Everybody’s Out There

by Robert M. Marchese

  Chapter 16

  I must’ve lost count or lost interest, but either way, I stopped keeping track of how long it had been since Laura and I had sex with one another. Eventually, for some reason, the matter stopped being depressing. Time fell through the air in dangerous acrobatic twists, and its crash landing made it and everything around it unrecognizable. So the lack of intimacy became the norm.

  “Seduce her, for Christ’s sake,” Ben said over the phone one evening. “Do I really have to go through this with you?”

  There was no levity in his voice when he said this. It was evident that he was becoming worried over my situation.

  “Candles, music, whatever. Or a getaway. What about a getaway?”

  I reminded Ben about my last attempt at this; the tickets I bought to Key West went unused, costing me over $1,000. He paused. I could hear Justine in the background.

  “Listen, I’m not saying the sex is everything,” he finally said, “but its absence is pretty serious.”

  Laura’s birthday was at the end of the month, I told him. Maybe I could plan a party. I could rent out a space and get her family and coworkers and friends in on it. Then at the evening’s end I could capitalize on her joy, and, possibly, with some luck, break our slump. Ben, I could tell, had muted his phone and was likely talking with Justine. Probably he was running my idea by her. When he returned to our conversation, he sighed and told me that my idea was a decent one. With his terseness and tired tone, I barely believed him.

  . . .

  Of course I thought of my father when I made an appointment with a therapist. His name was Dr. Jerome Forrest and I learned about him from Ben’s sister-in-law, who described him to me in a text as her “pocket sized savior.” In parenthesis, she revealed that the doctor barely scraped by at being five feet tall. My appointment was for a Wednesday afternoon. I called his office three times in two days to verify the details - the day, the time, the building. Dr. Forrest’s secretary identified herself to me as his wife, Shannon. She was tolerant and even good-natured over my obsessiveness. During the third call, I told Shannon I grew up with therapists all around my neighborhood. She joked that as a result I must be exceedingly well-adjusted. Initially missing the joke, I told her I was. Then, forgetting I was speaking to his wife, I began asking questions about the doctor. Was he any good? Where did he attend school? Was he as short as the rumor said he was? Shannon advised me to visit his website and said they looked forward to meeting me in person.

  The notion of therapy was surreal to me. These men and women were not mystics or magicians. They were fellow human beings who had enough ego to consider themselves capable of helping someone too fucked up to help himself. They had read some books and taken some classes. That’s all.

  I started to think about the therapists I knew while I was growing up. There had been a lot of them. The gregarious Dr. Homer Wald’s legacy lives on in the dorm whose name he inspired. Dr. Whitaker was a pale yet pretty woman who always wore her reddish hair in a tight bun that made me think of a ripening tomato; I secretly wished she and Rollie would marry. Dr. Lawrynowicz was a deep-voiced, heavyset man who was always looking for his glasses, clipboard, or keys. Dr. Nussbaum was and still is my father’s commandant. Dr. Hines, who used to call me Graymalkin, won a few bucks on Jeopardy in his mid-twenties and liked to mock this long-faded triumph.

  I thought about the human suffering they all must’ve been privy to, the abuse and neglect and despair and hopelessness. I wondered how that might’ve affected their state of mind and how they elicited such weighty matters from teenagers; they needed a special power to establish that type of trust. There’s no doubt that I regarded the therapists differently than I did the rest of the Old Man’s staff. To me, this elite group of bookish men and women with glasses and dated wardrobes and sincere, understanding smiles, were pathetically brave. They were stuntmen and stuntwomen, hurling themselves into wreck after wreck with full creative force, stepping brilliantly to the dysfunction, not sideswiping it, but taming it and naming it and learning how to master it somehow.

  The same could be said for my father, who I began to think a lot about during this time. Not only him, but his school and his kids. I found myself tramping through the HAS campus in my mind, remembering the scent of cigarette smoke when the wind gusted in a certain direction, recalling the stares of suspicious students as I talked to my father outside of his office. It was remarkable for me to consider that I shared meals with kids my own age who had done heroin, attempted suicide, pierced their nipples, bartered with sex, told their parents and teachers to die.

  “How does it work?” I asked Ben. “Do I just start talking? Or is it Q and A? Will he ask about my fucking childhood?”

  “How am I supposed to know? I’ve never been fucked up enough to need therapy. But in the movies there are always head games between patient and doctor. So there’s something to look forward to.”

  His joking was just what I needed. I was becoming anxious about the appointment. But Dr. Forrest’s stats all looked good. He was well-educated and qualified and was a handsome man to look at. He took nearly every type of insurance and his website was accessible. Still, I didn’t know what to expect. What would I say during our first session together? Where would I begin? How much would I reveal? Would the onus be more on the doctor or patient? Something else I thought about was whether or not I would lie. I truly thought about this. And it made me more anxious. It made me feel like whatever truths I had to offer might not be enough - that they might vilify me in the doctor’s eyes. They might cause Dr. Forrest to judge me and side with Laura and her parents and friends and coworkers and even the fucking strangers Laura had probably won over as allies. Then I began to get angry. Calculating the money this guy would make off of me when he couldn’t even see my position infuriated me all the more. I told Ben over the phone one evening that I thought therapy was a bunch of shit.

  “Well,” he said, “come Wednesday, you’ll find out for sure.”

  His memory of my appointment was both impressive and suspicious to me. Clearly, he was a good listener, remembering small details - two things I’d always known about Ben - but something told me he was keeping track of this thing. There was no doubt that he was relieved I’d made the appointment. He joked that it would free up a lot of his own time. On a serious note, he said it would do me a world of good. But I began to think those were euphemisms for his real sentiments, which might’ve been that I had fucked up my life and my marriage and another human being. Fucked them up beyond repair, so why not get a jump start on the therapy. I imagined him talking to Justine about it, saying things like, “Poor Laura,” and, “Well, you know Gray. You know how he is and how he likes everything in his life - flawless and up to his unbelievably impossible standards.” I called Dr. Forrest’s office two hours before the appointment and cancelled.

  . . .

  Wildfire was the only restaurant I considered for Laura’s party. I’d never been and it was out of my price range. The menu was high-end and the place looked nice enough online. The thought of being cheap and shopping around for the venue that would host my attempt at reconciliation was depressing. So I gave the man my credit card number over the phone and booked it.

  “Sounds too fancy,” Luke said when I told him my idea. “Too much pomp and circumstance. Laura’s not going to want all that.”

  “Want all what?”

  “Laura doesn’t like surprises.”

  I recognized right away what he was doing. He was trying to make me question how well I knew my wife. This business of not liking surprises wasn’t at all true. I didn’t argue. We hung up the phone and I called back a few hours later and spoke with Abby.

  “What can we do?”

  I asked her for a list of friends and coworkers and their con
tact info. The guest list, along with everything else, would be my responsibility, I told her.

  “Just tell the rest of the family,” I said. “That’s it.”

  And pray that my efforts aren’t in vain, I wanted to add. Before we got off the phone, I thought about telling Abby that I loved her. I had never done so before. My affection wouldn’t have been misplaced, but I thought it might come off as pandering. So I just thanked her before hanging up. Then I felt a pang of regret that I wasn’t more demonstrative. So I wrote out a brief text that read, “Thanks for everything. Looking forward to seeing you both. We love you very much.” Staring at my words for a few moments, I ended up deleting the last sentence before sending the message.

  . . .

  “Have you thought about moving?” Ben asked during lunch one afternoon.

  This was like a boulder flung from space, landing at my feet. He said it was something to consider, that it would foster the new beginning I was looking to establish between me and Laura. I liked the idea so much, without needing even a moment to contemplate its magnitude, that I managed to convince myself I had been the one to come up with it.

  “Stands to reason,” he said. “You’re working on getting your head on straight, right? Might as well deck this thing out with other changes, too. Besides, how attached to that house are you?”

  Ben didn’t know I cancelled my appointment with Dr. Forrest. I wanted him to believe I was the kind of man who could buy into something like therapy, especially for the purpose of saving my marriage. He called me that Wednesday evening, hours after he figured my first session had ended, and asked if I was okay. Nothing more. Just if I was okay. I said I was fine and that I appreciated the call. For a moment, I thought about lying and saying generic things like how cathartic it was; or detailed things like Dr. Forrest twirled his pen while I talked; or hopeful things like Dr. Forrest was able to perfectly articulate the type of relationship he feels Laura and I have.

  “I suppose we’re not that attached. It is just a house. I mean, if things had gone according to plan, who knows?”

  “If things had gone according to plan, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  Lately, Ben had grown a bit harsh with me. Even his sarcasm had an edge to it. It was often delivered in quick, solemn bursts of words that always seemed chewed up and spit out with ragged intent. Even the polite grins that used to accompany his remarks soon gave way to no eye contact or affect - or worse, a sort of stoic indifference I had no problem detecting in him. I told myself it was because he was in a rush for me and my wife to fix what had become broken. That he was worried and wanting only the best for me, which he decided must’ve been Laura. I told myself it was not because he was harboring some very real contempt towards me that he would show through such meager gestures.

  There was the Cadman Brothers disaster. There was the shortage of neighbors. There was the 3200-square-foot home with only two people occupying it, absently floating from room to room, hoping the largeness of the place would be enough to contain their burdens, wondering if the other was at home, praying at times that they wouldn’t be, but terminally aching when they weren’t. I imagined us once again living in the city. This appealed to me. People. Culture. Distractions. A return to our roots. When things were simpler. When they were free from the signposts of heavy responsibility.

  I found a townhouse on Milwaukee Avenue. The online photos were impressive. With its freshly painted rooms and refinished oak floors, it was described as move-in condition. There was another one, on N. Lakeview, with generous walk-in closets, a newly remodeled kitchen, and high ceilings. Then there was the one on E. 13th Street. With its views of the lake and harbor and Museum Campus, the doorman building unit had granite countertops and cherry maple hardwood. It had Laura’s taste all over it. I arranged for a private showing with my checkbook in my back pocket. After the tour, the realtor, Janet, an attractive fifty-ish woman with blonde highlighted hair and a pretty smile, told me the place would be sold by the end of the week. Looking out of the living room terrace at the cold, dark water of Lake Michigan, I suddenly felt a calm wash over me that I hadn’t felt in a long time. It was a complete feeling. Like my nerves had been rewired by the high altitude of the apartment. I suddenly didn’t give a shit about the past or the future or whether fate had driven me here to this spot on this day, or if Janet herself was some sort of alchemist who had altered my consciousness by advertising such a nice place and luring me to it.

  I asked for her pen and wrote a check for the $5,000 deposit. She told me I was a smart man. Letting the flattery settle for a moment, I cleared my throat and stumbled for a bit, trying to get some words out. Janet, probably in an act of deference, avoided eye contact as she looked at her leather folio and slid my check inside. Then she flashed a warm, inviting look, which told me I was cleared to speak. So I asked her, with as much savvy as I could muster, if, assuming special circumstances, the money was refundable.

  . . .

  “This is wonderful,” Laura kept saying throughout the evening.

  As her guests approached her, she would embrace them and say how she was glad to see them. Then she would add, to no one in particular, how nice it all was, the restaurant, the company, the food. Yet she never once turned to me as I followed her around like some idiot schoolboy, overseeing her affection towards others. I kept at it, though, staying close to her side, shaking hands with the husbands of her coworkers and friends, men I’d met on occasion at previous gatherings, asking banal questions about what they did for a living and if they thought we’d really be getting that big snowstorm predicted for the upcoming week.

  As the evening wore on, Laura and I eventually separated. I gravitated towards the bar, and she continued to work the room, soaking up as much good cheer as she could. I found myself watching her interactions, hoping she would turn suddenly away from her conversation and call for me to come to her side once again. Or that she would at least take pause for a moment, search the room, point me out to her friends, and raise her glass to me with a thankful smile.

  Ben and Justine couldn’t make it - both of their girls had food poisoning - so I was on my own. There would be no one to clap me on the back in front of Laura and tell me I was one hell of a guy for putting this thing together for my wife. It was pathetic that I needed this. But its simplicity would’ve been a starting point for me and Laura. Instead, I had to endure the imagined scrutiny I figured I was under from everyone in the room. They all knew about me. They knew I was the one responsible for the hard to define thing that had happened to my wife. They knew. A party, they must’ve thought. A party as consolation. What a guy.

  Abby found me by the bar at around the time I began to feel a buzz from the four beers I had. She ordered a couple of glasses of white wine. I told her she looked lovely, which was the truth. Her hair was shorter than it was the last time I saw her, and it was pulled away from her face in a tortoise shell hair clip. She wore a little makeup, which I decided was uncommon for her. It was all very becoming.

  Considering whether Laura would look like Abby in twenty or thirty years was always something I liked to do. It pleased me to think that she would. And for some reason it made me feel closer to Abby. But looking at my mother-in-law now made me wonder if I’d ever be able to find out this potential likeness for myself.

  She greeted me with a light rub to my shoulder. I wanted to tell her how I was happy to have her in my life and how I enjoyed not subscribing to all those stale, unfunny jokes that were supposed to define our relationship. Instead, I complimented her appearance and thanked her for coming to the party.

  “You did a terrific job, Gray. She’s having a wonderful time.”

  There was a trace of melancholy in her voice when she said this.

  “Good. I’m glad.”

 
The bartender presented two glasses and handed them to Abby. There was no one else in line at the bar, so we stood there for a few moments, neither of us speaking. Finally, after some time, Abby took the wine and turned to me with an earnest look. She pursed her lips and then took a deep breath.

  “We miss you, Gray,” she said before kissing my cheek and walking away.

  This arrested my beer buzz almost immediately. I wondered if Laura was among the “we” who had missed me. And if conversations had taken place where I was mentioned in a nostalgic light. Perhaps she was planning a seduction of her own. Any thoughts that Abby’s comment was obligatory were disregarded with a shudder as I asked the bartender for my fifth beer. My mother-in-law’s sentiment, I reasoned, was a portentous gesture, a carefully thought-out offering. I told myself it must’ve been not only Laura’s humble message being delivered by her magnanimous mother, but a quiet plea for me to once and for all embrace and live by the rectitude of this thing called family.