When Dorita left, I missed her. This was not good. This was not how carefree friends were supposed to feel. Damn. What was I doing to myself? My life was already complicated enough.
I was confused.
Well, I sighed, since I’m confused, there’s only one thing to do.
I called. She was free. This was good.
I walked there.
I needed the exercise.
Halfway there my cell phone rang. ‘Private number.’ Jesus.
This time I answered.
I heard a clattering sound. Some muffled grunts. Then the line went dead.
Just what I needed. Crank calls. I resolved to go back to ignoring private numbers.
Sheila was wearing a suit.
My, I said, you’re looking very corporate today.
She usually wore her quasi-hippy gear. Sandals. Baggy flowered top of some kind. Jeans, or something between hospital workers’ greens and silk pajamas.
She smiled, ignored my comment.
Okay, I said. On to matters more germane.
I wanted to talk about this Dorita thing. I wanted to talk about how radically I needed to sublimate – or was it how radical was the sublimation I needed? – when the need that needed to be sublimated was itself so radically submerged. But I couldn’t. For some reason it didn’t feel right. I didn’t feel ready. Not that I thought that Sheila would react in some inappropriate, some disabling way. Just that I didn’t think that I was ready to handle facing up to it. Getting up front and personal with my own personal Monster. Couldn’t do it. Not that day.
We talked about the strange and liberating coldness that I felt in the face of Melissa’s relapse.
There’s got to come a point when you recognize her responsibility for her own condition, she said. That it’s not your doing. You’re like the child who blames himself for his parents’ divorce. It’s not your fault. And you don’t have to live in hell forever. She’s created that hell. Not you. And only she can un-create it. You’ve done what you can do. It’s time to sit back. Let nature take its course. Or Melissa. If she’s ever to be rid of this, it won’t be because of anything you do or say. It has to come from within herself.
Sheila rarely went on at such length. But I’d lobbed her an easy one. And she’d hit it out of the park. Yes, of course. That was what I had been feeling. It wasn’t cold, unfeeling evil. It was resignation. It was taking back my life. And it was okay.
We talked about work. My increasing disillusion with the gamesmanship and intellectual squalor of office life.
She made the usual sympathetic noises.
The sympathetic noises helped. But they weren’t quite enough. We talked about tinkering with the meds. Increasing my dosages. I refrained as usual from telling her about the extra Valium I’d stolen from one of Melissa’s many stashes. Not because she wouldn’t understand. Because she might tell me about some deadly side effect. Of mixing it with all that other stuff. Then I’d have to give it up.
I’m thinking of quitting the legal biz, I said. Become a professional poker player.
Really? That’s interesting.
Interesting? I thought you’d disapprove.
Why would you think that?
Don’t you addiction people think of gambling as just another species of the beast? Wouldn’t you be afraid I’d succumb? Make my life even more ruinous than it already is?
Your life isn’t ruinous. You know that. And yes, it can be an addiction. A very destructive one. But I don’t see you as a gambling addict. I think you’re too calculating. Actually, I see you more like one of my other clients. He quit a very successful investment banking career and opened his own poker room. Right here in the city. He’s doing very well. And he’s happy. More happy than he ever was making five times the money.
That’s positively inspiring. And you think it’s okay? Isn’t running a poker room illegal?
I wouldn’t know. But you know I don’t make those kind of judgments.
The moral agnosticism of the shrink profession never failed to give me pause. It didn’t seem to fit, somehow. Perhaps it was some residual connection my subconscious made between therapy and confession, but I always expected Sheila to show some disapproval, however subtle, when I told her of my less savory actions and thoughts. But she never did. She was very consistent that way.
Well then, I said, I’ll keep it on the agenda. I wouldn’t know how to start, though, to tell you the truth. Which I always do, you know.
Know how to start?
Tell the truth.
Ah.
But not all of it.
She smiled her warm smile.
You wouldn’t be you if you did, she said.
I shook my head in admiration. She knew me better than I knew myself.
Of course, that’s what I was paying her for.
Anyway, as I was saying, I continued, to tell you the truth I wouldn’t know where to begin. But I can do some research. How hard can it be? Can’t be harder than what I do now, can it?
I would think not. We know that anything you apply yourself to you can do.
Sublimation, I said.
Sublimation?
She raised an eyebrow.
That’s what it is, isn’t it?
What what is?
This poker thing.
Maybe, she said.
Sometimes she liked to go into mysterious mode. Let me figure it out. Old-style shrinkification. But she saved it for special moments. When she knew I was close to something. When she could sit back and let me break out. Open a new door. Take a new step.
How far I still had to go. Before I could just sit in a chair, in the sun, sipping an iced coffee, and think, wow, it’s a beautiful day.
Damn, I said, you’re good.
She smiled her indulgent smile.
Did she like a compliment, like the rest of us? Or did she put it in a box, with the rest of my neuroses, neatly labeled? ‘Rick Redman’s compulsive aggrandizement of therapist: overcompensation for lack of parental objects of veneration in anal stage,’ blah, blah.
Who knew? Who cared? Hey, it made me feel better.
Surely that was enough.