Writers & Lovers(73)

‘I love him, Case. I think I’ve always, always loved him.’

‘Adam? Gross.’

He whines. ‘He shoved me off of him after.’ He barely gets this out before he lets loose with a wild moan. Oafie starts barking from Adam’s mudroom.

When the long jag is over, I pull his hands off his face. ‘Listen to me. He wanted it. He wanted you. This whole week all he’s done is talk about sex and the people you both fooled around with. He was working you all week. I saw it. He wanted you, then he wanted the satisfaction of pushing you away.’

‘It was so awful. The expression on his face.’

‘He’s never going to allow himself the option of you or any other guy. He’s not that brave. And I don’t think you’re in love with him. You just needed to play out an old attraction.’

He’s lying there with his eyes shut, but he’s listening.

‘Go home. Tell Phil everything. See where it goes from there. Maybe you’ll still want to leave him. Maybe you’ll look at that gorgeous dining room table he made you and you’ll think, “Is there anything sexier than an ophthalmologist who can make me a seven-foot table?” ’

In the morning I drive him to the airport. He flips down the visor and sees the red hollows under his eyes. ‘God, I look worse than you now,’ he says. He looks out the window at the morass of highway construction. ‘I hate Boston. Nothing but pain in Boston.’

At the terminal, he pulls his suitcase out of the back, and we stand close on the sidewalk.

‘You going to be okay?’ he says.

‘Yeah, and so are you. Call me when you get home.’

He nods. We hug each other tight.

I feel like my mother, and I feel like my mother is hugging me.

He walks to the revolving doors. He waves. The doors spin him away.





Caleb left me the name of a doctor who agreed to see me three times before my insurance ran out at the end of the month. His name is Malcolm Sitz, and his office is in Arlington on the third floor of a brick duplex. He can only meet at five thirty in the afternoon. We’ve just lost daylight savings so it’s already dark when I get there.

He’s a slender man with smooth skin and a silver bob. He has a moustache he likes to touch. From my seat, a pilled wool armchair facing his ergonomic recliner, I can look out the window and down into the house behind his small yard. It’s a contemporary house with walls of glass revealing a brightly lit kitchen. A girl of nine or ten is sitting at the table doing her homework.

He asks why I’m here, and I tell him about the buzzing under my skin, the ringing—

‘You have ringing in your ears?’

‘Not actual ringing. It’s like my whole body is a bell, like a huge bell in a tower that’s been struck and—’

He held up his hand. ‘Let’s skip the flowery descriptions. You’re anxious. Why? When’d it start?’

I tell him about Red Barn and Luke and the night I first felt it. I tell him about my mother dying and leaving Barcelona and moving East and Iris and the potting shed and the revisions and rejections and EdFund and all the debt collectors catching up with me. He listens, his fat pen with the jelly grip hovering over a yellow legal pad, but he doesn’t write anything.

‘Anything else?’

I tell him about Oscar. I tell him about Silas.

‘Did you ever hear the one about the donkey who starved to death between two stacks of hay,’ he says.

Fucking, fucking Pilgrims.

Down in the bright kitchen a man is chopping vegetables, and a woman is measuring out rice and water in a pot. The girl is still doing her homework. Her legs are swinging back and forth under her chair.

I start to cry.

Dr. Sitz seems to know exactly what I’m seeing even though he cannot see it from his chair. It almost feels staged. Cue the stable family.

At the start of the second appointment I begin by talking about my parents, and after a few minutes he waves his hand at me.

‘I don’t want to hear those old soggy stories. Tell me what you were thinking about on the way over here.’

I tell him I was thinking about all the people I’ve pitied and scorned for ‘selling out’ or ‘settling’ and how none of them are alone or broke or driving to a shrink’s office in Arlington.

‘You’re a gambler. You gambled. You bet the farm.’ ‘On this novel? That was a bad bet. I can’t even finish it.’

‘Not on the novel. Your success or failure is not based on what happens with that pile of papers. On yourself. On your fantasies. So what do you want now, at age thirty-one?’

‘I want to finish the book.’

He nods.

‘And start another one.’

He laughs. ‘You’re a very high roller.’

‘So what are you scared of?’ he asks me at our last appointment. ‘I mean really scared of.’

I try to think about it. ‘I’m scared that if I can’t even handle this right now, how will I be able to handle bigger things in the future?’

He nods. He scrapes his moustache against his thumbs. ‘Bigger things in the future. What’s bigger than this? Your mother dies suddenly. It echoes her previous abandonment of you thus making her death a double whammy. Your father proved to be incapable of being your father. You owe money to several large corporations who will squeeze you indefinitely. You spent six years writing a novel that may or may not get published. You got fired from your job. You say you want a family of your own but there doesn’t seem to be a man in your life, and you may have fertility problems. I don’t know, my friend. This is not nothing.’