I Like You Just the Way I Am (6 page)

Dr. Carl’s face gave away nothing.

“So how was your weekend? Did you get out of the house much?”

Again nothing, which I’d learned from school meant he was taking a “Rogerian stance.” Basically just shutting the fuck up and waiting for me to solve my own problems. Knowing what he was up to, I continued.

“It’s just kind of disconcerting that you know so much about me and yet I don’t know anything about you besides that you’re an Aquarius.”

“And how do you know that?”

Thinking fast, I rolled my eyes and tried to cover. “Oh, come on, Doc, it’s so obvious that you’re an Aquarius. Like I don’t know an Aquarius when I see one.” I laughed nervously before plunging into a rant about how offended I was that I’d never been molested.

*   *   *

“I’m telling you, he’s
an impenetrable forest!” I told Eric over coffee. Dr. Carl’s unwillingness to be straight with me was making me insane. It consumed my thoughts—and also distracted me from the fact that I was now basically living with Eric.

“I think this is just you not being able to respect boundaries or stomach rejection,” he said, like he’d actually been paying attention in class.

“Obviously!” I spooned the foam off Eric’s latte and ate it. “It just feels weird. He’s making me feel like a total stalker.”

“Well, you are. And that’s okay,” Eric said.
Finally,
some validation.

“You know what? I’m over it. His life is his life. Right? I can respect this bizarre nondisclosure tic of his. Besides, I’m probably seconds away from leaving grad school anyway. And don’t worry, I’ve already told my agents I’m gonna need your airfare negotiated into any and all future contracts.”

I downed the remainder of Eric’s drink and motioned for the check, but before we got up, Eric grabbed my laptop.

“Just to protect you from yourself, we are going to block both Dr. Carl and Lisa, okay?” he said, logging into my Facebook.

“Fine.”

“Password.”

Guilt washed over my face. I bit my lip, trying to maintain calm.

“What is it? Why are you blushing?”

“No, nothing. I mean, Eric, you were in prison. Giving you any of my passwords does seem a little—”

“Bullshit,” Eric said. “Dish now.”

“It’s
H-O-T
…,” I started.

“Yeah…”

“
C-A-R-L
.” I exhaled.

“Hot Carl? Do you even know what that is?”

“No. What?”

“It’s like when someone shits on your face,” Eric said. “You’ve never heard of a Hot Carl? Cleveland Steamer? None of this rings a bell?”

“Eric, I’m straight.”

“Wow.” He lifted his eyebrows in disbelief and logged in to my page.

Then, as if he’d seen a ghost, Eric’s face went white.

“What is it? Did someone I went to high school with have a stillborn or something?” I turned the laptop toward me.

The glare of the screen seemed to wash out everything but a single word:

CONGRATULATIONS!

Less than three minutes ago, Dr. Carl’s daughter, Lisa, posted a picture of Dr. Carl with his new fiancée. Dr. Carl was engaged.

“She’s so much older than me!” I gasped.

“Good for him,” Eric replied.

“No, totally.” I said, “I’m sure a woman like this will absolutely make Dr. Carl happy.” I clicked on her name and went directly to her Facebook page.

Anya Finkelstrum was a forty-five-year-old wedding planner from Boston. She currently resided in Topanga Canyon, six miles away from her eighteen-year-old son, Bengie, who just started his first year of college at Pepperdine. What Anya’s page didn’t reveal about her, I was more than happy to make up in my head:

Anya grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where her first husband, Cletus, routinely beat her. After tricking him into thinking she’d killed herself by jumping into a quarry, she changed her identity and fled to Boston with her son, à la Julia Roberts in
Sleeping with the Enemy,
until she could save enough money to move out to Encino (where a weird aunt lived) to start a new life. Convinced she’d never love again, but still a romantic at heart, Anya waited for Bengie to be old enough before going back to work full-time, this time doing something she loved: wedding planning. Anya refused to date all through Bengie’s adolescence and only met Dr. Carl by accident when she got dragged to a turtleneck wine party at a close friend’s house. They hit it off instantly and started what would become a full-blown courtship. Trying to show the utmost respect for Bengie and his mother’s relationship, Dr. Carl didn’t start sleeping over until Bengie was out of the house and away at school. Now the cat’s out of the bag, Lisa’s dad is fucking Bengie’s mom, and everybody including Lisa can’t wait to have a hand in the wedding.

No wonder he’d chosen her over me. My life story, however twisted, couldn’t compete with the one I’d invented for Anya. I suddenly wished I’d made my stories in therapy more compelling. I could have worked as a child prostitute for several months on the streets of Green Bay, Wisconsin, after running away from home. I could have been a sister-wife living on a Mormon compound in Salt Lake City. I could have backpacked across Asia and been wrongly imprisoned for drug smuggling like Claire Danes in
Brokedown Palace
. I’d made the hideous mistake of being myself in therapy, and now I was just another almost-famous starlet whom he’d eventually ask to endorse his forthcoming vitamin line.

Dr. Carl was getting married—and it was none of my business.

I couldn’t tell what was making me more upset: the fact that I wasn’t in the know about the wedding or the fact that I wasn’t
in
the wedding. Regardless of how I felt, Anya and Dr. Carl were to become one, and I had to learn to live with it.

*   *   *

“As, like, an exercise,
I think it might be good for me to meet Anya,” I whispered to Eric one day in class.

Dr. Wallace Shawn was blabbering on about how the human ego is a slave that must serve two masters: the id, the childlike pleasure-seeking part of the psyche; and the superego, its moralistic rule-dork counterpart.

“You are like a full-time id,” Eric whispered back.

“I need to know who my therapist is choosing to spend the rest of his life with,” I whined defensively. “Not knowing could be incredibly detrimental to my treatment. She could be a complete fucking whack job, and do I want to take love and relationship advice from a guy who’s about to marry a complete fucking whack job? I don’t think so.”

Dr. Shawn stopped talking and glared at me with hate. Eric and I were handed our take-home midterms and asked to leave class early.

“How is it that I’m a grown adult and still getting in trouble for talking in class?” I mused.

“Because you are still doing all the same shit you probably did in high school.”

“Fine, you know what? I’ll go to Anya’s work without you,” I fumed, and walked off.

“Who said anything about going to her work?” Eric called out after me.

“Where else am I supposed to run into her?” I said, my back still turned.

“You’re fucking nuts!” Eric shouted.

Maybe I was nuts, but it’s not like I was going to Anya’s work to threaten her life or tell her not to marry Dr. Carl. The only reason I called and made an appointment with her using a fake name was because Dr. Carl had built her up in my mind by refusing to talk about her with me. I had to meet her if I was ever going to put to rest the mystery of Dr. Carl’s private life and get my treatment back on track. I gave myself a pat on the back for taking such a proactive approach to my own mental health.

When I got to Anya’s office that afternoon, I paced back and forth outside, weighing what I was about to do for a good thirty seconds. Then the front door swung open.

It was Eric.

“Sweetie!” he said in a weird, low voice that he clearly thought made him sound heterosexual. “I told Ms. Finklestrum that when you scheduled, you didn’t know I’d be able to take off work for this. But, well, here I am!” Eric finished with a flourish before going in for what was by far the most awkward kiss of my life.

“Sweetie. Wow. I— Just— Wow.” I turned to meet Anya—
the
Anya—in person.

“Hi. I’m Anya,” she said, extending the hand I had no real interest in (the right one).

“Wow, beautiful engagement ring,” I said, staring at a modest two-carat cushion cut on her left ring finger.

“Thank you.”

“We were thinking of just getting tattoos,” Eric blurted out. He did some sort of gay-guy hand gesture to emphasize his point.

“So what kind of wedding are you two thinking about having?” Anya asked, showing us to a nearby love seat.

“I’m not really sure yet,” I said, and then slyly added: “What are you doing for
your
wedding?”

“I was thinking,” Eric cut in, “of topiaries comprising succulents as centerpieces.” He proceeded to out himself about five more times. “I’m into leathers and feathers, like maybe a bit of a ‘Coachella, vampire, summer harvest as shot by Sofia Coppola’ vibe.…”

Before I could do damage control, my phone vibrated with a missed call. Looking down, I saw that it was, finally, my agent. I anxiously excused myself to the restroom and was listening to the message (and possibly taking a peek in Anya’s medicine cabinet) when I heard the front door open outside. I looked out and saw that, walking straight in, carrying nearly five pounds of Jerry’s Famous Deli turkey sandwiches, was Dr. Carl. I closed myself back into Anya’s restroom as fast as I could.

Now I know why he can never do lunch sessions,
I thought to myself, enraged that I’d been passed over in favor of nosh with the fiancée.

I needed to formulate a plan. I scanned the room for a window or crawl space I could fit through.

Outside, I heard Anya introduce her fiancé to my “fiancé.” This was so bad. Pacing in a small circle, I could think of nothing else to do but check my voice mail and hope my agents were outside the building, waiting to move in and extract me.

“Hey, Jenny, it’s Rico. I don’t know if you got my e-mail but I think it’s time we let you go. Call me if you have any questions.”

I took a minute to sum up the situation: I was currently locked in a bathroom, hiding from my therapist, pretending to be marrying a gay ex-con, and getting dropped by my mid-level talent agency. All at the same time.

“You okay in there, sweetie?” Eric called out meekly.

I opened the door and yanked Eric in.

“What the fucking fuck are we doing?” he screeched. “I should have never come here. This was the worst idea ever. Like, I can’t even believe my life has devolved in this way. I’m even wearing agate stones to protect me against negativity, but somehow your insanity is overpowering them.” He touched one of his Chan Luu wrap bracelets and backed away from me like I was that little girl from
The Ring
.

“You two okay?” Anya asked, tapping on the door.

Eric opened it slightly, making eye contact with Anya.

“We are kind of going through something and
I think we need a little space
!” he shrieked flamingly.

“Do you two want to come back at a different time? I completely understand how this stuff works and—”

“No. I think we need
you
to leave,” Eric said. He sounded like a bitchy queen at the start of an ecstasy-fueled rave-rumble.

“What?” she asked, completely thrown.

“I said, my fiancée and I need a few minutes alone, and we would like you to
clear the fuck out
.”

“Um. Okay. Sure. We’ll just take a walk around the block,” Anya said, cowering away from the door.

When we were sure they were gone, Eric and I scrambled out the fire exit. I threw myself in Eric’s car and reclined the seat all the way back down to “therapist’s couch” position until he rolled away and it felt safe to pop back up.

*   *   *

I don’t think Dr.
Carl ever put together that I was the nutcase in his fiancée’s bathroom. And I never got the chance to come clean, because I never went back to treatment. I booked a very serious job on a SAG ultra-low-budget indie that landed me in nearby Sylmar for two weeks. And the demands of playing Wendy in
Ring Around the Rosie
were just too intense to juggle with grad school, so I dropped out.

In a way, I guess Dr. Carl was right. My learning that he was a normal guy who ate Jerry’s Famous Deli sandwiches and would probably spend his honeymoon at a Courtyard by Marriott
did
affect the way I saw him. I couldn’t continue to project my fantasies onto him. He wasn’t my father, my fiancé, or my lover. He wasn’t even my therapist anymore. He was just a middle-aged divorcé with reasonably good style and a car that wasn’t the Mercedes E class I’d been trying to break into. Turns out, he drove the Hyundai with the
COEXIST
bumper sticker parked next to it.

4.

I Need Everyone to Love Me

I need everyone to
love me. My feelings of inadequacy and lack of parental attachment have made me one of those sick bitches who can’t tolerate feeling ignored. My parents say all the right things when they are pretending to listen to me. But the truth is, they are more like cats. They accidentally had a litter of kittens, and then emotionally moved on to whatever ball of yarn rolled past their line of sight. When self-obsessed people breed, they make empty people like me who spend the rest of their time on earth trying to gain the love and approval they didn’t get as children. This doesn’t excuse my behavior. It’s just to say, if my parents had actually noticed me, I probably wouldn’t care so much about whether everyone else on the planet adored me. Unfortunately, I’m a bottomless pit of need, and here are several people who have suffered because of it.

My Future Ex-Boyfriend

Before you meet the love of your life, there’s usually one guy you date that you try to convince yourself is him. Let me save you some time: He’s not.

In my early twenties, my friend Chad attempted to set me up with a friend of his from work. He explained that Lance and I were exactly alike in thinking we were better than other people, and we would no doubt have a million more things in common. I was intrigued. Chad typically hated the idea of me with any man. It took away from my time being the stand-in for his out-of-town girlfriend, Erica, who was dating another guy, not returning his phone calls, and in no way considering herself his girlfriend. I knew if Chad was willing to doff off his plus one, this guy must be worth it. So I agreed to meet him.