Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,97

but this one made her anxious and worsened her insomnia. She decided she was done with medication.

Meanwhile, Rita told me that a board position had opened up in her apartment building, and I encouraged her to join so that she could get to know her neighbors better. (“No, thank you,” she said. “The interesting tenants are too busy to join.”)

I’d brainstormed with her about volunteering, perhaps getting involved in the art world or at a museum, since her passions were painting and art history, but she came up with reasons to dismiss these suggestions as well. I talked with her about how she might make contact with her adult children, who had, to this point, shut her out of their lives, but she felt she couldn’t handle another failed attempt. (“I’m already deeply depressed.”) And I’d suggested the dating apps, which resulted in what she called “the octogenarian brigade.”

All this time, what I found more urgent than her birthday-suicide fantasy was the acute level of pain she lived with and had been living with for so long. Part of it was due to circumstances. She’d had a lonely childhood, an abusive husband, and a difficult midlife, and she had certain relational patterns that got in her way. But part of it, I felt as I got to know Rita better, might be something else, and I wanted to confront her about it. I’d come to the conclusion that even if Rita could relieve some of her pain, she wouldn’t allow herself to be happy. Something was holding her back.

And then she called me for an emergency session.

Rita, it turned out, also had a secret. Recently, there had been a man in her life—and now she was in crisis.

Myron, Rita tells me when she arrives for her emergency session, agitated and uncharacteristically disheveled, is “a former friend.” At the time of their friendship, she explains, which ended six months ago, he was her only friend. Yes, there were women she’d say hello to in passing at the Y, but they were younger and not interested in befriending “an old lady.” She felt, as she had for much of her life, excluded. Invisible.

Myron, though, took notice of Rita. At the beginning of last year, when he was sixty-five, he had relocated from the East Coast and moved into Rita’s apartment complex. Three years before, his wife of forty years had died, and his grown children, who lived in Los Angeles, had encouraged him to move west.

They’d met at the mailboxes in the common area of their building. He was leafing through flyers advertising local events—junk mail that Rita always tossed straight into the trash—when he told Rita he was new to town and wondered if any of the listings were nearby. She peered at the flyer. The farmers’ market was close, she said, just a few blocks away.

Great, Myron said, will you go with me so I don’t get lost?

I’m not dating, Rita said.

I’m not asking you on a date, he said.

Rita thought she might die of embarrassment. Of course, she thought. Myron couldn’t possibly be attracted to her, standing there in her baggy sweatpants and T-shirt with the hole in it. Her hair was greasy, the unwashed hair of a depressed person, her face sagging with sadness. If he was attracted to anything, she assumed it was her mail: a brochure from the modern art museum, a copy of The New Yorker, a magazine about bridge. They apparently had similar interests. Myron was struggling to adjust to the city, and Rita seemed to be about his age. Perhaps, he said, Rita knew people to introduce him to, to get his social life going. (Little did he know that Rita was a friendless hermit.)

At the farmers’ market, they talked about old movies, Rita’s paintings, Myron’s family, and bridge. In the following months, Myron and Rita did things together—took walks, visited museums, went to a few lectures, tried some new restaurants. But mostly, they cooked dinner and watched movies on Myron’s couch, both of them chattering throughout. When Myron needed a new outfit for his grandchild’s baby-naming ceremony, they went to the mall, and Rita, with her keen artistic eye, found the perfect one. Sometimes if she was at the mall she would pick up a shirt for Myron just because she knew it would look good on him. She also helped furnish his apartment. In return, Myron hung Rita’s artwork on her walls with earthquake-proof hardware, and he served as her on-call