Suzy waves us over. She is a small woman, around fifty, in loose cotton clothes and chunky jewelry. She’s got frizzy black hair streaked with gray. Her vibe is “cool high school English teacher,” the kind you might find yourself smoking a joint with a few years after graduation.
After we introduce ourselves, Suzy leads us into the barn (which, to my relief, smells fine) and asks why we are there. Because she’s a fucking bitch doesn’t seem like the right way to kick things off, so I volunteer that we have been fighting a lot.
Suzy asks for specifics. What are we fighting about?
“Money,” says Martha.
True dat. Money is a constant flash point between us since we have very different attitudes about its purpose. Martha is of the opinion that money is to be spent in order to create a better life for herself and her loved ones, whereas I am of the opinion that money is a means of keeping score. The more you have, the more you are winning. Winning what? Just winning. Isn’t that enough?
“So you’re fighting about money,” Suzy asks.
“Yes,” replies Martha. “And also everything else.”
“Let’s start with money,” Suzy says.
So that’s how we start. Right away I like Suzy’s style. Unlike some other therapists I’ve seen, Suzy is a talker. I’ve never understood those bobblehead therapists who do nothing but nod. It’s really annoying. You talk, they nod. Even if you ask them a direct question, they just turn it around. “So what do you think I should do?”
“What do you think you should do?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m here.”
“Let’s explore that.”
“Eat me. Is that something we can explore?”
But Suzy is an active participant in the conversation. Instead of sympathetic nods and platitudes, she gives us practical, useful advice. Which is great because that’s what I’m paying for. Yes, we need to work on things ourselves, but if she can fast-track the process by telling us we’re idiots in one session instead of waiting for us to figure it out in three, that saves us a lot of money, which, as you know, I love.
One hour with Suzy is obviously not enough to dig very deep, but the simple act of frank conversation leaves Martha and me both feeling better. It is the first good talk we have had in weeks. After our session, we treat ourselves to lunch at a nearby restaurant, where we continue talking. So begins a positive feedback loop: therapy leads to good feelings, which leads to lunch, which leads to more conversation, which leads to more therapy, which leads to more lunch.
The lesson: the more you eat, the better you feel.
We see Suzy every week for the next several months. What began as a conversation about money evolves into long and intimate discussions about our deeper selves, the kinds of talks Martha and I used to have on the phone when we were first sneaking around together. The difference is none of these conversations ends with phone sex.
The main thing I take away from those initial sessions is that I can be a real asshole. I knew that already, but to hear my actions reflected back at me from Martha’s point of view opens my eyes a bit wider to my sometimes horrible behavior.
Until then, even though I recognized many of my imperfections, I still considered myself to be the hero of a magnificent, epic story in which I starred, a story in which the hero (me) may do some confounding and upsetting things, but his actions are redeemed in the audience’s mind because they understand that he is the most fascinating of archetypes, the charming rogue. You know, like Han Solo.
Apparently, the problem with this sort of thinking is that there is no unseen audience. As my therapist pointed out to me, there is nobody out there cheering me on when I call my wife a cunt. (I have called Martha this on at least a couple of occasions. Not proud of it, but there it is. Once I said she was being “cunty,” which felt like less of an insult. She did not think so. It should be pointed out, though, that she was acting kind of cunty.)
What I learn, and this is a tough pill to swallow, is that other people have their own stories in which I am not the star. From their point of view, whenever I do upsetting things, I am less like Harrison Ford as Han Solo and more like Mel Gibson as Mel Gibson.
In fact, Martha stars in her own story, and in her story, when I tell her that no, I am not going to clean the bathroom because I think cleaning it once every couple of months is plenty so if she wants the bathroom cleaned she can clean it her damned self, she does not interpret my position as that of the common man taking a heroic stand against tyranny. Martha’s audience just thinks Martha married a dickhead.
Which maybe she did.
So I’m sure she feels vindicated when I agree with her that much of my behavior is childish and needs to be addressed. But I bet she was not anticipating the degree to which our sessions would end up focusing on her. Until now, so much of what was wrong with us as a couple was laid in my lap: my depression, my stubbornness, my sullen attitude and general lack of cooperation.
Now, though, we find ourselves mapping the vast and uncharted territories of Martha’s psyche. After much exploration, here is what we discover: Martha is batshit crazy. Obviously, Suzy doesn’t use those words, but I do notice that whenever Martha is talking, she uses her finger to make whirling “koo-koo” motions.
Whole sessions with Suzy go by where we talk only about Martha, entire luxurious hours spent chronicling my wife’s need to set the house alarm at night and then recheck the alarm to make sure it’s set five minutes later, and five minutes after that, and how her newly diagnosed ADD relates to her childhood. I love it. I just get to sit there and make the same kind of nodding motions I hate so much when directed at me. Yes, I nod, as she unburdens herself to Suzy. Yes, I understand. I press my lips together in a tight sympathetic smile, nodding my bobblehead up and down. Yes, yes, yes. I murmur comforting noises and hold her hand, and think about where we will be going for lunch.
It is a perfect date.
Here’s the thing: I do understand. I know what it’s like to tease out your own ugliness and hold it up to the light for examination like a particularly stringy booger you just pulled from your nose. It’s gross, certainly, but that’s all it is, just something unpleasant we each have within us. All this pain we hold on to, Martha and me, all these fights, the bickering, all of it, is nothing. It’s just us saying the same thing over and over again: “I feel alone.” The girl sitting next to me struggling to articulate her pain is the girl I love. I miss the girl who does silly dances when Madonna comes on the radio and I miss the boy who danced along when I was twenty-three and falling in love.
How did I end up shrouding my best self in this marriage? When did our definition of ourselves as a couple become about the things we had to do instead of the people we want to be? When did I become afraid to poke fun at her the way I used to, to speak to waiters in funny accents to make her laugh, to buy her huge plastic butterfly key chains with her initials engraved in them just because they were ridiculous? When did that stuff stop? And why?
Fear maybe. The fear that the people we wish ourselves to be, the faces we present to the world, aren’t who we really are. That our true selves are the monsters who wear our clothes when we are home. Those other people, the charismatic people we show to the world, where do they go? Do we put them away like the good china, only to be brought out on special occasions? Because that seems like a stupid way to run a life.
I know her better than I have ever known anybody, but there are times when I have also never felt more distant from another person. The thing nobody ever tells you about marriage is that sometimes it makes you lonelier than being alone ever could.
So there we are, week after week, sitting in the corner of a big yellow barn telling a stranger all the things we struggle to say to each other. It helps. The girl I love is there, buried under to-do lists and anxiety, but she’s in there. The boy she loves is there, too, overwhelmed and not understanding how he will keep this life going for the people he loves, but he is there. Sometimes w
hen we leave the barn, I feel like I have just stepped out of one of those fancy showers that shoots water at you from a thousand different directions. I feel clean and hopeful and a little aroused.
Sometimes our good feelings carry over the entire week. But sometimes we start screaming at each other again as soon as we get home. That’s just the way it goes with us. One step forward, ninety-two steps back.
Over time we do get better. The amount of time between fights lengthens. We are more patient with each other, slower to react to provocation. We practice the listening techniques Suzy teaches us, like repeating back to the other person what they are saying so they feel heard.
Martha: “I feel like you’re not helping out enough around the house.”
Me: “You feel like I’m not helping out enough around the house.”
Martha: “Exactly.”
This shit is easy!
Sometimes when she asks me to do something, I don’t even bother repeating it back it to her, or tell her to fucking do it herself. I just do what she asks, without complaint. When I do, I hear my imaginary audience applaud. Once in a while I even hear them say saucy things to me like, “You go, girl!”
A few weeks ago was our anniversary. To celebrate we went to our favorite New York restaurant, Gramercy Tavern. (Reservations: 212-477-0777. In exchange for plugging their restaurant, I will be glad to accept a free dinner from them. Thanks in advance, Gramercy Tavern.) We go there almost every year. When the waiter came to our table, he said, “I think I waited on you guys last year at this same table. Happy anniversary.”
I said, “Oh yeah!” like I remembered him. But I didn’t remember because I don’t remember things. But I was impressed with his memory. (This did not translate to a larger tip for him, by the way, because 5 percent should be enough for any man.) It was nice to be remembered, nicer still to be remembered as a couple. Over the next several hours, we filled ourselves with meats and fish and bread and stinky cheeses. We talked in the easy way we do when we are getting along. We toasted each other with champagne. We laughed. It felt familiar and good, this annual ritual with my wife. Better even than picking up a stewardess at Applebee’s.
After dinner we go to a hotel room I’ve reserved. The kids are home with a babysitter. We have the whole night to ourselves in New York, a rare treat. We undress and contemplate making love, even though we are both so full we feel like pumpkins stuffed with turduckens. Ultimately, we decide against it because one or both of us might barf. Instead, we just lie down beside each other on the bed and kiss. I tell her I love her. I wait for her to tell me she loves me too.
I see her eyes drift to the window.
“What’s that?” she says, pointing to the drape. I hear the familiar anxiety in her voice and I tense. Why does she always think something is wrong when nothing is wrong? Why does she worry so much when there is nothing to worry about? She gets up from the bed and walks over to the window. “Oh no.”
I sigh and follow her, preparing to tell her that whatever she imagined she saw is nothing, to come back to bed, to kiss me again and tell me she loves me. And, failing that, to tell her she is crazy and needs serious psychiatric help, which probably goes against what Suzy would advise. But when I look at where she’s pointing, I realize I cannot tell her these things because crawling across the drapery is a bright red insect the size of a poodle.
“Is that a bedbug?” Martha asks.
“I’m sure it’s not,” I say.
But my assurances mean nothing to her. New York is currently experiencing an infestation of the little fuckers. We Google “bedbugs” and compare the images we find to the thing in front of us. It’s a bedbug.
“We can’t stay here,” she says.
No, we can stay here! We can just pluck the bedbug from the curtains and flush it down the toilet. We don’t even have to sleep in the bed; we can sleep in the bathtub! Don’t let one tiny bedbug ruin our night! Let’s just be together tonight, here, alone. C’mon!
But no. She’s right. We’re not staying in this filthy shithole. We have to get out of here. Now. We pack our things as quickly as we can and hightail it out of the hotel, stopping at the lobby to complain to the blank-faced desk clerk.
“Bedbugs!” I yell.
“Ooooh,” he says.
“I’m not paying for the room!”
“Ooooh,” he says. I don’t think he speaks English.
We pick up the car at the garage for the long, late-night drive back to the wilds of Connecticut. We try to laugh about it, but it doesn’t feel that funny when it is two o’clock in the morning and we are still a little drunk and carsick from the windy back roads. Anniversary officially ruined. Mood officially soured. She falls asleep in the car, and when we get back a couple of hours later we send the babysitter home, and wake up with the kids at dawn. We are exhausted and snappish with each other the whole next day. When she asks me to take out the garbage I tell her in my best Han Solo voice if she wants the garbage taken out she should take it out her damned self. She calls me an asshole. I tell her now I am definitely not taking out the garbage and she tells me she wants a divorce. And that, basically, is our marriage. It is, as they say, a lot of hard work.
CHAPTER 14
pills and booze
I feel the need to clarify something lest you get the wrong idea about my life: I am happy. Not all the time, certainly, but happy. More than that, I seem to get happier as the years go by. Not that I don’t occasionally think about swerving my car into oncoming traffic, but those sorts of thoughts don’t indicate unhappiness. They just mean I’m keeping my options open. Most of the time I’m happy.
Because I’m on pills.
I am a great fan of pills. And while I agree with those who say pills do not solve psychological problems, I am of the opinion that masking the symptoms is just as good as curing the disease.
The “disease” in this case is, of course, depression. I have it. You have it. Everybody has it. Depression is to modern Americans what scurvy was to old-timey sailors, so common it’s barely worth discussing. I mention it only insomuch as it affects me, although how much is sometimes hard to tell because even to me, a sufferer, “depression” seems like a fetid load of weaselly claptrap, a cheap and easy excuse for not participating in life.
I do think depression has an evolutionary purpose. Think about it: if your circumstances are miserable enough, you will either do something to change them or die. Our evolutionary trajectory suggests that a lot of us decided to do the former rather than succumb to the latter. That’s how we got from fire to the wheel to HDTV.
Plus, if you study history you’ll discover that all of history’s great minds were miserable fucks. Every single one of them. I know this because I researched every single person who ever lived when writing this book, and the notable ones were all depressed.
Obviously I am not saying that every depressed person is destined for renown, but I am saying that if you are a naturally happy person you will never do anything with your life.
This is why all great artists, for example, must be “tortured.” Never “upbeat.” Never “delightful”; there is no cliché of the “delightful artist.” Anyway, who wants to hang around mopey artists in their tattered black clothing, scribbling in their Moleskin journals, smoking their ridiculous organic cigarettes? Even artists want good dental insurance and relationships that do not involve stabbings. But they cannot have these things because they are artists. And artists must suffer.
(Paralegals, as a rule, are not depressed.)
As useful as depression has been in the past, I think it has outlived its evolutionary mandate. When our precarious existence demanded an “innovate or die” mentality, a certain collective ennui made sense. But now that we have frozen pizza and blowjob dolls and everything else we could ever possibly need, depression serves no purpose. It’s a vestigial quirk from another time, like the appendix. We don’t need it. The only part of society that still benefits from all this misery is the internati
onal singer/songwriter cabal. And, of course, the makers of pills.
My antidepressant of choice is Lexapro, the commercial name for a drug called escitalopram. Personally, I prefer the name escitalopram because it is so hard to say. The harder a drug is to pronounce, the more medicinally profound it seems. Lexapro just sounds like a brand of golf ball.
Lexapro belongs to a class of drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which operate under the same principle as Kevin Costner’s urine recycling machine in the movie Waterworld. For those not as well versed in Waterworld as I, the way it worked is, he peed into a machine, which took out all the toxins, enabling him to drink his own pee. That’s what SSRIs do, only with moods.
SSRIs are the most prescribed class of antidepressant in the country, generating tens of billions of dollars in annual global sales. But what’s fascinating about them is that doctors don’t know if they actually work. Actually “fascinating” might be the wrong word. “Hilarious” is better.
A huge study came out in the Journal of the American Medical Association a while ago that basically said researchers could not determine if SSRIs actually do anything to relieve mild depression or not. There is concern, however, that they may increase suicidal thoughts and behavior among young people, which is a curious side effect for an antidepressant.
There are a host of other documented side effects including impotence, increased levels of aggression, nausea, urinary retention, weight loss/gain, renal impairment, tinnitus, photosensitivity, and something called “genital anesthesia.” (Another way to get genital anesthesia is to rub cocaine all over your dick. Or so I’ve heard.) Anyway, doctors know SSRIs do all of those things, but they have no idea if they actually treat some of the problems for which they are prescribed.
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