“And now,” John goes on, “because of the ratings, I’ll never get rid of her.”
“You’re stuck with her,” I say. “Because of the ratings.”
“Fucking network,” he repeats. John takes another bite, curses the chopsticks. “It’ll be okay, though,” he says. “She’s kind of growing on me. We have some good ideas for next season.” He wipes his mouth with his napkin, first the left corner of his lips, then the right. I watch him.
“What?” he says.
I raise my eyebrows.
“Oh, no, no, no,” he says, protesting. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that there’s some ‘connection’”—he puts air quotes around the word connection—“between the therapist and you. It’s fiction, okay?”
“All of it?” I say.
“Of course! It’s a story, a show. God, if I took any dialogue from here, it would kill the ratings. So, no, obviously it’s not you.”
“I’m thinking about the emotions more than the dialogue,” I say. “Maybe there’s some truth in them.”
“It’s a show,” he repeats.
I give John a look.
“I mean it. That character has no more to do with you than the main character has to do with me. Other than his good looks, of course.” He laughs at his joke. At least, I think it’s a joke.
We sit in silence as John glances around the room—at the pictures on the wall, at the floor, at his hands. I remember his “One Mississippi, two Mississippi,” back before he could tolerate the wait. After a couple of minutes, he speaks up.
“I want to show you something,” he says, then adds sarcastically, “Can I get a permission slip to use my phone?”
I nod. He grabs his phone, scrolls through it, then hands it over to me. “That’s my family.” On the screen is a photo of a pretty blonde and two girls who appear to be cracking up as they do bunny ears on their mom—Margo, Gracie, and Ruby. (Turns out Margo wasn’t the patient before me at Wendell’s.) Next to Ruby is Rosie, the ugly dog that John loves dearly, with a pink bow on her patchy-furred head. After hearing so much about them, here they are, a mesmerizing tableau. I can’t stop staring at them.
“Sometimes I forget how lucky I am,” he says quietly.
“You have a lovely family,” I say. I tell him how moved I am that he shared this picture with me. I start to hand the phone back, but John stops me.
“Wait,” he says. “Those are my girls. But here’s my boy.”
I feel a pinch in my gut. He’s about to show me Gabe. As the mom of a boy myself, I don’t know if I can look without crying.
John scrolls through some photos, and there he is: Gabe. He’s so adorable I feel like my heart might split in half. He has John’s thick, wavy hair and Margo’s bright blue eyes. He’s sitting in John’s lap at a Dodgers game, and he’s got a ball in his hand, mustard on his cheek, and a look on his face like he’s just won the World Series. John tells me that they’d just caught a ball up in the stands and Gabe was ecstatic.
“I’m the luckiest person in the whole wide world!” Gabe had said that day. John tells me that Gabe said it again when he got home and showed the ball to Margo and Gracie and then again when he was snuggling with John at bedtime. “The luckiest person in the whole world, the entire galaxy and beyond!”
“He was the luckiest that day,” I say, and I can feel my eyes get wet.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, don’t cry on me,” John says, looking away. “Just what I need, a therapist who cries.”
“Why not cry in response to sadness?” I say pointedly. John takes his phone back and types something in.
“As long as you’re letting me use my phone,” he says, “there’s something else I want to show you.” Now that I’ve seen his wife, his daughters, his dog, and his dead son, I wonder what else he wants to share.
“Here,” he says, extending his arm in my direction. I take the phone and recognize the New York Times website. There’s a review of the new season of John’s show.
“Check out the last paragraph,” he says.
I scroll to the end, where the reviewer waxes poetic about the direction the show has taken. The main character, the reviewer writes, has begun to share glimpses of his underlying humanity without losing his edge, and this makes him all the more interesting, his moments of compassion a delightful twist. If viewers used to be riveted by his perverse lack of regard for others, the reviewer contends, now we can’t stop watching him struggle to reconcile this with what’s buried beneath. The review concludes with a question: What might we discover if he continues to reveal himself?
I look up from the phone and smile at John. “I agree,” I say. “Especially with the question posed at the end.”
“It’s a nice review, huh?” he says.
“It is—and more.”
“No, no, no—don’t start making this like he’s talking about me again. It’s the character.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Good,” he says. “Just so we’re straight on that.”
I catch John’s eye. “Why did you want me to see this?”
He looks at me like I’m an idiot. “Because it’s a great review! It’s the fucking New York Times!”
“But why that specific paragraph?”
“Because it means we’ll go into syndication. If this season is doing so well, the network can’t not give us another pickup.”
I think about how hard it is for John to be vulnerable. How ashamed and needy it makes him feel. How scary connection seems.
“Well,” I say, “I look forward to seeing where ‘the character’”—I make air quotations like John did—“goes in the next season. I think the future holds a lot of possibility.”
John’s body responds for him; he blushes. Caught, he blushes even more. “Thanks,” he says. I smile and meet his eyes, and he manages to meet mine and hold my gaze for a good twenty seconds before glancing toward his feet. Looking down, he whispers, “Thanks for . . . you know”—he searches for the right word—“everything.”
My eyes tear up again. “You’re so welcome,” I say.
“Well,” John says, clearing his throat and folding his pedicured feet onto the couch. “Now that the preliminaries are over, what the fuck should we talk about today?”
54
Don’t Blow It
There are two main categories of people who are so depressed that they contemplate suicide. One type thinks, I had a nice life, and if I can just emerge from this terrible crisis—the death of a loved one; extended unemployment—I’ll have something to look forward to. But what if I can’t? The other type thinks, My life is barren, and there’s nothing to look forward to.
Rita fell into the second category.
Of course, the story a patient comes into therapy with may not be the story she leaves with. What was included in the telling at first might now be written out, and what was left out might become a central plot point. Some major characters might become minor ones, and some minor characters might go on to receive star billing. The patient’s own role might change too—from bit player to protagonist, from victim to hero.