by David Rakoff
Young Woman’s face got suddenly sad. She put her hands on my shoulders and leaned her face into mine. I thought she was going to kiss me but her lips bypassed my cheek until I felt her mouth, hot against my ear. “Don’t tell anyone,” she whispered. “But I had an abortion last winter.”
An abortion! Can you even imagine the lubricious thrill of being the recipient of such a disclosure? I am here to tell you that you cannot because its pleasures were unquantifiable. If she had an abortion, then that meant … she wasn’t a virgin! I couldn’t choose a favorite posy from this bouquet of penny dreadfuls, it was almost too much. And still, all I really wanted to do was to put my own hands on Young Woman’s shoulders and look her in the face and snap her back to the reality of this artifice, back to this game. “Hey,” I would say to her, “I am eleven!”
That Young Woman should tell me her secret was momentous, to be sure, but only in degree, not kind. This was an absolute jewel of adolescent Go Ask Alice reality; far and away the juiciest thing I’d ever been told up to that point (it was also just about the last time that I would characterize someone else’s secret as “juicy.” The word would eventually be stricken from my lexicon, about which more later), but by that age, I was already long established as the person to whom people poured out their hearts. I cannot remember a time when they didn’t. As faggy, loud, skittish, neurotic, caustic, and polymorphously, fun-ruiningly phobic as I was (and boy, was I ever), the most striking thing about me was my size. I was the very opposite of a threat. If others had reservations about trusting me, they seemed to dissipate as quickly as that fleeting moment where one hesitates before undressing in front of the dog. I was there, but not really. In Gypsy folklore, when one has a secret that can no longer be borne in silence one digs a hole in the ground and speaks those terrible truths into it. I was that hole. But a hole with a difference. A hole who could arrange his features and posture into an expression that was simultaneously neutral and curious, but not morbidly so. A hole who knew enough, once confided in, not to be a malicious blabbermouth.
I don’t know when I learned to do this, but I do know how. Psychiatry is the family profession. A certain kind of active listening and an understanding of the importance of confidentiality is just part of the fabric of many shrink households, just as Chinese immigrant homes might speak Chinese. It was understood that secrets exist for reasons. Reasons we sometimes would never know, but that still had to be honored, nonetheless. In some unspoken way, I had hung out my shingle from an early age and made it known that I was open for business. And I’ve been relatively lucky in the secrets that have been sent my way. Not because they are so juicy (again that awful word; I’ll get to it, I swear) but because they are so relatively tame, in the larger scheme of things. I have never been told any tales of serious financial malfeasance. (No surprise there. I can imagine it would hardly be worth dealing with what would surely be idiotic but inevitable interruptions of “Wait, is ‘net’ the bigger number, or is that ‘gross’?”) No one has tearfully confessed to me an indiscretion involving, say, a blinding fugue state of racial hatred, a machete, and the innocent Tutsi children next door. There are perpetrators and victims aplenty in my closely guarded blotter, but no actual crimes committed, at least not in New York State. Most of what I hear about is infidelity. A lot of infidelity. So much infidelity it’s a wonder anyone manages to stay together.
But together we are, enmeshed in an ever-more refracting web. As my friend Rebecca says, “We’re all connected by paychecks and body fluids.” My childhood dream—that I would move to New York and have a creative life filled with many interesting friends who had terrible, terrible problems—came true. New York is for me, at this point, almost shtetl-like in its overlap. I sat at a dinner with a friend and her parents as it slowly dawned upon me that the patriarch was none other than the man who had been habitually sleeping with (and slowly breaking the heart of) a man I knew who had a thing for older married guys who liked to wrestle. Another time, I mentioned to someone that some other friends I knew had a similar artwork in their apartment only to realize that this copy had been a gift—a token of philandery—from one of them. On one of my birthdays, with no plans of my own, I hung up from a phone call with a friend I was comforting in order to answer my buzzer, to find the straying, soon-to-be-ex-husband weeping, coming up my stairs to give me the same news. Still another weeping husband—I had hopped on the train to the Upper West Side from Brooklyn one Sunday morning because it had sounded on the phone like he might kill himself—forgot about me and left me in the bedroom while he called his wife, traveling on business, from the living room to confess all. He found me asleep on their bed four hours later. That was fun.
I’ve only ever gotten in trouble once, and then for a relatively minor infraction. I was silent about a friend’s impending divorce, and another friend was angry with me for not having shared the information. I suppose it would have cost me nothing to have told all I knew, but if you fancy yourself a practitioner of discretion, you might as well try being discreet, no? Moreover, when I was called to be given the news—news I already knew, news I had chosen not to share, news about someone’s very real pain—my friend’s voice was almost musical, swooping with the italics of schadenfreude. “Want to hear something juicy?”
Here I will refer an old Yiddish parable: An old woman is called out of her house to join her neighbors in the fun of watching the village idiot ranting in the square. She goes, and there he is, a grown man, raving like a lunatic, spewing saliva-flecked curses at the crowd, who are all hugely amused, with the exception of the old woman, who doesn’t crack a smile. “If he wasn’t my idiot, I’d laugh, too,” she tells them. This, then, is “juicy’s” toxic bit of transubstantiation: secrets turned into gossip; your pain into someone else’s pleasure. Every hilarious town fool is someone’s schizophrenic son. So my answer to that question “Want to hear something juicy?” is almost always no.
One need employ no tricks in the getting of information, no special child-of-psychiatrist lingo, hypnotic gestures, or pendulous swinging of a pocket watch in front of people’s faces. I don’t wheedle. For the most part, I stay silent. I don’t flatter myself. It requires no talent to get information, although it takes some skill to guard it. And I do guard it.
“You’re a big ear,” said a friend.
A big ear with a peppercorn for a heart. Like many impulses of an apparently altruistic cast, it was initially powered by a generator of unattractive self-interest, churning away in my grimy subbasement. By age eleven I understood that whatever deviant desires and inappropriate-object choices already roiling away in my young psyche (Edward Fox in The Day of the Jackal, Christopher Gable in Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend, Rudolf Nureyev, just for juvenile starters …) might be best left un-broadcast until such time as I could, say, grow up and move to Manhattan. There is no better way to conceal oneself than by listening to others.
That’s a tad cynical. Let me add that there is also, perhaps, no greater kindness. Plain old listening is the most basic therapeutic model. Even when its motives are of dubious purity, it can be tremendously helpful. For the auditor, however, years of attentiveness—and years of appreciation for that attentiveness—can have a detrimental effect, skewing self-perception, fomenting arrogance, and spawning dreams of a grand and entrepreneurial nature; tainted fantasies, for example, of monetizing an activity already managed as unthinkingly as breathing. And so:
The informational meet and greet about becoming a life coach was being held at a hotel hard by Grand Central. Despite a renovation a few years back—new surveillance cameras trained on the doors of the men’s room just off the lobby, and the regular patrolling of security into the gents’ to inquire of those fellows deemed to be lingering too long at the urinals—and notwithstanding a handsome interior of plasterwork, brass, marble, and thick carpet, the premises could not rid themselves of an illicit feeling of furtive transience.
That tentative legitimacy extended to this evening.
I had recently seen a calendar of breast cancer survivors where every artfully draped playmate who had survived that dreaded disease was now a life coach. Really, how hard could it be?
A small group of fifteen or so had gathered in a thin slice of grandeur of a room. Chopped down in size two times, with front and back walls of corrugated, retractable louvers, the crystal chandelier illuminated a space not much bigger than a bedroom. The prospectuses were in their cardboard folders, fanned just so on the trestle table by the chuffing percolator, the Mint Milanos were stacked in their fancy paper ruffs. We stood around in our damp coats, most of us clearly weighing whether we should just leave before things began in earnest. A freezing rain had turned it into the kind of night where one wants to be home already.
Undaunted, the organizers—a sweet married couple in their sixties, New York Jews transplanted to Florida—moved through our awkward knot of wet wool and briefcases, introducing themselves, handing out cups of coffee along with glossy information packets, and inviting us to take our seats.
They began their pitch. “Therapy deals with what hurts. Coaching deals with what works,” which conformed to what I’d heard derisively said of coaching: that it was essentially dumbed-down therapy for those people too proud or blocked to admit they needed it (also known as men). Opening aphorisms aside, it became clear that it was far less easy to become certified than we had all hoped. Basic training requires well over a hundred hours of instruction and study, which is heartening for those folks who seek out coaches for their problems, but disappointing to those of us looking to make a quick buck. Speaking of bucks, it cost around $3,000 just for the fundamentals. On the “th” sound in “thousand,” before the word had been completely formed by the wife of the duo, one woman stood up and walked out without any ceremony. It looked like a possible exodus when the only other remaining woman stood up at the same time, but it was only to ask a question, and by ask a question, I mean make a declamatory pronouncement. It was not immediately clear whether she was there to learn how to become a life coach, came to find one for herself, or had just stumbled in off the street. Rising to speak seemed an oddly formal gesture in so small a room.
“Yeah,” she began, sounding a little angry. “My name is Johanna.” She sidebarred almost immediately, putting the organizers on notice that she was having trouble with how elitist the whole enterprise of life coaching seemed to her, but that’s not why she stood up. “My problem is clutter!” She turned her head around to look at those of us sitting behind her, which was everyone as she had parked herself in the front row. She gave a low chuckle and a simultaneous look that was darkly amused and sexual. Johanna said it again, for emphasis, “Clutter!,” and then chuckled once more, too. You know what I’m talkin’ about. We didn’t. She sat down.
Once they had gone through the details of the lengthy protocol—the weekly teleconferences, the one-on-one mentoring sessions, the various levels of apprenticeship and supervision before we would receive accreditation or clients of our own—they introduced their protégé, a newly certified coach and high-end residential real-estate agent in the Orlando area. He was a gay man of a sleek, bronzed, and slightly cheesy perfection native to the warmer parts of these United States. His enthusiasm for coaching was a whole-body affair, right down to his nipples, which poked through the clingy, cigarette-smoke-gray fabric of his sweater like a pair of distant headlights approaching through a bank of fog.
It was quite clear from the widespread fidgeting and watch-checking that not one of us here would go through with this. Aside from the fact that it was expensive, we were surprised and regretful to find the training process both time-consuming and legitimate. And although there would be no classes to attend in person—both our apprenticeship and the eventual treatment of our future clients would all be done over the phone from the comforts of our homes in our underpants, if we so chose—it was not enough to persuade us to sign up. It was just too many hours. I could imagine my ear after all that teleconferencing: hot and achy, the phone receiver as greasy and used as a pizza box.
“Any questions?” the woman of the couple asked. There were none. What had seemed so promising just ninety minutes ago when we all filed in—a quick stop on the way home from work to start on a whole new way of life—turned out, like most things in this world that are worth doing, to require effort; almost as much as training as a therapist, working with what hurts. We would just have to content ourselves with the trust of our friends as payment.
People began to gather up their briefcases and put on their raincoats. Many of them still had long commutes ahead of them. We left Johanna there. She had fallen asleep, her head thrown back, her mouth open, no doubt enjoying some well-deserved respite from the oppressive clutter that awaited her at home.
Present-day Toronto is a megalopolis of sprawl, but thirty years ago, it simply ended at Steeles Avenue, like a medieval map. On one side were apartment buildings, the last outposts of civilization, and right across the street, an unknowable expanse of open cornfields stretching out to farming communities and farther away still, the vast, piney wilderness: bears, moose, eventual tundra, right across the road.
The winter after Bomb Shelter, Young Woman and I were pressed into service one Sunday to lead an afternoon program for children who lived north of the city. Yuval, the shaliach—literally “envoy,” a kibbutznik sent with his family to live among us and extol the Socialist dream—drove us far beyond Steeles to an old one-room church of dull pink brick, standing in a treeless yard. We waited in the carpeted basement for forty-five minutes, chatting among ourselves, while not one child came. I can’t imagine what we managed to talk about. Yuval was a man of forty with children, Young Woman was in university in the sciences, and I was all of twelve. I remember feeling like Yuval was cramping my style. Young Woman and I hadn’t seen each other for more than six months; we had some catching up to do. She would no doubt be itching to bring her most trusted confidant up to speed on all that had transpired in her life.
After an hour with nobody having arrived, we decided to cut bait and head back to the city. Yuval would turn out the lights and lock up while Young Woman and I went outside to wait. We stood in the churchyard under a dull oyster-colored sky. The early-March air had the aspirin smell of winter trees and cold mud. I turned to Young Woman and gave her a look at once casually companionable and also meant to convey the heavy import of what she had once shared with me. A look that said, Alone at last. I never told anyone, you know. That thing we share. Remember?
But she didn’t seem to. Her eyes lingered over my face in the most fleeting and casual manner before she went back to cracking the wafer of ice on a puddle with the toe of her boot. Hearing Yuval turning the dead bolt on the church door, she brushed past me, muttering, “Well, this was a fucking waste of time,” as she headed for the car.
There would be many more instances like this, where the people who had told me things had no memory of it, or at least claimed not to. Perhaps one day I will have heard too much. I will be a living reminder of someone else’s shame and be dropped as a result. It hasn’t really happened yet. For the most part, we all go on. With luck, the canker of the most terrible secret eventually stops throbbing, although there’s really no predicting how someone will weather having spilled their beans, just that they will spill them. That is inevitable. We are disclosing animals, wired for unburdening. It’s what we do as a species. When I am being told, I listen, mindful of the honor, remembering all the while that the shore would be mistaken to believe that the waves lap up against him because he is so beautiful.
A Capacity for Wonder
Three Expeditions
Her tone was rhetorical, only half amused and sawtoothed with mild irritation.
“Do you like anything?” she asked me.
I’d heard it, or words to this effect, many times before. A reductive verdict that paints me as impervious to joy. I am not. What I am is the opposite of an adrenaline junkie, essentially allergic to the hormone. I o
nce spent close to a week paddling like a madman over Class V rapids while whitewater rafting through Chilean Patagonia with Robert F. Kennedy Junior. I am not speaking metaphorically here, how I wish I were. I really did whitewater raft through Chilean Patagonia with RFK Jr. and family. It suffices to say that a nicer, smarter, nobler man you could never hope to meet, but it was an excursion and activity I would only ever repeat at high-gauge, hollow-tip-bullet-loaded gunpoint. Those five days unleashed a largely continuous endocrine cascade that flooded my brain with the stressor and just made me feel weak and jittery, whereas it seemed only to make everyone else’s eyes bluer, their bone structure more patrician and to just generally quicken and galvanize the life force coursing through their healthy Christian bloodstreams.
And so what if it is also true that I am incapable, when entering a beautiful old movie palace, for instance, to simply gaze in wonder at its gilded rococo froth without also simultaneously scanning the room for the comforting red lettering of the nearest fire exit. Or, when traveling by subway (front car, always) between Manhattan and Brooklyn, I read my newspaper while remaining conscious at all times of the subtle shift in incline, the slight pop in the ears that indicates the halfway point under the river, which will prove useful in determining whether I would swim forward to the next station or back whence we came in the unlikely event the tunnel filled with water. That doesn’t make me immune to pleasure.