Believe Me

by Patricia Pearson

  I missed Calvin, and felt more keenly his sorrow. And I missed Lester, who was packed off every day to daycare, with his toys and his snack and his inchoate sorrow.

  In the end I kept the appointment with Helen, driving up to St. Clair and Yonge that Friday after dropping Lester off.

  “Wait,” I said, as I sank into the giant chair. “Helen, can I clarify something first?”

  She nodded, seated at her escritoire, this time in a natty blue wool suit.

  “I take it from our past-life regression thing that you believe in reincarnation, which would make you … what … a Buddhist or a Hindu or something like that?”

  She smiled demurely and shook her head. “Not really, Fran, no. I’ve just found that this technique is helpful to many of my clients, and really, what’s important is what they believe, not what I believe.”

  I studied her, careful. “So you don’t believe in reincarnation.”

  “My spiritual views aren’t pertinent, as long as I am properly trained and very mindful.”

  How odd. Relativism in service to godliness. I had a thought: “So then, before I came the first time, you thought I was a Hindu?”

  She dipped her head down, embarrassed. “I was under the mistaken impression that you were a Buddhist. I apologize.”

  We gazed at one another in vexed silence.

  “The main thing,” she finally said, patting her hair and stretching her shoulders back, “is I appreciate your coming back, and I do have something else that I think will work very nicely for you. I can see that you’re still very tense, and I do think I can help.”

  I sighed and threw my head back on the chair. The truth is, I didn’t mind that first bit she did, where she got me to relax to the point of incontinence. That was alright, I could do that again. It was either Helen, or an entire bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

  “Okay,” she said, once she had expertly brought me through her ritual of relaxation and I was duly tossed flat on a beach. “Now, I want you to imagine a place. It can be any place at all, as long as it is your own, secret place. I want you to imagine every part of this place. See it. Are the walls wood, or glass? Are there many bright windows, or is it cozy and dark? What is on the floor? Is it carpeted or smooth? Is there a big feather bed, or just big cushions gathered around a fireplace?”

  Gamely, I imagined a place, then several different places, and busily redecorated this way and that until I finally settled on a space of sunlit glass and marble with a white, furry sort of rug on the floor. As an afterthought, I added Brad Pitt, naked.

  “Are you in your secret place?” Helen asked. I fluttered my pinkie.

  “Gooood. Now, remember that this is your hideaway from the world, a temple of solitude that no one can enter but you.”

  Reluctantly, I booted out Brad Pitt, but then a few moments later Viggo Mortensen showed up, and what could I do? I had to be polite. He lay down beside me on the furry rug and we began conversing in Elvish.

  “Alright, Frannie,” Helen said, “good. I want you to focus, for a moment, on your fears about climate change. Think about how you feel as you sit happily and safely in your own private space.”

  Excuse me, do you mind? I’m lying around naked with Viggo Mortensen! Go talk to Al Gore about climate change, if you’re so interested in the subject, you bitch!

  Oh dear. I wasn’t being sufficiently suggestible. Again. I wondered if I should tell her that. On the other hand, I didn’t want to confess, for that would break the spell and make me surrender my imaginary sanctum. Me, sunlight, a man whose stringy, unwashed hair is bizarrely alluring, and a furry rug. A corner of heaven. I didn’t want the solitude that Helen was coaxing me toward. If it was solace that I sought, then I associated it with something other than being alone. I paired it with whispers and shared pleasure. With feeling fulfilled and serene.

  This sensation of loneliness brought a wave of sadness to me as true and deep as anything I had ever felt. Minutes passed in silence. I lay with the feeling for a long time, it seemed, and Helen, to her credit, remained motionless and perfectly quiet.

  At last, after one hundred and twenty-five million years, I struggled to sit up.

  “You’ve seen something,” she said gently, with a half-smile.

  “It’s nothing,” I told her, blinking, running my hand shakily through my hair. “I mean, it’s just that I understood or felt something that I guess was there all along, this powerful sense of being alone.” I shrugged. Uncertain. “That’s all.”

  Back out on Yonge Street under the pale, subtly brightening sky of early March, I walked past the windows of Bregman’s Deli, where my aunt Mary used to take me with Kate for bagels and cream cheese when my mother had to work on a Saturday. It was early on in Mum’s psychotherapy practice, and she couldn’t afford to ask anyone to shelve their neuroses till Monday. I remembered carving faces in the cream cheese with my straw. I couldn’t eat the bagel until the face was complete, perfected to my satisfaction, and then I would dreamily efface it with my tongue. Kate would make faces in her bagel too, and then stab it with a toothpick. I cannot recall what Aunt Mary was doing, or thinking, on her side of the table, although I realize now that it was around the time she was being abandoned in slow motion by Uncle Svend.

  Later, in university, I would sometimes drag myself into Bregman’s with a hangover and a man I’d just slept with, and we’d sit in giddy silence, clouded by the secretive sense of our having had sex, sipping coffee and picking at scrambled eggs. And later that same day, I remember calling one of those men from a pay phone, still dreamy like a kid, wanting to know when I’d see him again, and he told me, sheepish, that he couldn’t go out—he “had a date”—and I stood there at the pay phone, as sharply and abruptly wounded as if I’d been hit with shrapnel.

  So much makes you alone. The men who love you, but don’t. The shopkeepers who pretend to be friendly, but aren’t. The fathers who negate your desire to believe in them. The doctors who keep secrets they don’t care about, while you stay in the dark. The ideologues who make you feel like crap for being human, like the worst sin you could commit in the world is not knowing where you are going, no matter how openhearted your path.

  “We will have to choose between two ways of being crazy,” the priest Jean Vanier once wrote, “the foolishness of the Gospel, or the nonsense of the values of our world.”

  35

  Monday morning. No quote from Avery today, just a relayed message. “Sherman wants to talk to you.” A pencil tapped against his head.

  Of course Sherman did. I went down the hall, and hovered at the threshold of his office, braced for my scolding.

  “Sherman?” I ventured, when I caught his attention. “Avery said that you’d been looking for me.”

  He was seated at his polished mahagony desk, staring down at a copy of the Moral Volcano, his anger evident in the clenching of his jaw.

  “People,” he said, without looking up, “are making fun of me for my latest column, Frances. They say it reads as if it were translated from Turkish by Google.”

  “Oh,” I said vaguely, and shrugged.

  “I trusted you with my writing, Frances,” he continued. “That’s why I gave you the last sign-off before it went to print.” He locked eyes with me. “I don’t mean to pry,” he added, his tone turning acid, “but you aren’t having a nervous breakdown of some sort, are you? An episode in your life that is making you want to lash out?”

  “Oh, look,” I answered, as I felt heat flush my cheeks, “it’s funny that you should mention not wanting to pry, because I have been feeling the same way. Like, I’ve been dying to ask you if you have ever been to France, and if that’s where you met Gail, or whether you formed your bizarre ideas about Gallic politics after watching La Cage aux Folles.”

  He leaned back in his leather desk chair and steepled his fingers, regarding me as if a chill had just gone up his spine.

  “What do you mean?” he wanted to know, careful.

  I stuck out m
y lower lip and shrugged. “I went to France when I was nineteen, and I had a good time; the crêpes in Brittany were unbelievably delicious.”

  Somewhat undone by the stupidity of what I’d just said, I soldiered on. “And you know, I found the French could be insufferable, particularly in their disdain for your ability to speak French properly, and also if you dared accuse a waiter of ripping you off in a restaurant, God forbid.” I rolled my eyes. “But what confuses me, in what you’ve been writing, is that I can’t say that I ever got the impression that the French wanted to take over the United States by brainwashing liberals.” I looked at him. He had no response. So I continued, “And so … I’ve been worrying … I don’t know if I’m editing you for sense in that sense, because I’m not sure you’re actually capable of making sense. In what you say about the French.”

  “What is it that goes over your head, precisely?” he inquired.

  “I guess what it is, Sherman, is that I can’t edit you for sense when the argument you make, sense-wise, is that half of the American population is in the thrall of a bunch of guys in Paris. Or when you argue that poor people in Canada don’t deserve to die in hospital beds if they can’t afford them. And that abortion is a feminazi tryanny. You pose a challenge for me that transcends figuring out where the commas should go, because—”

  “Ah,” he interrupted, reaching for his phone as if to dismiss me, “the truth comes out, doesn’t it. You cannot betray your cause.”

  “My cause?” I echoed, and now my ears were ringing like someone had just clanged a pair of cymbals two feet away. “I worry about you saying things like that, Sherman, because it’s so paranoid. The truth is, I’ve never really thought about whether I was a liberal, or a what, until you started throwing cartoon versions of human experience at me.” I stopped hovering on the threshold of his office and marched in, energized by my need to get this off my chest.

  “You know, I can’t even figure out what you mean by ‘liberal.’ You’re actually using the word as if you’re referring to ‘the Japs’ in World War II. It’s like … enemy rhetoric. Oh, lo, here cometh the foul tribe of Canaan. Who do you mean, Sherman? Your fellow Canadians, all shopping together at Costco and watching Hockey Night in Canada? I’d say they’re about as dangerous as hobbits at a gardening show. Is that the apocalypse you see coming, Sherman, your fellow Canadians puttering through garden shows and terminating pregnancies and getting cancer and needing beds? Have you visited the Congo lately?”

  “Poor little liberal girl,” he murmured, avoiding eye contact as I prowled his office.

  “What makes you say that?” I persisted. “I agree with certain things, and not others, but they don’t break down along clear lines. Oh!” I had a thrill of revelation as I studied his face. “That makes me undecided, or a ‘moderate’—right? Too complicated, too wishy-washy in my thinking. So, in your mind, I am a liberal, aren’t I?”

  “Please leave,” he urged, assuming an expression of utter contempt and reaching once again for his phone.

  “Oh, no,” I said, “I’m not finished.” Indeed, I was so intent I felt like Columbo in a wrinkled raincoat, unraveling the incriminating truth. Of course, Sherman wasn’t remotely listening at this point; he’d just shut down. It was like arguing with an iguana. Unable to reach him with words, I threw my bagel at him. A crescent of toasted pumpernickel glanced off his shoulder, leaving a smear of cream cheese on his fine wool jacket and landing with a soft thud on his desk. Spluttering in surprise, he hung up the phone.

  “I’m sorry, Sherman. I wasn’t finished. You weren’t listening. Hear me out, if you don’t mind, or I’ll throw another snack.” I sat down on a chair by the window and leaned toward him. “Here’s what drives me crazy. You and your magazine, you stake out the moral high ground, that’s your whole raison d’être, isn’t it? With your disapproval of abortion and gay marriage and what you call liberalism? But you’re childish. You have no empathy, you just toss around stereotypes. You publish Ann Coulter, for God’s sake, who sneers that all the ‘pretty women’ are Republicans. She shows about as much talent for argument as a child throwing a water balloon out the window. Have you not noticed? Or is it all just a game, where you get to show off to each other about who’s sauciest and boldest in their snickering? You remind me of the artistocrats before the French Revolution, trading bon mots at soirees while the mobs gathered.”

  He gave a theatrical sigh. I got up and started heading for the door. But I paused at its threshold and turned back.

  “Just ask yourself this one question. Where is your moral high ground? Really, that is what I want to know more than anything else. Is the God who told you to oppose abortion and liberals the same God who bids you to act like a grade-school brat? Can you point it out to me in your sacred texts sometime, where it says ‘Lo, you must stomp on French bread and pull hospital beds out from underneath the backsides of the poor?’ Where are you getting your convictions from, Sherman? From God? I notice that the Pope opposed the war in Iraq, and so did the Archbishop of Canterbury. Or are you Buddhist?”

  “Get out!” he shouted at me, swooping down to clutch my bagel and throw it back at me. I ducked and it shot into the common lounge and smacked against the UN poster.

  “Okay,” I said, throwing my arms up, “fine.”

  I was filled with adrenaline and gumption, but it wasn’t fine. All I had managed to do was engage in a food fight.

  36

  “Hey, you,” said Kate, popping her head into my office the next day.

  “Good Lord,” I said, looking up in startlement from my newspaper, “what are you doing here?” My nerves were a bit frayed.

  “Court was canceled,” she explained with a smile, striding into the room and unwinding her long green scarf. “Gotta minute?”

  “Of course I have a minute,” I said, gesturing in exasperation at all of the books and galleys and manuscripts piled pell-mell on my desk. “All I have to do is figure out what’s a Must Read for spring. Any suggestions? What do women in the middle of divorces want to read?”

  “The Riot Act,” Kate said.

  Avery returned from a visit to the bathroom down the hall. “Oh,” he exclaimed. “Hello, Kate.” He scratched his neck reflexively and then stuck out his hand as if to shake hers, but almost instantly retrieved it and jammed it into his pants pocket.

  “Mr. Dellaire,” Kate said, her voice faintly teasing, for she sensed that she made him nervous. “I haven’t seen you since that fundraiser for literacy at the Women’s Bookstore. How are you, sir?”

  “Oh. Tolerably well,” Avery replied, nodding his head too much, and smiling with self-conscious pleasure. This was interesting. I’d never seen Avery thrown off by the presence of a girl.

  “Don’t let me interrupt you,” Kate said, gazing at us both.

  “No, not at all,” Avery rushed to assure her, taking his seat and then standing up again. Kate dragged Goran’s chair over to my desk, sat down and fished something out of her coat pocket. It was a packet of Smarties. “Guess who I’m having dinner with tonight?” she inquired mischievously, waving the box at me. I knew what was in it, in addition to the chocolate Svend was fond of.

  “Oh no, Kate. No,” I protested. “You can’t do this. It’s nuts.”

  I was incredulous, for I’d assumed she’d get over the impulse. I took a swipe at the box in her hand but she yanked it away and leapt out of her seat. “Come on, Kate,” I persisted. “You’re a Quaker, for God’s sake. Isn’t it against your beliefs to drug men?”

  Avery was now talking on the phone, and watching us in bemusement. I lunged again for the Smarties box and this time, I snatched it out of her hand. Without further thought, I stood up and ran, and Kate began to chase me, around and around the office until both of us were giggling hysterically. She cornered me, and I thrust the box at Avery. “There’s trouble in there,” I yelped through my laughter. “Hide it for me, or she’ll feed them to her dad.”

  Thoroughly flustered, Avery grab
bed up the box as Kate ran straight for him. He held it high to his chest and she tried to wrestle it free. Just as she seemed to be reclaiming her prize with a tenacious grip, he broke away and rushed into the corner of our office. He found himself at the opposite end from the door, thus foiling any chance of flushing the box down the toilet in the hall. Kate charged toward him, her scarf sliding off her shoulder and spooling to the floor, the pair of us still laughing our heads off. Avery, caught up in his mission and panicked by her approach, suddenly upended the box into his mouth.

  “Oh. Whoa, time out!” Kate announced, halted in her tracks in sheer surprise. “Avery, what are you doing?”

  I darted over and eased the box from his grip as he choked slightly, trying to swallow. “No, no, no, bad idea,” I said, whisking it away. Kate and I immediately bent our heads together to examine the contents. “How many did you buy?” I asked.

  “Four,” she said.

  “How many are left?”

  She shook out the Smarties, and then fished out the Ecstasy tablets and studied them in her palm. “Three.”

  “Oh, fuck,” we said in unison.

  “Avery, are you insane?” I asked. “What did you do that for?”

  “I wasn’t thinking,” he answered, beginning to pace in distress. “I just—I formed half a strategy.”

  “With no exit plan,” said Kate.

  “Alright,” I mused, thinking aloud as I steered Avery over to his desk and made him sit down. “Okay. What time is it? Nine-thirty? How long does the drug last, Kate?” She pushed up her coat sleeve and looked at her watch. “He’ll be fine by two-thirty,” she guessed.

  “Oh, Christ!” moaned Avery. “Are you saying that oversized Smartie I swallowed was a drug?”

  “This is not going to be a problem,” Kate replied, assuming the crisp tone of someone taking command in a crisis. “It’s not a psychedelic, Avery, it’s just Ecstasy. If anything happens, and I’m not saying it will, if you can’t handle it or you want to lie down or something, we can take you home. Not a problem.”