by Joel Derfner
But he is smart and funny and handsome and stimulating and profoundly compassionate and great in bed. He has a stronger sense of empathy than anybody I’ve ever met. He is a psychiatrist in a hospital where he cares deeply about very sick people who think they are the Emperor of Japan or the sun’s sister or a butternut squash. He paints beautiful and complex pictures of my dog. He admires me and my work and finds me handsome and puts up with the fact that I am crazy. He likes me even though I am vengeful and punitive. He is the only man I’ve ever dated who I didn’t want to be when I grew up and I love him very much.
So why is it that I wake up sometimes in the middle of the night paralyzed by doubt, staring out the window until the closest thing to certainty I can find is the fear that I’m settling and that really I should hold out for the polyglot millionaire?
And if I’m on a search for love in Manhattan, then why am I moving to Brooklyn with Mike in two weeks?
Why am I frightened that, if I ever do to him in bed what he usually does to me, I will despise him afterward for allowing me to take care of him rather than the other way around, for abdicating his responsibility as my protector and leaving me undefended and alone?
He is an extraordinary man and even after these paragraphs appear in print he will love me.
And as I go to sleep beside him I pray that when I wake up tomorrow that will still be enough.
ON TEACHING AEROBICS
I would probably never have become a step aerobics instructor if the first step aerobics class I attended had not been taught by my soul mate. John was not only scorchingly hot but also, I discovered by Googlestalking him after I got home, a Doctor of Physics. Oh, and just for fun, fluent in Italian.
Naturally I became a regular at his class. I made prodigious efforts to help him understand that he was my soul mate, including but not limited to spending days drafting an e-mail asking him out and then sending it and then going mad with fear when I didn’t hear back from him immediately and finally doing the bravest thing I had ever done in my life, which was calling him and actually leaving him a message asking him out on a date. (This might possibly have been a braver thing to do if I hadn’t written the message out beforehand because I was going to call when I knew he was teaching, after I had called earlier and he had answered and I had hung up and he had *69ed me and called back and I had pitched my voice a major third higher than usual and affected a Southern accent and apologized for dialing the wrong number.)
The voice mail he left in response to my message did not contain the word “yes.”
Due to poor planning on my part, I couldn’t go to his next class, and I was leaving town the day after that, which meant it would be weeks before I saw him, and he would think I had stopped coming to his class because I was in love with him and couldn’t deal with being rejected, and I would never be able to go to his class again because then I would have to see him and be humiliated. I was about to start vomiting in frustration until I checked his website and saw that he would be subbing for another instructor the next morning. The class was at an appallingly early hour but obviously I had no other choice.
When I ran into John on the gym floor before class, he seemed pleasantly surprised to see me; I pretended to have had no idea he was going to be there, and deceitfully claimed that I had a meeting in the neighborhood and had figured I’d just stop by the gym beforehand. I knew from a mutual friend that John had recently returned from a trip to Italy, so I’d practiced several amusing things to say offhand in Italian once he mentioned that he spoke Italian, but by the time I realized he wasn’t going to mention that he spoke Italian I’d already said all the amusing things in English, and I didn’t trust myself to improvise, so I told him I had to get a drink of water and ran into the locker room.
Class actually went quite well once it started, and I managed to fix my mouth in the semblance of a smile for most of the hour, though this was made more difficult by my uncertainty about whether my staring at him would come across as appropriately watching the teacher or inappropriately gazing at him in pitiful doomed love.
When John went over to the stereo to change the tape, muttering rhetorically, “What’s next?” I said, “Chocolate,” a piece of humor for which I think I should receive a great deal of credit given my emotional state at the time.
He stared at me, looking baffled, and said, “What?”
Obviously he hadn’t heard me, so I took a deep breath and croaked “Chocolate!” a little louder.
“What?”
“CHOCOLATE!” I screamed. He continued to stare at me, and somebody else said, “Abs!” and he turned to her and said, “No, abs is later.” Then he put in a new tape and I killed myself.
Unfortunately, John didn’t notice, so I had to finish the class. I spent the cooldown period deciding to give up step aerobics in despair, but I knew that I would never actually do it, because sadly I had come to enjoy step aerobics too much.
My problem with most exercise is that, while it engages me physically, it leaves me mentally unfettered, which is never a good thing. I’ll lie on the bench or sit on the stationary bike or stand on the treadmill for however long I’ve committed to doing so (well, for however long I’ve committed to doing so minus fifteen minutes), and as I grunt conspicuously with each repetition or pretend I’m pedaling as fast as I can or bop my head in time to my iPod while sauntering along there is absolutely nothing for my mind to do but spin around in ever-tightening circles far more agonizing than the torture to which I am subjecting my body. This is the main reason I find step aerobics so appealing: you have to pay really close attention to what you’re doing for an hour or so, or else you risk getting the steps wrong and looking like a moron in front of the entire class. And when you’re paying really close attention to what you’re doing for an hour or so, well, that’s an hour or so you can’t spend thinking about how if you had just gotten Thad Sapphire the small Valentine’s Day basket in your senior year of college instead of the big one with the teddy bear you wouldn’t have freaked him out and he would have wanted to date you and now you would be happy.
Since I spend basically all my time thinking about how if I had just gotten Thad Sapphire the small Valentine’s Day basket in my senior year of college instead of the big one with the teddy bear I wouldn’t have freaked him out and he would have wanted to date me and now I would be happy, I found the opportunity to turn my thoughts elsewhere very appealing. So I started going to other step classes taught by other instructors, and then I started getting to know some of those other instructors (a process rendered less exciting but also less intimidating by their consistent failure to be both Doctors of Physics and fluent in a Romance language), and after I had been stepping for nine or ten months I was talking to one of these instructors after class and he said, “Hey, you should think about teaching,” and I froze.
Because what on earth could be sexier than being an aerobics instructor?
An aerobics instructor who had published a book?
And who wrote musicals?
And who knew French and Italian and German and ancient Greek though he’d forgotten most of the first three and all of the last and who had graduated summa cum laude from Harvard though he’d barely passed his general exams and who spent all his time looking up things that nobody else knew anything about so that people would think he was smart and like him the most or at least pretend not to notice how pathetic he was?
Secretly I believe that most of us have a fixed amount of talent we can distribute as we choose between our minds and our bodies. Some people spread themselves evenly and are sort of smart and creative and sort of in shape. Other people pour all their energy into developing one quality and become expert mathematicians or fashion models, but their complementary facets show a lack of focused attention: nobody admired Einstein for his well-developed quadriceps, and Giselle Bündchen’s name is nowhere to be found on the list of luminaries Ban Ki-moon has consulted about the International Compact on Iraq.
I w
ould never be a Doctor of Physics, so I understood that the zenith of perfection John had attained was beyond my reach, and I was okay with this, except in August when my therapist was out of town. But if I was both a mental genius and a physical one, if I became not only a composer and writer and polyglot and Harvard honors grad but a composer and writer and polyglot and Harvard honors grad and aerobics instructor, then what conclusion could I draw but that my terror of ever making a mistake and leading the cute guy next door with the funky haircut to stop speaking to me was groundless because I am actually way better than everybody else?
So I practiced and passed my certification test and started teaching and was bad at it and got better and got better still and picked up gigs at fancier gyms and now I teach eight classes a week, give or take, and sometimes I even have fun doing them.
But none of that is as important as the fact that I can think of myself as an aerobics instructor. Because now, when I step into a subway car afraid of every single person I see, at least I can say to myself, well, you’re probably the only one on this train who can render the date in the style of the French Revolutionary calendar and bench-press more than his own body weight.
Despite my myriad achievements, however, my self-loathing has unfortunately refused to accept that I am the boss of it, and in fact has discovered an even more pernicious way to gain the upper hand. When I’m teaching, Thad Sapphire and the Valentine’s Day basket are usually far from my thoughts, but what replaces them is worse, as illustrated in the following table representing a typical class.
Of course, there are occasions on which this internal monologue is hushed too, and when this happens I tend to long for its return.
Rather than using well-known recordings, the companies that release aerobics CDs usually just get the rights to songs and rerecord them in the appropriate format. This means that, when you buy CDs for an aerobics class, even if you know the standard recordings of songs, you don’t really know what these versions will sound like until you hear them. If you are a responsible teacher, you listen to your CDs ahead of time to get a feel for the high points and the more relaxed moments, so that you can adapt your routine to the music coming out of the speakers. If you are me, you don’t.
Most of the time this presents no significant difficulties. But one day in a class I was teaching with music I hadn’t previewed, the CD moved to the next song and suddenly I began to feel very strongly that I had heard this music before. As I continued to call out the steps, I thought, wait, can this really be a cover of that song? And shortly thereafter it became clear that yes, this really could be a cover of that song, which was “Without You.”
No, I can’t forget this evening,
Or your face as you were leaving,
But I guess that’s just the way the story goes.
You always smile, but in your eyes your sorrow shows.
No, I can’t forget tomorrow
When I think of all my sorrow,
When I had you there but then I let you go….
I can’t live if living is without you.
I can’t live, I can’t give any more.
After about fifteen seconds of trying to teach to the song, I ran over to the stereo, said merrily, “Okay, folks, we’re going to the next song because I have totally traumatic associations with this one!” and forwarded the CD to the next track, which was, if memory serves, ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.”
I’m sure my students thought I’d skipped “Without You” because it was a breakup song, which was fine by me. Because my traumatic associations with the song have to do not with any romantic entanglements but with my mother’s miscarriage of the child who would have been my older brother. She told me a story once, when the record player had gone quiet, about leaving her doctor’s office after getting the news, waiting in the car while my father went into the pharmacy to get her anti-cramp medication, and turning on the radio just in time to hear the DJ introduce “Without You.” I’d noticed that whenever we listened to the song she tended to get a funny look on her face, but this was the only time I ever heard her say why. And now I can never hear “Without You” and not think of my mother there in the turned-off car, mourning her dead child—whom she and my father had been referring to as Junior—and knowing that even if she had more children her diabetes would eventually ravage her body and then kill her in the prime of her life. I can’t hear that song without thinking of her blighted hopes and her constant struggle against pain and her childhood lived in fear of a monstrous mother and the magnitude of what she was able to accomplish in the world despite the forces ranged so mercilessly against her.
When I’m wandering the aisles of Rite Aid and “Without You” comes on the store radio, it’s not such a big deal; I can take a moment, get wistful, and then go back to hoping that if I brush my teeth with Rembrandt Plus Toothpaste I will be more popular.
But in front of a room full of type-A twentysomethings, shrieking, “Around the world! Knees higher! I know you can do it! Show those calories you mean it!” I found that hearing anybody sing You always smile, but in your eyes, your sorrow shows…. I can’t live if living is without you, I can’t live, I can’t give any more was unbearable.
Some months ago, several minutes into a class I was subbing for a fellow instructor, a very awkward middle-aged man in the back of the room stopped exercising and went over to lean against the wall. I checked to make sure he was all right and not having a heart attack, and he said everything was fine, but he stayed by the wall for the rest of the hour. After class was over and everybody else had left, I asked him again whether he was okay.
“I’m scared,” he said.
“Of what?” I asked.
“Everything.” He looked so forlorn that I put a hand on his shoulder, whereupon he started to cry. I did not know how to respond. This was not a situation that had been covered in my American Fitness and Aerobics Association Primary Group Exercise certification class.
After a few moments he regained control of himself. “I’m starting a new job next month,” he said, “and I’m really worried about it. I’m scared of getting old, I’m scared of losing my boyfriend.”
Under ordinary circumstances I am a very good listener, mixing warm affirmation with insightful questions in whatever ratio seems appropriate. But this man might as well have been talking to the Babylonian Sphinx. I longed to be somewhere else, the sands of the Gobi desert with no water, anywhere but here. “I’m trying really hard to live in the moment,” he said.
“I haven’t lived in the moment since 1999!” I laughed desperately. This did not cure his depression.
Eventually I asked him whether he wanted to try exercising again, just the two of us; he said he did, and I spent fifteen minutes teaching him the most basic routine I could come up with, at which he sucked. He kept getting in his own way, lifting his right knee instead of his left or moving backward instead of forward. Finally he did it right twice through and I said brightly, “Great job I have to go meet my friend for brunch bye!” and fled as if the studio had been in flames. I did not have to go meet my friend for brunch. But I could not bear to look into this man’s eyes any longer and see such voracious need, because what if I realized that I was standing in front of a mirror?
It was on a cold Tuesday in January that I taught my first aerobics class in the group home for the severely mentally ill.
I have been fascinated by mental illness ever since I can remember. It would be inaccurate to say that I am dating my boyfriend Mike because he is a psychiatrist, but I cannot deny that postcoital small talk about Capgras’s syndrome (a neurological disorder that leads people to believe that their family members and pets have been replaced by impostors) is not least among the perquisites of our relationship.
The idea of becoming a group fitness instructor to the insane had taken root in my mind when Mike refused, no matter how piteously I begged him, to smuggle me into the Christmas party for his hospital’s psych ward. “Why are you so interested?” he
asked.
“Because I would get to see crazy people in their natural habitat!”
“The patients go for a walk outside every day. Why don’t you just hang out in the park and wait for them to show up?”
“That would only be seeing them from a distance.”
“Maybe you could come and teach them aerobics,” he said, and though he was joking I understood at once that he had unwittingly revealed my destiny. I couldn’t teach at the hospital, it turned out, because of the insurance risk, but I asked around and found a group home that was interested.
This wasn’t just a self-serving idea. The medications that control the most severe illnesses also tend to cause serious weight gain and its attendant health problems, so I would be helping the severely mentally ill avoid diabetes, hypertension, and back fat.
Most importantly, though, I would be able to tell people that I taught aerobics in a lunatic asylum.
There are 297 conditions listed in the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the resource psychiatrists use to diagnose mental illness. To me the most disturbing of these are the psychotic disorders. Depression I can handle; anxiety I can handle; Munchausen by proxy I actually get a little kick out of. But these disorders do not necessarily cut those who suffer them off from reality. A psychotic can hallucinate mocking voices, inhabit imaginary universes, become somebody who died three thousand years ago. I really wish people would stop saying “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” while raising their eyebrows to underscore the deceptively simple profundity of these words. Because insanity is not doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results; insanity is thinking you’re the Empress of China.