Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,24
his therapy room. Instead of professional-looking furniture and the usual art—a framed poster of an abstract painting; maybe an African mask—the aesthetic in here is Grandma’s hand-me-downs. There’s even a musty smell to go with it. In a corner are two worn, high-backed dining chairs in an outdated paisley gold-brocade fabric, an equally worn and outdated rug on top of the beige wall-to-wall carpet, and a credenza covered by a stained lace tablecloth topped with doilies—doilies!—and a vase of fake flowers. On the floor between the chairs is a white-noise machine, and in front of them, in lieu of a coffee table, is what probably used to be a living-room side table now nicked and chipped and covered by a mess of magazines. A paper folding screen shields this seating area from the path leading in and out of Wendell’s office so that patients have some privacy, but you can still see clearly through the hinged openings.
I know I’m not here for the décor, but I find myself wondering: Can somebody with such bad taste help me? Is this a reflection of his judgment? (An acquaintance told me that she’d been profoundly distracted by the crooked pictures hanging in her therapist’s office; why wouldn’t she just straighten the damn things?)
For about five minutes, I glance at the magazine covers—Time, Parents, Vanity Fair—and then the door to the therapy room opens and out walks a woman. She whizzes behind the screen, but I can tell in the split second I see her that she’s pretty, well dressed, and tearful. Then Wendell appears in the waiting area.
“I’ll just be a minute,” he says, and he heads into the hallway, presumably to use the restroom.
As I wait, I wonder what the pretty woman was crying about.
When Wendell returns, he gestures for me to enter his office. There’s no hesitation at the doorway now. I go straight to position A, by the window, he to position C, by the side table, and I launch right in.
“Blah-blah-blah-blah,” I begin. “And if you can believe this, Boyfriend said, ‘Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah,’ so I said, ‘Well, blah-blah-blah?’”
Or at least, that’s what I’m sure it sounds like to Wendell. This goes on for a while. I’ve brought in pages of notes for this session, numbered, annotated, and in chronological order, just like I organized the interviews I did as a journalist before I became a therapist.
I confess to Wendell that I’d caved and phoned Boyfriend and that he’d let it go to voicemail. Humiliated, I had to wait a full day for him to call me back, knowing the entire time that the last thing anyone wants to do is talk to the person he’s just broken up with but who still wants to be together.
“You’re probably going to ask what I wanted to get out of calling him,” I say, anticipating his next question.
Wendell raises his right eyebrow—just the one, I notice, and I wonder how he does that—but before he can respond, I plow ahead. First, I explain, I wanted Boyfriend to tell me that he missed me and this was all a big mistake. But barring that “unlikely possibility” (added so that Wendell knows I have self-awareness, even though I’d believed that Boyfriend would tell me he’d reconsidered), I wanted to get clear on how we had arrived at this point. If I could just get my questions answered, I’d stop going over the breakup in my head ad nauseam, in an infinite loop of confusion. Which is why, I tell Wendell, I subjected Boyfriend to a several-hour interrogation—I mean conversation—in which I tried to solve the mystery of What the Fuck Led to Our Sudden Breakup.
“And then he says, ‘Being around a kid is limiting and distracting,’” I go on, reading verbatim quotes. “‘It never would have been enough alone time with you. And I realized that no matter how great the kid, I’m never going to want to live with any child other than my own.’ So then I said, ‘Why did you hide all this from me?’ and he said, ‘Because I needed to figure it out before I said anything.’ And then I said, ‘But don’t you think we should have discussed this?’ and he said, ‘What’s to discuss? It’s binary. Either I could live with a kid or I couldn’t, and only I could figure that out.’ And just as my brain is about to burst, he says, ‘I really love you, but love doesn’t conquer all.’