This Is Not Chick Lit

by Elizabeth Merrick

  Some months ago, Doctor, I argued a case against a public defender who claimed that my office’s accusations were based not on facts, as indeed they were, but on a series of coincidences. Coincidence, I’d repeated, as if it were another name for Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. But I myself have often noticed how often coincidence plays a role in our daily interactions, rolling the dice in ways we could not have predicted. For a while I kept a notebook just to see for myself if such things happen as often as I thought, and they did.

  So maybe I am coincidence-prone. Or maybe it was simple statistics. Maybe half the people on that bus had children with serious emotional problems. Maybe that is modern life, and no one will say it, no more than I would come up to you or anyone else on the bus and say that my daughter is now a freshman at college and seems to be doing well. She has a therapist she likes and trusts. Dr. Janet Finch. Perhaps you knew her, Doctor. She’s very much like her name.

  But even with Dr. Finch’s help, my wife and I will never in our lives enjoy another moment when we aren’t holding our breaths. Which maybe was the point of it all. If you aren’t holding your breath, you should be. Certainly, in my daily work, I meet a lot of people who were never expecting to have something terrible happen. Who weren’t watching out. Who were not waiting, as they say, for the other shoe to drop. Perhaps you too have wondered about that expression, Doctor. Isn’t the logic inexorable? The other shoe will drop. How common is it for people to go to bed wearing one shoe?

  Doctor, that hardly gives me hope, which merely compounds the gloomy residue layered on us by the hours that my wife and daughter and I spent in the offices of Gloomy Gus professionals not unlike yourself. How distractedly all the doctors said, “There’s always a chance.” They meant to reassure us by invoking the very slim chance that things would turn out to be all right.

  Forgive me, Doctor, for second-guessing you. How you must hate when that happens. The layman, with a few fuzzy ideas he’s picked up from TV, presuming to understand how the medical mind works. Even so, Doctor, I guess you’re thinking you understand the reason why I am writing this letter. You think it’s about my daughter, that I associate you with her problems, or with the doctors who failed to help us. But you, as a doctor, should know—just as I do, in my profession—that there is never just one thing, one reason, one motive.

  Of course, it was just at this moment that the midtown traffic slowed and stopped and sealed us in that belching tin can ringing with your voice. Like my fellow passengers, though I can only assume this, I staved off panic by telling myself it couldn’t last. Sooner or later, the traffic would move. Your conversation would end. Perhaps I was the only one who wondered about your battery life, your calling plan. Dr. Janet Finch advised us to make certain boundaries clear. Our daughter can’t be on our cell-phone plan, though we pay her bill and sharing a plan would save money.

  And of course we passengers were right. Traffic started moving again. But if it had ended there, if you had gottem off the bus in midtown, or if I had stepped down and stopped for that wonton-noodle soup, I would have missed the end of the story. I would have left the bus with a very different impression of you than the one I eventually took away, and I would have no reason to be writing you this letter.

  I must have had some instinct, Doctor. For some reason I stayed on the bus. You said, “Normally, I’d just hand them a referral. Not even charge for the consultation.” You laughed, Doctor. Presumably Jerry had made some joke about money. “But what made the difference, and I’m not kidding you about this, Jerry, was that weekend retreat I spent in Sedona with the Tibetan lama. I know you guys got a good laugh about it, but the guy was something. And I think it changed me, Jerry. It’s affected my practice. You want to know an example? I’ll give you an example.”

  I was listening hard, Doctor, and trying not to be distracted by yet another coincidence, which is that my wife spends occasional weekends at a Zen Buddhist monastery up near Woodstock. We don’t talk much about it. I don’t ask, she doesn’t volunteer. She goes with a friend of hers, another teacher at her school. One night, we went out for dinner with the friend and the friend’s husband, and the husband kept mentioning the Zen stuff and rolling his eyes, much the way I imagined my fellow passengers rolling their eyes about your conversation, Doctor. But I couldn’t participate in the eye rolling, if you know what I mean. Because the truth is that on the Sunday nights when my wife comes home from the monastery, I feel a special tenderness for her, even more than normal, and it seems to me that she is more placid, or in any case less afraid.

  “Okay,” you said, “here’s an example, Jerry. The lama said, ‘Always look harder. There is something you are missing.’ So I called the kid back in, and the three of us, I mean the four of us, we just sat there and looked. I mean, I looked. I kept looking. The kid was looking at the carpet. And then I saw it. The flecks of color, of paint, on the kid’s hand.

  “ ‘You like art?’ I said. He nodded.

  “ ‘How do you know?’ he said.

  “ ‘I can read minds,’ I said. And you know, I think he believed me. People have that thing about doctors. The poor little fucker thought I was a magician. So I decided to run with it. I said, ‘I want you to paint for me. I want you to paint food. But the only way you get to paint it is to eat it afterward. Then you bring me the paintings. I buy them. They’d better be cheap.’

  “ ‘How do you know I can paint?’ said the kid.

  “ ‘I can see it,’ I said. ‘Trust me.’ ”

  And now, Doctor, more than ever before, I positively longed to look around to actually see how many fellow listeners I had, and of those how many were as surprised as I was, to hear your story take this turn toward Buddhism and art.

  “So here’s why I’m calling you, Jerry,” you said. “This morning the kid’s mother phones. And she says the kid has gained a few pounds, and he’s got this painting for me. A picture of a steak. A fucking steak, Jerry, can you believe that? He ate the steak. Right, right. I know it’s too good to be true, I don’t believe in quick fixes, either. You think I’m confusing a painting of some meat with a cure? But you can’t help admitting it’s interesting. The kid’s stopped losing weight. He’s bringing the painting in next week. You need any art for your office? Okay, here’s my stop. I’ll call you later. Gotta run.”

  And that was it, Doctor. The bus stopped. I assume you left. I didn’t turn to see you go. Some delicacy prevented me from looking, I don’t know. But instantly, I wished I had looked, and I scanned the street for some sign of you. But you had already disappeared beneath the scaffolding at the base of the Empire State Building, and into the crowds swarming west on Thirty-fourth Street. I regretted not having seen your face, as if that might have provided some clue to the mystery of why you did what you did. Why you betrayed a professional confidence, why you told a bus full of strangers about the intimate life of a troubled boy, and your feelings about him. Was it so we could admire you, Doctor, so we could praise you, along with Jerry, even after we had been held prisoner by your voice, by your story?

  And how should we weigh all that against the fact that you may have saved the life of this boy, that you saw something in him, and helped him? If you saved him, it would be worth it, whatever discomfort we felt listening to a story that we should not have been hearing, together with the more particular pains suffered by me and any other of the passengers who happened to have something in common with the characters in the story you were telling.

  Was it worth it, Doctor? And how would we have chosen if we’d had a choice between your saving the boy and our having to listen to it, or your having failed with the kid—and our being spared? Because it seems less likely that you would have been telling your friend and, by extension, the whole bus the story of how you’d fucked up. Life is full of choices, Doctor, and part of my job as a lawyer involves thinking those choices through. And forming some opinion about innocence or guilt. I realize that we may have strayed here into some philosophical region,
somewhere in the vicinity of that tired old question about saving the Rembrandt or the old woman. But what am I in that equation, the Rembrandt or the old woman? And what about the poor kid eating radishes and painting pictures of steaks, and eating?

  Ever since that morning, I have been weighing it in my mind. And I find that the scale keeps tipping, first one way, then the other. Which is why I am writing this letter to you, as one professional to another, in the hope that you will come forward and tell me what you were doing that morning, and that a word of explanation from you will tip the balance this way or that, and let me put this matter to rest, and go back to my normal life.

  Holiday Reinhorn

  Tommy’s cousin Gabe. Tommy’s distant cousin Gabe from Stillwater, Minnesota. Tommy’s cousin Gabe, related to my husband through divorce and remarriage, in lieu of actual blood, who arrives on my front porch at dinnertime with a duffel bag and fanny pack. Industrial-sized.

  Gabe. Two hungry blue eyes, trapped in a giant body. Infinite, knowing eyes of an orca whale. This is Gabe.

  Sea monster son of Vickie, the housewife, and Gary, the unemployed architect. Grandson of Lillith, the secretary, and Chester, the inventor of the lightning rod.

  Gabe, clinically depressed, he announces at the table after Tommy gets up to go check his e-mail, and not taking his Paxil.

  Tommy’s cousin Gabe, who admits to falling in love with married women only, who has flown out to Los Angeles this time to deliver a hardbound copy of The Celestine Prophecy to a married woman he knows in Calabasas.

  Strawberry blond, 275-pound Gabe, whose job it is to run employee vacation and incentive programs for Buy Rite International Corporation. Gabe, who can, on any given weekend, fly down to Fort Worth in order to tell several people (always women and usually married) that they have just won a free weekend trip to Cabo San Lucas.

  Gabe, who tells me (and my husband’s currently empty dining room chair) that he gives all the women he loves a copy of The Celestine Prophecy. Laurie, Molly, Susan.

  GABE EDWARD ARTHUR KAKE. Twenty-four years of age. Recent graduate of a Lutheran university, which he attended over the dead, severely diabetic body of his Catholic father, Gary, the unemployed architect. With undergrad friends from around the globe who were all deported last year, leaving him with absolutely “zero” people.

  Gabe, who will be the first to admit he has a problem with Pop-Tarts sometimes, and who asks me, did I know, was I aware, that after he gives out trips to Puerto Vallarta and Acapulco to these married women he knows are married (that he has read about in the personnel files), after they scream and laugh and he gets, quote, “a free hug,” after he asks these selfsame women out for a celebratory drink or dinner and they say no, they are engaged, betrothed, previously committed, whatever! After that did I know that then, stranded in these very foreign American places, did I know that he, Gabe, always goes back to his second-class hotel with no toaster in sight and eats raw Pop-Tarts and turns on the water of the sink full-blast so nobody can hear him crying? Did I know that? Could I guess?

  “No, Gabe,” I say. “I couldn’t have guessed.”

  Gabe: moving from topic to topic without changing tone, taking a breath, or blinking, who has had more than just one psychic dream come true in his life, and who, more than anything, wants an Irish setter, because they were described in the Dog Fancier’s book he got free from a friend at work as being full of abounding love, even if there is no one there to receive it.

  Gabe, who tells me all of the above while Tommy is still conveniently in his office, MIA. And who tells me, in addition to all of this, that every single untouchable married woman in his life, the Lauries Mollys Susans, he has just now, this very second, realized, remind him of me.

  Gabe tells me he is aware that I am married and that I am also thirty-six. “The age difference would be a problem, wouldn’t it?” he asks, and I answer him in all seriousness over the sound of Tommy washing his hands in the bathroom.

  “Yes.”

  Gabe, who follows me through the house after dinner while I sweep. Who trails out into the driveway after me when I take out the recycling. Who puts his pistachio shells down the garbage disposal even though I tell him, “Gabe, please don’t put your pistachio shells down the garbage disposal.”

  Gabe, who would climb into a woman and live there forever like a castaway if she’d let him. Gabe, who has scurvy, practically, from his desire for these pirate-fantasy women he cannot touch.

  “I guess I’ll take this as a compliment, Gabe,” I say, when I turn around and find him four inches from me as I finish the dishes.

  “Do so,” he says quietly. And then winks.

  Porous, soft, almost albino Gabe. Who leaves his advice books about women on the coffee table for me to find after he unpacks. Like Maxim’s Pocket Book of Women, and WOMEN: The Unauthorized Guide, which when I do find them, and of course, open them once Tommy and I are in the bedroom, advise men to speak in a lower register to women because it reminds them of their father’s authority, and to speak in rhythmic tones to women because it lulls them into feeling comforted and protected, and quote, “ready for anything.”

  “There’s someone I want to show you to, okay?” Tommy whispers after we hear the squish of Gabe in the living room, lowering himself onto the blow-up mattress, and as he points the webcam toward my side of the bed, I roll my eyes at him before I pull off my shirt.

  “You better do it fast.”

  Gabe: in the house for eight days so far. Who eats entire bags of sesame sticks covered with Italian dressing and calls this dinner. Who says even though we’ve met him only once before, that Tommy and me, we feel like his only family.

  “We should introduce him to Summer,” Tommy says. “Remember? That girl with the e-tutorial for virgins?”

  But God knows he’d fall in love with her. He’d fall in love with a woman in a Crisco commercial. He’d send her fan letter after fan letter: “When you picked up the corncob that way, I found you beautiful.”

  Gabe, reviled by his own body. Gabe, who looks unlived, whose skin is pale, fetal-looking. Whose skin has the milky quality of having been torn from the womb too soon. Gabe, who barely has palm lines, whose eyes trace my silhouette at the sink as he picks gum off the lining of his ski jacket with a butter knife. Gum that got stuck there when he went alone to see Unleashed at the 22-plex because we had to go to one of Tommy’s parties and couldn’t take him.

  And finally, Gabe. Who is sitting in the living room with all the lights off when I come home from work on the afternoon of Day 9, cradling my sixty-pound pit bull in his lap.

  “How’s it going, Gabe,” I ask, and when he hears my voice, he looks up and smiles beatifically.

  “Not good.”

  And this is when Gabe tells me about “recently,” when he was just sitting at his desk inside Buy Rite corporate headquarters. How he was just sitting there, in his cubby, when he, quote, “hit a wall.” Literally. And his hand popped straight through the particleboard in a geometric circle. Perfectly round.

  And at that precise moment, he had to get away from Laurie, typing away in the cubby right next to him. Married Laurie. Wife of somebody else. Laurie, who owns one shepherd mix and one full-bred shepherd, and who, if he’s honest with himself, is actually the one who gave Gabe the idea about the Irish setter and the Dog Fancier’s book too, in fact, when she and the husband invited him over that one great year on Super Bowl Sunday.

  Laurie, who was diagnosed recently with both breast and ovarian malignancies. Laurie, who is getting radiation here in Calabasas, by the way, where she is currently staying with her cousin Molly, and her cousin Susan. Cousins and next-door neighbors, he adds. Both already married.

  “Calabasas?” I say, before it occurs to me. “Oh.”

  “But it wasn’t stalking her to come here,” Gabe assures me. “Not by a long shot.” They worked together at the Buy Rite. She was sick and it was obvious. Before he punched a hole in it, their cubbies used to share a
common wall.

  “Used to?”

  Gabe sighs and nuzzles the dog, who lathers him with her tongue from chin to forehead. “If you hear someone throwing up in the women’s bathroom,” he says, “and you can recognize from the sound of the retching who it is, shouldn’t you go in? Following someone you love to the bathroom isn’t inappropriate. In a perfect, evolving world like the one in The Celestine Prophecy, this kind of service would be called ‘friendship slash concern.’ ”

  “People don’t get fired because they walk into the women’s room, though.”

  Gabe pushes the dog from his lap and his shoulders droop. “It was just an e-mail to a few people on the sales floor,” he says. “If someone cares whether or not you die, I don’t see the problem with letting several key individuals know about it, do you?”

  “Wow, Gabe,” I say, staring across the coffee table at him without blinking. “A group e-mail.”

  “I know,” Gabe sighs, bowing his head. “Do you think I could get a free hug?”

  Gabe, in my living room with a swirl of black dog hair on the pocket of his button-down.

  Gabe, who promises, as our arms jerk uncomfortably around each other, that on his next visit he will definitely give me a copy of The Celestine Prophecy, or have one of Laurie’s cousins from Calabasas drop it by. Either one.

  Gabe, who leaves on Day 10 while Tommy is doing errands, requesting a ride to LAX five and a half hours before the departure of his plane. Who we will not hear from again until we receive his family’s Christmas letter two months later. “Gabe got fired from Buy Rite for some reason,” it says, “and Gary has to get his leg amputated in April from the diabetes. His attitude is positive and he wants to start playing golf.”