Trust Exercise(60)
Therapy can seem like revision of memory. It can seem like you’re saving your life by destroying your story and writing a new one. It can seem like therapy won’t get its goddamn grubby mitts off you. At best therapy demands uncomfortable humility from the person with total recall, and at worst it can remind me of my mother—the difference being that therapy wants the emotional truth, while my mother runs screaming from any emotion or truth that’s not hers. Was Sarah the same, as I’d always assumed? One thing I’d known about Sarah since high school was that her memory was well below average. She forgot things all the time, in every category. She forgot where she’d placed her bag, her jacket, or her lipstick the instant whatever it was left her hand. She forgot what assignments there were, or whether she’d done them. She forgot why she’d fought with somebody, and what had been said. The result of her forgetfulness—or the reason for it?—might be her “imaginative gift” for rewriting the past, but did this mean she was more, or less, likely to perceive someone else’s emotional truth? If she forgot my emotional truth—assuming she’d ever known it in the first place—was she now all the more on the lookout for it? Or would she just lend me hers, like my mother would do, and ignore a bad fit?
Karen would have thought the latter—or she would have thought that she thought the latter. But as Sarah embarked on her fourth daiquiri, Karen realized that something had changed. It wasn’t just Sarah’s blood alcohol level. Sarah, who had been so obviously shocked and terrified in the bookstore when Karen appeared—who had been, at that moment, and whether accidentally or not, perfectly in touch with the emotional truth of the situation, which was that Karen despised her—had now nestled into a new, fraudulent understanding, of Karen’s creation, with all the unquestioning trust of a baby. That new, fraudulent understanding was that Karen and Sarah had never ruptured. They had always been friends. They had never stopped loving each other, simply drifted apart. And Karen realized that she, Karen, had known all along that Sarah, for all her charisma and beauty and knowingness, which is different from knowing, was fundamentally forgetful, insecure, untrusting of her instincts, and anxious for praise and acceptance. And Karen realized that she had known all along that Sarah, if given the chance, would ignore Karen’s emotional truth if she was offered an emotional falsehood that made her feel better. And Karen realized that this weakness of Sarah’s was something she, Karen, had been counting on. For all her self-deprecating misgivings about having come to Skylight Books without a plan, Karen let herself admit she’d had a plan all along.
“I’d have loved to see his face when you showed up at auditions,” Sarah said eagerly. By now she had heard about Martin’s new play—minus Martin’s witch hunt—and David’s production of it—minus David’s crusading—and Karen’s saucy, fun-loving decision to take David up on his bogus invitation to audition for him, if not the form the audition had taken. Karen had made Sarah laugh about David’s shrewd use of his charm as a method of payment. Oh, yes, Sarah remembered this well. David’s gift for making you feel only he saw your gifts. Despite the cool night Sarah was flushed, with alcohol but more substantially this memory of David, and the pleasure of talking about it. Although, in her new happy trust in her friendship with Karen, she didn’t neglect to insist Karen was talented. “I mean, David’s right, you are good,” she said, “but I think you’re right also—that he told you to audition because he loves pretending he’s this great, supportive guy. That’s why I love that you went. So what happened?”
Karen did a look of comical surprise—she hadn’t mentioned already? “I got it.” Sarah shrieked and threw her arms in the air.
“After all that BS about my unacknowledged talent I guess he had to cast me,” Karen said. This was false modesty. Remember that the part—the only female part in the play—was written for a woman who “however long she lives, will never cease to look the waif.” Remember that the character is slight enough to be mistaken for a boy. Karen is petite and in excellent shape but she’s never since she turned ten years old “looked the waif” or been mistaken for a boy. That pretty young actress whose audition Karen wiped from David’s memory—she’d been a waif. But David wound up casting Karen, to his own great surprise, and no more from pity than guilt. Her un-ideal physique was the proof that she had something better. “Didn’t you and Martin have a thing?” David had asked Karen at The Bar, after telling her he’d given her the part to his own great surprise. Karen had lowered her lids at him, as if she hadn’t expected the question—she had—and also found it in very poor taste. “Fine,” David said, “but just do me a favor. Don’t get in touch with him before the first rehearsal. I want to see the look on his face. I bet we’ll be able to use that, for when the Girl first comes into Doc’s bar.”
“So he’s Doc?” Karen confirmed casually.
“Fuck yeah. I told him that I wasn’t going to do it if he didn’t play Doc. I can’t wait to see his face when he sees you.”
“Me too,” Karen said.
At the open-air Mexican restaurant, Karen didn’t go into these details with Sarah, not even the detail of Martin’s casting. But when Sarah asked, “Do you think there’s any chance Martin might come see it?” Karen said, “David seems sure that he will,” and watched Sarah first withstanding, then submitting to temptation.