“I didn’t see it at all,” she told me after she arrived wearing a cast. “And I don’t just mean the pole.” Her car had been totaled but, miraculously, she’d ended up with just a broken arm.
“Maybe,” she said, for the first time, “I have a drinking problem, not a therapist problem.”
But she was still drinking a year later, when she met the Dude.
29
The Rapist
At John’s appointment time, my green light goes on. I walk down the hall to the waiting room, but when I open the door, the chair John usually takes is empty, save for a bag of takeout. For a minute I think he might be in the restroom down the hall, but the public key is still hanging on the hook. I wonder if John’s running late—after all, presumably he ordered the food—or if he’s decided not to come today because of what happened last week.
That session had started off uneventfully. As usual, the delivery guy brought our Chinese chicken salads, and after John complained about the dressing (“too saturated”) and the chopsticks (“too flimsy”), he got right down to business.
“I was thinking,” John began, “about the word therapist.” He took a bite of his salad. “You know, if you break it in two . . .”
I knew where this was going. Therapist is spelled the same way as the rapist. It’s a common joke in the therapy world.
I smiled. “I wonder if you’re trying to tell me that sometimes it’s hard to be here.” I’ve certainly felt that with Wendell, especially when his eyes seem to bore into me and there’s no place to hide. By day, therapists hear people’s secrets and fantasies, their shame and their failures, invading the spaces they normally keep private. Then—boom—the hour’s over. Just like that.
Are we emotional rapists?
“Hard to be here?” John said. “Nah. You can be a pain in the ass, but this isn’t the worst place to be.”
“So you think I’m a pain in the ass?” It took some effort not to emphasize the I, as in “So you think I’m a pain in the ass?”
“Of course,” John said. “You ask too many damn questions.”
“Oh? Like what?”
“Like that.”
I nodded. “I can see how that might annoy you.”
John brightened. “You can?”
“I can. I think you’d rather keep me at a distance when I’m trying to get to know you.”
“And heeeeeere we go again.” John rolled his eyes dramatically. At least once a session, I bring up our pattern: my trying to connect with him; his trying to flee. He may be resistant to acknowledging it now, but I welcome his resistance because resistance is a clue to where the crux of the work lies; it signals what a therapist needs to pay attention to. During training, whenever we interns felt frustrated by resistant patients, our supervisors would counsel, “Resistance is a therapist’s friend. Don’t fight it—follow it.” In other words, try to figure out why it’s there in the first place.
Meanwhile, I was interested in the second part of what John had said. “Just to be more annoying,” I continued, “I’m going to ask you another question. You said this isn’t the worst place to be. What’s the worst?”
“You don’t know?”
I shrugged. No.
John’s eyes bugged out. “Really?”
I nodded.
“Oh, come on, you know,” he said. “Just guess.”
I didn’t want to get into a power struggle with John, so I took a guess.
“At work when you don’t feel that people understand you? At home with Margo when you feel you’re disappointing her?”
John made the sound of a game-show buzzer. “Wrong!” He took a bite of salad, swallowed, then lifted his chopsticks into the air to punctuate his words. “I came here, you may or may not remember, because I was having trouble sleeping.”
I noticed his dig: May not.
“I remember,” I said.
He let out a huge sigh, as if summoning the patience of Gandhi. “So, Sherlock, if sleeping is a problem for me, where do you think it’s hard for me to be right now?”
Here, I wanted to say. You’re having trouble being here. But in good time, we’ll talk about that.
“Bed,” I said.
“Bingo!”
I waited for him to elaborate, but he went back to his salad. We sat together while he ate and swore at his chopsticks.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?”
“I’d like to hear more,” I said. “What are you thinking about as you’re trying to fall asleep?”
“Jesus Christ! Is something wrong with your memory today? What do you think I’m thinking about—everything I come in here telling you each week! Work, my kids, Margo—”
John went on to relate an argument he’d had with Margo the night before about whether their older daughter should get a cell phone for her eleventh birthday. Margo wanted her to have it for safety, now that Grace was going to be walking home from school with her friends, and John thought that Margo was being overprotective.
“It’s two blocks!” John said he told Margo. “Besides, if someone tries to kidnap her, it’s not like Grace is going to say, ‘Hey, excuse me, Mr. Kidnapper, let me just pause here for a second, get my phone out of my backpack, and call my mom!’ And unless the kidnapper is a complete idiot—which he could be, okay, but he’s probably just a sick motherfucker—the first thing he’s going to do if he steals someone’s kid is look in her backpack for a cell phone and dump it or destroy it so we can’t track her location. So what’s the point of the phone?” John’s face had turned red. He was really worked up.
Since our Skype call the day after Margo had insinuated that she might leave, things between them had calmed down. As John described it, he tried to listen more. He tried to get home from work earlier. But really, it seemed to me that he was, as he said, “appeasing her,” whereas what she likely wanted was the very thing John and I struggled with together: his presence.
John packed the remnants of his lunch into the takeout bag and tossed it across the room, where it landed with a thud in the trash can.
“And that’s why I couldn’t sleep,” he went on. “Because an eleven-year-old doesn’t need a cell phone and you know what? She’ll get one anyway because if I put my foot down, Margo will sulk and tell me in some passive-aggressive way that she wants to leave again. And you know why that is? Because of her IDIOT THERAPIST!”
Wendell.
I tried to imagine Wendell hearing Margo’s version of this story: We were talking about getting Grace a cell phone for her birthday and John just went ballistic. I pictured Wendell in position C, wearing his khakis and cardigan, giving Margo the head-tilted look. I imagined him asking a Buddha-like question about whether she might be curious why John had had such a strong reaction. I figured that by the time their session was over, Margo would have a slightly different take on John’s motives, just as I had come to see Boyfriend’s actions as less than sociopathic.
“And you know what else she’s going to tell her idiot therapist?” John continued. “She’s going to tell him that her fucking husband can’t fucking have sex with her, because when I got in bed at the same time she did instead of finishing up my emails—another thing I’m doing to make her happy, by the way—I was so pissed off that I wouldn’t have sex with her. She approached me but I told her I was tired and didn’t feel well. Like a housewife in the fifties with a headache. Jesus Christ, right?”