Empathy (10 page)

“Give me an example,” Doc said.

“Some girl named Sarah fell in love with me. We hitch-hiked across America, stopping off in Chicago where she fucked her exboyfriend. Three days later, in a parking lot by the Bonneville Salt Flats, she said, ‘You think I'm a homosexual but I'm not.'”

Oh my God
, Doc thought.
That's exactly what that woman in white
leather said to me. Only why did she say that to me? I'm a man. I'm supposed to be immune to that sort of thing
.

“Then what happened?”

“We went to California anyway. I only had twenty-six dollars and couldn't very well turn around and hitch-hike back to New York alone. I could get raped. Spent a few weeks picking walnuts in her hometown of Visalia and ate potato dinners followed by harassing questions by her family.”

“Hold everything, Anna,” Doc said. “I though you said you never had a lover who let you meet her parents.”

“We weren't lovers anymore, remember? She'd gone straight conveniently in Utah.”

“Oh yeah.”

“So, one day we're hanging out by the one and only hot dog stand on Visalia's main drag and her father reached into his car and handed me a present. ‘Here's something you might be interested in,' he says. It was a book called
The History of Deviance in America
.”

It seemed to Doc that her time was almost up, but he decided to make it a double session.

“So then, Doc, we go to LA where she picks up some guy on the UCLA campus and we end up living with him. Me, sleeping in the living room in a condo in Westwood, listening to them fucking. Finally, she realizes that she's pregnant from that guy in Chicago. I spent three days sitting silently beside her in welfare centers and abortion clinics until the Medi-Cal came through and she gets it paid for. See, I was still acting like a lover. So, the night after the operation we're eating in that guy's apartment and news comes on the TV that Medicaid abortions have just been outlawed by the Hyde amendment. The next morning I told that guy, ‘Buy me a one-way to New York or I'll break your legs.'”

“Did he do it?”

“They always do it. All you have to do is mention New York.”

“What happened to her?”

“She had a nervous breakdown and joined EST. Nine years later she came out again and apologized. But that's a long time to wait, nine formative years.”

Yeah he'd make it a double session but only charge her for one. Or was that too Pavlovian and unprofessional?

You're not supposed to let your patients know that you like them
, he remembered. It's that fucking blank slate.

“What can you do to feel better?” Doc asked.

“My last lover's boyfriend got to go to her mother's house whenever he wanted to. He got to go so much that he didn't want to anymore. He even got to go when they were breaking up so she could be with me. But I never got to go.”

“Oh,” Doc said. “That is not right.”

“Soon it will be my birthday and I want to go.”

“I think you should go,” Doc said.

“Her mother has an apartment on the Upper West Side. I want to go there.”

“Do you have the address?”

“Yes, I called information and got listings for everyone with that name on the Upper West Side, and I narrowed it down to her.”

“How are you going to get there?”

By this time Anna's body language was entirely different. That's because she was scheming, strategizing for things to go her way.

“I'm going to wake up on the morning of my birthday. I'm going to put on my best clothes. I'm going to take the subway, and when I get out I'll go to the nearest Korean fruit stand and buy some flowers. Some special flowers. Some orange ones. Then I'll go to her door and ring the buzzer.”

“What if there's a doorman?” Doc said. “They have those on the Upper West Side, you know.”

“If there's a doorman, I'll announce myself. I'll say ‘I've come to bring some flowers.' I'll get the best ones.”

“Even if they're expensive?”

“It's my birthday,” Anna said. “I don't care how much it costs.”

There was a pause then, common among patients, and Doc took advantage of it to look out the window. He always noticed these shifts in conversation that seemed to be physical ones. They had to do with breathing.

“But Anna, what if she doesn't let me in, I mean, let
you
in?”

“I don't know,” Anna said.

There was another one, a shift. When a person walks on a dark road at night and no light, there's a bouncing slide and dry smell. Then, let's say, the road becomes asphalt. It's obvious, the change.

“What do you think, Doc?”

“Well,” he said. “Why do you need her mother to let you in the house?”

“I need it because I am not slime. I need it because I am good enough to invite for dinner.”

“Well then,” he said very upset, “well then, I think you're doing the right thing.”

Doc sat thoughtfully, looking out the window.

Five years ago this neighborhood was gentrified,
he thought.
There were strangers everywhere buying art that no residents could afford or understand. There were no more pet shops or used refrigerator stores or TV repair.

Now, thanks to thousands of drug addicts defecating in hallways and the stock market crash, rents had gone down. Thanks to drugs it was a slum again. Stores only opened if they sold something cheap like Pepsi or shampoo.

There were never pictures of the Depression paraded in the newspapers anymore. And they were probably no longer displayed casually on television specials as symbols of the past. Doc didn't have a television but he could predict that sort of thing. He just didn't need one. He could always tell what was on TV when he heard more than two people in a row say the same strange phrase in the same way. He knew that they had just seen it on television. A few weeks later everyone would have those words written on their chests. When he needed a program he just went for a walk.

The stairs. The door. The steps. The street. That's how it went. Then he'd be shocked at how sweet the cherry blossoms smelled, right in the middle of all that junk. Why were there blossoms of anything in February? A sound. A dog. A woman with a beard. Two running nuns. A secondhand shoe. The sadness of being alone in the house for a while. The way the rain smells any time of year.

“I want to get these images out of the freezer,” Doc said later,
safely back at home. “I mean, the ice.”

He needed to sit around. Then he had to eat. He had to. He was embarrassed by eating. He knew he wasn't doing it right. It was the wrong thing or the wrong way. It was supposed to be a socializing habit. Doc made a whole salad and then was too tired to take even one bite. So he had a corn muffin-salad-mayonnaise sandwich instead. No toaster. No microwave. No toaster oven. No electricity, remember? His practice was going well enough for basic necessities but that did not include repairs. The fridge was plugged into the living room but without kitchen-based electricity, the appliance question was moot.

The minute the last piece of food was off the plate he started walking, chewing toward the sink to get it out of the way. He was angry because it wasn't right or enough. So, Doc took out his green box of recipes and started flipping through the index cards. He dropped it often, so they were not in very good order.

Sweet Potato Cheesecake, Baked Dip and Shake Chicken for Seven, Chicken-a-la-Mac, Chicken-a-la-Orange, Chicken Parisienne, Chicken and Rice Scrapple, Oven-Fried Chicken Drumsticks, Shrimp Bites for Six, Spaghetti with Pork sauce.

Some of the sections had headings like PIE.

Under VEGETABLES there were

He decided to read some ingredients.

Doc noticed how white his legs were. Thanks to the ozone people couldn't sit in the sun anymore. Caucasians had always been the ugliest race and now there was really no way out.

Then he looked under DESSERTS.

This food meant so much. It came from the most dangerous magazine in the United States of America,
Family Circle
.

This was special food. Food intended for special family occasions. It came from the time when America had dreams. When Americans didn't mind being geeky and weird because soon the whole world would be that way too. It didn't mind eating slop because America would make slop important. Slop would have meaning. Slop would mean power.

Whatever happened to upward mobility?
Doc suddenly remembered. It only seemed to apply to immigrants from very poor countries and even then they had to work twenty-four hours a day for one or two entire generations. It seemed virtually impossible for anyone else to become richer than their parents no matter how hard they tried. It didn't change if they were CEOs or on the welfare roles. All the children were worse off.

Then Doc remembered that he had been promised video telephones by 1980. He forgot why.

Doc put the slop out of his mind and cancer, its logical conclusion. Instead he went to buy a scoop of ice cream at the corner store.

God, their flavors were really complicated. They were all based on muddy combinations like Chocolate Super Fudge Crunch Raspberry Swirl. Or else it was allusions to popular culture, like Cherry Garcia. If you weren't a Grateful Dead fan, you wouldn't know what you were eating.

“Excuse me,” Doc asked the clerk politely. “Don't you have any ice cream with only one word in the title? And one without any sexual innuendo please.”

Later, at home between patients, the phone rang.

“Doctor's office.”

“Anna O. here.”

“Anna.”

“Doc, will you come with me? We'll make it session number three.”

He felt sore in various places.

“Anna, if you want me to come you'll have to pay my full rate.”

“Ten bucks an hour!”

“That's right. You know I'm going to be spending the whole time listening to you talk.”

“Thank you, Doctor. This is going to be my greatest birthday, ever. Thank you, Doctor. Thank you.”

Anna was flipping through the newspaper, bored at a receptionist job. Being a true New Yorker she had always turned first to the obituaries. It was a well-worn habit left over from when that was the only way to get an apartment. But now it helped her keep up with her friends.

Oh shit
, she said.
Jack died
.

Jack died and Anna missed it.

She'd last seen him walking down the block the spring before. No, it was warm but it wasn't spring. The cherry blossoms bloom too early now. It must have been February.

“Anna!”

“Jack, how are you doing?”

“Well, Tim is dying.”

“Yes.”

Jack was really short. He had fiery red hair and dirt on his shirt.

“Yeah, Anna. He was just on
Good Morning America
two weeks ago and seemed so immortal. Now he's got lesions on his lungs. I want to see him every day but you know how Tim is. He has to entertain. I've never officially said good-bye to anyone before.

Jack was smiling through all of this. His manner was conversational.

“The thing is, Anna, it's all getting so normal. I mean, the first group that died - well, they didn't even know what was happening to them. Then the second group was all waiting for the miracle cure around the corner - Q, Ampligen, egg whites, bloodfreezing, aspirin. Running around from doctor to doctor trying anything. But this
group - we all know it's probable death. There's no mystery anymore, no romance. There's no way out. I mean, ten years ago if some thirtythree-year-old fellow died, his whole friendship circle would be devastated for years. They'd never get over it. Now it's so normal to die at thirty-two. We abandon them when they're halfway into that purgatory between home and hospital. We don't even wait around for them to die anymore - too many others standing in line. Last night I walked into a room where a quarter of the men had lesions on their faces. Some had small lesions, peeking through thinning hairlines like a little kiss from God. Others had those big porous oozing ones. My black friends' lesions are black. They were walking around with lesions holding little cocktail glasses and flirting. Oh men, they can't admit to being frail, even when running back and forth between the flirt and their diarrhea. Now Tim's dying. And his dying is so different from Phil's dying. Vito left instructions for his memorial service - he picked out which Judy Garland clips should be shown. John Bernd went so long ago now.”