by Kyra Davis
Each customer was more annoying than the last, until Gigi showed up and suddenly the customers didn’t seem so bad. I watched her ring up a six-hundred-dollar sale for a woman who had sworn thirty minutes earlier that she couldn’t afford anything in our department.
I looked at myself in the mirror strategically located by the leather jackets. You had to have a certain look in order to get strangers to pay good money for things they didn’t want. Gigi had it and I didn’t.
“Shouldn’t you be asking the mirror who’s the fairest of them all?”
I smiled and turned to see Caleb standing a few paces behind me. He used his thumb and forefinger to check the quality of one of the jackets hanging nearby. “You have time for a cigarette break?”
“We don’t smoke.”
“Damn, then I guess we’ll have to spend the whole time talking.”
“Allow me to take you to my parlor.” I signaled to Gigi that we were going to my office before leading Caleb back.
Caleb made himself comfortable in Gigi’s chair and idly looked through the Sassy on-order book. “So you and Tad talked.” The extreme casualness of his tone told me how hard he was working on not pushing me for information.
“We talked.”
Caleb looked up from the book expectantly. “Sooo…” he prodded.
“He says he’s not doing drugs.”
Caleb made a small dismissive gesture. “I assumed he would. What happened when you pressed the issue?”
I looked down at my hands.
“You are kidding.” Caleb slammed the on-order book closed. “You asked him if he was on drugs, he said no, and you just said, ‘Oh, okay, thanks for clearing that up?’ I thought you said you watched Oprah!”
“I do! I just…” I rubbed my hands up and down my skirt. “I don’t know. You should have seen him, Caleb. I expected him to get angry and defensive but he didn’t. He really opened up to me.”
“About what? What dark secrets does Taddy boy have?”
“He’s having problems at work.”
Caleb’s body had a small convulsive reaction to my statement. “He’s having problems at work? That was the big revelation? That was the excuse he used to justify lying about your rent, forging your name on a credit card and acting like an all-around asshole?”
“He’s not always an asshole!” I squared my shoulders and prepared myself for battle. It was bad enough that I had called him a prick. I couldn’t allow my friends to compare him to other obscene body parts.
“April, lets get real. If your marriage was even halfway okay you wouldn’t have had to qualify that last statement with an always.”
I started to respond but was cut off by the buzz of my intercom. “April?” Gigi’s voice sang. “Line one is for you.”
I noticed my hand was shaking when I reached for the receiver. “Hello? I mean, this is April, can I help you?”
“Hello, this is Harry Klein, you left a message at my office yesterday.”
“Oh, hi!” I mouthed the word therapist to Caleb, who was still looking mystified.
“You said you wanted to make an appointment?”
“Yes, yes, I did.” I waited for the long list of questions. He’d probably want to know why I felt we needed marriage counseling, if there were children involved, if I really had homicidal tendencies and stuff like that.
“My first available appointment is 11:00 a.m. two weeks from today. Does that work for you?”
I frantically flipped through the pages of my Day-Timer. What about the questions? “Eleven works. I don’t have Tad’s schedule in front of me but I’ll just tell him he either makes it to the appointment or he makes his own appointment with a divorce attorney.”
“Then I should pencil you in for eleven?”
I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach. What kind of therapist didn’t laugh at other people’s misery? “Go ahead and pencil, we’ll be there at eleven sharp.”
“Good…” He proceeded to give me directions on how to get to his office while I pretended to listen. As long as I could remember the street number and the Web address for MapQuest I’d be fine.
I hung up the phone and smiled weakly at Caleb. “Well, that’s step one…we’re going to therapy.”
Caleb nodded but seemed unimpressed.
I sighed resignedly. “You’re right. My marriage is in trouble. But you’ve got to understand, when Tad’s good he’s very, very good. When I lost our baby…” My voice trailed off and I looked away.
Caleb rolled his chair closer to mine and he carefully removed a piece of lint that was clinging to my stocking. “I know Tad can be wonderful,” he said. “I’ve seen it. But sometimes…” He hesitated then straightened up. “You know what? I’m being horrible. Marriage counseling is a fabulous idea. So tell me, who’s the lucky shrink?”
“Harry Klein, I found him in the phone book.”
Now Caleb was on his feet. “The phone book? My God, why don’t you just go and get your hair styled at Super Cuts while you’re at it.”
“Well, forgive me, but I don’t travel in the kind of circles in which people go around bragging about their therapist. I had to start somewhere, and the Yellow Pages—”
Caleb held his hand out to stop me. “Fine, just promise me that you won’t give up on therapy if this guy turns out to be something less than Freud.”
I thought about what I would be left with if therapy didn’t work out. I nodded solemnly. “I promise.”
NINETEEN
Two weeks later Tad and I sat on the couch in the therapist’s office with about two feet of space between us. I had never seen Tad more rigid. His eyes kept darting to the door as if he was toying with the idea of making a run for it.
The man sitting opposite us looked normal enough. His horn-rimmed glasses could have used a little tightening but other than that he was very put together. He was wearing a pair of chinos and a periwinkle-blue button-down shirt, and his salt-and-pepper beard was short and well groomed. He looked like a prototype for liberal Jewish intellectuals everywhere.
“So why don’t we start with you two giving me a little history.” He looked at Tad and pushed up his glasses. “Shall we start with you? Where did you grow up?”
Tad’s eyes widened and for a minute I thought he was going to cry. And then something happened. I could practically see the gears in his head leaping into action. He flashed me a satisfied smile and leaned back into the sofa. “I grew up in a little town called Georgetown. Not the one in D.C.—this Georgetown is in Massachusetts.”
“Oh?” Harry raised his eyebrows in curiosity. “I haven’t heard of it.”
“Not a lot of people have, it has a population under ten thousand. Very rural and woodsy. My dad and I would go camping all the time, sometimes fishing or hunting. My mom would have a homemade apple pie waiting for us when we got home…”
“We got it,” I said. “You lived in a Norman Rockwell painting but—”
“April—” Harry looked at me over the rims of his glasses “—Tad clearly wants to share his experiences about his childhood. We need to allow him to do that.”
My mouth dropped open. I had just been chastised by our therapist. We had been in his office for all of five minutes and already I was the bad guy. I crossed my arms in front of myself protectively. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to hear about Tad’s childhood. I would love to, especially since the soliloquy he was currently reciting was the only thing he had ever shared about his childhood experiences. The racism bit didn’t become an issue for Tad until he moved to a town that actually had black people in it, and it was then that he realized that some of the things his parents had taught him were wrong. It must have been painful for him to be forced to choose between his principles and the people who had provided him with such an idyllic childhood, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he had issues around it—but that wasn’t why we were in therapy. We were there so that we could deal with his issues around credit cards and lease agreements. Surely we could de
al with the important things first and save the warm fuzzy stuff for Christmas.
Tad cast me a sympathetic but somewhat patronizing look. “April has a hard time listening to me talk about the joys of my childhood because hers was so difficult. She’s had to go through a lot.”
“Oh?” Harry looked over at me. “Is that true?”
“No! I mean yes, but that’s not my issue. It’s true that my mother wasn’t the apple-pie type, but—”
“That’s an understatement.” Tad relaxed farther back into the sofa. “You told me that your mother rarely showed up for dinner.” He turned to Harry. “She even refused to come to our wedding. She told April she was protesting it or something. April was devastated. Just a few weeks ago April admitted that she hadn’t come to terms with her feelings of abandonment.” Tad reached over and gave my hand a squeeze. I wanted to bite his fingers off.
“Is that true?” Harry leaned forward. “Do you feel that you have abandonment issues?”
“I don’t know, maybe,” I said, not bothering to mask the impatience in my voice.
“Do you feel that it has affected your relationship with Tad?”
“Look, I don’t mean to dodge your questions, but I’m not here to talk about abandonment or my problems with my mother.”
“But maybe those things are more relevant than you think,” Tad said, raising his eyebrows. “I feel like you’re always questioning me, both my actions and my intentions. Maybe that’s because you expect me to hurt you the way that your mother hurt you, or worse yet, disappear like your father did.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” I pounded my fist into an adjacent throw pillow, sending up a few thousand particles of dust. “For the last time, I do not question everything you do!”
“April, I don’t think you’re really hearing Tad.”
Once again I was rendered slack-jawed. My husband and my therapist were ganging up on me. What kind of dark hell had I stumbled into?
“The key words in Tad’s statement were ‘I feel,’” Harry continued. “In relationships it’s often not always about what we do but how we make our partners feel. Tad feels like you’re questioning his every move. Now, how does it make you feel to hear him say that?”
My eyes scanned the room, looking for the hidden camera. This had to be one of those reality show hoaxes. Any moment now an attractive man with a blindingly white smile would jump out and tell me that Tad and my new therapist were really a couple of professional actors hired to make my life a living hell for the amusement of the American people.
But if there was a cap-toothed host hiding in the wings he wasn’t making an appearance, and Harry and Tad were waiting for me to respond.
I cleared my throat. “I think…”
Harry put a hand up to stop me. “Not I think,” he corrected. “I feel.”
I bit back a scream. I gave Harry a level look and then smiled demurely. “My bad.” I took a stabilizing breath and turned my body so that I was facing Tad. “Tad, right now I feel like telling you to go fuck yourself.”
Harry shook his head in disappointment. “I’m afraid that wasn’t a very productive statement.”
“I’m sorry, perhaps that was a bit narrow.” I pushed my purse strap up on my shoulder and stood up. “How’s this. I feel like telling you both to fuck off. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I feel like storming out of here.”
There was a shocked silence as I left the office. Caleb had been right, I shouldn’t have picked a therapist out of the Yellow Pages. I mean, really, what did I know about this guy other than that he had an office that was close to my home? Of course, there was something to be said for that because now even if I didn’t catch a bus I would only have to walk for fifteen minutes before arriving at my front door. In fact, a walk was just what the doctor ordered.
I went a block out of my way so that I could walk down Lake Street. Normally I love to dawdle in that neighborhood and I admire the beautiful architecture of the mansions that line the sidewalk, but today I chose the street for its lack of pedestrian traffic. The fewer people around me the better.
I stuffed my hands in my pockets as I marched toward a fog bank that had settled less than a mile ahead of me. How had Tad done it? How had he turned the therapy session around so that it was all about me and my issues rather than his and ours?
Unless the issues really were mine. I slowed my pace. Why had I reacted so violently? Was it because he had hit a nerve when he started talking about my mother? Had I allowed my feelings about her to affect my relationship with Tad? Did I question him too much?
I quickened my pace again. Now I was totally confused. I knew that Tad bore a lot of the responsibility for our marital problems, but maybe I needed to own up to my part, as well. Was it possible that I was driving him to do some of the things he was doing? I mean, if a therapist would side with him so quickly then surely some of his points must be valid.
I turned it all over in my mind as I completed my walk. I was somewhat relieved when I got home and found that Tad wasn’t there yet. He was probably disappointed in me for walking out on our therapy session. Good, my little inner voice said. Now he’ll know what it’s like to be let down by someone he loves.
But maybe I had let him down before this. Maybe—
The phone rang, interrupting my thoughts. I put my hand on my chest in a pathetic attempt to rid it of the anxiety that was restricting my lung capacity. It was probably Tad, and I wasn’t ready to talk to him.
“Nobody’s home to take your call,” Tad’s recorded voice said over the answering machine, “but if you leave your name, number and a good time to reach you we promise to get back to you.”
The machine beeped and then a male voice spoke. “Yo, April, you there? It’s Jeremiah…”
I grabbed the phone with a little too much enthusiasm. “Hello?”
“Hey, you. I haven’t heard from you since you ran out of Paul’s crib. I just wanted to check and make sure everything was cool.”
“Cool? Nothing is cool,” I spat out before I was able to censor myself. “I’d say I was having the worst day of my life but there’s been so much competition for that title that this day barely even makes it to my top ten.”
“Whoa, slow down. What happened?”
“I lost my mind, that’s what happened! I am in the middle of a nervous breakdown. Maybe it’s my husband that’s driven me to this point, but then again it might be my mother. That’s how pathetic I’ve become, I can’t even figure out who to use as a scapegoat!”
There was a long silence on the other end of the line. I realized that I was talking to a man who was in no way required to listen to my hysterics. I fell into the chair by the phone. Well, if Allie had been right about Tad being jealous, he certainly didn’t have anything to worry about now. As soon as we hung up, Jeremiah would be calling the phone company and requesting to have a caller block put on my number.
“April, do you want me to come over?”
I was so surprised and relieved by his offer that I actually laughed out loud. “I thought I might have scared you away.”
“Nah, I don’t scare easy. Tell you what, I’m hanging with the guys right now, but we’re done rehearsing for the day so I’ll ditch them and come over.”
“There’s no need for you to ditch your friends. I guarantee that they’re better company than I am right now.”
“Now, why would I want to hang with a bunch of ugly dudes when I could offer a shoulder to a fine woman like yourself?”
“You’re not trying to make a pass at a married woman, are you?” Please God, let the answer be yes.
“A pass? Nah, just trying to flesh out a fantasy.” He laughed, and I could hear the voices of the other band members in the background. “Hey, I got an idea,” he continued. “You don’t have to go into work this afternoon, right?”
“No, I have the rest of the day off.”
“Great, meet me at the Legion of Honor.”
I wrinkled my brow. “Why?”
<
br /> “You got to trust me on this. Just meet me at the front entrance in twenty-five minutes. There are times to question and times to go with the flow. Right now you need to be flowin’.”
So it was unanimous. The entire world thought I questioned people too much. Fine, if they wanted me to flow, I’d flow. “I’ll be there in twenty-five minutes.”
Twenty minutes later I was standing in front of the white pillars that led into the Legion of Honor. It was definitely one of my favorite museums in the city. It had been built to resemble the Parisian eighteenth-century Palais de la Légion d’honneur and held works of art that ranged from ancient to modern. I looked wistfully at the view of the bay. It hadn’t been far from here that Tad had proposed.
“There she is.”
I turned around to see Jeremiah, Dallas, Gary and Paul walking up to me. Now I was really lost. “You all came?”
“Yeah, these guys needed a little culture and I figured you’re the chick to give it to them.”
“I’m sorry, but what precisely is it that you expect me to give them?”
“Precisely? Well, I would ‘precisely’ like you to give us a tour of the museum. You know, tell us about the art and the artists…Hell, the building itself looks pretty damn artsy. Is it supposed to look like it’s from Ancient Greece or something?”
“Not exactly, it’s neoclassical architecture, which basically means that it’s the Renaissance era’s interpretation of the architectural style of the Ancient Greek and Romans. Neoclassicism was very popular during the reign of Napoleon.”
“See, we’re already learning shit and we haven’t even walked in the door. Aren’t we, guys?”
The rest of the band offered their agreement and encouragement.