Group

by Christie Tate

  Two hours later, I handed Dr. Rosen a hard copy of the e-mail. “Read it,” I said. “Start with the second paragraph.”

  “ ‘It’s imperative that I marry a Jewish woman.’ ” Dr. Rosen looked up.

  “Why’s he talking marriage? Y’all fucked, what, six times?” Nan said.

  “Five.”

  “He’s just scared,” Marnie said. Emily and Regina agreed.

  “White people are so weird.” Nan laughed to herself, her golden hoop earrings catching the sunlight.

  Panic coursed through me, making it hard to sit in my chair and hear what everyone was saying. How could they be so calm? The Intern was going to pack up all the pleasure and freedom and drive it away in his fancy black car.

  “You don’t know that,” Dr. Rosen said.

  “A lot of good dating Jewish men has done me! Thanks a lot, Dr. Rosen.”

  “It has done you a world of good. And you don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

  I knew the next time I walked into this stupid fourteen-by-fourteen room, I’d be sitting in a heap of my own heartache, kicking the tissue box away as tears streamed down my face.

  When the Intern rolled up to my office for the last time a few days later, his smile looked fake and betrayed no hint of his trademark sass. His hug was the swift A-frame embrace you’d give your great-aunt Beatrice. Heat and the promise of sex no longer warmed the air between us.

  He drove us to Sai Café in Lincoln Park, where we ordered separate sashimi rolls. I avoided the shrimp to prove what a good Jewess I could be. I called Rory from the bathroom where water softly trickled through a miniature rock garden. “I can feel a ‘good-bye forever’ coming.” My stomach was at the top of a hill about to plunge into free fall. Rory told me to breathe and stay open to all possibilities. “Maybe he’ll ask you to convert,” she said.

  “It’s not going to work,” he said as he pulled in front of my building at the end of the night.

  I asked why we couldn’t just keep hanging out. He shook his head, insisting it would be wrong to lead me on. I told him I’d consider conversion.

  “You’re Catholic.”

  “I haven’t been to mass in years, and I’d be a wonderful Jew. I hate ham. I’ll send my kids to shul. I’ll blow the shofar.” His lips turned up, but it wasn’t a true smile. It was a pity smirk.

  “I’m serious. I’m not talking about an Internet conversion course. I’ll go to Anshe Emet or KAM Isaiah. I’ll have a mikvah and a bar mitzvah—”

  “Bat.”

  “I’ll keep kosher, bake challah, circumcise—”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I shut my mouth and stared straight ahead at the spot where he first kissed me, where my appetite shriveled, where this thing I called a “love affair” but would later downgrade to a “fling” had started.

  “Can’t you come up for one more night?”

  “Let’s not turn into caricatures of ourselves.”

  From my office the next morning, I begged Dr. Rosen to call me back. I couldn’t wait until the next session. I needed him now. When he called, I cried into the phone, asking him to tell me why. Why didn’t the Intern want to be with me? Why was I on the phone with him crying again? Why did I have to be raised Catholic? Why did my parents have to name me after Christ? I twisted the phone cord around my finger and listened for the hope in Dr. Rosen’s answers. Nothing he said soothed me. He asked me if my life was getting better than it was before I started treatment. Yes, my life was better than it was before—I felt close to him and my group mates. Clare knew about my groups and my recovery. I was learning how to be who I really was in front of other people. But a relationship with a man felt as impossible as ever.

  “I need more help. Something more. There must be something more. Maybe I’ve gone as far as I can with you, Dr. Rosen.” I had no idea what I was asking him for. My thoughts were not coherent—I was babbling into the phone trying to beat back my sadness. My index finger turned white under the black phone cord.

  “I have something in mind. We can talk about it in your groups tomorrow.”

  I took a ragged breath. “What’re you thinking?” My heart lifted at the thought of a shortcut through the heartsickness.

  “We can discuss it tomorrow.” What was he planning? Individual sessions? Match.com for sexually anorexic women?

  “Give me a hint.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  24

  I showed up in the waiting room ten minutes early, my face tight and splotchy from crying. I slumped into a chair across from the particle board bookshelf and closed my eyes. When someone walked through the waiting room door, I opened one eye, expecting to see Carlos or Patrice, but it was a tall man in a gray business suit holding a brown leather briefcase. Total lawyer or finance type. Ten years or so older than me.

  I’d forgotten that Dr. Rosen had announced we were getting a new member.

  “I’m Reed,” he said, sticking out his hand like he was at a cocktail party. I didn’t stand up, but I offered my hand and felt something flicker in the air between us when our palms met. His salt-and-pepper hair was short on the sides and longer on the top, and his shoes were polished to such a high shine that I could see my sad, puffy face in them. Of course, I noted the gold band on his left hand and a dimple on his left cheek when he smiled. Seconds later, Dr. Rosen opened the door, and we filed into the group room. Carlos and Patrice arrived before we sat down.

  “What’s that?” Reed pointed to a purple terry-cloth hand towel in my lap. I’d been carrying it around with me since the Intern dropped me on the curb.

  “This is my mourning rag. I just got dumped.” I grabbed a thread between the fingernails of my index finger and thumb and yanked. I pulled another and then another. Soon individual purple threads crisscrossed my lap. A few drifted to the floor. As I yanked, hot tears rolled down my cheeks. Having something to do with my hands soothed me, and yanking threads out of the cloth helped me parcel out my anger in microdoses. Patrice scooted the box of tissues on the floor over to my chair. I kicked them away. “I don’t do tissues.”

  Patrice ignored my outburst, rubbed my arm, and reminded me that the Intern was not marriage material.

  Carlos took the lead on the interrogation of Reed and elicited the pertinent information: hotshot investment banker, married, twin girls, sober a few years, and then the jackpot:

  “Why are you really here?” Carlos asked.

  Reed’s face reddened, and he looked at Dr. Rosen, who nodded encouragingly, like tell them.

  “Out with it,” Carlos said. When Reed hung his head, Carlos caught my eye and mouthed he’s so hot. I nodded and yanked out another purple thread.

  “I’m struggling in my marriage.” Ah, intimacy issues.

  “Go on.” Carlos raised his eyebrows.

  “Oh, brother.” Patrice sighed. She sensed what was coming—a tale of unfaithfulness, a long-suffering wife, a mistress who made him feel vital. Dr. Rosen’s face wore his widest grin.

  “I was at cocktail party for one of our funds a few weeks ago. There was a woman—” Reed looked around the room, unsure. Could he trust us? “She and I went back to her office, and she gave—”

  “Oh my God, she sucked your cock!” Carlos clapped his hands.

  Patrice asked if he’d told his wife. He hadn’t; he hoped to save his marriage. Patrice and Rory praised Reed for his bravery in telling us.

  I spread my towel out on my lap. I’d plucked a four-inch bald spot in the middle of it. I ran my hand over the sheared fabric. What would it be like to run my hand over Reed’s lapel? His leg? This was the longest I’d gone without thinking about the Intern in a week. I felt something like hope bore its way into my rubble heap of a heart. I wished group was longer than ninety minutes.

  Before group closed, I gathered my purple threads and lobbed a burning question. “Do y’all think I’ll ever have sex again?” Reed’s mouth curled into a half smile.

  “If you want to,
” Dr. Rosen said.

  “I do. Really soon.” My body hurt from missing the Intern and the pleasure he offered.

  “You’re open to suggestions?”

  “I’ll do anything.” Our fidelity-challenged, hot new group member had made me forget that Dr. Rosen was going to suggest something to me. “What’d you have in mind?” I dropped the towel into my lap and opened my palms.

  “I suggest you join the Monday/Thursday group.”

  I sucked in a sharp breath and grabbed the towel with both fists.

  “You cannot be serious. Another group? Twice a week?” Did he know I had a full-time job? Did he know that lawyers have to bill forty hours a week? I shook my head and pursed my lips. I picked up the towel and yanked hard at a thread on the border of the bald spot.

  “This group is different. It’s the same members twice a week, which creates additional intensity. Every member is a long-term patient—”

  “I need to come here four times a week to get into a real relationship? How fucked up am I?”

  “You’re very fucked up.” Dr. Rosen smiled.

  “Nice sales pitch.”

  Dr. Rosen suggested I stay in the Tuesday-morning group, but drop the afternoon one to make room for this Monday/Thursday group. Where was this offer a year ago when I would have rather shaved my head than return to the group where Nan and Marnie almost came to blows? Now I felt a pang of sadness. Those women carried me through my Jeremy days and all through my fling with the Intern. Nan had held me that day I tried to pull my hair out. Zenia had taught me about fan fiction and long-distance lesbian sex. Was I ready to leave them behind?

  “I’ll think about it.”

  When we stood up for the closing, I let my sheared towel and all the plucked threads fall to the floor.

  Here I was again, debating whether to join another Rosen-group. I’d said yes twice and now my life was filled with people who knew me well. Intimately. Rory knew about every drop of food I put into my mouth. Marty offered my nightly affirmations. My groups knew about the dirty dick I’d sucked, my pinworms, my temper tantrums. Wasn’t that what I’d always wanted? People to fully know me and all my stories while also sharing theirs with me. That was definitely part of it and now I wanted more. I wanted a family of my own, one like Marnie’s, Patrice’s, Rory’s, and Nan’s. I was grateful for what I had but new desires bloomed: To have a family of my own with a partner. To become a mother. To settle romantically. To find my power at Skadden. I believed Dr. Rosen could get me there, though it stung that it would take three sessions, as in two hundred seventy minutes, of group each week.

  I’d heard of the Monday/Thursday group. It was the only Rosen-group that met more than once a week. It was known as the “advanced” group. There was some pride at being invited. And there was also suspicion that Dr. Rosen just wanted my money—I was vulnerable and making six figures. He could be offering me a way to get where I wanted to go or using me as a cash cow to finance a sailboat. How could I know which it was?

  And yet, of course I said yes. With three days a week of group, surely I would have everything I wanted in a less than a year.

  Part 3

  25

  The temperature was well below freezing the third Monday in January, but I was too nervous to feel the burn of the wind on my face. When my feet went out from under me, I skidded on the fresh layer of ice blanketing the sidewalk, ass on concrete, two blocks from Dr. Rosen’s office. Was joining this new group a horrible idea? My throbbing hipbone suggested yes.

  “What have you heard about us?” Max asked. He had tousled blond hair and perfect posture, and wore a blue blazer with the gold buttons. Midforties. Very country club. I’d heard of Max. The word on the Rosen-grapevine was that he had come to Dr. Rosen years earlier strung out on drugs and living in his car. I’d heard something about felony charges. But he’d cleaned up and risen through the ranks of a pharmaceutical company. Now he was a hotshot exec, served on the board of his daughters’ fancy private school, and summered in Snowmass. Something in his raised eyebrows and smirk told me he knew I’d heard the rumors.

  “Nothing much.” My skin felt too tight.

  “You’re lying.” Max stared at me. My eyes darted away from his. I glimpsed Dr. Rosen, who offered nothing but his goofball smile.

  “Well.” I took a deep breath. “I heard you’re a recovering addict.”

  “And?” My too-tight skin turning red.

  “You used to party pretty hard.”

  Max didn’t look away. He knew exactly what I wasn’t saying. It was a test, and I’d failed.

  Here, there was no plum-headed Zenia describing her fan-fiction sex. No one was eating or screaming or bawling. Everyone had a briefcase or a dignified leather purse tucked beside their chair. “We’re the advanced group.” Max was clearly the spokesperson for this highly composed and civilized group of people.

  Patrice from Tuesday morning was there. She’d graduated to this “advanced” group a year earlier, but hadn’t said much about it, other than that Max could be a handful. This morning, she smiled warmly but did not offer any tips on how to survive the next eighty-five minutes. The bruise on my hip pulsed with my heartbeat, but if I winced or rubbed it, I would draw attention to myself. No thank you.

  Lorne was another familiar face. He was midforties and slightly disheveled—wrinkled khaki pants and frayed maroon sweater—but had an open smile that felt like a welcome. I’d met Lorne at his wedding, which I had attended as Jeremy’s date. Jeremy and Lorne were in the men’s group together. My left foot jangled as I considered what that meant.

  “We’ve heard about you,” Brad said, as if he had read my mind. Brad was slightly older than Lorne, tall and thin like Ichabod Crane with salt-and-pepper hair. The only thing I’d heard about him was that he was obsessed with money.

  “What’d you hear?”

  He and Max exchanged a look. Both smiled.

  “That you had anal sex with Blake,” Brad said with only a hint of sheepishness. Not what I was expecting, a memory from a relationship before I started group. My mouth twisted into a scowl. Whatever, Brad. I could own my sexual history.

  “With Jeremy too, actually,” I said.

  “I’d heard that too,” Brad said.

  My stomach heaved with anxiety. Was I going to throw up? What was I doing, letting men I didn’t know quiz me about my sex life? This was the first moment in my three and a half years with Dr. Rosen that I wished desperately for confidentiality. All these years, I admired Dr. Rosen’s insistence that secrets were toxic. Now I saw the murky downside: I’d just joined a group full of people who knew everything there was to know about my anal sex résumé.

  The group let me stew in my discomfort and went on to discuss Lorne’s unhinged ex-wife and Brad’s upcoming job interview for a position that would increase his base salary by 20 percent. When there was a lull in the conversation, I caught Dr. Rosen’s eye. “What makes this the advanced group?” I asked. Before he could answer, a woman with shoulder-length silver hair wearing a navy polyester pantsuit jumped in.

  “Max and I are charter members of this group. Going back to the late eighties. I’m Maggie, by the way.” She was sitting right next to Dr. Rosen. “We knew Dr. Rosen back when—” She paused.

  “When what?” I said.

  Maggie rolled her eyes. “Let’s just say Dr. Rosen used to have very different boundaries.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “Max once had lunch at his house—”

  “He served me a ham sandwich,” Max said. Ham? Dr. Baruch Attah Adonai served tref to a patient? “He used to be less Jewish. His über-Jew thing started when he married his second wife.”

  Maggie leaned over and told me she was once “very close” with Dr. Rosen’s ex-wife, who was anorexic and cheated on Dr. Rosen with a man she met at the Checkerboard Lounge. “I think it was a Black man.”

  “Guess that explains your reaction to my Luther Vandross dream,” I said to Dr. Rosen
. He clutched his belly and laughed.

  Max mentioned that Dr. Rosen took an extended leave of absence in the early nineties for an undisclosed reason. Brad and Lorne debated whether it was treatment for sex addiction or codependence.

  With each revelation, my stomach clenched tighter. The shiny Dr. Rosen who lived in my imagination, to whom I gave the power over my deepest desires, was splattered with mud with each new divulgence. I curled my lips over my teeth and pressed down hard.

  Max turned to Dr. Rosen and slapped his forearm. “Remember when you had diarrhea for months? When was that? Eighty-nine? Ninety-one?” The rest of the group called out different years. Why did they know about Dr. Rosen’s bowels?

  I wanted to vaporize and float out of the room and out of treatment. Max and Maggie were fire hydrants gushing story after story about Dr. Rosen dating back to the first Reagan administration—when I was still in junior high. That time his dog ran away. That summer he wore seersucker. That time he had to physically restrain Maggie from attacking Max and broke one of her ribs. In fifteen minutes I learned more about my therapist than I had in the past three-plus years. The blank slate was slathered in muck.

  Dr. Rosen smiled in his usual unguarded way. He wasn’t embarrassed by these disclosures. I looked around the room—no one else was alarmed. Their bodies were loose in their chairs. These stories were like family lore shared around the Thanksgiving table year after year. If Max stopped in the middle of a story, then Maggie or Brad would keep going. So many stories. So much history. So many layers of shit slathered on my Dr. Rosen.

  Until this moment, I’d admired what an iconoclast Dr. Rosen was, even when my friends who saw other therapists raised their eyebrows when I told them about Baby Jeremiah, the cocktease prescription, my nightly calls to Rory and Marty. I believed Dr. Rosen was courageous, smart, and gifted at treating addicts like me. But now I worried that he was something else: deeply flawed and possibly negligent. Maybe even dangerous.

  The longer I sat and listened to my new group mates laugh about the past, the more nauseated I felt. They all had marriages, children, and careers. Maggie was a grandmother. None of them were desperate for something like I was, though Brad definitely fixated on increasing his net worth. None of them needed Dr. Rosen to be the powerful Oz and not an ordinary con man as much as I did.