Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,173

as I’m about to leave, a friendly couple starts talking to me. They say that Julie is responsible for their marriage—she set them up on a blind date five years ago. I smile at their story, then try to excuse myself, but before I can, the woman in the couple asks, “And how did you know Julie?”

“She was a friend,” I say reflexively, mindful of confidentiality, but the moment I say it, I realize it also feels true.

“Will you think about me?” Julie used to ask me before she went in for her various surgeries, and I always told her I would. The assurance soothed her, helped her stay centered in the midst of her anxiety about going under the knife.

Later, though, when it became clear that Julie would die, that question took on another meaning: Will a part of me remain alive in you?

Julie had recently told Matt that she felt horrible for dying on him, and the next day he sent her a note with a lyric from the musical The Secret Garden. In it, the ghost of a beloved wife asks her grieving husband if he could forgive her, if he could hold her in his heart and “‘find some new way to love me/Now that we’re apart.’” Matt had written, Yes. He added that he didn’t believe that people disappeared but that something in us was eternal and survived.

Walking to my car that day, I hear Julie’s question: Will you think about me?

All these years later, I still do.

I remember her most in the silences.

56

Happiness Is Sometimes

“Honestly, don’t hold back. Do you think I’m an asshole?” John asks as he sets down the bag with our lunches. He’s brought his dog Rosie to session today—her “danny” was ill and Margo’s out of town—and she’s on John’s lap, sniffing the takeout containers. Now John’s eyes are on me, as are Rosie’s beady ones, as if they’re both awaiting my response.

I’m caught off guard by his question. If I say yes, I might hurt John, and the last thing I want to do is hurt him. If I say no, I might be condoning some of his more asshole-like behaviors instead of creating awareness around them. The second-to-last thing I want to do is to be John’s yes-man. I could turn the question around on him: Do you think you’re an asshole? But I’m more interested in something else: Why is he asking—and why now?

John flicks off his slip-on sneakers, but instead of arranging himself cross-legged on the couch, he leans forward, elbows on knees. Rosie jumps down, positions herself on the floor, and looks up at John. He hands her a treat. “Here you go, my little princess,” he croons.

“You’re not going to believe this,” he says, looking back at me, “but I made a, uh, unfortunate comment to Margo a few nights ago. She said that her therapist recommended a couples therapist for us, and I said that I wanted to get a referral from you because I don’t necessarily trust her idiot therapist’s suggestion. I knew the second it came out of my mouth that I should have filtered, but it was too late, and Margo just tore into me. ‘My idiot therapist?’ she said. ‘Mine?’ She said that if my therapist can’t see what an asshole I am, then I’m going to the idiot therapist. I apologized for calling her therapist an idiot and she apologized for calling me an asshole, and then we both started laughing, and I can’t remember the last time we laughed like that together. We couldn’t stop, and the girls heard us and they came in and looked at us like we were a couple of crazy people. ‘What’s so funny?’ they kept asking but we couldn’t explain it. I don’t think we even knew what was so funny.

“Then the girls started laughing and we were all laughing about the fact that we couldn’t stop laughing. Ruby got on the floor and started rolling around, and then so did Gracie, and then Margo and I looked at each other and we got on the floor and all four of us were rolling around on our bedroom floor and laughing. And then Rosie runs over to see what all the commotion’s about, and when she sees us rolling around the floor, she freezes, right there in the doorway. She just stands there shaking her head, like, You humans are too much. And then she runs away. And then we laughed