Little Black Lies

by Sandra Block

  I could sit here all day, staring out the window in my favorite settee by the hearth, procrastination being one of my favorite pastimes. It takes all my will, but I peel my eyes off the raindrops scurrying down the window and focus on the book in my hands, smoothing down the first page of the first chapter.

  Personality Disorders

  Antisocial personality: Long-term pattern of exploiting the rights of others. The behavior can be criminal. Patients may be charming and magnetic as well as gifted at flattering others.

  I’ve never been called charming, magnetic, or gifted at flattering others. So I think I’m okay as far as antisocial goes.

  “You good? Or can I get you anything?” Eddie asks.

  “I’m great, thanks.”

  This is the longest string of words Eddie has ever said to me. To call Eddie “shy” is being kind. He is not far from “Cluster C Avoidant” in the personality disorder chapter. Reportedly Eddie has a crush on me. I take this with a mountainous grain of salt, however, coming from my brother. Eddie is a type of handsome: pale, lanky, with a ponytail and leaf tattoos vining up his arms. Being six feet, five inches, he is taller than I am, so he likely gets asked, “What’s the weather like up there?” ten times a day as well, though I am not sure how much else we have in common. Eddie likes philosophy and Russian poetry; again, per Scotty. I haven’t thought much about Russian poetry or philosophy, other than as a risk factor for suicide.

  High-pitched laughter rings out over at the bar, mixed with the noise of beans grinding. Ditzy laughter, from girls hunched over their phones, rapidly texting. Scotty is head barista today, flirting with as many women as possible. Scotty has a way with the ladies, as they say. I’m not sure why. He’s on the taller side, but not as tall as I am. And he’s skinny, boyish-looking. But if I had to venture a guess for his success with women, it would be his eyebrows. Expressive, with a hint of James Dean.

  The Coffee Spot is a place that prides itself on not being Starbucks, which isn’t a grand achievement, but it does have a certain charm. If Sam’s office is a yacht, and the nursing home a Victorian tearoom, then the Coffee Spot is a funky bachelor pad. The walls are mocha brown, as are the stained wooden floors, but everything else is without color scheme or theme, except maybe “cool.” The furniture is all secondhand and beat-up but comfortable: mismatched chairs and sofas, including my favorite eggplant settee by the fireplace. Local avant-garde artwork covers the walls. The bathrooms don’t say Women or Men but are labeled by bronzed torsos, that kind of place. This was Scotty’s college job, which soon became his actual job when he flunked out of the University at Buffalo. He claims this was due to the stress of dealing with Mom. I claim this was due to smoking too much dope. So we have a difference of opinion.

  An antisocial person may be superficially attractive and charming but has little regard for others. Patients often have a history of oppositional defiance disorder (ODD) in childhood. They show a pattern of lying, stealing, and having problems with authority, and as a result, may end up incarcerated. Many in the prison population would fit this diagnosis.

  Funny trivia fact: Tattoos used to be included as a sign of an antisocial personality. Now they’re just a sign of trying to fit in. If tattoos were still part of the diagnosis criterion, everyone at the Coffee Spot would be on their way to jail, including Scotty, who has several tattoos strategically circling various muscles. My mom tried to warn him off ink by telling him he couldn’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery with any marks on his body. “Give me a break, Mom,” he said. “Every fucking person in Jerusalem has a tattoo.” This was after his summer trip to Israel, which had the unintended effect of making him more rebellious and less religious, if this was possible. “Language, Scotty!” my mom yelled, which is something she said a hundred times a day.

  Laughter wafts over the bar again. This time it’s an older woman giggling with Scotty. When I say older, I mean older for Scotty. That makes her about thirty.

  “Pumpkin spice latte,” Eddie calls out, and the woman shimmies up to grab it. Pumpkin spice latte? How anyone could choke down that swill is beyond me. The woman is in a cheap, blue business suit. She has red hair and freckles, completely not Scotty’s type. Scotty goes for girls with implants and skinny arms, spray-on tans and white teeth. Barbie girls. Those are the girls who usually end up in Scotty’s room, a red handkerchief tied jauntily around the handle to let me know to knock first. He goes for girls who shop at Abercrombie, not Dress Barn. But then again, he appears to be flirting back all the same. Getting her number even, I’ll be damned.

  “Could I get you anything else, Zoe?” Eddie asks. He sounds petrified. I don’t think he’s ever called me by name before.

  “Still good, Eddie. Thanks.” I hold up my cup in evidence, still half-full. Or half-empty, you know, depending.

  He nods and looks as if he is about to say something, then veers off to another table as fast as his lanky legs will take him. Poor guy. If he had an eighth of Scotty’s moves, he’d be shacked up right now, bright red handkerchief tied around a doorknob, reading Russian poetry to some dewy-eyed damsel. Probably not me. I haven’t been dewy-eyed for a while.

  Dum-dum-dum-dah.

  Beethoven’s Fifth. This is the text tone for Jean Luc. My heart always thumps when I hear that tune, pathetic as that may be. Scotty programmed the text tone as a lark. Scotty does not like Jean Luc, whom he routinely refers to as “Frog-Boy.” My brother has never actually met Jean Luc, so I’m not sure what the issue is. Maybe it’s a Freudian thing.

  Vous êtes mon petit chou, the text reads. Literally, “You are my little cabbage.” Jean Luc knows I find this endearment hysterical.

  How’s my little broccoli? I write back.

  Skype?

  Sure. I move my coffee over to boot up my laptop. In a minute, Jean Luc’s face fills up the screen. I never tire of looking at Jean Luc. I am not proud of this superficiality, but it’s a fact. He is beautiful, Ralph Lauren–model beautiful: brooding eyes, ropy muscles from years of soccer, and dirty-blond, unkempt bangs that always fall into his eyes. When I first met Jean Luc, winter break of my last year of medical school, I spent the entire day trying to classify him. He is a curious mix of awkward, clueless, and handsome. You could mistake him for snobby, but he’s actually shy. Aloof, when he’s just solving chemistry problems in his head. And then there is his beauty, which is unavoidable, though he doesn’t seem to notice. But women notice. They zone in on him in a bar, attracted to the Darwinian fittest, the peacock with the most outstanding feathers.

  Yet he picked me—the tall one—much to the shock and unalloyed dismay of the other female contestants. This fact surprises me to this day because I am not beautiful. It’s not that I’m bad-looking, just forgettable. It’s like once you get past the six-foot thing, it’s hard to remember anything else. If I robbed a liquor store at gunpoint, the victim would tell the criminal sketch artist, “She was over six feet tall,” then be at a loss. No one remembers my eye color (hazel, whatever hazel means, sometimes brown, sometimes green) or hair color (brown, but just brown, not chestnut brown, for instance) and freckles (which I’m told are cute, but not in an I want to bed you kind of way). But Jean Luc disagreed with my assessment. He said I was too stupid to see how lovely I am, which was the first time I have ever been called either stupid or lovely.

  “How’s life in DC?” I ask.

  “Going well,” he answers. “The government job is promising.” Jean Luc had his doubts about going into government work instead of academia, but the tenure prospects weren’t encouraging last year.

  A girl runs behind Jean Luc on the screen, wrapped in a towel like she’s fresh out of the shower. Her blond hair is slicked back and dripping. “Sorry!” she calls in a singsong voice.

  “Did I interrupt something?” I ask him.

  “That’s Melanie.” He pronounces it in the French way, Meh-lah-NEE, with the accent on the last syllable. “Robbie’s girlfriend,” he explains. Robbie is his flatmate, s
omeone he met from the classifieds for the apartment. Robbie is quintessential DC: power ties, lunch meetings at pricey restaurants where he might be seen, twice-a-day workouts. He is everything Jean Luc is not. Jean Luc widens his eyes and mouths. “She never leaves.”

  This gets a chuckle from me, a relieved chuckle. We talk awhile. I tell him about everything: my newest patient—the lovely Sofia Vallano, the annoying Dr. Grant, my mother’s fading mind, Scotty’s latest dalliances, the return of the nightmare. Everything, in short, except how much I miss him. Because I don’t know how to tell him that. It is logical, he explained, that we should date other people when we are miles apart. And Jean Luc is logical. He thrives in the reliable world of chemistry, a world of absolutes. One night, as we sat in damp grass and gaped at the fireworks springing up against the sky, he pointed in the air and said, “You see, fireworks are chemistry. You mix them together, and they explode. It is predictable. It is…” He searched for the word in English. “Accountable. People are not always accountable, but chemistry”—he smiled, as if he were talking about a lover—“chemistry is always accountable.”

  A cat jumps up on the table in a gray flash. Jean Luc pets her absentmindedly, even though he’s allergic to cats, then she flies off the screen again.

  “You have a cat?”

  “It’s Robbie’s,” he answers. “Kitty.”

  “The cat’s name is Kitty?”

  “Yes.” He shrugs. “Melanie named her.”

  “Hmm.” So Melanie is either a complete dullard or woefully ironic.

  Jean Luc glances at his watch, a silver and blue one that I gave him for his birthday. “Zoe, I have to go. We are going for dinner soon.”

  “Okay,” I say, noticing the fading blond in his hair, the summer sun long gone now. “Where are you going?”

  “Sushi,” he answers with a grimace. “This is all they eat around here. So expensive for little fish pieces that are not even cooked.”

  I lean back in the settee, laughing. Half the time, Jean Luc doesn’t even realize he’s being funny. “Have fun.”

  “Je t’aime,” he says.

  “Je t’aime,” I answer. We are taking a break but still saying je t’aime. I close Skype, and my gaze wanders back to the window, where some of the raindrops are now freezing in beads. I smooth the book page again.

  Patients with antisocial personality disorder are not necessarily sociopaths. Many are nonviolent unless provoked.

  The woman with the pumpkin latte is leaving, huddling up against the cold rain. Sleet thuds against the window, threatening actual snow. The flames flicker against the grate on the hearth. I lean my head back against the soft leather and take another lingering sip of coffee before looking down at my book again. Internally I sigh, if this is possible.

  Hours to go before I sleep.

  Chapter Four

  The psych ward is buzzing as usual. The heater in the resident room clangs away as cold leaks from the window. Patches of last night’s snow checker the ground.

  How is my little kumquat? I text and drop the phone in my stiff lab-coat pocket, behind my Psychiatry Pearls book, before I have a chance to fret over whether I will get a response or not.

  “Who are you texting?” Jason asks, sneaking up behind me.

  “No one.”

  “It’s your boyfriend, right?”

  I don’t answer, and he starts jabbing my arm. “Give it up, girl. Pictures.”

  “He’s not even my boyfriend anymore,” I say, showing him a photo on my phone.

  “Holy shit.” Jason grabs my phone to take a closer look. “He’s fucking hot. He looks like Beckham.” He pauses to consider. “I’d have sex with him.”

  “Oh, thanks, Jason. He’ll be so pleased.”

  Jason was on call last night and looks a bit bleary-eyed, the gelled, bleached tuft of his bangs starting to droop and the trademark bow tie long gone. He sits down heavily in his chair and leans back, the two chair legs precariously digging into a stain on the rust-brown carpet. The carpet is dotted with such stains, in various shapes and shades, like islands on a map. The resident room is a metaphor for our department: broke and run-down. Psychiatry is a poor man’s medical field. The neurosurgery resident room, on the other hand, looks like the Taj Mahal.

  Dr. A enters the room and takes a seat next to Jason. “Anything for me?” he asks.

  “Yeah,” Jason answers. “You ready?”

  “Ready as I’ll ever be,” Dr. A says, remarkably not screwing up any part of the phrase.

  “Who’s yours again?” Jason scans his page.

  “Wisnoski, Hillbrand, and Edwards.”

  “All right,” he shifts papers. “Wisnoski, Wisnoski, Wisnoski,” he says, pointing to the name. “Still on twenty-four-hour one-on-one. But they’re watching him today, may d/c it for the weekend if he’s no longer verbalizing clear suicidal ideation. He pretty much still is, though.”

  Dr. A nods.

  “EEG normal. We upped his Lexapro to fifty milligrams qd and added Abilify at ten. No privileges right now, no phone if he asks, which he will.”

  “What’s the plan if there is not significant improvement from the medication changes?” Dr. A asks.

  “Possibly ECT,” says Jason. He is talking about electroconvulsive shock therapy, one of the last resorts for depression. But this is Mr. Wisnoski’s third suicide attempt in the last five years.

  “Ah, that is why they got the EEG,” he says.

  “That’s the fact, Jack.”

  Dr. A looks puzzled and pulls out his idiom notebook. “Who is this Jack?”

  “Forget it, man. Just yes, you’re right, that’s why they got the EEG.” Jason scans farther down the sheet. “Fuck, I need some coffee. Hillbrand is finished with detox and is awaiting transfer to rehab.”

  “He’s off suicide watch?”

  “Yeah, turns out he drank window cleaner to get drunk, not to kill himself.”

  “Lack of insight,” I offer.

  “Yeah, I’d say,” answers Jason. “And Edwards is stable, awaiting discharge.”

  Dr. A pats him on the back and grabs his charts to start seeing his patients.

  Jason turns to me. “Who you got?”

  “Just two right now. Miles Featherington and Vallano. Tiffany Carlson got discharged.”

  “Okay. Featherington has group therapy in the morning. Going up on Risperdal and Depakote for OCD. Limited to ten-minute showers, and watch that no one gives him a toothbrush or he gives himself a thorough rectal cleaning.” I wince. “Oh, and he gets to look at his stamp collection every Wednesday if he doesn’t refuse meds.”

  “How about Vallano?”

  “No fireworks yet,” Jason says. “She’s the model patient, I guess. She has a nail file for her manicures that has to be locked up nightly to prevent someone else grabbing it, and she also has charcoals that have to be locked up.”

  “Charcoals?”

  “It seems she’s quite the accomplished artist,” he says.

  “A woman of many talents,” I say, grabbing the charts. “What’s her privilege level, by the way?”

  “Level three,” he says. “As long as she cooperates in group, which she has been.” Level three is the highest. It means she’s allowed magazines or books from the library, makeup and nail polish, one phone call per week (which she never takes), and group outings. Though she’s still not allowed off the floor without an aide. I check over the orders from last night before going on to see my charge.

  Sofia Vallano is lying on her bed, propped up on her elbows, her hands cradling her chin. She is flipping through another magazine that has a waifish woman telling you “what men really want” on the cover, the sort that casually describe fellatio in an elevator. I would think finding out “what men really want” doesn’t come in very handy in a mental institution, but who can tell. She is bouncing her feet together in an absentminded rhythm. She looks as if she could be at overnight camp, were it not for the fact that she is over thirty, on a psyc
hiatric ward, and a probable psychopath. She is just missing the Dubble-Bubble chewing gum and posters of Teen Beat heartthrobs taped to the walls.

  A couple of small, framed charcoal drawings sit on her bare desk, along with the hospital-issued pink-plastic pitcher of ice water. The pictures are quite impressive, actually. One is a landscape of branches in a night sky, with a moon shining through. The other is a self-portrait, not surprising for a narcissist.

  “Did you draw these?” I ask, picking up a frame, starting in safe territory.

  “Yup,” she says, eyes still on the magazine. A teenager ignoring her mom, except that she killed her mom. And she’s no longer a teenager.

  “They’re good.”

  “Yup,” she repeats, nonchalant. The silence builds as she flips through her magazine, refusing to interact with me beyond monosyllables.

  I sit down in the chair next to her bed. “So how are you finding the new place?”

  Sofia crosses her legs, still lying on her belly. “It’s a variation of the old place.”

  I nod, flipping open her chart, and scoot my chair closer to her bed. I wait a long thirty seconds to see if she’ll break the silence, but she doesn’t. “Do you want to talk about why you’re here?”

  Sofia’s upper lip flinches a millisecond, but she keeps her face buried in her magazine. “Haven’t you heard?” she asks.

  “Well,” I say, leaning back in the chair, faking a laid-back posture to match hers. Mirroring: another big one in the psychiatry bag of tricks. “I have read through your chart, of course.”

  “It’s all in there then. You know more than I do.”

  “Maybe. But, even still, I’d like to hear it in your own words. Do you feel ready to talk about it?”

  Sofia pauses to consider, looking at the ceiling. “Not really.”

  I sigh inwardly. So far this is going really well. She flips through the magazine pages, though I can tell she is not reading the words. The branches of an old maple tree sway in the fogged-up window, a few faded orange leaves clinging stubbornly.