the remainder of our session. When, out of the corner of my eye, I caught him surreptitiously glancing at the clock, I collapsed my head into my lap, totally spent, utterly exhausted from my tirade.
“I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to stop now,” he said softly. “I’d like to see you next week at the same time.”
Rising on wobbly legs, I took out my checkbook, but Dr. Lee refused payment, insisting that our first session was a professional courtesy. I left his office unsure as to whether I felt any better and whether Dr. Lee was the right person for the job. He was credentialed up the ying-yang, no question about his background and training; but I think analysis is a little like marriage. Finding the right therapist is as important and individual a decision as choosing the right spouse. After all, it’s the therapist who’ll see you at your most vulnerable and unguarded and to whom you’ll confess your deepest secrets and confide your darkest fears. And when I stepped out onto West End Avenue, I wasn’t convinced that I’d made the best match in either case.
When I got home, the answering machine was blinking urgently. I admit that I’d hoped it was Eli, abjectly begging to come back across the street and be reconciled to the bosom of his family, so I could decide whether to embrace or eviscerate him. It wasn’t. The message was from Talia Shaw. She asked me if it was all right if she resumed her therapy sessions with me.
I didn’t return her call right away. Nor did I return it the next day, or the day after that, o
r even the following week. I felt like a hypocrite and a fraud. How could I possibly have been—and still be—or ever be—of use to my clients, when I couldn’t even help myself? I’ve been an analyst for years, but now I had absolutely no desire to sit in a chair all day and hear about other people’s problems, absorb their neuroses, encourage them to find healthy solutions to their issues: ones that didn’t involve acting-out and impulsive or self-destructive behavior. Even “re-tail therapy” can turn into a nightmare when a client has no impulse control and maxes out her credit cards, sending herself into spiraling debt because in her despair she had convinced herself that she just had to have something—a sweater, an evening gown, a fur coat, a motorcycle—in every color, and then everything would be all better. Maybe all my empathetic understanding, which I had always considered one of my therapeutic strengths, had turned me into a dysfunctional sponge, a walking petri dish of toxicity that had somehow managed to poison my own domain.
During the past few days I had come to realize that there was more going on than my feelings about Eli’s infidelity and the collapse of our life together. As a therapist, I was burned out. I had nothing more to give my clients. I’d allowed my own ship to end up on the rocks; how dare I pilot other captains? What chutzpah I had!
I needed a break; maybe even for forever.
But giving up was something I routinely discouraged my clients from indulging in. Adjusting their attitude, overcoming and throwing off bad behavior, yes; throwing in the towel, no. Yet I was running on fumes. Maybe I’d been that way for a while, which is why I sometimes felt I had so little to give my family (no matter how hard I tried to give them everything I had left) after a long day sitting across from the couch.
The Catch-22 was that even though I needed to take a breather, I really couldn’t give up my practice. It looked like I’d be heading for divorce court. No matter what the settlement, given Eli’s income it couldn’t possibly cover one kid with six more years of private school ahead, and another one bound for college in a few months. I didn’t have the luxury of quitting. And as long as I was going to continue my salaried sessions down at the women’s health center, I had a moral obligation not to abandon my pro bono laundry room clients either.
18
TALIA
“Look!” Talia brandished her cane. “I almost don’t need it anymore.” She ambled over to the sofa and seated herself, positioning her back against the armrest with her injured leg stretched across the length of the couch.
“You know, it might be hard for you to get up from there, if you want to move around during your session.”
“That’s okay. I don’t know how much moving I’ll be doing. I’ve gotten very Zen over the past few months of having to sit still a lot. Now I can see dances in my head; the inside of my forehead is like a giant movie screen, y’know? And there’s all this choreography going on inside my brain. And I can picture myself moving through space too. So I can, like, see myself dance while I’m sitting here.”
“Have you ever considered a future as a choreographer?”
At least I didn’t get the same kind of reaction that I’d received months ago when I suggested that Talia consider teaching. “Maybe…” she said thoughtfully. “But I’m not willing to let myself believe that my dance career is over, just because of this ACL crap. You taught me something, Susan. It wasn’t anything you said, specifically. It was more like leading by example, y’know? When dancers learn a new piece, the choreographer, or his assistant—or if the choreographer is dead, there’s usually a person who is like the official recorder and teacher of their ballets…anyway, the piece is always demonstrated for us, right there in the studio. The choreographer, or whoever, shows us the steps and the attitudes and we follow their example and then make it our own—I mean putting our own expression into it, of course—not doing our own steps or anything.”
“So how did I lead by example?”
Talia looked at me as though I were utterly dense. “Because you didn’t give up! You didn’t call it quits even when what you thought was the worst thing that ever happened to you happened. Well—you did call it quits, but you didn’t give up. You came back down here after a while, even though it was probably a really hard decision to make after telling us that you were too burned out to continue our therapy sessions. It couldn’t have been easy listening to nut jobs—speaking for myself only—all day. Y’know, I know I’m not the easiest person in the world. I’m vain and I complain a lot, and I see the glass half empty most of the time, and if all your other clients are like me, no wonder you needed a break! And maybe…maybe it’s really good for you too, that you’ve come back, because, if you think about it, while you sit there listening to all of us go on and on about our problems, you might even realize that you’re not nearly as messed up as we are. Which should make you feel better about yourself.”
I laughed. “It doesn’t quite work that way, Talia. I can’t even say that I wish it did. Because if it did, if my clients aren’t making progress toward healthier behavior, it would mean that I’m not doing my job after all. I appreciate the sentiment, though.”
“I told you I’m not very good with words,” Talia said, giving me a goofy smile. “But I’m getting better. I’m actually saying stuff now, y’know? A few months ago, if I’d been unable to dance during our sessions, I would have sat here like a lump. So I guess the ACL injury had a weird benefit. I’ve had to use other parts of my body in order to express myself.”
“So now that you’ve discovered the power of words, how do you feel about using some of them to talk about what’s been up with you since we last spoke officially.”
“Ohhhh…I’m not sure I can talk about important stuff! You’re asking an awful lot of me right off the bat, y’know.” We both burst out laughing. “Have you ever heard of the Miller Clinic?” I shook my head. “Oh. Well, never mind, I shouldn’t have expected you to. It’s just a place that specializes in P.T. for injured dancers. I’ve been rehabbing my knee down there and going back to a modified version of my Pilates exercises, and my physical therapist is a dancer who ruptured a tendon years ago and was never exactly the same since, but she totally got into Pilates—teaching it, I mean—and found that it was really rewarding. She even started liking teaching better than dancing because she was seeing right up close that she was having an effect on people; her students became sort of like an audience. So…I dunno…maybe it’s something I should think about. I’m definitely not going to stop dancing. But this injury has made me think about my future—after dancing. Y’know, I’ve realized for a while now it’s not going to be that far away. Oops. Excuse me.”
Talia awkwardly got to her feet and made as mad a dash as she could for the little bathroom. I heard her wretching through the partially open door. She returned to the couch wiping her mouth with a damp paper towel and looking very pale.
“I want to talk about that,” I said calmly.
“What?”
I pointed to the bathroom. “Talia, an eating disorder is a very—”
“Is that what you think I have?” She looked shocked.
“Well, in the past when you’ve run into the bathroom, I wondered whether you were purging yourself with diuretics. I have to say that the signs do point to—”
“It’s not! I promise you. Why does everyone assume that just because a skinny dancer pees a lot or throws up that she’s got bulimia or something? You’ve never met my mom, but she’s always been as thin as a whippet—until the alcohol started to add weight. I—this is going to sound really stupid—”
“Try me.”
“I…have a low potassium thing. So I’m supposed to take supplements and eat a lot of foods that are full of it, y’know? Like bananas. But I hate bananas. The doctor told me that I could drink a glass of grape juice every morning instead—the real thing, not like ‘grape drink,’ y’know? So I do. And I really like grape juice. But for some reason, whenever I drink it, which is first thing in the morning, it makes me throw up
.”
“Talia…?”
“What?”
“Do you drink the grape juice on an empty stomach every morning?” She pondered the question and nodded. “Well, if what you’re telling me is true—that all this throwing up is purely due to an adverse reaction to drinking grape juice on an empty stomach—then you might want to consider eating a bit of solid food with it.”
Talia made a face. “I can’t eat breakfast. I can’t even think about eating until about ten in the morning.”
I regarded her skeptically. “I really hope that you’re telling me the truth, Talia. I’ve been through it. So, believe me, I understand how painful and embarrassing it can be. And how horribly self-destructive it is to your body. I want you to know that we can talk about it in here. And we’ll get you some help. Okay?”
“I know what you’re saying, Susan, but I swear to you, if anything, I have a food allergy, not an eating disorder.”
“Just giving you food for thought.”
Talia tugged at her ponytail elastic and her dark hair came tumbling down over her shoulders. “Ahhhhh,” she murmured happily, vigorously shaking her head. “And another thing…you have no idea how good it feels not to have my hair pulled into a tight bun all the time. I never realized why I always seemed to be walking around with a headache until my ACL popped and I didn’t have any reason to stick all those bobby pins in my head every day!”
“So…to go back to what you were saying before the hair subject…you’re becoming the ant and not the grasshopper…planning for the future instead of living for the moment. Which isn’t the same as living in the moment, by the way. You should live in the moment. And it sounds like you’re thinking about training to become a Pilates instructor down the line. What about teaching dance? Have you reconsidered that?”
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