Dr. Rosen cocked his head toward me and smirked. “Yes?”
“I have nothing to add to this trip down memory lane.”
“Did you want to share something? You were mumbling under your breath?” Maggie said through her innocent-as-Grandma smile.
Everyone stared at me. My hands were shaking as if I’d stepped up to a podium to address hundreds of people, not a circle of six. “Look, I’m here to get into healthy relationships and start a family of my own. I don’t want to know about Dr. Rosen’s fecal history.” I turned to Dr. Rosen and asked my favorite question: “How is this going to help me?”
Before he could answer, Max did. “How do you know it’s not helping you?”
“Listening to stories about his history as a shrink with bad boundaries is helping me?”
“Why not?”
Max knew nothing about me. I glanced at the clock again. Why couldn’t I make my feet move to the door? Why was I putting myself through this? This group—all of this therapy—might never lead to any of the things I wanted. I might come here faithfully twice a week, pay my seventy bucks a session, and still die alone.
Grandma Maggie held up her left hand and pointed at her wedding band. “Dr. Rosen is really good at getting women like you married. You’ll see. I got married two years ago.” Maggie was easily in her midsixties and had been with Dr. Rosen since George H. W. Bush was vice-president. It was hardly consoling to think I had decades to go before settling down and starting a family.
“Six months,” I said. “If my life isn’t better by July, then I’m leaving.” Never mind the five-year timeline I started with at my first appointment. I’d been in treatment with Dr. Rosen for three and a half years, had now signed up to come three sessions a week and spend eight hundred dollars a month on therapy. The stakes had risen. I wanted results.
“Threatening to leave is an interesting way to build trust and intimacy.” Max smirked.
“I come here three times a week—”
“So do I,” Lorne said.
“Me too,” said Patrice.
“This really is a cult.” Everyone laughed. “Six months.”
“Would you leave Tuesday-morning group too?” Dr. Rosen asked.
“Yes. All or nothing. Six months.”
That evening, I sat in my office as the sun slunk below the horizon. I typed a search into Google: “Therapists in Chicago.” A list of links appeared. A psychologist named Linda, an analyst named Francis, who was in the same building as Dr. Rosen. I imagined calling Linda or Francis, but it felt impossible. It took too much energy to fill someone new in. The apples. The worms. Jeremy. The Intern. Dr. Rosen and my first two groups had taught me to eat, sleep, and have sex. I’d miss Dr. Rosen and his goofy-ass laugh. I’d miss my Tuesday-morning crew. The first session in the “advanced” group was not exactly life-altering, but I owed it to myself to give it some time. Just in case, I bookmarked the website with Linda’s and Francis’s contact information.
* * *
My new life with three group sessions per week: I went to group before work on Monday and Tuesday; on Thursdays I went in the middle of the day. “Long lunch,” I called it. I worked from nine thirty in the morning until seven at night, unless there was a project that required me to stay late. At night, I’d log off and walk home to my new apartment across the street from Clare, who’d recently gotten engaged to Steven. Instead of entrenching myself as their third-wheel roommate, I’d rented a one-bedroom in a high-rise on Clark and Maple from Kathryn, a Rosen-patient in the Friday women’s group. While I missed Clare’s company, it felt good to spread out into all corners of my new space and to watch the sunset from my western windows. Dr. Rosen viewed this move to a place of my own as evidence that I was making space for a romantic relationship. I narrowed my eyes when he said that, afraid to abandon my skepticism, solid as shale, for flimsy, see-through hope. On the weekends, I’d go to 12-step meetings and spend at least half a day at the office, reviewing documents and proving (to myself) that I deserved to be at Skadden. Behind the regular hum of my life, I waited for Something Big to happen. I waited for the “advanced” group, which I imagined as a blowtorch aimed straight at my heart, to work its magic on me. But there was no magic, no sparks flying from a naked flame, no fast-tracking my ability to attach to other people. There was sitting in the circle and talking, listening, feeling—the same things I’d been doing since I started with Rosen.
The six-month clock ticked on.
There were a few changes. The first thing was that I contracted severe constipation. My bowels would release only every eight days, so I walked around for seven days with a dull throbbing in my lower belly. It hurt to bend down. It hurt to run. It hurt to sneeze. I felt fatter than my fattest PMS day. My digestive system had turned off as soon as I started the new group. Nothing was moving through me. If this was the only gift of the new group, then I didn’t want it. To console myself, I would flip the calendar to July like a kid counting the days until Christmas, except instead of anticipating a jolly man in a red suit with presents, I imagined how I would terminate my relationship with my elfin therapist who promised I wouldn’t die alone. When I complained in Monday group about my constipation, it spurred Max to remind Dr. Rosen of his legendary diarrhea in the late eighties. When I asked what I should do about the constipation, Max would bark, “Maybe if you didn’t have a six-month deadline, you wouldn’t be so full of shit.”
On Tuesday mornings, I told my original group that I had no idea what to do in the new group. I tried to describe how it felt to have no idea what to do with my hands or my voice for ninety minutes straight. Patrice shook her head. “She’s doing just fine in there.”
“It doesn’t feel like group therapy. No one except Lorne comes in with any issues. They chitchat like old friends. No one knows about my pinworm or my eating disorder or how I debased myself with Jeremy. They don’t seem to care about anything but what’s right in front of them.”
“And the problem is…?” Dr. Rosen asked.
The problem was that I sat through two hundred seventy minutes of therapy per week and didn’t feel any better.
During Monday/Thursday sessions, I felt like a stranger who wandered into someone else’s family reunion. Pulsing through each conversation were layers of history, memory, story, and relationships that I couldn’t access. When Max or Lorne asked me how I was doing, I voiced my heart’s most immediate desire.
“Seriously, how can I get rid of this constipation?”
“Lots of water,” Dr. Rosen said. “You could also try psyllium husk. That’s the active ingredient in Metamucil.” Apparently, I was now paying eight hundred forty dollars per month to learn about the active ingredient in a laxative.
In Monday/Thursday group, Dr. Rosen didn’t give prescriptions. Nobody called anyone else to get to sleep or to discuss their after-dinner fruit binges. For ninety minutes twice a week, we sat in the circle and pinged off each other. Brad would talk about getting cheated out of a commission at work, and Max would call him out for being pathologically obsessed with money. Patrice would complain about the partners in her practice, and Dr. Rosen would confront her on not owning her authority as the most senior member of her practice. If I was quiet for too long, Max would turn to me and ask how many months until I quit. I’d ignore him and ask Dr. Rosen how this was helping.
“Of course it’s helping you.” Max sighed with annoyance.
“But nothing’s changed except my bowels.”
“That’s bullshit. And you know what?” Max said, his voice raised. “Stop trying to convince us you’re pathetic. Just stop. It’s annoying.”
No one could shame like Max. When he shook his head and sighed with disgust, I felt chastened. When I looked to Dr. Rosen for guidance or comfort, I saw only his inscrutable smile, so I shifted my gaze to a blotch in the carpet shaped like Australia.
A few minutes later, Dr. Rosen turned to me. “Why don’t you ask Max to tell you all the reasons you aren’t pa
thetic?”
My chest constricted. In the split second before I took Dr. Rosen’s suggestion, I imagined Max repeating the same messages that thundered through my head: It’s your own fault you’re alone. You’re untreatable. You are pathetic! Planting my feet on the ground, I looked directly at Max.
“So, how come I’m not pathetic?”
Max looked at Dr. Rosen and said, “I have to do all the work around here.” Then he sighed and turned to me. “You’re this brilliant attorney who’s working at one of the most high-powered firms in the city. You’ve graduated to this advanced group. You’re working hard to figure out how you’re fucked up and what you should do about it. You’re not pathetic—you’re pissed that you haven’t gotten all the things you’re working hard for, which is better than this ‘poor me’ thing you do.” He paused for a beat, and I held my breath, thinking he’d saved a zinger for his closing salvo. “Don’t fucking do that.”
I knew I was supposed to keep looking at Max and breathe, but I couldn’t. Who would I be if I saw myself the way that Max did?
* * *
One March afternoon, I sat at my desk eating a box of raisins—still working on that constipation—when my work e-mail dinged. Would you like to go for drinks? It was from Alex, who lived four floors above me. I’d chatted with him in the elevator a few mornings earlier when we were both on the way to the gym and learned that, like me, he was a junior associate at a huge law firm. He’d chosen a treadmill close to mine. In the mirror, I watched his lean legs turn round and round. Zero body fat, perfect form, easy breathing despite his six-minute-mile pace. His physical beauty was so distracting I had to move to the bikes.
I covered my mouth with my hands to conceal my joy at this invitation, this potentially Big Thing.
26
We met at an Irish pub on Clark Street the following Monday after work. And even better: I was no longer constipated. Less than an hour after receiving Alex’s e-mail, my bowels cranked back to life.
Alex and I compared notes on our budding legal careers—“so much document review”—and split the shepherd’s pie for dinner. I hesitated for only a millisecond when the dish arrived covered in a layer of browned mashed potatoes with mystery brown lumps floating underneath. I could do this: I could eat stew from another country with this beautiful man.
From the bathroom, I called Rory to tell her I was on a date with a neighbor who looked like Brad Pitt, only cleaner and taller.
“Gay?” she asked.
“Possibly.” He was raised by a single mom and had two sisters, so it made some sense he was not bursting with machismo. What hidden thing in this physically beautiful man’s heart could hurt me later?
Alex and I e-mailed throughout the week, and I put my best Christie forward. Witty responses. Jokes about law firm life and pop culture. I waited a few hours before responding to his e-mails, even though I prepared my responses within seconds. I curated a Christie I imagined would appeal to him. My best guess about what a man as beautiful and put together as Alex might like: Lighthearted humor. Intelligence and ambition. Independence. And based on his BMI, a commitment to physical fitness. I had all of those things, and I shined them up for Alex and served them in balanced doses in each missive. As for all my emotional ups and downs, I sequestered those in group.
Two days after our first date, he asked me out for a second: Italian food and then live jazz.
The darkened club was packed with couples who looked at least a decade older than we were. Alex and I sat against a far wall beneath a picture of a young Billie Holiday. A round-top table big enough for only our two drinks separated us from the aisle, where harried waiters brought mixed drinks to the tables crammed all around us. As a trio played a set, Alex held my hand, his thumb tapping to the beat against my palm.
When the band took a break between sets, he asked follow-up questions to the getting-to-know-you ones he’d asked at our first dinner.
“You think you’d ever move back to Texas?”
“No way.” When he asked why, I paused. There were multiple answers. I could tell him that I didn’t like the heat or the conservative politics. Or that I felt like I had to make it on my own in the city I’d adopted and that moving back home would smack of defeat. Or that I’d failed to secure any attachments to any of my friends who still lived in Texas, so I wasn’t itching to return. Those were true, but when I looked at the curve of his lips and his perfect jawline, I felt emboldened to give him the real reason. “I’m pretty attached to my therapist.” And once I trotted out Dr. Rosen, I decided to go all the way. “And I do group therapy, so I’m attached to all of my group mates too.” No need to tell him it was two groups and three sessions a week. I stared at the image of Billie Holiday singing into an old-fashioned silver microphone. Oh God, what have I done? Was I subconsciously trying to scare Alex away by hinting I was crazy?
“That’s cool,” Alex said. He smiled in a curious way. Like he was surprised that I’d revealed something so vulnerable. He inched closer. “Would you like me to join you out on that limb?”
I smiled. “Sure.”
“I told you my parents got divorced, right?” I nodded. “What I didn’t mention is that after their divorce, they remarried. Each other. And then divorced again.” He shifted his gaze to the vacant stage. Then he turned back to me. “So, that’s complicated.”
“Sounds like it.”
What I wanted to say was “thank you.” Thank you for understanding vulnerability. For meeting me on the limb. For showing me it wasn’t disastrous to mention therapy on our second date.
As the band shuffled back on the stage, Alex scooted his chair closer to mine. In the darkened club, we sat hand in hand, knees touching, letting the music seep into our bones. I recognized the familiar feeling of warmth and safety that settled after the rush of emotional risk. This was how I felt in group after sharing something difficult and then hearing my group members say “same here” or “I relate to that.” Like the time I told the women’s group about my breast hatred and each one of them offered me a story about her own tortured relationship to her breasts.
My turn, your turn. Back and forth.
So this was how it happened. This was how you built an intimate relationship. Word by word. Story by story. Revelation by revelation.
Just like group.
He invited me up to his apartment after the jazz club. “I want to show you the view from my southern balcony.” He put one arm around me as he pointed out the Big Dipper. With the stars as our witness, we shared our first kiss. When he pressed his perfect lips against mine, I swallowed starlight, and my heart began to glow. He walked me up to my place. “There will be more,” he said, kissing me again.
If this was the gift of the advanced group, I’d stay forever.
* * *
Alex was wonderful. Our dates were the stuff of my deepest longing. I could hardly believe how much I enjoyed being with him. The only downside was the low-grade anxiety I felt all the time about how to make it last. I agonized about how and when the relationship would sour or fizzle or implode.
I brought my anxiety to group. “This can’t last,” I insisted. “Tell me what to do to keep this thing going.”
“Can you let go of your need to control it?” Dr. Rosen said.
“No.” Dr. Rosen didn’t understand. Alex’s body was near perfect, he smelled like fresh sport deodorant, and I could see my sexual prime on the horizon. If I gave in to this relationship and let myself believe it was something real, then what if it failed? Would that destroy me?
“Can you let go of your expectation of failure?”
“I’ll try.”
* * *
Life with Alex, who had signed up for two triathlons for later in the summer and a marathon in the fall, meant early morning runs and bike rides before work, followed by swims at the gym or in Lake Michigan after work. Within a month of dating, he began inviting me to join him most mornings and evenings. One Saturday, he knocked on my door at s
ix in the morning. He had a race bib pinned to his fleece jacket and his hands stuffed into thin black gloves. He fastened my bib to my shirt and handed me a water bottle. At the starting line of the ten-mile race he signed us up for, he rubbed my shoulders when he noticed I was shaking from the cold. Patches of snow still clung to the ground by the running path, and only several hundred runners had showed up for the lakefront race, where the wind promised to slap our exposed faces. I’d never run a ten-mile race, but my body had taken on a new buoyancy since dating Alex, which was part anxiety, part joy. A loopy willingness to try anything, including this freezing-cold road race, made me say yes to whatever he was offering.
Each time we walked to dinner after work or ran on the lake, a featherweight optimism knocked on my heart, inviting me to let go of projecting the failure of the relationship. Maybe every relationship wouldn’t end with me huddled in the group room crying into a rag. Maybe every relationship wouldn’t end at all. Maybe it would last.
After the race, my hamstrings ached and my shoulder stung where my sports bra strap dug into it. But with Alex, the pain gave way to pure joy.
* * *
Dr. Rosen held up a picture for everyone to see one Monday morning. Patrice slipped on her reading glasses and Max leaned forward. “This is what it means to get unblocked,” Dr. Rosen said. It was a picture of me and Alex: I wore a pink cocktail dress, and Alex wore a tux. We’d gone to a gala for the Joffrey Ballet. In the darkened theater, the dancers twirled in brilliant tulle and Alex held my hand in both of his. I inched closer to him in my red velvet seat, until our legs were touching. During dinner in the giant, gilded Hilton ballroom, he rubbed my back and played with the clasp of my necklace. On the dance floor, he held me close as the band covered Otis Redding. Later, he kissed me again on his balcony. “It feels like you’re my girlfriend,” he said. I leaned into him and exhaled.
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