“Well,” I began, “it was—”
“Oh, Jesus, I was kidding!” John interrupted. “Obviously I don’t care what it was like for you. That’s my point. It was a Lakers game! We were there to see the Lakers.”
“Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“Okay, you don’t care.”
“Damn right, I don’t.” I saw that look on John’s face again, the one I noticed when he was watching me run with Zach. No matter how I tried to engage with John that day—by helping him to slow down and notice his feelings, by talking about his experience with me in the room, by sharing some of my experience in our conversation—he remained closed off.
It wasn’t until he was leaving that he turned back to me from the hallway and said, “Cute kid, by the way. Your son. The way he held your hand. Boys don’t always do that.”
I waited for the punch line. Instead, he looked me right in the eye and said, almost pensively, “Enjoy it while it lasts.”
I stood there for a second. Enjoy it while it lasts.
I wondered if he was thinking about his daughter—maybe she’d outgrown letting John hold her hand in public. But he’d also said, “Boys don’t always do that.” What did he know about raising boys, being the father of two girls?
It was about him and his mother, I decided. I tucked away the exchange for when he’d be ready to talk about her.
27
Wendell’s Mother
When Wendell was a boy, every August he and his four siblings would pile into the family station wagon and drive with their parents from their Midwestern suburb to a cabin on a lake for a vacation with their large extended family. There were about twenty cousins in all, and the kids would wander as a pack, taking off in the morning, checking back in with the adults for lunch (which they ate ravenously while sitting on blankets spread over a verdant field), and disappearing again until dinnertime.
Sometimes the cousins would go for bike rides, but Wendell, the youngest, was afraid to ride a bike. Whenever his parents and older siblings offered to teach him, he feigned indifference, but everyone knew that the story of an older boy in town who had fallen off his bike, hit his head, and gone deaf from the blow had stuck in Wendell’s mind.
Fortunately, bikes didn’t matter all that much at the cabin. Even when some of the cousins went out on their bikes, there were always enough kids with whom he could swim in the lake, climb trees, and play epic games of capture the flag.
Then one summer, just after Wendell turned thirteen, he went missing. The clan of cousins had returned for lunch, and while they were munching on watermelon, somebody noticed that Wendell wasn’t there. They checked inside the cabins. Empty. Groups dispersed to search for him at the lake, in the woods, around town. But Wendell was nowhere to be found.
After four terrifying hours for his family, Wendell returned—riding a bike. Apparently, a cute girl he’d met by the lake had asked him to go on a bike ride with her, so he went to the bike shop and explained his problem. The owner looked at this eager, skinny thirteen-year-old and instantly understood. He shut down the store, took Wendell to an abandoned lot, and taught him how to ride. Then he gave him a free day’s rental.
Now there he was, riding a bike toward the cabins. His parents cried in relief.
Wendell and the girl from the lake rode together every day for the rest of the trip, and when it was over, they wrote letters back and forth for the next several months. But one day Wendell got a letter from her saying that she was very sorry, but she had found a new boyfriend at her school and would no longer be writing to Wendell. His mom found the ripped page while emptying the trash.
Wendell pretended not to care.
“That year was a crash course in biking and love,” Wendell’s mother later remarked. “You take a risk, you fall down, and you get back up and do it all over again.”
Wendell did get back up. And in time, he stopped pretending not to care. After graduating from college and joining the family business, he couldn’t pretend any longer that his interest in psychology was just a hobby. So Wendell quit and got a doctorate in psychology instead. Now it was his father’s turn to pretend not to care. And like Wendell, eventually his father got back up on that metaphorical bike and embraced his son’s decision.
At least, that’s how Wendell’s mother tells the story.
Of course, she didn’t tell me this story. I know all of this courtesy of the internet.
I wish I could say that I accidentally stumbled on this information, that I needed Wendell’s address to send in a check and typed in his name and—Oh, wow, look what popped up—right there, on the very first page of results, was an interview with his mother. But the only part that would be true is the part where I typed in his name.
A small comfort: I wasn’t alone in Googling my therapist.
Julie once said something to me about a scientist at her university that I’d written about, as if we’d previously mentioned that we both knew him (we hadn’t). Rita once alluded to the fact that she and I had both grown up in Los Angeles, though I’d never told her where I’d grown up. John finished one of his “idiot” rants about a just-out-of-college hire who’d graduated from Stanford with “The Harvard of the West, my ass.” Then, looking sheepishly at me, he added, “I mean, no offense.” He must have known I’d gone to Stanford. I also know that John Googled Wendell to check out his wife’s therapist, because once he complained that Wendell had no website or photo, which immediately made John suspicious. “What’s the idiot trying to hide?” he’d said. “Oh, right—his incompetence.”
So patients do Google their therapists, but that wasn’t my excuse. In fact, it had never occurred to me to Google Wendell until he suggested that by Google-stalking Boyfriend I was holding on to a future that had been canceled. I was watching Boyfriend’s future unfold while I stayed locked in the past. I’d need to accept that his future and mine, his present and mine, were now separate and that all we had left in common was our history.
Sitting at my laptop, I remembered the way Wendell had made this all so clear. Then I thought about how I knew nearly nothing about Wendell other than the fact that he’d trained with Caroline, the colleague who gave me his name. I didn’t know where he’d gotten his degree or what he specialized in or any of the basic information people tend to gather online before seeing a therapist. I’d been so eager for help that I took Caroline’s referral for my “friend” sight unseen.
If something isn’t working, do something different, therapists are taught in training when they’re hitting a wall with a patient, and we also suggest it to our patients: Why continue doing the same unhelpful thing over and over? If following Boyfriend online was keeping me stuck, Wendell implied, I should do something different. But what? I tried closing my eyes and taking some breaths, an intervention that can disrupt a compulsive urge. And it worked—sort of. When I opened my eyes, I didn’t type Boyfriend’s name into Google.
I typed in Wendell’s.
John had been right; Wendell was virtually invisible. No website. No LinkedIn. No Psychology Today listing or public Facebook or Twitter. Just a single link with his office address and phone number. For a practitioner of my generation, Wendell was unusually old-school.