by Adam Haslett
After ratatouille and an hour of cartoons, I’d try Caleigh again, and if she didn’t answer, I’d call Celia or Alec, not to confess in full the shape of the trap, because they had their own to avoid, but just to talk with someone for whom I didn’t have to mask my basic state. I knew they wanted to help. They would always ask, hopefully, how my meds were working. I’ve never stopped wanting to give them at least some reason to think I’m getting better.
Anafranil
There are years it is difficult to account for in retrospect. Most of my twenties, for instance. I can’t say exactly when it was that the vinyl shop in East Boston went out of business. Late in the first Clinton administration, maybe? Or how long it took me to find the job at the left-wing call center. We raised money for whatever not-for-profit had hired our shift to rake through old lists of Mother Jones subscribers and members of the ACLU who might be talked into giving ten or twenty dollars to endangered fish or gay people. I can say that getting paid on commission blew. You’d be soliciting some Arkansas outlier for a Native American higher-ed fund, watching the seconds disappear on the huge digital clock above the supervisor’s desk as the person you’d already given up on began explaining how the bills for her fibromyalgia treatment had cleared out her savings and was making her wonder if she’d have to give up her dog, a three-legged rescue with hypertension and hookworms, and you’d want to say, Look, lady, it’s through with you, you’re terminal, that shit’s not improving. But you know what? If you chip in fifty bucks to the college fund, someone not yet down for the count might actually get an education, so stop yakking and pay it forward. I’d like to afford that burrito in four hours and you’re not helping. And why did the owner of the call center drive a BMW? Because a bunch of essentially unemployed people managed to suck enough pocket change out of enervated hippies to fund at least one upper-middle-class existence. As for Anafranil, I put up with the tachycardia for a while, but being unable to take a shit more than every ten days proved untenable. Which is a pity given that its eradication of my libido took the edge off missing Caleigh as sorely as I still did.
Celexa
There was a downside to seeing my father’s old shrink and never paying his bills, which was that when he eventually stopped returning my calls, I didn’t have much of a leg to stand on. His unannounced withdrawal from my care after all this time seemed highly unprofessional given how essential his prescription pad had become to my daily functioning, but I figured he’d spoken to colleagues who’d suggested it was time he extracted himself from such a messy relationship. I could have used a referral, but there we are. I didn’t want to ask my mother for the money to actually pay for a psychiatrist, but what option did I have? I was on things you weren’t supposed to come off of unsupervised.
The guy I found at Boston City Hospital was only a few years older than I was and wore a wedding ring. I’m against marriage on principle—not love and trust, which I pine for, but the legal entity, given its history—so it wasn’t Dr. Bennet’s marital status per se that I envied, but the indication it gave that he, too, was one of the elect, enjoying the plenary ease of intimacy with a woman who had chosen him over and above other men. And of course he had a steady income, and all his hair, and that mild-jock physique of the former team-sports player, giving him the air of physical carelessness, that impunity which went along with even the merely passable good looks prized by women for the social capital they offer, and I suppose the pleasure. Which returns us, by the logic of opposites, willy-nilly, to the category of the loser or creep, that staple of high school which lives on in a youth-obsessed culture, hunting people into middle age—the erotically failed man whose desire is imagined to grow lascivious with embitterment until his loneliness has made him so ugly he’s a pervert, beginning then to shade into the monster of the pedophile, subject to the most righteous and violent anger of all, the rage of parents on behalf of their minor children. Which isn’t to say that meeting Dr. Bennet “triggered” anything in me, just that I wanted to be sure he wasn’t going to bluster his way into some misbegotten get-tough approach and start cutting back on my Klonopin. Luckily, he proved more humane than that. Like Dr. Gregory, he didn’t want to subtract drugs, only to add them.
Effexor
When he asked about the work I did, I told him about music as the medium for the transgenerational haunting of the trauma of slavery, and how what I needed most was a research library, a JSTOR account, and three years of postgraduate funding. To be honest, I didn’t care about the degree. I’m not an academic careerist. I would have been happy simply with the time to write. But it was hard to get at what needed to be done after eight hours of pleading with white liberals for the habitat of a frog. So I settled for a new prescription. The Effexor plus the Klonopin, combined with the lithium Bennet put me on after hearing about Dad, added up to a minor reprieve of their own, enough in any case to let me focus on applying to graduate school and get started on the reparations work Caleigh and I had been discussing for several years already.
To the extent that people consider the reparations movement at all, which most don’t, they think of General Sherman and Special Field Order No. 15, granting freed slaves the coastal lands from the Carolinas to northern Florida, the infamous promise of forty acres and a mule, and so imagine that the modern push amounts to a claim for cash for every living descendant of a chattel slave. Whereas in fact the movement’s first demand is an official U.S. government apology and recognition of the injustice of slavery, accompanied by suits against banks and insurance companies whose prior corporate entities profited directly from the uncompensated labor of the human beings they owned. And only then, a congressional allocation of billions of dollars to be spent on institution building to improve the education, health, and well-being of African-Americans generally. After all, the U.S. compensated Japanese-Americans for interning them during World War II, and Germany paid restitution to surviving victims of the Holocaust. That governments should pay for the sins of their past, even if committed by repudiated regimes, is hardly unprecedented. The caustic, knee-jerk rejection of the idea of restitution for slavery is but an indication of why it is necessary. What we ignore only persists.
So Caleigh and I, with Myra’s assistance, set to work writing a brief, explanatory pamphlet, our modest contribution to the consciousness-raising effort. I wanted to put an eighteenth-century schematic drawing of the hold of a slave ship on the cover, to show how the ancestors of our fellow citizens had arrived here, but Caleigh favored an early-twentieth-century photograph of a black dirt farmer harnessed to his plow. We ran off five hundred copies at Kinko’s, and from then on I always made sure to have a supply in my bag so that when riding the bus or the T, I could spend a few minutes imposing them on my fellow passengers.
Lexapro
When I did get around to applying to grad school the year I turned thirty, I was surprised, given how much thought and study I’d put in, to be rejected by each and every one. Being white was probably not an advantage in my chosen field of African-American studies (though, naturally, that is an admissions preference I wholly support, no matter its effect on me). By this time, my roommate Ben had performed the hat trick of meeting a highly intelligent and alluring woman outside of his knitting circles, maintaining his sense of self-worth long enough for them to complete a course of dating, and eventually convincing her, Christine, to move in with us. As the rejection letters arrived weekly through March and April, the two of them didn’t know what to say after asking me how my day had been and hearing only another report of canceled possibility. Any more than Celia or Alec did. I’d never felt the least bit competitive with either of them (though Celia’s ease in finding a new boyfriend each time she broke up with an old one irked me at times), and I put out of my mind the fact that my sister already had a master’s in social work and that Alec had completed his journalism degree, despite being five years younger.
Wellbutrin
There continued, the following spring, to be no
rational basis to resent either of them in particular when I got rejected everywhere I applied for a second time. The left-wing phone bank had cut back on staff by then and I was unemployed, which Dr. Bennet was helpful enough to remind me was a major life stressor. As in, justifying of increased doses across the board. Generalized anxiety, that’s how he now described my condition. He suggested a support group, which conveniently met just down the hall from his office. Where the support group met that would help me get over going to this support group wasn’t clear. But oh well.
I thought fibromyalgia in Arkansas was bad, but there was no telephonic remove from the Gulf War vet who slept curled around his rifle and looked at us as if we were bloody remains, or the woman being charged with child neglect because she could never clean enough to satisfy herself it was safe to feed her malnourished offspring. Our youngest colleague still wet himself at the age of twenty-two. When we weren’t hearing about melted corpses on Iraq’s highway of death, we could kick back to the tale of a bankrupt lawyer’s sixteen-hour odyssey to find a lightbulb in sufficiently undimpled packaging. Someone once said, It’s all about the parties you go to. No kidding. The facilitator was into what she called “aversion treatment.” The lawyer was instructed to go straight from the meeting to the nearest drugstore, walk to the housewares section, and pick up the first 100-watt bulb his eyes alighted upon. Not so clear that the vet should cluster-bomb downtown Attleboro for a little DIY reenactment, but the woman afraid of her groceries could force herself to cut broccoli right on the counter and then eat it with her little ones. Before my terror at the reality of these people’s lives caused me to flee the scene, I got two assignments from the facilitator myself: to leave the house just when I expected Caleigh to call, and to empty the drawer where I put all my unpaid bills and sort them in order of priority, presumably so I could figure out which one to talk with my mother about first. I completed neither.
Remeron
Flummoxed at my refractory symptoms, Dr. Bennet ran me through a complete re-eval, said I needed to stop talking about psychoanalytic theory in our sessions, and put me on enough uppers to cheer a POW. I recall a period of two or three months when my head felt compressed to the density of an anvil strapped to a potting wheel left on high speed in a sun-drenched meadow. It was like getting root-canal work while vacationing in the tropics. Indeed, the experiment came to an end when my stepped-up jaw-grinding caused me to chip a molar. But for a while there I did get out of my room at Ben’s a bit more often. I toured the remaining indie record shops on Saturday mornings when the new shipments arrived. It was on one such outing, after many dateless years, that I encountered Bethany. She had a tiny glistening nose stud, and a nearly shaved head, and was flipping through a bin of Aphex Twin. Need I say more?
Celia
Jasper was an Anglophile from Coeur d’Alene. He did his best to monogram everything he owned. Today it was a royal-blue turtleneck with his chosen initials—JHP, for Jasper Henry Philips—done in three-inch brocade letters outlined with sequins and pinned at the breast like a Michael Jackson costume still under construction. So far, he’d avoided the shelters by couch-surfing and squatting. When Michael phoned me at work, we were almost at the end of our session, which Jasper had again idled away with his fantasies, this time of befriending Princess Diana, his all-time-favorite celebrity. I had five minutes left of my weekly effort to find him a job.
I told Michael I couldn’t talk.
“What about later?” he asked. “Can we talk later?”
A girl who hadn’t shown up in three weeks was waiting outside my door. I had appointments all afternoon. I needed to go running after work.
“I’ll try you,” I said. “But it’ll be later, your time.”
“Oh,” he said, as if he’d forgotten we lived on different coasts. “Okay.”
We spoke twice a week at least, but in the evenings or on weekends. I was surprised he even knew the name of my agency to look up the number. Something had agitated him; he was calling to be assuaged.
“I’ll try you,” I said. “I will.”
“Sooo,” Jasper said as soon as I hung up, “your boyfriend’s traveling—and he isn’t your husband because you’re not wearing a ring. Where is he? Paris, London?”
To help establish a rapport during our first meeting, I’d made the mistake of mentioning I’d lived in England. Now it was all he wanted to talk about.
I suggested we look over the listings together. There were openings for baggers at the Marina Safeway, temp-driver jobs he didn’t qualify for because he didn’t have a license, a copy-shop assistant position in Oakland, and the usual volunteer stuff, distributing condoms or working at the Meals on Wheels kitchen, what the agency called “community networking opportunities.”
I needed him to focus and commit to three applications before our next session. If I’d had an hour with him, I would have asked whom he was spending his time with, if anyone was pressuring him for sex, how he was doing physically and emotionally. But that wasn’t my job. I was supposed to prevent him from becoming homeless (which he effectively already was), help him find legitimate employment, and coach him on maintaining whatever support structure he already had, which in his case consisted mostly of asking each week if he’d been in touch with his mother. My older colleagues often didn’t bother with parents when a client was no longer a minor, but according to Jasper, his mother had left his stepfather—the person he’d fled from in the first place—so it seemed at least worth a try for him to talk with her, given what his options were.
He stood by the window now, gazing into the alley as if across a rough, romantic sea. “What does your boyfriend do in London? Is he an international businessman? Does he feature those fierce three-piece tweed suits? Or cravats, does he wear cravats?”
I couldn’t decide which of my brothers he’d get on with better, Michael or Alec.
“That wasn’t my boyfriend,” I said.
“Your lover, then.”
“Jasper, if you don’t apply to anything, I’ve got to put that in your file, and in a few weeks they’re going to tell me to terminate you from services.”
“If you lived in England, how come you don’t have an accent?”
“Listen—”
“Okay, I’ll apply. Just tell me.”
“I’ve lived here more.”
“Did you grow up in a house with servants?”
“Where do you get all this?”
He picked up and examined the tape dispenser on my desk as though admiring the facets of a crystal vase. I would have said he was high, but his speech and movements were too precise, his affect too consistent. He was practicing, that’s what he was doing, rehearsing for a future life.
“My grandmother said it was the classiest place she’d ever been, and that I would love it there. She had a videotape of Diana’s wedding. We used to watch it all the time. People thought she was pretentious, being into all that, so I knew she was onto something, pissing those jackasses off. She left me all that stuff, the books and music and the mugs with the coats of arms, everything she’d bought over there and all the stuff she’d collected. Most of it’s at my mom’s. But I brought a few things with me.”
I pictured him there with his grandmother, on their little island of manners. I wanted to draw him out on it, to hear what it meant to him. And from there maybe get him to talk about his growing up, and eventually about what exactly his stepfather had done that caused him to leave. Jasper was one of the clients who shared something of himself, if only because he desired an audience. Most of the kids I saw were sullen and defensive, and treated me as another scold of the adult world who didn’t care what they felt. It wasn’t that I wanted to cut him off now, just that our half hour was up. I told him he had to call me with the three jobs off the list he was going to pursue so I could set up the interviews, and that I needed copies of his applications at our next appointment.
“It’s true, isn’t it?” he said. “People do live in castles there
.”
“Like ten people, Jasper. Most of them are just normal. They’re not that different than here. Really.”
“Normal like you? Like college and going to Europe and working here because you feel good helping ignorant people like me? That kind of normal?”
“Our time’s up,” I said. “I have someone waiting.”
“People always get angry when I tell the truth. Happens every time.”
On the outbound N Judah that evening I noticed a man in a three-piece suit. Instead of reading the paper folded in his hands, his eyes crept along the bodies of various young women, particularly those in skirts and lipstick, his glance occasionally falling on me as well, curious but uncertain, and a bit aggressive, a bit pissed off, as if I wasn’t giving him something that belonged to him.
Jasper’s image had stuck with me. Of my boyfriend dressed in tweed, like the suits Dad used to wear. Paul sitting at a big conference table with other men in suits and calling me after his meeting, as I suppose Dad had called Mom. I’d never wanted such a partner, or even been able to imagine why anyone would. Still, getting back to our apartment and finding Paul lying on the couch, reading under a blanket, a glass of bourbon beside him on the floor, I found myself wondering what it might be like if Jasper’s fantasy were even a little true.
The drink irked me. It threw his sugar off. Which made it more likely that he would have a low in the night, waking us both. But if it was just one, or maybe two, and he drank them slowly enough and timed his shots right, it might still be fine.
“What’s up?” he said. “How was the day?”
The fact that he was flat on the couch suggested his hadn’t been exactly fruitful. But then through the open French doors into the kitchen I noticed the sink was empty of dishes, and the cereal we’d needed was on the counter. So he’d been shopping. Which meant that he would make dinner, holding up his end of the bargain we’d struck: if he was going to work only part-time while he wrote his screenplay, he had to do more than his normal quarter share of the domestic work.