Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,176

arms, rearranges his legs. Rosie opens her eyes, sighs, closes them again. He goes on to say that he remembers standing on the awards stage with the show’s staff and thinking, Ha! Take this, you morons! You can take your rejection letters and shove them up your asses! I’ve got a fucking Emmy!

Every year, as his show garnered more awards, John would feel a perverse sense of satisfaction. He’d remember all those people who hadn’t believed he was good enough, but now here he was, with an office full of Emmys, a bank account full of cash, a portfolio full of retirement funds, and he’d think, They can’t take any of this away from me.

I think about how “they” had taken away his mother.

“Who’s ‘they’?” I ask John.

“The fucking med-school interviewers,” he says. It’s clear that his success was driven as much by revenge as passion. And I wonder who “they” are for him now. Most of us have a “they” in the audience, even though nobody’s really watching, at least not how we think they are. The people who are watching us—the people who really see us—don’t care about the false self, about the show we’re putting on. Who are those people for John?

“Oh, come on,” he says. “Everyone cares about the show we put on.”

“You think I do?”

John sighs. “You’re my therapist.”

I shrug. So?

John relaxes into the couch.

“When I was rolling on the floor with my family,” he says, “I had the strangest thought. I was thinking that I wished you could see us. I wanted you to see me in that moment because I felt so much like a person you don’t really know. Because in here, you know, it’s all doom and gloom. But driving over here today, I thought, Maybe she does know. Maybe you do have, like, some kind of therapist’s sixth sense about people. Because—and I’m not sure if it’s all of your annoying questions or the sadistic silences you put me through—but I feel like you get me, you know? And I don’t want your head to get too big or anything, but I thought, you have a more complete picture of my total humanity than anyone else in my life.”

I’m so moved I can’t speak. I want to tell John how touched I am, not just by how he feels, but by his willingness to tell me. I want to tell him that I don’t think I’ll ever forget this moment, but before my voice returns John exclaims, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, don’t fucking cry on me again.”

I chuckle, and so does John. And then I tell him what I was too choked up to say a minute ago. Now John is tearing up. I remember an earlier session when John said that Margo always cries, and I’d floated the idea that Margo was doing double duty, crying for both of them. Maybe you can let Margo cry, I’d suggested, and maybe you can let yourself cry too. John hasn’t been ready to let Margo see him cry. Not yet. But given that he’ll let me see it, I feel hopeful about their couples therapy.

John points to his tears. “See?” he says. “My fucking humanity.”

“It’s magnificent,” I say.

We never open the takeout bag. We don’t need the food between us anymore.

A few weeks later, I’m on the couch at home, bawling like a baby. I’m watching John’s show, and the sociopathic character who’s become softer around the edges is talking to his brother—a person we hadn’t known existed until a couple of episodes ago. The sociopathic character and his brother had apparently been estranged, and the audience is learning in a flashback what the estrangement has been about: the brother blames the sociopathic character for his son’s death.

It’s a wrenching scene, and I think about John’s childhood dream of becoming a psychiatrist and how his grasp of exquisite pain is what makes him such a powerful writer. Was this a gift left by the pain of his mother’s death and, later, by Gabe’s? Or was it the legacy of the relationships he shared with them while they were alive?

Gain and loss. Loss and gain. Which comes first?

In our next session, John will tell me that he watched this episode with Margo and that they talked about it with their couples therapist, who, so far, seems “not particularly idiotic.” He’ll tell me that as the episode began, he and Margo sat in their den on opposite ends of their couch, but when