American Spirit: A Novel (15 page)

How to Ace Therapy’s Stupid Trick Questions

M
ATTHEW TAKES THE ELEVATOR
up to Milton’s apartment and this is where this stuff happens. And one pays in cash from the bank machine for this. Every twenty that comes out these days is starting to look like food or electricity or gasoline; Jackson’s face concerned and grave about the shape things are in. But one doesn’t have to pay for therapy until the end of it; and maybe Matthew can talk fast and do a half session.

Into the elevator, the smell of food from every floor means the air is one huge, terrible soup. Out of the elevator, down the hall, and the door to the apartment is left ajar in welcome. One walks in through the door, fresh from the elevator
and hallway of bad soup, and into the smell of yesteryear’s tonics wafting from the apartment’s bathroom. Moving farther still, down toward the living room, and here is the best painting in the city as far as Matthew can tell—a pumped-up and saturated pallet of hyper green and red against gray-and-white resignation. This painting, this photo-realist thing, depicts his therapist mowing a perfectly square lawn in front of a perfectly pleasant house in the suburbs, in his trademark suit, in this case linen, eyes miserable and sunken, face ashen. The routine most weeks is that Matthew stands in front of it, courting Stendhal syndrome, until Milton pokes his head from the small office next to the kitchen to say they can get started. One time there was an exchange, and this was years ago, and it went something like this.

“That’s you? Mowing?”

“It was a gift from a client. At one point I left the city for the suburbs, when I was married.”

“How was it?”

“A very pleasant picture for a long time, and then a lot like this one.” And on this line Milton stands for a beat to let it land, turns his head slightly to try to see Matthew and whether or not the joke sticks. In the old days he wouldn’t have done any of that, but this is what signing up for improv and stand-up comedy classes at age sixty-five has done to Matthew’s therapist.

Matthew is sitting on the sofa in the little room now. The last few sessions have been canceled and allowed to go unpaid,
completely against the usual policy and custom of paying whether or not one shows up, and whether or not your life felt any different after the session. Maybe being back here again is good, but maybe it’s still too soon after black Friday at the office—maybe one should wait a year, because the session is already rooted mostly in Matthew issuing personal spin with regard to how things are going; he sounds like an athlete doing locker room press. And the stuff that comes out of the mouth, it’s almost actually believed in the heart and head: Matthew wasn’t fired so much as he saw an exciting opportunity to take advantage of; his marriage didn’t explode in his face so much as he’s questioned monogamy like some kind of sporting intellectual cad; money is fine, things are good financially, and besides, money isn’t everything. There is no talk of frightening young people with guns, drinking and doing drugs in parking lots all day long, meditating/fistfighting, being a freelance drug dealer for a night, sex on hallucinogens, or crafting. Matthew talks to his therapist the way most people talk in job interviews or when being pulled over for driving while intoxicated. He issues what he guesses must be the right answers, hoping something he says triggers one of the jokes at his expense and is laced with advice for better living. Before the stand-up comedy classes, Milton tended to just land straightforward maxims; homespun turns of phrase that brought cold comfort; that rolled off the tongue and into Matthew’s head, arguably never sinking in.

Slow down to go faster.

Learn to stand still long enough for

something to happen.

If you feel guilty, you’re probably being had.

If you haven’t cried since you were nine,

maybe you haven’t tried.

And while we’re on the topic of crying, Milton is aware that Matthew hasn’t cried since he was nine. Years ago, when therapy started, Milton made it a habit of making sure to draw attention to the box of tissues on the table in front of Matthew; nothing overt, subtle stuff, but as the two of them were settling in to begin, he might have moved them forward on the table while acting like he was simply rearranging things after the last session. One time he asked Matthew to please check and see if there were still plenty left in the decorative box that dispensed them. And Matthew made note of it, and also note of the fact that his reserve needed to be fortified and steeled in this environment where crying was being encouraged like this.

And so if the topic were to turn to the parents and what happened, or the homestead and the heartbreak, he would answer questions like a soldier taught to handle questions without getting too wound up in them. He would use any number of tricks to keep it together in his head. Probably the most common of which was simply thinking of work stuff or wildlife or sex—of anything to distract himself emotionally. So Milton would ask him how he felt about death or divorce
or his parents and let him know that it was okay to feel sad, even as an adult. And Matthew would stare back and reply with an unwavering voice, and in his head he would be thinking:
blow job, blow job, blow job.
Once he almost said the word aloud while the brain juggled the tasks of answering and thinking. And when you’re talking about your parents to a trained mental health professional, and you blurt out
blow job,
you may as well just go ahead and book three years’ worth of sessions, because it would open a can of worms, to say the least. But in today’s session, after issuing the handful of levelheaded responses about how things are going and generally creating the impression that nothing has changed without Matthew’s permission or even his insistence, the brain administers a twitch and a squeeze of serotonin that lies on its surface and is spared uptake. It seems that the stiff upper lip has earned him his walking papers for the day.

“Okay, so, in closing, everything is going well, is what I’m hearing.”

“I mean, yeah, you know. I mean, yeah, I’m interested in some other opportunities possibly. I don’t know if I love, per se, what I’m doing for a living. So I might investigate some pretty interesting offers and ideas and things that are coming my way. And I’m reevaluating some things. Personal things.”

“And how does it make you feel when you consider this?”

“Just the way a person, you know, feels when thinking. The normal feelings, really. It makes me feel like a man thinking about other opportunities. You know that feeling, you’ve thought about other opportunities, I’m sure. I mean, no, everything’s
good. There have been some tough breaks, there have been some lucky breaks and good times, really the basic mix that everybody has. Really pretty normal; pretty average.”

“I noticed you were limping on the way in; just a little.”

Matthew pauses here trying to size up whether or not it’s a trick question, or trick statement, or trick observation; whatever it is, is it a trick? It is. Right? Yes. Has to be.

“I… was hit. By a car.”

“You really had to think about that for a minute.”

“I was just, yeah, I had almost forgotten to be honest with you. It just. I was shopping. Got hit shopping.” This is such a good lie that it’s basically the truth.

And then Matthew just stares, waiting for the next question, wondering if he’s nailing them, wondering if he’s passing the test, wondering if his parents’ battered and bruised ghosts, soaked in fuel, are stuck to him; wondering if every single stupid thing he’s pinned with these days is written all over his face in a rash of tells and ticks. Kristin doesn’t know what she’s not supposed to know, Milton doesn’t know what he’s not supposed to know, the guy at the gas station in the morning is sewn up fine and doesn’t suspect a thing has changed. Matthew isn’t fooling anyone and Matthew is the last to know. Hey, the bell on the timer made the
ding!
And here’s the part when Milton says he’s afraid their time is up.

And then he might add that he’d love to show Matthew a video of his recent stand-up comedy or the most recent student film he’s acted in, but only if Matthew feels okay with
that; only if Matthew has the few extra minutes. If Matthew says yes, then he’ll see his therapist in a host of roles. He’ll see him act like an elderly man propositioning hookers in what is supposed to be a comedy; he’ll see him walk out into a field in a white suit and die of a heart attack in what is supposed to play as poignant drama or something. Or maybe today it will be a video of him holding down a ten-minute slot at The Comedy Cellar with rough-hewn impressions of rednecks largely informed by old American television like
Hee Haw
and
Laugh-In.
And these awkward five minutes will start once the bell rings; once Milton speaks up to say time has had its way with the session. But first maybe just reaffirm that things are going fine.

“So, yeah, no complaints, really. I don’t know. Things are fine. I’m fine.” Here lies a last, long pause, born the moment one wonders how well they’ve gotten over, and dead once the next words are finally spoken.

“Would a little loan come in handy? A couple hundred dollars for a few weeks?”

“Yes.”

Gut Feeling

T
HE DAYS STANDING
between Matthew and the next craft class pass about as slowly as they can, just for spite it seems. There are a handful of things that don’t help; a day spent going to have a machine take sixteen X-rays that deliver a sliced-up cross-sectional picture of the abdomen, for instance. The head is screaming inside, offering up this sturdy piece of medical advice:
Why confirm what you already know is bad news and more than a suspicion?

The way this goes down when the insurance is gone is that one goes to a place called Alpha Imaging and waits in a waiting room that boasts Home Depot tile, leatherette sofas, and a Mediterranean mural that work in concert to try and make you feel like you’re not in an X-ray imaging facility at all, but
rather burning your vacation days on a rustic seaside plaza in Barcelona. Matthew waits until one of the stout, tough, tired Puerto Rican women gossiping at the front counter call the correct name. But first they bitch about the Bronx number 4 train and how it’s running late every day. Then they show each other their long nails somehow painted like a cross between a floral print in a hotel bar and a custom van from the eighties. Then one of them picks at a lunch in a container from home; heated up in a microwave. Any organic smell heated in this room somehow instantly smells like something gone wrong; like stale blood and hair; it floats by duly noticed and steadfastly ignored by the waiting room full of long faces resigned to distracting their worst thoughts with celebrity gossip magazines. After signing in and filling everything out, Matthew steps back up to the counter to discreetly say that his plan today is to pay with a credit card. And then the receptionist or admissions woman or whatever she is announces this at stage volume to the rest of the people relaxing in the clean Spanish courtyard by the sea.

“So dares no insurance? Den you nee to pay today.”

And Matthew feels like he may as well turn around to the room behind him filled with a dozen everyday people waiting to find out if they’re ghosts, and announce plainly:
I went to the bathroom all over my office, so I got fired and now I don’t have insurance. I drink and take pills to forget that I’m going bankrupt quickly and bleeding inside slowly; everything’s fine, though, I’m fine.
Even the gun wouldn’t fix it today, this esteem
that hangs in shreds, like a flag faded by the sun of a hundred hot days, only to be left out in a hurricane. Matthew remembers to clarify one other thing.

“My doctor said to tell you I need to walk with films, not with a disc. I have to bring films to my doctor’s appointment next week.”

“I know,
Papi,
butchu steel got to wait until we call you name. Everyone else, they waiting too.”

“I know, I wasn’t saying I…”

And on his way back to the leatherette sofa in front of the big aquarium, Matthew tries to give the other people waiting a kind of look like,
Of course I have to wait to be called, I wasn’t asking for some kind of break, I just needed to tell them I have to get film and not a disc… isn’t she ridiculous?
But they’ve got themselves and their situations on their mind, like anyone here in a right mind would, so nobody catches his look.

When it’s all over, after Matthew has been dressed in gowns and slippers that are about three pieces of bad news away from being something one’s body gets wheeled off wearing, after he’s taken dumb big breaths and held them for the technician, and been slid into a metal tube smaller and tighter than the one his parents stepped into and fell from the sky in, after the machines circle and cut their slices of view, Matthew leaves with a big square envelope of X-rays, jammed under his arm like one of those oversized checks they give contest winners, but what a stupid contest to win.
Then Matthew is at home in the kitchen, holding each giant black-and-white snapshot up to the light above the stove, trying his best to make heads or tails of sixteen sequential peeks at everything inside the body. The emulsion around the edges is black but his name and date of birth are clear, and so is today’s date, and so are the heart, intestines, liver, and pancreas. And when a person looks at something like this, frame after frame of guts and a birth date, one thinks about how long they’ve been living, how long they’ve got left to live. And at the edge of each little snapshot is your doctor’s name, and on the edge of each giant page of little snapshots is the word
emotion
with a little
^®
next to it.