by Phoebe Fox
Her toffee-colored eyes welled up again. “That she knew who I was. That I was a home wrecker. That she was back to reconcile with Cooper.”
“I’m so sorry. That must have been awful to hear. Was it true?”
“Well, I asked him about it the next day—right after I talked to you, actually. He said they just had to work out the details of the divorce. We had a date Friday night, and I thought things were okay, but then Saturday he said he was busy, and I heard... Shit.” She wiped at her cheeks and stood up abruptly. “Would you like something to drink? I need one.”
I always advised against people using alcohol to cope with relationship troubles. It could so easily lead to the worst breakup behaviors—drunk dialing, rebound hookups—and it only helped make a depressed person feel more depressed. But I didn’t know Tabitha well enough yet to comment. Instead I simply asked for a glass of water, and was relieved when she came back with the same for herself.
She sat back down and took a deep, shaky breath. “Okay. I’ve got a friend who’s a waitress at the Gulf Grill down at the beach, and she said Saturday night Cooper and his ex had a really cozy candlelit dinner there. That’s an awfully romantic setting to work out a divorce,” she said bitterly, taking a big gulp of her ice water.
There are no secrets in small towns—everyone knows everyone, or knows someone who does, and Cooper had to realize that something like that would travel right back to Tabitha’s ears. This was not looking good.
“What happened next?” I asked neutrally.
“Nothing!” she wailed. “That’s the last I talked to him. I haven’t heard from him since. I texted him when I went to bed last night—just a casual, ‘Hey, just wanted to say good night.’ Then I called again this morning. He didn’t answer.”
Tabitha looked miserably unhappy, and was staring at me as if I were the oracle at Delphi, waiting for me to dispense a magical solution for her. I leaned back on her sofa and thought.
When I was younger I used to love making drawings with colored pencil or Magic Marker, then covering the whole thing in a thick, waxy coating of black crayon. I always put the black pages aside in stacks, and later I’d pick one out at random and scrape away the crayon in various patterns, never knowing which bright-colored drawing I’d reveal underneath.
Helping someone dig down to the truth is like that. You can’t see what’s really there until you start scraping away slowly, carefully, so you make sure to remove all the waxy black overcoating, not just smear it around the page on top of what’s underneath.
The situation Tabitha found herself in was rife with impending disaster—the affair and breakup had happened too recently and too suddenly, and Tabitha had fallen for Cooper too fast. He wasn’t just on the rebound; he was freshly on the rebound. His wife’s tire marks had barely faded from the driveway. Even if he had worked out all his feelings about her betrayal (which I strongly doubted), he probably wouldn’t be in any hurry to jump back into another relationship.
But the sex between them was phenomenal, Tabby repeated when I carefully voiced the thought, and I began to suspect she was blinded by it. Too often I’d seen women take great sex as an indicator of great love, and read a lot more into a relationship than was actually there. As Sasha liked to say, the heart muscle is directly connected to the vagina muscle.
Still, they’d been dating five months. After five months, I felt she was entitled to at the very least a phone call. The fact that Cooper hadn’t bothered spoke volumes about his feelings. I would bet he wasn’t remotely ready for the kind of relationship Tabby was looking for. Even though he might like her and enjoy her company, he obviously had a lot of baggage he hadn’t even begun to unpack when they started dating. Now that his wife was back, they were clearly addressing their unfinished business. And Tabitha wasn’t a character in that play.
But I couldn’t come right out and say all of that to her. She’d have to see the truth for herself, so little by little we scratched away what was covering up the real picture of their relationship together.
“So how often did you and Cooper see each other before this?” I asked her.
“Well, he usually makes a date with me one night a weekend. And then we hook up sometimes for happy hour, or a quick dinner during the week.”
I nodded. “Okay. If you guys run into people he knows, how does he introduce you?”
She thought for a second. “‘This is my good friend Tabby.’”
Even now, five months in. I tried not to wince.
“Any birthdays in these five months? Holidays? How did you guys celebrate; were there gifts or a card?”
Her expression clouded over. “We spent Christmas and New Year’s apart, because Cooper said he needed to see his parents and sister in Michigan. I got him a set of Le Creuset cookware; he gave me a sweater.” Tears formed in her eyes again, and this time spilled over. “On Valentine’s Day he took me to brunch and gave me a single white rose and a card that said, ‘Thanks for all your kindness, caring, and compassion.’ And afterward he dropped me off at home—I spent that evening watching Love, Actually alone with a box of Norman Love chocolates I bought myself and a bottle of red wine.”
She slumped back against the sofa cushions, her head tipped down, occasional sniffles piercing the silence I let fall. She was almost there, and needed to figure this out for herself. Finally she looked up and met my gaze. “He’s going to get back together with Maria, isn’t he?” she asked dully.
I raised my hands and shoulders in a “who can say” gesture.
“But he’s not ready for someone new.”
I didn’t answer. It wasn’t a question.
Tabitha made a noise between a groan and a scream and flopped back in the chair. “God, I’m such an idiot! How did I not see this?”
She drew her knees to her chest to form a tight ball with her body and buried her face in her hands—not crying, but obviously losing herself in self-recriminations. That was counterproductive—berating herself was only going to keep her mired in misery, and it wasn’t going to help her see her relationship more clearly and figure out what to do next, how to honor her own needs. I made a few attempts to draw her out and get her talking again, but Tabitha was too far down the road of self-reproach to respond.
I stood, took her glass, and carried it to the kitchen in one flow of movement. “Come on,” I instructed. Right now Tabitha desperately needed to feel better about herself.
So I took her shopping.
Sometimes it’s the most basic solutions that are the most effective. And it’s called “shop therapy” for a reason.
While Tabitha tried on designer outfits at Nordstrom and slipped on shoe after gorgeous impractical shoe, I kept her talking. Not about Cooper this time. We talked about her work—the time she’d gotten to interview Meryl Streep when she’d come to town for a benefit at the Harborside Convention Center. The articles she’d written about illegal immigrants in Laredo, Texas, for a series in her old paper in San Antonio—stories that had won her a Texas Press award. We talked about her family—her mom, struggling to get by with full-time care of Tabitha’s autistic brother, whom Tabitha sent money back to help support. The advocating she and her mother and other two brothers had done for autism awareness and research. The feeling she got the few occasions her brother looked directly into her eyes.
I hoped she sounded as accomplished, capable, and kind to herself as she did to me.
She wore one of her new outfits home—a silvery gray pencil skirt with a ruffled teal sleeveless top that made her eyes glow like embers. The pretty, polished woman in front of me was a far cry from the bedraggled, beaten one who’d opened her front door a few hours earlier.
“You look amazing,” I told her honestly.
Tabitha stopped and checked herself out in a mirrored column. “I do, don’t I?” She straightened to stand taller, and made a quart
er turn to check out her rear view. “I wish Coop—” She cut herself off. “I’m going to call him when I get home. I think it might be best if we spent a little time apart. For now, anyway.”
I nodded and suppressed a smile. This was where I’d wanted Tabitha to get to, but if she was going to stick by it, the resolution had to come from her, not me. “That’s a smart idea. Are you okay?”
She shrugged. “Not yet, but maybe in a while. He’s got to figure out things with his wife”—she grimaced at the word—“before he starts something new with me. Or...whoever.”
“Call me later?”
“If I need to. Thanks a lot. For everything.”
“Good luck.”
I watched her walk away toward her car, a little sashay in her hips. I wished it were always so easy to help someone figure out how to do what was best for themselves—most of us fight harder against seeing the things we don’t want to see.
nine
Lisa Albrecht paid me an actual compliment on my first Breakup Doctor article.
“It didn’t suck. Let’s see where it goes.”
She bumped up my inches to twenty-five (nine hundred to one thousand words, using newspaper math) and gave me the go-ahead to make it a weekly feature. I started working on my second column, combining reader questions with my own thoughts from the two clients I’d met with that day. The Breakup Doctor was like another persona, all-knowing and wise, compassionate, straightforward, and no-nonsense. Sliding into her skin was freeing. Exhilarating. All the tough-love advice I’d ever wanted to shout at my more self-destructive patients, and couldn’t, flew unchecked from my mind through my fingers onto the page.
The number one rule of breakups is that you can always see them coming—if you look. It’s easy to cling to the happiness you felt early in, to be willfully blind to the signs that things aren’t as rosy as they used to be, and that trouble is looming on the horizon.
But the signs are always there.
Maybe his voice completely changes tone when he talks to other people, flatlining into disinterest as soon as he’s talking to you. Maybe she stops telling you things about her day, her life, how she’s feeling, when she used to be a Chatty Cathy. Maybe he comes home later and later every night, swearing nothing is wrong, but the unsettled feeling in your belly makes you wonder.
Trust that feeling. Trust the little voice in your head—the one that is always there, the little lizard brain that picks up on all the subtextual meanings that your crazy-in-love brain is impervious to—that says something is wrong.
The best way to handle being dumped is to prevent it. That might mean fixing the problems before they become relationship breakers. Or it might mean jumping off a sinking ship yourself, before you’re pushed off the plank. Either way, awareness is the first step.
If you can’t shake that uneasy sensation in your gut lately, open your eyes and take a good, long look at your relationship, and see if your instincts are trying to tell you something.
Then check in with the Breakup Doctor to learn what to do next.
When the column ran on Friday, I had a fresh deluge of emails. My new client roster steadily expanded, and suddenly I was scrambling to keep up.
Izzy Truman had called things off with her boyfriend of two years when she realized the relationship wasn’t going anywhere. Even though it had been eight months since she ended it, she was still in love with him, and having a hard time letting go. Rachel Moretti caught her boyfriend in flagrante with his ex—she’d dumped him on the spot, but now she wanted to know if she should try giving it another chance. I suspected my verdict would remain my knee-jerk “hell, no,” but I tried to keep an open mind till I heard the full story. Timothy McGarrett walked out on his girlfriend when she started pushing for a ring—now three months had gone by, he was miserable, and she wouldn’t take his calls.
Paul Simon seriously underestimated: There are so many more than fifty ways to leave your lover.
Since I had no office, I arranged to meet my new clients at restaurants, at coffee shops, in hotel lobby bars, and sidewalk cafés. With what I charged my clients, picking up the tab at the places I arranged to meet them wasn’t a hardship, and it was far cheaper than renting office space. It wasn’t ideal, but at least the public places kept most people from careening over the edge as they told me about their breakups—and often it was the only reason I found time to eat. I tried to keep my orders outside of regular meals down to a cup of black coffee or bottled water—otherwise my waistline would expand as fast as my bank account was.
As my inbox filled up day by day with readers writing in, it seemed logical to create some sort of materials I could easily send out to people inquiring about hiring the Breakup Doctor—starting with what I did, and my rates. I racked my brain for specific descriptions of the services I felt qualified to offer: relationship counseling, grief therapy, life coaching. Thinking of Tabitha Washington, I added image consultation, figuring that if a makeover project were too daunting for me to handle alone, I could always pull in Sasha.
I also thought it was a good idea to specify what I didn’t do. Among the list I proscribed any interaction on my part with a client’s ex; investigative services; and posing as a new girlfriend. I stipulated a set of parameters as I thought them up, like “initial consultations by appointment only” and “payment payable at the end of each session.”
At the rates I was charging, eight consultations a month would pay my mortgage. Two more would take care of most of the utility bills. If I could add another handful of clients to my roster each week, then within six months or so I could pay back what I still owed to my parents, catch up on my student loan payments, and set aside enough to convert half of my house into an office for my own practice.
I felt a happy little glow at the thought.
As I was putting the final touches on my third column the following Monday, I got a call from a local radio station. Would I be interested in doing an on-air interview as the Breakup Doctor a week from tomorrow?
My heart jumped as I thought of the possibilities—the number of people I might reach on the air...the new clients it might bring me. Yes, of course I would, I told the pubescent-sounding girl on the other end of the line.
“We’ll do it live,” she told me, her words firing out at me like machine gun bullets. “You’ll be on the Kelly Garrett Morning Drive Time show, and then we might take some callers on the air; that okay with you?”
“Kelly Garrett? Like the Charlie’s Angel?”
“What?”
“Never mind. Are there a list of questions I should be looking over ahead of time?”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s all casual—Kelly will ask about what you do, the new column, that kind of thing—just bring your best advice, and get there a little early so we can take you back into the studio, okay?”
Naturally I called Sasha instantly once I hung up the phone, and Friday after work we met at her apartment so she could prep me for the interview—and help calm my nerves.
“Take deep breaths before you go on-air, but not too deep—you don’t want to hyperventilate,” she told me as we sat in her living room with glasses of wine and a plate of fruit—Sasha’s idea of hors d’oeuvres. “Make sure you’re speaking from your diaphragm.”
“What does that even mean?”
There followed a ten-minute demonstration of diaphragmatic breathing, with me lying on Sasha’s floor making humming sounds while she rested a hand over my abdomen.
“When you get in front of the mike, pretend you’re talking to one person—someone close to you, like me,” Sasha instructed. “And remember, even though they can’t see you, if you’re smiling, you sound more confident and approachable.”
“How do you know all this stuff?”
She shot me a disbelieving look. “How do you not?”
Someti
mes I think Sasha is one superpower away from taking over the world.
“What do you want to do tonight?” I pushed myself just far enough off the floor to flop over onto the sofa, idly brushing carpet lint off my jeans.
“Where’s the master of the universe?”
“Ha, ha. You’ve been talking to Stu. He’s working late. So, what? Movie? Go see a band? Hang out here and make fun of reality TV?”
Sasha’s silky blond hair curtained her face as she brushed away my imaginary body indent on the carpet. “Can’t tonight. I have plans.”
“A date?”
She nodded. “Someone special, actually.”
It was all I could do to hold back a sigh. Weren’t they all?
“Okay.” I leaned up and pushed off of the sofa. “Have fun. Careful fun.”
“Why is Kendall working so late? On a weekend?” Sasha looked disapproving.
“’Tis the season,” I said lightly, poking my feet back into the shoes I’d kicked off. “It’s not forever. And I asked him to set aside the whole day for us tomorrow. Even God rested.” This week I’d made sure to ask him in advance. I picked up my purse. “Hey, you have to promise you’ll be listening on Tuesday.”
“I promise. I’ve got an interview in Naples first thing that morning, and I’ll have you on in the car as I drive down there.”
“That’s an early interview.”
Sasha cleared her throat and avoided my eyes. “Actually, I sort of wanted to talk to you about this story I’m working on.”
“Talk to me? Why?”
“Well...It kind of has to do with you, actually.”
I grinned. “Me? You want to do a story on me? What do you mean, as the Breakup Doctor?”
“Not exactly.” She blew out a big breath, her cheeks bubbling out. And even so, she managed to look pretty. “I’m doing a profile—a big feature, actually. Interviews with a number of people...background, that kind of thing. With a tie-in to the theater. And I was hoping you’d let me use you as one of the interviews.”