But still—no.
“I’m your therapist and a guy,” Wendell says today, adding that we all interact with people in different ways based on any number of things we notice about them. Political correctness aside, we aren’t emotionally blind to qualities like appearance, wardrobe, gender, race, ethnicity, or age. That’s the way transference works. If my therapist were a woman, he says, I’d react to her based on the ways I relate to women. If Wendell were short, I’d react to him as somebody who’s short rather than tall. If . . .
As he talks, I can’t stop staring at the “new” him, trying to make the adjustment. It occurs to me that it wasn’t just that I hadn’t been attracted to Wendell earlier. It was that I hadn’t been attracted to anyone. I was grieving, and it’s only upon my gradual emergence that I’ve begun to feel attraction in the world again.
Sometimes when a new patient comes in, I ask not just “What brings you here?” but “What brings you here now?” The now is the key. Why this year, this month, this day, have you decided to come talk to me? It seemed like the breakup was my answer to “Why now?” but underneath it was my stuckness and my grief.
“I wish I could stop crying!” I’d told Wendell early on when I felt like a human fire hydrant.
But Wendell saw it differently. He’d given me permission to feel and also a reminder that, like so many people, I’d been mistaking feeling less for feeling better. The feelings are still there, though. They come out in unconscious behaviors, in an inability to sit still, in a mind that hungers for the next distraction, in a lack of appetite or a struggle to control one’s appetite, in a short-temperedness, or—in Boyfriend’s case—in a foot that twitched under the covers as we sat in that heavy silence under which lay the feeling that he’d kept to himself for months: whatever he wanted, it wasn’t me.
And still people try to suppress their feelings. Just a week before, a patient had told me that she couldn’t go a single night without turning on her TV, falling asleep to it, and waking up hours later. “Where did my evening go?” she asked from my couch. But the real question was, where had her feelings gone?
Another patient recently lamented, “Wouldn’t it be nice to be one of those people who doesn’t overthink anything, who just goes with the flow—who lives the unexamined life?” I remember saying that there was a difference between examining and dwelling, and if we’re cut off from our feelings, just skating on the surface, we don’t get peace or joy—we get deadness.
So it’s not that I’m in love with Wendell. The fact that I’m finally noticing him not just as a therapist but as a man is simply evidence that our work together has helped me rejoin the human race. I feel attraction again. I’ve even begun dating, dipping my toe in the water.
Before I leave, I ask about the “Why now?” of Wendell’s office renovation, of his beard.
“What made you do all this?” I ask.
The beard, he says, was the result of being out of the office and not needing to shave; when it was time to come back, he decided he liked it. As for the office makeover, he says simply, “It was time.”
“But why now?” I ask, trying to phrase my next question graciously. “It seems like you’d had that furniture for, um . . . a long while?”
Wendell laughs. I didn’t hide the subtext very well. “Sometimes,” he says, “change is like that.”
Back in the waiting area, I move past the new modern-looking screen separating the exit from the seating. Outside, heat mirages rise on the sidewalk, and as I wait for the light, the Imagine Dragons song pops into my head again. I’ve been waiting to smile, ’ey, been holding it in for a while. When the light turns green, I cross and head toward the parking lot but today I don’t go straight to my car. I keep walking up the street until I’m in front of a glass storefront—a salon.
I catch sight of myself in the window’s reflection and stop to adjust my top—the one from Anthropologie, which I’d chosen for tonight’s date—and then hurry inside.
I’m just in time for my appointment at the waxing place.
Part Four
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
46
The Bees
A minute before Charlotte’s appointment, I get a text from my mother. Please call me. She doesn’t normally send texts like this, so I dial her cell. She answers on the first ring.
“Don’t be alarmed,” she says, which always means that something alarming has happened. “But Dad’s in the hospital.”
My hand tenses on the phone.
“He’s fine,” she says quickly. Fine people aren’t admitted to the hospital, I think. “What happened?” I ask.
Well, she says, they don’t know yet. She explains that my father was eating lunch when he said he didn’t feel well. Then he started shaking and had trouble breathing, and now they’re at the hospital. It looks like he has an infection but they don’t know if it’s related to his heart or something else. He’s fine, she keeps repeating. He’ll be fine. I think she says this as much for herself as for me. We both want—need—my father to be fine.
“Really,” she says, “he’s fine. Here, see for yourself.” I hear her mumble something to my father as she hands him the phone.
“I’m fine,” he says by way of hello, but I can hear his labored breathing. He tells me the same story about having lunch and not feeling well, leaving out the shaking and difficulty-breathing parts. He’ll probably be out by tomorrow, he says, once the antibiotics kick in, though when my mom gets back on the phone, we wonder whether it’s something more serious. (Later that night, when I go to the hospital, I’ll see that my father looks pregnant—his abdomen filled with fluid—and that he’s on several different IV antibiotics because a serious bacterial infection has spread throughout his body. He will be hospitalized for a week, the fluid around his lungs aspirated, his heart rate stabilized.)
But right now, getting off the phone with my parents, I realize that I’m twelve minutes late for Charlotte’s appointment. I try to shift focus as I head to the waiting room.
Charlotte jumps up from her seat when I open the door. “Oh, phew!” she says. “I thought maybe I had the wrong time, but this is always my time, and then I thought I had the wrong day, but no, it’s Monday”—she holds up her phone to show me the date—“so then I thought maybe, I don’t know, but here you are.”
This all comes out as one long sentence. “Anyway, hi,” she says, moving past me into my office.
This may seem surprising, but when therapists are late, many patients are shaken. Though we try to avoid this, every therapist I know has let a patient down this way. And when we do, it can bring up old experiences of distrust or abandonment, leaving patients feeling anything from discombobulated to enraged.
In my office, I explain that I was on an urgent phone call and apologize for the delay.
“It’s fine,” Charlotte says nonchalantly, but she seems out of sorts. Or maybe I am, after the call with my father. I’m fine, he had said. Just like Charlotte says it’s fine. Are they both really fine? Charlotte fidgets in her chair, twirling her hair, looking around the room. I try to help her locate herself by meeting her eyes, but they’re darting from the window to a picture on the wall to the pillow she always keeps on her lap. One leg is crossed over the other, and she’s rapidly kicking that leg in the air.