I waited for the agonizing seconds of silence, of digestion. But Erica responded quickly.
“I’m not clueless,” she said. She reached over and grabbed my hands. I found tears flooding my face.
“Please don’t make this easy for me.”
“I left you, Will, in that way . . . there’s something else I have to tell you. This won’t be easy.”
“Josh,” I said automatically.
“This morning,” Erica replied. “He went peacefully. Sondra called me.”
Before guilt, before pathos, I calculated. My first failure. Of course, a terrible sense of loss and pain set in, but in those microseconds before conditioned emotions were activated, in that sliver of time pushing apart stimuli and reaction, I calculated. Not bad. Three out of four.
I then collapsed on the bench, immobilized. I had failed Josh through hubris and broken faith with Erica through weakness.
I glanced at Erica and saw that she was controlling her shock at my betrayal.
“Just leave me,” I said.
“No one is leaving anyone,” she responded. Then, she turned to me wearily but fearfully. “Right?”
“I won’t leave you, but I’m weak. You have to be the strong one.”
She laughed while tears traced down her face. “Maybe,” she said faintly, “just maybe forces higher than we can understand are at play.”
“Don’t do this,” I said. “You have no business forgiving me.” I pulled my hands away from her. “Walk away now. I don’t have a strong history of improving myself.”
It occurred to me that a philanderer could do no worse than to marry an energy healer, for any act of disloyalty would be viewed not as the act of a miserable bastard but as the result of energetic forces that he was powerless to resist.
“Will you . . . be with her again?” she asked. I turned to Erica.
“No,” I whispered. “Never.”
I longed for a hysterical rebuke, a righteous lecture—anything but her brittle smile, suffused with trauma.
37
The Point of Return
In the weeks following Erica’s return to New York, our lives attained a dull, comforting normalcy. This was the new normal, however, with Erica slowly rebuilding her practice and me continuing my erratic schedule of seeing new clients. We resumed our physicality, and while we were tender and fulfilled, the experience was no longer thrilling. Previously, sex had become the interlude to a thousand questions and the respite to troubling doubts, a welcome interruption to the onslaught of alternative thinking that I resisted.
But now, I had migrated to Erica’s world, and our presence on the same plane reduced tension. “We’re good,” I kept telling myself, and there was truth to this. Our company together was soothing, meaningful, substantive.
But I felt a train wreck of anger, self-doubt, and sadness approaching, and I wanted to talk to someone. The irony did not escape me. Here I was, peddling alternative modes of healing under the radar, arriving at the conclusion that I needed the benefit of conversation therapy.
I had decided to reduce my workload, in part because Erica needed the use of her office but also because I was losing some of the breathless enthusiasm tinged with uncertainty that made my practice questionable and exciting. The exception was Jessica. I looked forward to our meetings. Jessica prattled on during these sessions, mixing platitudes and insights in a way that kept me off balance. She never wanted the “meditative moments,” the collective silences that constituted the staple of my sessions with other clients. She just wanted to talk. And from time to time, she would interrupt her monologue with surprising questions that whistled past most of my defenses, leaving me to parry her interrogations with clumsy responses. She would push forward with a fair degree of skill, and then, just when the futility of my reluctance became obvious, she would retreat back to her monologue, uninterested in capturing the truth she had so deftly approached.
Looking back, though, if I were to graph the content of our sessions, I would notice a trend toward the intensifying of the probe. The monologues became just a little shorter, and the interrogations just a tad more sustained. During our session in October, she halted her monologue in midstream. “I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up,” she said, and then, she stopped talking.
This was new. Jessica had never hit a brick wall before. Every despairing thought had simply branched out to its subcategories, and I had become conditioned to think that the greater the despair, the longer the session. But now, without prologue, she paused.
“I don’t want you to take this the wrong way,” she said, “because you have helped me enormously. I would have gone through with my original plans much earlier had I not met you. But I don’t see the point anymore.”
“That is way too mysterious,” I said.
“Is it really? I wanted to end it all, and the fact is, I still do.”
I walked over to the couch and sat down next to her. Jessica began to breathe irregularly, and I stared straight ahead.
“Well, you can’t do that,” I said.
“Why not? Why is there such a stigma attached to the act? Have you ever noticed how programmed, how uniform, our responses are? What a shame. So much to live for. If only they had received help. Where were the parents? The friends? How could all of the warning signs have been missed?”
“Maybe none of this is the result of programming but the result of our shared humanity.”
“Well, I have a different take. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes, it makes sense and is the right thing to do. Aren’t we varied enough as a species, that with some unfortunate people shoved into this world with bad chemistry, the right choice, the humane choice, is just to end it quickly? No more pain. No more feelings of entrapment and hopelessness. Just the release, the freedom.”
“That’s bullshit. Complete and total bullshit with just enough pseudointellectualism to make it sound inviting.”
“No, it’s not bullshit. It’s so true,” she said.
“You’re torturing yourself for no valid reason.” What nonsense I was peddling as I sought to soothe Jessica. As I scrambled for conventional responses, my mind raced to contemplate a perverse math: Josh, dead. Erica, betrayed. And now Jessica, suicide victim? That would bring the score to 3–3. Three lives improved, three lives damaged. Conclusion—everything happening around me was the result of random forces beyond my control and disconnected to my involvement. Or maybe I possessed bifurcated powers, dark and beneficent, discharged in erratic patterns, deployed regardless of my intentions. Those near me were either blessed or at risk.
I looked at Jessica. “There’s another reason you can’t . . . do this thing,” I said. “And that’s because I can’t have your blood on my hands.” I stood up and walked over to the window looking out onto the street. “I already have too much as it is.”
Jessica’s head snapped up. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“There’s no way you can make a comment like that and leave it hanging,” she said.
I continued to stand, facing outward, facing away from Jessica. “I don’t know if I’ve really helped anyone, but I do know there are those I haven’t helped.”
“Who have you not helped?”
“I didn’t help Josh.”
“Who’s Josh?”
“A boy. A child. And I didn’t help him.” I sat down on the floor and kept my back to Jessica.
“He’s dead now. And I didn’t help him. And it’s not just the failure, although that’s bad enough. There was a breach of trust involved. He looked up to me.”
I turned around and faced Jessica, who stared back at me with sympathy and shock. I needed to talk. Who else could I speak to? Not my parents. They were surprisingly, even astonishingly open to the changes in my life, but they were unfailingly supportive, and I needed something other than support. Not Erica. She would understand the events, but she wouldn’t understand me, not in this instance, not what I was gr
appling with. Certainly not Sondra. She wouldn’t blame me, but she did not offer the freedom of discourse that I so desperately needed.
There was no one, except this peculiar, smart woman. And as we continued to measure each other, I realized that nothing I had ever said in her presence escaped her understanding or intuition. My father’s 80/20 theorem would have been challenged. She had an exponential ability to talk and listen at amplified levels. And I needed to talk.
“Here’s what I know,” she said, “even without knowing anything at all. And it is this. You did not cause the death of this child, Josh.”
“You’d get an argument from his father on that one,” I said.
“You need to take me through this,” she said. “It might even help me. It would certainly help you. And I owe you beyond anything I can pay you.”
“How does that work?” I said. “You’re about to off yourself, and you’re assuring me that I’ve helped you?”
“I say a lot of stupid things in the moment. The truth though is I’m not likely to do anything of the sort, and if that’s true, then it’s because of you, which is saying a lot. So tell me about Josh.”
I did, slowly at first, and of course, talking about Josh required background. None of the isolated background made any sense without all of the background, and I provided it all, in fits and starts, with a complete lack of organization. But I could see that Jessica was skilled, like someone who could find unnumbered, scattered sheets of a treatise on the floor and assemble them in order with no assistance, no background knowledge. The pages needed to be there but nothing else.
She was terrific. Her questions were gentle prods, not an exhaustive declaration about how to arrive at a distant location but simple suggestions along the way. Make a left here, make the third right there, and I didn’t have to know where I’d end up to appreciate the accuracy and logic of her prompts.
And everything came out, whether excavated or offered at this point I can’t say. But I can say that everything came out. Every detail. Soon, Jessica pressed only for facts and figures, knowing that once I was successfully directed, I would supply all of the nuance.
And I did.
38
Crossed
For years, Shlomi had cut my hair. I think an ex-girlfriend recommended him to me shortly after I graduated from Hamilton, but I can’t be sure. Shlomi was skillful and a welcome relief to the local cuts I had received for years from my local barber in Garrison. But over time, Shlomi and his salon on the Upper West Side began to annoy me. Maybe I found the results just a shade too stylish. And I disliked having my hair washed and conditioned every time I went there, especially the disorienting feeling when my chair was jerked backward and my head was stuffed into a sink, the blood rushing to my head, the hot water flowing over my skull, Shlomi massaging my hair too slowly for comfort. Ultimately, though, I accepted the protocol. Without the procedures, Shlomi couldn’t do his job.
But one day, I found myself on the East Side on Eighty-Seventh Street near First Avenue and saw three corporate types with great haircuts emerge from a ramshackle hole-in-the-wall. There was a rugged, almost casual look to them, their hair styled and neat but with a touch of defiance. I walked in and found Yosef, the proprietor, seated on a bench, reading the New York Post with his feet propped up on an empty crate. I looked around. The floors were a clean, cracked linoleum. The walls were bare except for a few photographs of what I assumed were Yosef ’s hometown in Russia or Greece or wherever he was from. On the back wall was a poster of Humphrey Bogart, unframed and affixed to the wall with thumbtacks. I looked back at Yosef, who acknowledged my presence with a sturdy nod.
“Do I need an appointment?” I asked.
“No appointment. We go now,” he said.
I was about to ask the price, but then I saw a placard next to the Bogart poster that stated, “Haircuts: $15.00.” At first, I thought this was a quaint historical oddity, harking back to some dusty, small town in the distant past where good people labored honorably and charged a fair fee for their services. Then, Yosef asked, “Fifteen dollars, okay, right?”
I sat down and expected the chair to recline but found instead that the seat was constructed of uncomfortable wood, with four ungainly legs stubbornly extended onto the hard floors. There was no sink nearby, no array of conditioners and coloring agents and shampoos. Instead, I saw a spray bottle with its original label scraped off. Yosef picked up the bottle and began spraying my hair. I flinched.
“Water,” Yosef said. “Just water.”
“What was in the bottle originally?” I asked.
“Water,” Yosef said. “Just water.”
I’m no expert on the styling of men’s hair, but even my untrained eye could see that Yosef was masterful, his scissors flying around the perimeter of my scalp as he cradled his cell phone against his neck and rattled through a heated conversation in a foreign tongue. Who was he talking to? Was he paying attention to me and to the task at hand? The questions were irrelevant. His hands knew what to do.
I loved the haircut, and I’ve never been to anyone else ever since. I noticed a subtle, crisscross pattern, especially on the sides, which struck a balance between the corporate necessity of neatness and the individuality conferred by a measured carelessness. I asked Yosef about this once, and he smiled. “Is my recipe,” he said. “No one else can do this.”
I think he was right. I looked for this pattern and never found it on anyone other than the clientele walking out of Yosef ’s shop. I lost no small degree of faith in the logic of the marketplace. Why wasn’t Yosef charging one hundred dollars per cut? His clients could easily afford a substantial price hike. Was there a loose, unspoken conspiracy of silence among us, his clients? At the end of my first haircut, I gave Yosef a twenty-dollar bill and told him to keep the change. He was appreciative but confused, maybe even just a little irritated. It’s money, his body language told me, so I’ll take it. But this is . . . unnecessary.
I gave up on discerning the logic of it all. This was New York, a city teeming with contradictions. Somewhere on the Lower East Side, there was a jewelry designer in a tiny decrepit shop as accomplished as anyone working at Tiffany’s or Bulgari. I’d been to Chinese restaurants in Astoria and Jackson Heights that flew under the radar, unbeknownst to Zagat or TripAdvisor, offering extraordinary cuisine. And a number of my ex-girlfriends had dragged me to lower Broadway or Ludlow Street, where dirt-cheap but stylish clothes were sold, some of them hawked on the sidewalks.
Still, I kept a lookout. I never found that telltale crisscross pattern in the streets and parks of the city, but I found myself intrigued by men’s hairstyling. If I was walking down a crowded Midtown avenue or strolling through Central Park, I found myself making numerous mental notes about the patterns of men’s hair.
So I was particularly intrigued on a chilly January afternoon, walking through Madison Square Park, when I became seized with the certainty that I had just come across, or was in the vicinity of, the crisscross pattern. I stopped close to the Broadway boundary of the park and looked quickly around, finding nothing. I continued to walk and saw it again, before a swarm of bicyclists obstructed my view. I wasn’t sure, but I believed that the individual with the pattern was across the street, in front of the Toy Building on Fifth Avenue.
I rushed across the street, cursing a tour bus that crashed through the intersection of Broadway and Twenty-Third without regard for my safety, or anyone else’s for that matter. I found myself on Fifth Avenue and whirled around, closely inspecting every well-dressed male. This was, of course, a futile quest. I wasn’t even certain that I had actually seen anyone with the crisscross pattern, and if I had, that person, at that intersection, had no fewer than twenty paths leading away from where I stood. And what would I have done if I caught up to the individual? I smiled at my silliness and waited for the walk sign to allow my return to the park.
As I waited, the loud headlines of the tabloids at the corner news kiosk caught my attention.
And something else did too. The crisscross pattern. There it was, not on a pedestrian but on the cover of New York magazine. This is what must have caught my attention from a distance. I congratulated myself on my powers of observation.
The cover photograph was a profile of a well-groomed white male in his midthirties, with the crisscross pattern slightly edged over his left ear. There are no coincidences, Erica was fond of telling me. I believed her in that moment. This individual was a customer of Yosef ’s. I just knew it. I walked up to the kiosk and picked up the magazine, anxious to learn the identity of the famous person with whom I shared a hairstylist.
I wish we could divide brief moments into smaller time segments and then scrutinize them, the way viewers watch a slow-motion replay of an out-of-bounds call in an NFL game. Such an ability might improve our understanding of the neurology and biophysics of the human species. Take me, for example. If scientists could have peered into my psyche and commented at length on each developing stage of my reaction rather than make dull observations on the ensuing twenty seconds after I picked up the magazine, they might have noted the following: They would have observed the obvious—namely, that my legs gave out from under me, but that during those microseconds of imbalance, I had found my footing again. I did not fall to the ground.
And if the permutations of my mental state could have been tracked nanosecond by nanosecond, I wonder how the arc of my emerging awareness would have been described. Puzzlement, then confusion, then humor. For surely anyone could have recognized that, buried within the spectacle of my photograph, prominently displayed on the cover of a widely read magazine, were elements of absurdist humor and paranoia. Frank Zappa meets Franz Kafka.
After humor, resistance, then denial, and I will defend the proposition that resistance and denial are two very different states. Resistance gently pushes back on the onrush of facts and evidence, not exerting itself, because there is a certain comfort in the belief that it is not necessary to do so. Denial, by contrast, is overwhelmed by facts and is accompanied by an absence of comfort. But make no mistake. Denial is not the mere flip side of acceptance. It is a separate state, anchored in certainty even as the reasons for that certainty are eliminated.
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