Awash in Talent (25 page)

Wondering how you could work on such detail-oriented code in the midst of utter chaos, I pushed open the door to the little powder room off your study.

You asked me later why I didn’t ask you for the shaving cream, and believe me, I wish I had.

I would’ve screamed if that hadn’t entailed opening my mouth. As it was, I put both hands over my nose and mouth and still couldn’t keep out the stench. I had never paid much attention to your little area, but I guess that’s no excuse for not making sure you weren’t wallowing in your own filth. Because you were, all this time. The sink should’ve been white but had pink and black mold rising out from the drain. A towel that looked crusted hard with filth hung lopsided from the rack and under it, drops of black mold had sprouted and begun to climb the walls. But that wasn’t the worst thing on the floor. All around the toilet, crusted dried spots of yellow urine.

My skin was crawling. I turned to run out, but smacked into you. You must’ve finished with your morning routine upstairs and come down to start work, only to find me invading your space. Your basic instinct is to keep me from getting away from you, and your thumbs and fingers found the exact spots where you’d already bruised me, and I cried out.

“What’s wrong?” you asked, fighting my kicking and struggling.

“Let me go,” I said, far too harshly. “I’m going to be sick.”

I’ll have to remember the next time you’re holding me too tight that the threat of vomit provokes immediate release. I sprinted up the stairs to scrub myself in the shower—I’m still shaking with the shock. The way you violated my yellow Victorian with your disgusting thoughtlessness! Then I went up to my office and searched maid services and got an estimate for that kind of industrial strength cleaning. I went down to where you were quietly working away and asked if we could afford a maid service.

“You’re keeping the house just fine,” you said, with code whizzing through your thought energy. “But if that’s what you need to be happy, of course we can afford it.”

Victorian houses have their nooks and crannies for filth, but I thought I’d been up to the grimy challenge. But if you’re not even going to be able to keep yourself sanitary, it looks like I could use a little help, to put it mildly. I never suspected marriage would demand that I muck out my partner’s filth. Shouldn’t I have been informed if that’s really an expectation? I mean, you’re a grown man, so I assumed you could take care of one tiny space. All of a sudden I miss my one-room apartment on Governor Street. These thoughts aren’t worthy of such a grand, wonderful house. Maybe I shouldn’t try to hold on to it so fiercely. Maybe I should prepare myself and walk out with the clothes on my back.

Where would I go? Even with my burgeoning practice, I can’t afford my own house. Could I go back to an apartment after this? Among the dizzying array of historical houses on the East Side, this is my only home. You can’t change that, no matter how much you do or don’t try to mess it up.

Inaction, keeping up the status quo. Already in my short career I’ve witnessed the strain of maintaining an untenable situation destroy more than one person’s sanity. How did I get here, to this place, where I massage my bruises to punish myself for such stupidity? I may not come out of this with my sanity.

This morning, I let a pair of crisply starched maids in downstairs and apologized profusely for what they were about to encounter. I asked if they had masks, and thank goodness, they did. They worked on the first two floors for most of the morning, and between sessions, one of them knocked on the entry door to my session room. I smiled meekly, but she only asked whether I wanted the office cleaned.

“You can add it next week,” I said.

Her thought energy was swarming with disgust and disapproval, but still she smiled.

“How was the first floor? Did it make you want to run away?” I asked.

She took a moment to mentally review the horrors she’d witnessed over the years. “I’ve seen worse,” she finally pronounced. It was a lie I felt grateful for.

When clients give me their copays in cash, I’ve been squirreling it away in the books no one will ever pick up on the bookcase, under vases, in cracks in the windowsill, etc. I unlocked the confidential file drawer in my desk and found a sizable wad, which I pressed into her hand without counting. “Bless you,” I said.

“We’ve already been paid through the company,” she protested, but I saw all the things she would use the cash for: new work shoes for her husband, a copay for the kids’ orthodontist, a savings account for elder care for her parents—absolutely nothing for her. Those things seemed much worthier causes than my half-baked escape fund. “Please take it as hazard comp pay and share it with your partner.” As she took the cash, an image came into her mind of her cleaning partner retching into a bucket while my dear husband blithely worked in the next room. Story of my life: all kinds of wretchedness I never signed up for.

This afternoon, Emily showed up at the door. I’m sure she was escorted to the appointment, but that person was waiting somewhere else. Emily was looking out the window as if she could dart back downstairs again. When I placed my hand lightly on her shoulder, she shrugged it off and slumped onto the couch. Her body language helps me read what I can’t from the static.

“I thought we had a deal,” she said by way of opening.

“A deal?”

“I pour my heart out for you and you release me from these sham therapy sessions. Did I not make myself clear?” She sounded especially squeaky over her static today.

“I understand you don’t want help, Emily, but truly, all I want is to help you,” I said lamely. I could sympathize enough to see how she felt betrayed by my diagnosis.

“You want to help me? Let me see Carlos. I don’t know why I’m the one who’s not allowed to see Carlos when I only want to know how he’s doing and it was Beth who viciously attacked him and probably caused him lifetime disabilities.”

I tried to get her to see the other side. “Beth wasn’t trained in using her powers, and you even wrote that she explained to you her uncontrollably negative feelings toward Carlos because of your attachment to him.”

“Yes, I see. It’s my fault she attacked an innocent man. It’s all my fault, just like everything. I don’t understand how I can be the least special sister and still have all the blame for everything. If the world revolves around Beth, why am I at the top of everyone’s blame list?”

Far be it from me to blame the victim. I tried to understand who exactly that was in this case. “You still blame Beth for Carlos’s injuries, even though you moved in next to him and kept that fact from her?”

“Being surprised about your neighbor doesn’t give you free reign to crucify him—literally.”

Since I can’t see into her mind, it can be difficult for me to remember the depths of Emily’s psychological problems. Her observation was all too sane, so I was stumped as to how to continue.

Emily picked up the thread for me. “Dr. Blundt, more therapy? Really?”

“More therapy? Are you talking about the support group?” In my official report, I had prescribed group therapy as well as continuing with me and her family sessions and taking the right drugs. “That’s not a punishment, Emily, it’s meant to help you. To get you away from your family and to give you perspective.”

“What kind of perspective can crazy people give me? Didn’t my writing show you that there’s nothing wrong with me? That Beth is the violent menace to society? How incompetent are you, exactly?”

That hurt as much as she probably intended it to. With any other client, I could shake it off because I have a clear view into his or her motives for saying something like that. But with Emily, I have only my own interpretations bouncing off her crackly shield.

“That’s just it, Emily. I’m not incompetent, and I can see that you need these sessions, and prescriptions, and a group to make progress.”

“Well, I don’t need this. Maybe I just won’t come anymore.” She jutted her chin out defiantly.

“I have a dozen phone numbers I can call if you don’t show up. Do you want those people to be wondering where you are?”

Her face changed. I wouldn’t have recognized her. A tear burst from her eye, followed by the biggest flood I’ve ever seen in a therapy session, real or on TV. It was such a relief to see emotion cross her stolid face, I cried a little, too.

I sat next to her on the couch and handed her some tissues. She accepted them, but rejected my hand on her back. One breakthrough at a time.

We didn’t say much more. Her mother was at the exit door, and it became a touching scene of maternal compassion when she saw Emily’s tear-streaked face. She looked at me and I got pure static from her, too. No normal thought energy. What is going on with that family? I slogged through it and whispered in the mother’s ear, “Today we’ve had a breakthrough. Therapy is not easy.” I gave her my most encouraging smile and she smiled back and that’s how I felt the rest of the day: all smiles.

And the drama continues. Why won’t you let me slog through the days without all these tests?

Last night, I played dead when you came in, lying on my side, turned away from you. I refused to react when you caressed my buttock and then jiggled the mattress practically off the bed frame taking care of yourself.

This is hardly the first time you’ve done this, and between it and the snoring, I don’t get much sleep anymore. Even though I haven’t been in love, I can imagine, I can create in my mind, someone who exists without annoying the daylights out of me. Someone whose sleep apnea is a sweet slumber song and who doesn’t toss and turn too much. Because even though I try to rise above such silly things, there isn’t any love to help me up.

After that, it took me hours to fall asleep. It’s another obvious sign of my troubled mind. But I’d accomplished the feat for a little while at least, because I woke up at about 4 a.m., not knowing where I was or who I was with. I made out the bedroom in the light from the streetlamp outside and realized with a sigh that I had been awakened by your high-decibel snoring. Maybe you’re sensitive to the suffering and disdain I must let off like stink waves in the comics—? No, you’re just a light sleeper, because you woke at my stirring and said drowsily, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said, too firmly. “Go back to sleep.”

If only you didn’t have to try and show me your human side at these times. This could have been a non-incident, but no, you had to drag out all the emotions I’ve been keeping so studiously bottled up.

Even though I was turned away, I could hear that you were on your back, blinking at the ceiling in the low light. “Are you happy?” you asked.

No
. “Sure. Go to sleep.”

I probably should’ve turned around to get a sense of your thought energy before attempting a deflection like that, because you weren’t in the mood to let it go. Jiggling the mattress again, you rolled over to switch on the bedside lamp.

“I sense”—this sounded ridiculous coming from you, the most self-absorbed and least sensitive person I’ve ever met—“something’s wrong. Is it me? Is something I’m doing bothering you?”

“No.” I held firm in my turned-away position.

I thought of the million things I might have said if we’d been, for example, in a marriage counseling session, or if I’d been alone on the receiving end of a therapy, where I could better contain my growing fear and be honest. But none of those million things really matter. I’m beyond marriage counseling. This whole thing was a terrible idea from the moment I logged on to the dating site, and had been prolonged mainly by my obsession with real estate.

You kept badgering me to answer and it turned into a game in your mind—could you get me to say something and start a fight? You flipped me onto my back and crouched over me and kept asking. That need for conflict gave your eyes a bizarre beatitude.

So I gave you what you wanted in the hope that it would be over faster that way. “You’re really negative,” I said. “It makes me feel sad.”

Your ego flared up, like monster made of fire. “You don’t have to absorb my negativity like a sponge.”

“That’s just it, I didn’t have anything to absorb or not absorb when we first met. You used to be much cheerier in general and you’ve changed.”

Everything I said was true, and you didn’t even try to deny it. You leaned over me, your eyes so close I feared your energy would pick up my thoughts and carry them back to you.

“I had to keep you. I had to act nice so you would stay around.”

I’m still furious at you for basically tricking me into marrying you. I couldn’t believe you actually said it out loud. You thought your little confession was bringing us closer than ever. I had to blink and struggle under the force of your energy, and you thought I was trying to get away, so you pinned my arms and pressed down into the mattress until I heard the springs squeal in protest.

I could hardly breathe, and my heart felt like a wild animal squirming in my throat, but I closed my eyes and said, more weakly than I would’ve liked, “Is this the only way you can keep me?”

You were horrified, and rightly so. You let me up all at once so that I bounced and my legs kicked you a little. Your thoughts were more muddled than I’d ever seen them. You stood up and took out your frustration on my bedside lamp, which shattered against the floor. Bunglingly, you reached for the biggest piece and set your bare foot right in the middle of the light bulb shards. Red blood sprang out like a fungus onto the expensively restored hardwood.

You looked at me, fully expecting that I would get up, sterilize your wound, apply bandages, and then clean up your outrageous mess. This was all based on a conceit that you hold so dear it comes through as a core nugget of all your thought cycles: you think I’m a substitute for your mother.

I sat up. I was too mad to control my words, although I did stop myself from picking up more broken pieces and grinding them into your miserable flesh. “I am not your mother and I will not tolerate your tantrums. If you ever lay a finger on me, that’s the last you’ll see of me.” It was like fireworks going off in my head, asserting myself like that. It felt scarier and better than anything I’d ever done since I’d left California.