Second Acts

by Teri Emory

  “Let’s hold off on that for now, Madeline. I can have you evaluated at some point by a psychiatrist who will prescribe something for you if needed. But I’d like us to talk some more first.” I see the familiar flicker of disappointment in her eyes. I know what that look means: She was hoping for a shortcut to happiness.

  She’s probably ventured into one of the dozens of Internet chatrooms devoted to depression for a dose of “reliable” medical updates and testimonials from the Prozac/Paxil/Zoloft-faithful.

  I’ve spent time in the chatrooms myself, of course, to get a handle on the research my patients tell me they conduct. I’ve read the comfortably anonymous exchanges of information and advice. I’m convinced that drug companies and health plans pay shills to proselytize in cyberspace.

  “Don’t waste your time talking to some shrink who just takes your money week after week. Get on the fast track,” writes BlueNoMoreinOhio in the blackcloud.com chatroom. I’ve seen the online newsletters, touting the advantages of “pharmacological intervention” (meaning, antidepressants, which are relatively cheap) over “long-term counseling” (the kind I do, which the health plans find too expensive). I’m lucky that I have a practice in a place like Laurel Falls, where most people can afford psychotherapy without worrying about being reimbursed by their insurance companies.

  No use in my trying to balance Madeline’s ideas with talk of the side effects of antidepressants. She’s so tired of being sad, she’d willingly tolerate a little drowsiness, diminished sex drive, anesthetized feelings—for just a quick jolt of happiness. She wants the fast track.

  “See you next time, Dr. Gillian,” she says, with only the faintest dismay in her voice. Women like us, we do as we’re told.

  I end office hours early so I can drive to New Haven. Dr. Moros has asked me to present a case study to one of his classes for first-year students.

  The small lecture hall is already full when I arrive. Dr. Moros greets me with a warm hug. I take a seat at the desk behind him on the stage and listen to his introductory remarks on today’s topic: “Finding the Main Idea in the Depressed Patient’s Psychosocial History.” I scan the faces in the room as he speaks. They’re so young, these therapists-to-be.

  “Your challenge,” he begins, “is to figure out from what your patients tell you about themselves whether they are experiencing a situational depression or something more pervasive.”

  On the blackboard, Dr. Moros writes: “Text and Subtext.”

  “The text is what the patient tells you about his or her life,” he says. “The subtext is the deeper psychosocial picture—childhood, family, work, medical history, previous emotional bouts. The patient may present with an isolated, seemingly anomalous episode—a phobic reaction, a panic attack, some other sudden behavioral change that has brought on a depressive state, or, in fact, is itself activated by an undiagnosed, low-level depression. Maybe an overwhelming event—death, divorce, family crisis—has engendered neurotic symptoms. The patient may be functional in most ways—able to work, take care of children, et cetera. The text, that’s merely the beginning of the story. ‘I’m fine,’ the patient says, ‘except for the occasional migraine I get whenever my mother calls.’”

  The students laugh at this. Dr. Moros doesn’t smile, waits for the laughter to subside.

  “Or, the text is, ‘My dog died and I can’t stop crying,’ and then you find out that Fido’s death isn’t the issue at all, that it’s a repressed childhood trauma or kinky sex dreams that have brought on anxiety or depression. Fido may turn out to be just the trigger. The therapist must then go in search of the subtext: the main idea, the patterns of behavior, the recurring themes, the fantasies. Many people miss the main idea of their own lives—dependence, loss, shame, disappointment, fear, work, friendship. And, of course, love in all its forms. Love! The big main idea of most people’s lives. And the most complicated.”

  He introduces me as a gifted therapist, says it’s an honor to have me present one of my cases to the class, etc. He jokes that I am a survivor, a former student of his. I begin my presentation on Angela, a forty-year-old woman, a stay-at-home wife and mother (we don’t say housewife anymore), in a marriage she characterizes as “having the usual ups and downs.”

  Angela was referred to me by her internist because she had begun to have panic attacks in public places. Her nineteen-year-old daughter was about to be married. Angela had been married at about the same age. In the months before she came to me, Angela had grown increasingly agoraphobic, paralyzed at the thought of going to movie theaters, grocery stores, and, especially, shopping malls. This meant she had not been able to shop for a dress or do much else to prepare for her daughter’s wedding. And Angela was petrified at the thought of walking down the aisle in the church. All of this I learn from what she tells me—her text.

  I ask the class: Where do you begin to find the recurring themes? The subtext? Why panic attacks, and not some other behavior? None of the students’ responses goes in the right direction—to Angela’s conflicted feelings about her own early marriage, which she has transferred to her daughter. A pattern, a theme. Maybe the main idea of her life.

  I review Angela’s three months of treatment, how she came to realize that she was depressed. I point out her neurotic identification with her daughter. I suggest that she somaticized her anger and disappointment at her own life into panic attacks, whose physical symptoms gave her permission to avoid participating in her daughter’s wedding. The people in Angela’s life were more likely to be sympathetic to episodes of shortness of breath and heart palpitations than to vague, depressive complaints.

  I ask if the class has any questions.

  “Did she go to the wedding?” asks a budding therapist in the first row. “Did she get over the attacks?”

  I knew Angela wasn’t going to be a quick fix, I say. We worked out a plan with her family and her priest for Angela to be seated in a front pew of the church before the wedding ceremony began, so she wouldn’t have to walk down the aisle. Her internist prescribed Ativan to get her through the day. Angela continued to see me for several months. The panic attacks subsided. And then, as our sessions increasingly focused on the problems in her marriage, she stopped coming to therapy. This happens sometimes when you get too close. Some people discover that the main idea of their lives is something they don’t want to face. Examining the subtext seems risky, or uncomfortable, or just too much work.

  The young student looks crushed.

  I lean forward from the lectern. “Nothing is perfect,” I tell him.

  __________

  It’s raining hard as I leave the building. I have no umbrella. I pull my blazer up to cover my head, and I run to my car. I turn on the car radio to catch the weather and traffic report. It’s a quick-moving storm, says the chipper voice. Should be out of the area in the next half hour. I decide to stay where I am until the storm passes. I leave the ignition key turned so I can listen to the radio without running the engine. I can almost hear Jim’s impatient rebuke: You’ll kill the battery, Beth.

  The oldies station is paying tribute to “sixties chicks.” The DJ promises Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Mary Wells. “Up first, Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Ponies. Make sure your mom is tuning in,” the DJ yells. “I’ll bet she remembers where she was the first time she heard this

  one . . .” You and I travel to the beat of a different drum . . .

  He’s right, this DJ with the earsplitting voice. I remember where I was. In the dorm, Goodyear Hall, at Buffalo, living with Sarah and Miriam. Our cramped room—the only triple on the floor—was redolent with the mingled scents of three perfumes (Sarah’s L’Air du Temps, Miriam’s Shalimar, my Réplique). Faint traces of marijuana and the incense we burned to mask the smell were in the air, too. Music was loud and constant. The songs we played—from record albums lined up on a makeshift bricks-and-boards bookcase—reflected both the turbulent times we
were living in and our aching desire to find true love.

  The Vietnam War and growing social movements colored everything about our college years. Sarah, Miriam, and I were often distracted by the frenetic energy of campus events. We accepted as gospel that just about any sit-in or teach-in (anti-war or pro-liberation of any group) was a far more valuable use of our time than, say, calculus class.

  We righteously chose our priorities. We skimped on study hours to gather signatures in support of anti-war groups. We cut classes to accompany our boyfriends to a barber who would make them “Clean for Gene” McCarthy when they canvassed voters. We begged for extensions and pulled all-nighters to finish term papers after long days of organizing teach-ins. We emptied our meager checking accounts for train tickets so we could march on Washington.

  We were so sure of everything we were sure of.

  There were endless late-night discussions in the dorm, which usually began high-minded (politics of the day, poetry of the ages) but ended up, sooner or later, at sex. All three of us had come to college as virgins, though Sarah and Miriam claimed vast experience at the “everything but” game that was the way of all flesh in the era before the Pill. French kissing was as far as I had gone.

  We guessed that Miriam would be the first to lose her virginity. Sex was already the big main idea of her life. Men were drawn—still are—to her easy charm, her perfect little body, her gorgeous face. Later in our lives, one of the men she almost married would describe her appeal: “Miriam communicates only one message, no matter the words that come out of her mouth: ‘Imagine me in bed.’ And so, we do.”

  Early in the first semester of freshman year, it was Miriam who found the name of Dr. Sanford, the gynecologist near campus who dispensed birth control without undue lecturing. Miriam went on the Pill after meeting Alex Van Buren, a political science major, at an anti-war demonstration in late September. By homecoming weekend in October, she had succumbed to Alex’s crusade to get her into bed. The morning after she slept with him for the first time, Miriam described the night to Sarah and me in such detail that I actually remember her first sexual experience as vividly as my own.

  Sarah was the next of us to visit Dr. Sanford, after successfully capturing the attention of Claude Lequesne, the teaching assistant in her Survey of French Literature course. Claude was an older man—twenty-four, as I remember—who talked at length about an ex-wife and young son he had left at home in Marseilles. Sarah happily imagined herself on regular visits to the south of France, stepmother to a petit garçon. Even after she learned that Claude’s wife was not exactly ex, and he returned to France, Sarah credited her first lover with great tenderness and impressive technique in bed. I think his speaking French to her during sex allowed her to overlook his shortcomings.

  My turn came when I was nineteen, during my sophomore year, in Bradley Garrison’s creaky bed on the top floor of a rambling wood-frame house near the campus. Bradley shared the house with four roommates, who were downstairs at the time, smoking hashish and blasting a Jefferson Airplane album. The thumping bass of “White Rabbit” shook the walls as Bradley unbuttoned my pale blue Army/Navy-store workshirt and kissed my neck. He worked his mouth down my body to breasts, stomach. I moaned convincingly, though I was mostly thinking, as he tugged at the zipper of my bell-bottom jeans, that I should try the Stillman Diet that I’d heard could knock off ten pounds in a week. It was over for Bradley in thirty seconds. “Did you . . . uh . . . um . . .?” he asked. “Oh, yes,” I lied. Eventually, I managed to train Bradley in the mechanics of foreplay (knowledge of which I had acquired from late-night catechisms in the dorm), and I began to enjoy orgasms on a regular basis. Bradley and I broke up when we realized, after some months, that we had little in common when we weren’t horizontal. At least we were honest with each other—we never even pretended to be in love.

  The following semester I took up with David Thierry, a psychology graduate student. After several tedious episodes in bed, I tried reading erotic love poems to him—Pablo Neruda, e.e. cummings. David yawned. I splurged on a push-up bra and black lace underpants. He blushed. Finally, shyly, I suggested oral sex, remembering, as I made my request, Bradley Garrison’s generosity and finesse in that department.

  “If you really want to, babe,” David said, leaning back against his mirrored headboard, “go right ahead.”

  Incredibly, I did.

  In spite of David’s limitations, I continued to see him until the end of that year, when he graduated and moved to Michigan to pursue a doctorate. I hardly thought about him for a long while after that, except for the times when Sarah and Miriam could persuade me to tell the “Go Right Ahead” story about David to new women friends who hadn’t heard the tale. Then, a few years ago, I was under the dryer at the hairdresser’s when one of those advice columns in a women’s magazine caught my eye. A reader had written to ask about overcoming her husband’s inhibitions in bed. The advice offered was replete with seduction techniques guaranteed to unleash the husband’s libido. “Read provocative books, wear enticing outfits to bed, tell him exactly how to please you,” urged the columnist, described by the magazine as the noted clinical psychologist and sex therapist, David Thierry, Ph.D.

  I’ve wondered what goes on in late-night colloquies in women’s dorms these days. I’m sure that my daughter has been to bed with a boyfriend or two, but from what I can tell, her generation has more in common, sexually, with their grandmothers than with their mothers. Caution and monogamy rule again. No surprise. By the time Nicole was old enough for us to have the Talk—where babies come from and all that—it was the AIDS era, and I felt obliged to frame the information I gave her within rules I had once thought archaic. My generation took the Pill and worshipped the Kama Sutra. No blood tests, no condoms, no inhibitions. Sex was life affirming, not fatal. Long before AIDS existed, of course, our generation learned that sex is one of life’s most complicated ventures, but for a while there, the people we most admired blithely advocated something they called free love. They were no less sanctimonious than today’s teen idols, who appear in public service announcements, solemnly reminding their peers that free love has given way to safe sex. Neither generation has it right, though. Nothing that happens between lovers is ever truly free. Or safe.

  The rain lets up, and I make my way onto the highway and home to Laurel Falls. As I pull into the garage, the DJ is leading into “. . . one of the best covers ever of a Beatles tune. Judy Collins, ‘In My Life.’” Our song, Jim’s and mine; he sang it to me at our wedding. There are places I remember / All my life, though some have changed . . .

  I turn off the engine, step out of the car, enter the code to disarm the security system. Our code is 1776. Adam chose it when he was in the third grade, the year he played Thomas Jefferson in his class play. Some are dead and some are living / In my life, I love you more.

  Jim is not home yet. He’s having dinner at Le Cirque with new partners from his London office. They’ll be here for the party. In the old days, just our close friends came to our fall party, often with their young children. Everyone wore jeans. I did all the cooking. Jim sang and played the piano. Adam and Nicole helped us clean up the mess the next day.

  Now that Jim invites business associates, it’s a different kind of party. We hire caterers and bartenders and parking valets and a cleanup crew, and Gillian Investments foots the bill. The men will be in coats and ties, the women in designer cocktail dresses. No one will think of bringing children. All I do is send invitations, approve the menu, and direct the staff we hire. Our house is different now, too. With the additions we’ve built—master bedroom suite, remodeled kitchen, enclosed patio, pool and cabana—our living space is twice what it was when we first moved in.

  Another Lean Cuisine for me tonight. Still hoping the clingy creation that Miriam persuaded me to buy for the party will hang the right way on my middle-aged hips. While the scant portion of frozen chicken piccata (270 calorie
s, 7 grams of fat) gets irradiated in the microwave, I check the answering machine for messages. The caterer for the party has an unusual South African Cabernet she would like to discuss with me. The pianist needs directions to our house. The Laurel Falls Museum of Fine Arts wants to know when I’ll be available to discuss this year’s fundraiser. Two hang-ups without messages. The Caller ID screen says the calls came from the Carnegie Grand Hotel in Manhattan. Wrong number, no doubt.

  Next to the phone is a note from Carmen, our housekeeper. “Nicole she call. She is okay. No thing importante.” Carmen has worked for us since the week we moved into this house. It’s a cliché, I know, for rich people to describe their household staff as family, but I can’t imagine life in Connecticut without Carmen. Of course, we could have hired someone willing to live in, but having anyone but Carmen take care of the house (and all of us) is unthinkable. She was a godsend through our many renovations, translating my wishes into Spanish for the construction crews, choreographing the moves of tradespeople all over the house. When I was in graduate school, Carmen would come to work early and stay as late as I needed her to drive carpools or fix dinner for Adam and Nicole. The kids loved her. Those were the years when Jim had just started to build Gillian Investments, and the routine of his being at work all the time, turning into a ghost at home, had just begun. Carmen was my friend and confidante, sympathetic and reliable.

  I turn on the TV above the counter to give myself company as I eat dinner at the kitchen table. I catch the end of a Law & Order rerun: Sam Waterston and Jerry Ohrbach are exchanging cynical remarks on the outcome of a white-collar corruption trial. Dateline is next, featuring a report on recent art forgeries in Italy. A ten-second teaser for the story shows a sweeping aerial view of Rome. The voiceover, in Italian-accented English, insinuates government complicity “at the highest levels.” I smile, wondering if students at the Rome Academy of the Arts, where I spent the second semester of my junior year, are today gathering in sidewalk caffès to gossip about this latest scandal.