“No, not at all,” he says, and I’m pleased that he’s able to acknowledge that somebody in his life isn’t an idiot.
“Thank you,” I say.
“For what?”
“For saying I’m not an idiot.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he replies. “I meant no, you’re not nice. You won’t let me use my phone to call the idiot who put mayonnaise on my sandwich.”
“So I’m mean and an idiot?”
He grins, and when he does, his eyes twinkle and his dimples appear. For a second I can see how some people might find him charming.
“Well, you’re mean, that’s for sure. I don’t know about the idiot part yet.” He’s being playful, and I smile back.
“Phew,” I say. “At least you’re giving me the benefit of getting to know me first. I appreciate that.” He begins fidgeting, uncomfortable with my attempt to engage. He’s so desperate to escape from this moment of human contact that he starts munching on his mayonnaise-y sandwich and looks away. But he’s not fighting me, and I’ll take it. I sense a microscopic opening.
“I’m sorry that you experience me as being mean,” I say. “Is that why you made that comment about the fifty minutes?” The mistress insult—that I’m more like his hooker—was more complicated, but I’m guessing he made the fifty-minutes crack for the same reason most people do—they wish they could stay longer but don’t know how to say this directly. Acknowledging their attachment makes them feel too vulnerable.
“No, I’m glad it’s fifty minutes!” he says. “God knows, if I stayed for an hour, you’d keep asking me about my childhood.”
“I just want to get to know you better,” I say.
“What’s to know? I’m anxious and I can’t sleep. I’m juggling three shows, my wife’s complaining all the time, my ten-year-old is acting like a teenager, my four-year-old misses the nanny who left for graduate school, the fucking dog is acting out, and I’m surrounded by idiots who make my life harder than it needs to be. And, frankly, I’m pissed off at this point!”
“That’s a lot,” I say. “You’re dealing with a lot.”
John says nothing. He’s chewing his food and studying a spot on the floor near his flip-flops.
“Damn right,” he says finally. “What’s so hard to understand about three words? Hold. The. Mayo. That’s it!”
“You know, about those idiots,” I say. “I have a thought about that. What if the people who are pissing you off aren’t trying to piss you off? What if these people aren’t idiots but reasonably intelligent people who are just doing the best they can on a given day?”
John lifts his eyes slightly, as if considering this.
“And,” I add softly, thinking that as hard as he is on others, he’s probably triply hard on himself, “what if you are too?”
John starts to say something, then stops. He looks back toward his flip-flops, lifts a napkin, and pretends to wipe the crumbs from his mouth. But I see it happen anyway. He quickly maneuvers the napkin upward and below his eye.
“Goddamn sandwich,” he says, stuffing the napkin into the food bag along with the rest of the meal before tossing the whole thing into the trash can under my desk. Swish. A perfect shot.
He looks at the clock. “This is nuts, you know. I’m starving, it’s my one break to eat, and I can’t even use my phone to order a proper lunch. You call this therapy?”
I want to say Yes, this is therapy—face-to-face, without phones or sandwiches, so that two people can sit together and connect. But I know John will just offer a sardonic rebuttal. I think about what Margo must go through and wonder what her own psychological history must be for her to have chosen John.
“I’ll make you a deal,” John says. “I’ll tell you something about my childhood if I can order some lunch from the place up the street. I’ll order for both of us. Let’s just be civilized and have a conversation over a goddamn Chinese chicken salad, okay?” He looks at me, waiting.
Normally I wouldn’t do this, but therapy isn’t by the numbers. We need professional boundaries, but if they’re too open, like an ocean, or too constricting, like a fishbowl, we run into trouble. An aquarium seems just right. We need space for spontaneity—which is why when Wendell kicked me, it was effective. And if John needs some distance between us in the form of food to feel comfortable talking to me right now, so be it.
I tell him we can order lunch but he doesn’t have to talk about his childhood. It’s not a quid pro quo. He ignores me and dials a restaurant to place the order, a process that, of course, frustrates him.
“Right, no dressing. Not drinks, dressing! ” He’s yelling into the phone, which is on speaker. “D-r-e-s-s-i-n-g.” He sighs loudly, rolls his eyes.
“Extra dressing?” the guy at the restaurant says in broken English, and John becomes apoplectic as he tries to communicate that the dressing should be on the side. Everything’s a problem—they have Diet Pepsi, not Diet Coke; they can be here in twenty minutes, not fifteen. I watch, horrified and bemused. It must be so hard to be John, I think. As they wrap up, John says something in Chinese, and the guy doesn’t understand. John doesn’t understand why the guy doesn’t understand his “own language” and the guy explains that he speaks Cantonese.
They hang up and John looks at me, incredulous. “What, they don’t use Mandarin?”
“If you know Chinese, why didn’t you use it to place the order?” I ask.
John gives me a withering look. “Because I speak English.”
Yikes.
John grumbles until lunch arrives, but once we set out our salads, he lets down the drawbridge a bit. I’ve already had lunch but I eat some salad anyway to join him; there’s something innately bonding about sharing a meal together. I hear some stories about his father and older brothers and how he thinks it’s strange that while he doesn’t remember much about his mom, he began dreaming about her a few years ago. He keeps having versions of the same dream, like Groundhog Day, and he can’t make it stop. He wants it to stop. Even in his sleep, he says, he’s being bothered. He just wants peace.
I inquire about the dream but he says it will upset him to talk about it and he’s not paying me to upset him. Didn’t he just tell me that he wanted peace? Don’t they teach “listening skills” to therapists? I want to talk about what he just said—to challenge his beliefs that he shouldn’t be uncomfortable in therapy and that he can find peace without also experiencing discomfort—but I need time for that, and there are just a couple of minutes left.
I ask when he has peace.
“Walking the dog,” he says. “Until Rosie started acting out. That used to be peaceful.”
I think about how he doesn’t want to bring the dream into this room. Could it be that this room has become something of a sanctuary for him, away from his job, wife, kids, dog, the world’s idiots, and the ghost of his mom that appears in his sleep?
“Hey, John,” I try. “Are you feeling peaceful right now?”
He chucks his chopsticks into the bag where he’s just packed away the remains of his salad. “Of course not,” he says, adding an impatient eye roll.