And Sometimes Why
Page 10
Work was the only thing that stilled the itch, but it had been two weeks since the accident, and the network was still insisting he take time off.
“Be realistic,” Aaron had said. “You’ve had a trauma. Someone died. A girl is in a coma. They say she’s probably not coming out of it.”
“It’s not my fault. The guy was a sleazeball drunk.”
“Well, the girl was an innocent victim. Have you seen her parents? Nice people. At the hospital every day, no comment to the press. Real class. They’re a wreck. If you go back to work like nothing happened, you will look like a heartless schmuck.”
“I was hired because I’m a heartless schmuck.”
“That’s a game. This is life. I want you to go see Boyd.”
“I don’t need a shrink.”
“I’ll leak it that you’re seeking professional help. This way, the show will get double publicity.”
Hooking television-show contestants up to a polygraph was not the career Boyd Davis had envisioned for himself when he was a young man studying psychology at Princeton. He’d been mid-complaint about the crushing boredom of clinical work when Aaron, his old Princeton roommate, suggested the job. Boyd had taken a sip of the seventeen-dollar martini Aaron was paying for, and laughed.
“Why not?” Aaron pressed, suddenly taken with the idea. Two clients on the show would mean two commissions. “You’d give the show class.”
As a child, Boyd had fallen in love with psychotherapy after his parents had taken him to see Dr. Mordechai Eisenmann, a psychoanalyst who lived and practiced out of a cheerful yellow Victorian in the center of Greenwich, Connecticut. Boyd, a pudgy, morose child, prone to pastries and historical novels, found the father he had always wanted in Dr. Eisenmann, a Holocaust survivor in his late sixties who was not intimidated by the silence of a ten-year-old boy. His first three visits, Boyd had not said a word. After five minutes of that, the doctor had shrugged his shoulders and begun paying bills, filling out forms, even talking on the phone, while the boy sat furiously staring at his hands.
When his fifty minutes were up, Dr. Eisenmann would announce that the session had been “highly revealing.” Boyd glared at him. He knew when he was being laughed at. Finally, on the fourth visit, he couldn’t take it anymore. “I really don’t think you should be doing that!” he had sputtered when Dr. Eisenmann began typing a letter on an old manual typewriter that made a terrible clatter.
“So,” the doctor said, looking pleased, “you’re ready to talk.” Boyd noticed he did not phrase the sentence as a question.
“What do you want to know?” the boy asked suspiciously.
“What do you want to tell me?” the doctor asked.
“Nothing. Everything about me and my life is utterly banal and boring.”
The doctor laughed as if he found his young patient genuinely amusing. It was the opposite of how Boyd’s parents treated him. His father, a thin-lipped Episcopalian who worked in trusts and estates and, as Boyd now realized, was probably a closeted homosexual, would grow visibly agitated at his fits, angrily denouncing his selfishness. His mother, a pretty, underfed blonde who wore pearls when she dropped off groceries to the needy every Friday afternoon, would try to cajole Boyd out of his moods with hugs and chocolate-chip scones, which is how Boyd developed the weight problem that got him mercilessly teased at school. What Dr. Eisenmann called “a vicious cycle.”
“Vicious is right,” Boyd responded.
After six months with Dr. Eisenmann, Boyd learned to say no to the scones.
“Are you sure?” his mother asked, nervously eyeing the pastries she had just baked.
Boyd could hear Dr. Eisenmann’s voice in his head. Do you think your mother will survive if you say no? Boyd wasn’t sure. Sometimes, baking seemed her only plea sure. If he didn’t eat them, who would?
“Why don’t we take a walk instead?” Boyd asked, just as Dr. Eisenmann had suggested.
“Oh.” His mother’s hand flew to her clavicle where it nervously played with her pearls. “Okay, I’ll just get a cardigan.”
In six months, the extra weight was gone. More important, he had discovered things about his mother he had never known. “You see how the Moores have planted their rhododendrons in full sun?” She’d shake her head sadly as they passed a mock Tudor ablaze with the showy purple flowers. “Rhododendrons are undercarriage shrubs that thrive in filtered light, under big trees. I’ve seen them grow to fifteen feet in Scotland, where they’re native. The Mexican landscapers who do the planting around here don’t understand. They’re sun people—la más sol, el mejor—but plants are like people. Take them out of their natural setting, they can survive, but they won’t flourish.” Boyd learned to see his mother as somebody more than the disappointed woman sipping a six-o’clock martini as she steamed green beans.
After the weight loss, his pleased parents made noises about stopping therapy, but Boyd resisted. Dr. Eisenmann was not one of those silent shrinks who insist the patient figure things out on his own. “I am Toto,” he told his young patients, “pulling back the curtain to reveal the wizard.” Seeing him every week was like getting through adolescence with Cliff Notes to human behavior.
“If a girl is inexplicably cruel, that means she likes you.”
“How do you know this stuff?” Boyd would ask, amazed, when his explanations proved correct.
The doctor shrugged. “We all like to think we’re more complicated and original than we are. Read your Darwin. Variations from the mean are slight and gradual.” It was Dr. Eisenmann who had first dropped hints to him about the nature of his parents’ misery, allusions Boyd had chosen to ignore. It was one of the few things he and the doctor disagreed on—Boyd believed there were some things we were better off not understanding. Mordechai Eisenmann, whose parents died in Bergen-Belsen, believed denial was the root of all evil.
When Boyd got to college and declared his interest in the field of psychology, he could see it disappointed his parents, who made vaguely derogatory comments about men in “the helping professions.” As a student, he’d found the subjects of Freud’s case histories—Dora, the Wolf Man, the Rat Man—far more gripping than any made-up character in a novel or play. It was only when he began treating real-life patients that he realized how removed those theories were from reality. In his heart, he was his father’s son, a Yankee stoic secretly disgusted by whining. The depressives were the worst. Whenever a new one came to see him, Boyd could feel his own spirits sink at the sight of their ashen faces and the dullness of their lives. He tried to view his contempt as useful countertransference, a living example of how the rest of the world viewed the sad sacks, but deep in his heart, he knew he had failed at empathy, the sine qua non of his profession. He was glad Dr. Eisenmann had not lived to see what a mess he had made of his career.
“Okay.” Aaron had shrugged after Boyd turned him down. “But why don’t you think about it for a week? Talk to your wife.”
In the days that followed, Boyd found himself increasingly drawn to the idea. He knew Aaron was simply buying his Princeton degree. He also knew that, after graduation, there had been little to brag of in his career: one article published in eight years, countless hours of clinical work, constant fighting with insurance companies for reimbursement. Why shouldn’t he trade that expensive degree for some decent money—what good was it doing him? A week to the day, he called Aaron.
“Fantastic,” Aaron answered when he got around to returning the call. “You’ll have to take a screen test, but it’s nothing. Just a formality.”
Everybody agreed that Boyd’s preppy good looks—curly hair the color of rolled oats, tortoiseshell glasses, oxford blue shirt—looked good on camera, but they worried about his stiffness.
“Muffy, dahling, be a dear and bring me a fresh martini,” one of the production associates said mockingly after watching his tape.
“I think it works,” Aaron responded, “he’s the real thing. You don’t see that enough on television.”
He tried to justify the job. Didn’t Freud do the same? Excavate the unspeakable, the desire to fuck our mothers, kill our fathers, smell our poop, and then analyze it? Only Boyd knew better. He saw how confession diminished people. Sometimes, he felt the impulse to comfort them, but what could he say? You were right to humiliate yourself for the promise of a Jet Ski or an all-expenses-paid trip to some shithole Caribbean island? The world is a better place now that we know you’ve worn your wife’s panty hose under your jeans?
Worst of all was the way that fame gave total strangers the license to accost him in public. Dr. Davis, can I talk to you for a minute? My husband is having an affair. My son is smoking pot. My daughter is a slut. I hate my job. I hate my life. He shrank in their presence, appalled by the hot breath of their needs. Sometimes he pondered quitting, especially in the spring, when the Princeton alumni magazine arrived full of news about his former classmates. So-and-so is now lead counsel for the FCC. So-and-so has joined the board of the Council on Foreign Relations. So-and-so is now head of trading for global fixed income at Morgan Stanley. So-and-so is on the short list for doing something normal to make his mark on the world. But now that he lived in a big house with a pool, a nanny to help with the kid, a twenty-foot Etchells he took out on weekends, he knew he couldn’t go back to his old life. So when Aaron Kramer called and asked him to see Harry Harlow for a consultation, what was he going to say?
“God, Aaron, I don’t know. I mean, I haven’t seen any patients in a while.”
“Has the field changed in the last three years?”
“Well, no, but Harry Harlow is a colleague. I think it would be pretty questionable for me to treat him. I mean, in terms of confidentiality.”
“All I am saying is, see him a few times. Let’s see how it goes.”
“I don’t even have an official office anymore.”
“What about your study?”
“It’s going to be awkward, but if it’s important to you…”
“It is important to me.”
Two days later, Harry found himself in front of Boyd’s house fifteen minutes earlier than scheduled. “Is it a problem?” he asked. “I didn’t know how long it would take to get here.”
“No, no.” Boyd moved his body in front of the open laptop in the kitchen. He didn’t want Harry to see he’d been playing an online game of Scrabble.
Harry looked around the room. The house was humming with the electricity of machines washing things but no visible humans. Boyd had told his wife earlier in the day that she needed to be out when Harry arrived. “No problem,” she answered. “I need to pick some things up at the mall.” He started to open his mouth to complain. Her constant shopping was beginning to look like a classic case of compulsive behavior, but this time he let it go. He needed the house empty.
Harry looked around the room, the stainless-steel appliances, the honed granite countertops, the fruit bowl on the center island piled high with bananas. “Is this where you see people?” he asked.
“No, no. This way,” Boyd ushered him into the study.
“You don’t want me to lie on that, do you?” Harry pointed to a leather chaise.
Boyd did not. He always gave patients a choice but felt awkward when they opted to lie instead of sit. As he told the ones who chose a chair, Freud instituted the couch only because he himself did not like being looked at. When Harry chose the leather club chair, Boyd was relieved. In his limited experience, the couch gave people the license to ramble even more than usual.
“So,” Harry said, “how does it work?”
“How does what work?”
“You know, the whole therapy thing.”
“How would you like it to work?”
Harry smirked and shifted his weight as if he had sat on something sharp. “I would like you to tell Aaron I’m ready to work.”
Boyd was surprised Harry thought he had that much power. The realization made him sit up a little straighter. His problem, as he was well aware, was that he suffered from a persistent case of deep, unshakable skepticism regarding the way he made a living. Every time a patient walked through his door, Boyd had needed to wrestle with his suspicion that the whole field of psychotherapy was a massive load of shit. Why had nobody ever been able to quantify the beneficial effects of talk therapy? All those PET scans and MRIs that were supposed to justify the field had ended up showing a big fat zero. And why were there so many different, contradictory approaches—Jungian, cognitive, Gestalt, Reichian, Rolfian, Sullivanian, rational, behavioral, blah, blah, blah. Any crackpot with a ficus tree and a knockoff van der Rohe Naugahyde chair could hang a shingle as a therapist. And if shrinks were so damn good at unraveling the twisted knot of the human condition, why were they such messes themselves? Most of the very men who purported to be experts at understanding the human psyche were themselves deeply dysfunctional narcissists. Assholes, in a word. Boyd squashed these thoughts as quickly as he could. He knew they would get him nowhere fast in the here-and-now of his life.
“Why do you think Aaron thinks you aren’t ready for work?” Boyd asked.
“I have no idea.”
“Do you want to go back to work?”
Harry shrugged. “Do you?”
Boyd didn’t answer. Aaron had already warned him that Harry didn’t know that the show was planning to resume taping next week with a handful of substitute hosts—an African American comic who said “nigger” so many times the show was unusable, a retired football player famous for a paternity suit, a fat lesbian comic, and an aging movie star who had run unsuccessfully for the Senate a year earlier.
“I can’t sit here and say, ‘I love my job,’ but”—Harry shrugged—“it’s what I do.”
Boyd knew he was supposed to hold back, to let the patient suggest corridors of conversation, but he didn’t have the patience for that. “What about the accident?” he prodded.
“What about it?” Harry asked, crossing his arms over his chest. Even he could hear the defensive tone creeping into his voice.
“How do you feel about it?”
“I feel great,” Harry answered angrily. “How do you think I feel? Some asshole decides to kill himself and his girlfriend by throwing himself against my car at sixty miles an hour. How am I supposed to feel? But it wasn’t my fault. Why does nobody seem to believe that?”
“Who doesn’t believe you?” Boyd asked.
“I mean, I’d have to be a monster to feel nothing. I think about it all the time. I wanted to visit the girl or send flowers or something, but my wife was, like, ‘Don’t do that, you’ll be admitting guilt. They could sue us.’ I called the hospital to get information, but they won’t say anything unless you’re family.” Harry sighed loudly and rubbed his forehead as if to erase the contents. “What I want to know is ‘why?’ Did he do it on purpose? Or did he lose control? And of all the idiots on the road at that moment, why did he have to choose my car? Was it me? Did I swerve into him? Maybe I did something without even realizing it. But every one said he swerved into me. So I don’t know. I don’t think I’ll ever know. I mean, how could I know?”
“Have you discussed this with anyone else?”
“Like who?”
“Your wife. A friend. A brother or sister.”
“I’m an only child. My mother died a few years ago. I never knew my father.” After Harry got famous, a man who claimed to be his father once tried to contact him through Aaron’s office. He still had the man’s name and address in Memphis, Tennessee, but he had never responded, and the man had never tried to contact him again.
“It’s a lot to carry around—guilt, uncertainty.” This was a trick he had picked up from Dr. Eisenmann—name the emotion and exp
ress sympathy.
“But that’s just the point,” Harry said. “I do feel guilty, but I don’t think I should. It wasn’t my fault.”
Boyd tried to smile in an understanding way. “You have guilt for feeling guilt. Meta-guilt.”
“I guess,” Harry shrugged. “I didn’t go to college.”
Boyd cringed. Harry was reminding him of how he appeared to the rest of the world. Preppy, smarty-pants, perpetually boyish. “Unfortunately, we don’t always get to choose what we feel. Our work here is to understand how those feelings…” Boyd paused. What? Destroy our livers? Shred our insides? Make us fuck every thing up? “…impact our lives.” He decided to stay with platitudes. Much safer. Especially in the beginning.
“Our work here?” Harry repeated. He had hoped one visit would be it, and now the guy was talking as if this was going to be a regular thing.
Out of the corner of his eye, Boyd was annoyed to see his wife’s minivan pull into the driveway. She was at least half an hour early. He leaned forward in his seat and cleared his throat to signal that the meeting was over. “Maybe in our next session”—Boyd moved closer to the edge of his seat—“we could explore your relationship with your wife? Why it is you don’t feel supported.”
The door to his study flew open. “Daadddeee!” A girl in pigtails flung herself onto her father’s legs.
“Not now, pumpkin, Daddy’s working.”
The girl turned and glared at Harry. “That’s not work,” she said.
Boyd tried to laugh. “From the mouths of babes. Same time next week?”
Harry hesitated. It hadn’t been quite as bad as he had thought it would be. He did feel a kind of lightness around his shoulders, the way he once imagined he’d feel after acupuncture but never really did.