Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,164
session.
John shakes his head, mixes his salad with his chopsticks, takes a bite, chews.
“Fucking network,” he says, swallowing. “They made me do it.”
I nod.
“They said everyone likes therapists.”
I shrug. Oh, well.
“They’re like sheep,” John continues. “One show has a therapist, every show has to have one.”
“It’s your show,” I observe. “Couldn’t you say no?”
John thinks about this. “Yeah,” he says. “But I didn’t want to be an asshole.”
I smile. He didn’t want to be an asshole.
“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.