Because They Wanted To: Stories (10 page)

Margot blinked and stared at him. His bright-orange shirt was open to his exquisite collarbones. His long, subtle hands looked hypersensitive against his cheap coffee cup. He was outrageously fine and fair. “What do you mean?” she said. “What on earth do you mean?”

She didn’t remember his answer, or even if he had one.

She got up at six in the morning so that she would have time to eat a nourishing breakfast and prepare a sack of wholesome lunch food. She made herself a porridge of four kinds of whole grain mixed together in the blender. She thought of a former client, a fragile widower named Thomas, whom she had persuaded to make at least one daily meal for himself. On his second breakfast he had dropped his bowl of oatmeal, and she had been unable to make him try to cook again. As Margot remembered him, she felt an intense rush of loyalty and protectiveness bordering on love.

She turned on the radio. People were talking about whether or not the nation’s children were being doped up with Ritalin on account of an attention deficit disorder vogue. “It’s a brave new world!” yelled a caller. “And you people . . . you . . .”

Margot put a lot of butter, honey, and milk in her cereal. She was the only person she knew who still used whole milk, and she was inexplicably proud of that tiny fact. She sat down and dug in. At least she hadn’t spilled
her
cereal.

She arrived at the bus stop just in time. The bus was crowded, and she had to stand with people pressed so closely about her that she barely needed to grasp the handrail. She was held and rocked in the warm, undulant mass as the bus chugged up hill and down, stopping and jerking exhaustingly. Through the damp cloth and
wool of their sweaters and coats, Margot felt people striving hard inside the bone and muscle of their bodies. They seemed horribly tense and mostly unhappy, but there was courage in their tension, and even hope.

“Stupid cunts. Stupid cunts are running the world.” The passenger seated before Margot glared up at her like an insulted snake. “It’s cunts in the command seat,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “It really is. And most of them are guys.”

He wrinkled his brow and retracted. The Asian woman to Margot’s right tried to withdraw from her in distaste but got squashed against her instead as the bus wheezed uphill. Margot’s stop came, and she burst from the bus feeling energized by the little exchange.

The morning was a chaos of bad news and mix-ups. A client who’d been socked on the nose by another client in a support group was threatening to sue the clinic. There were six messages on her voice mail from a client who said his son’s foster parent was trying to kill the kid. Two of Margot’s clients had been denied further visits by their HMOs because they had “improved,” meaning that they hadn’t attempted to kill themselves recently. Margot waded in, negotiating the snarl of emotional currents that vied and buzzed against each other like agitated snakes. She sorted them, one at a time, handling each furious, vibrating strand with care, allowing some to careen past her.

She ran out of steam in the middle of a session with a thirty-seven-year-old woman who, although she knew she was pretty for her age, was having suicidal thoughts because she didn’t look like a supermodel. “I know it’s stupid,” she said. “I’m embarrassed even to mention it. But it’s all I can think about.” In spite of her embarrassment, it was all she could talk about too. “I don’t just want to look like that, I want the whole world to
be
like that.”

“Like what?” asked Margot.

“Static. With no feelings except, like, if it’s your birthday you’re happy, if your mom dies you’re sad.” She paused, as if she’d just remembered something. “I mean, I know the models themselves aren’t like that. They probably have the same stupid, ugly problems I do. It’s more the world as they represent it. Without any fucking
awful complexity. Without any of this filthy shit.” She indicated her thigh with a backhanded slap.

After this session, Margot stopped for a snack of orange sections and cheese cubes in the lounge, where she listened to a social worker named Georgia say awful stuff about a colleague she referred to as “the big fat cow pig.” Then she went to the rest room, where two other social workers were talking about a woman who’d been in earlier, trying to have her daughter committed. “I don’t know about the kid,” said one, “but I’d sure like to put Mrs. Bitch away.” Margot washed her hands and pressed a wet paper towel against her forehead and temples. She looked at herself in the mirror, resolutely hooked her hair behind her ears, and for some reason thought again of Patrick.

Emerging from her room for late-night toast, she would pass his girl-friends in the hall on their way to the bathroom, or meet them smoking cigarettes in the kitchen. She remembered a beautiful girl named Helen, who had long brown hair and a funny habit of picking up random objects and immediately putting them down as if suddenly stricken with disappointment in this speckled ashtray or that empty fluted cup. Most of the girls seemed unhappy, but their unhappiness seemed integral to them, and in some curious way strengthened Margot’s impression of their integrity. They would look at Patrick as if calmly measuring the distance between him and them, as if they knew that his little area of private space was closed to them, but that was all right because they had their own little area they were planning to go back to once they got what they came for—although of course it often didn’t work out that way. Margot remembered one girl in particular, a girl she had glimpsed on her way past Patrick’s barely opened door. She had been sitting on Patrick’s worn mattress, waiting while he did something at the other end of the room. Her arms were wrapped across her torso, each hand grabbing the opposite small shoulder, and one small, gray-socked foot covered the other in a pathetic gesture of protection, but her downturned angular little face was proud and beautiful and full of tense, ready feeling. One month later the girl called Patrick and cried so loud and hard
that Margot heard the sobbing as she squeezed past Patrick sitting on his haunches in the dark, narrow upstairs hallway with the telephone receiver between his cheek and his graceful shoulder, listening with a look of rapt, sensual sorrow.

For Margot, it had been quite a display. Although she could be attracted to males or females, she had little luck with either; her shy flirtations tended to be muffled failures, which started, then ended, with puzzled indifference, embarrassment, and trailing irresolution. It was almost a relief for her to witness romantic shenanigans, just to know that they actually happened. At least that was how she had felt at first.

The rest of the day she had an intake phone shift. It was an uneventful few hours, except for a slightly unusual call from a young man who said he was phoning not because he had a problem but to ask for advice about a disturbed woman who was harassing him. She had been calling him and writing rambling, nonsensical letters, and finally he’d had it out with her on the phone. He was worried, he said, about what she might do next.

“Let me be sure I understand,” said Margot. “Does this woman want to make an appointment, or . . .?”

“She was the girlfriend of a friend of mine, and then they broke up and I started fucking her a little bit.” He appeared not to have heard her question. “And then I realized she was really sick—she was on all this medication and shit. I thought maybe it was the medication that was making her weird, so I told her maybe she should stop. She did stop, and she got so fucked up she couldn’t get out of bed. Then I got interested in somebody else, and so I told her, and she just wouldn’t leave me alone. First she sent me this crazy letter, and I just went and put the envelope she sent it in on her mailbox.”

“You . . . wait. If you could tell me what you want me to help you with, I could—”

“I’m trying to! So then she called me, really mad because I left her an empty envelope, and I just—”

“Well,” said Margot, “it—”

“I didn’t have a pen! I didn’t want to be rude to her—I mean, she’s so sick already. So I left the envelope so she’d know I’d gotten her letter.”

Margot was eating dinner when Patrick called, but she picked up the phone anyway. His voice was shy and warm. “I’ve been thinking about you all day,” he said. They talked while she ate with one hand, intermittently tucking the receiver between her shoulder and her head so that she could carve and salt her fancy take-out chicken thigh.

“I was remembering how we used to talk,” he said. “It always made me feel better talking to you, especially about relationships. And I wondered if you knew that.”

Margot mumbled how she’d been thinking about him too. Her mumble was also shy and warm. It was unusual, her thing with Patrick, she thought. But it was good.

“You always helped me figure out what I was really doing. Guys sometimes aren’t very clear about that.”

She hadn’t remembered doing that, but she liked the idea that she had. As if to reinforce the idea, Patrick began describing in further detail the relationships he had mentioned while they were standing on the street. It wasn’t entirely true that he’d broken it off with the masochistic phlebotomist, he said. Tricia still called him in the middle of the night when she was “in crisis” and came by his office in sexy dresses for free Prozac. Last week she’d sent him a birthday card that had a picture of an emaciated kneeling woman with her head thrown back and a tortured look on her face. “God knows where she found the thing. It was repulsive, actually. But still, it hit me right in the gut. I even brought it to the couples therapy that Rhoda and I are doing.”

“Why?”

“To illustrate what I’m not getting from Rhoda.” He paused self-consciously. “It may’ve been an unkind thing to do. I mean, I don’t want that from Rhoda, but I want her to understand that need in me because it’s part of who I am. And she just can’t. I mean, her card was generic flowers and a love message.” He sighed. “Underneath all the New Age goofiness, she’s just totally suburban, you know?”

“So are we, remember?”

Patrick was silent for a moment. Margot salted her oily tomato salad.

“You’re right,” he said. “That sounded ridiculous. What I meant to say is, she’s really conventional.”

“Patrick,” she said, “how’s Dolores?”

“Oh.” She almost heard him wince. “I don’t know. Isn’t that awful? We haven’t had much contact over the last five years. I know she’s living in some slum in Miami, probably working as a waitress. She’s a total alcoholic. Last time I talked to her she was having an affair, if you could call it that, with this fourteen-year-old Latin kid who couldn’t speak English. She rear-ended somebody because she was driving around drunk with her pants down and the kid’s face between her legs, and I mean so drunk that when she got out of the car, she forgot to pull her pants up and she fell and broke a tooth. That was the last time I talked to her. Since she stopped speaking to my dad, I’m not even sure where she lives. It was just too much, you know? It was painful.”

Margot remembered Dolores sitting at the table, affixing her false fingernails, holding her hand at a distance and appraising it with an arched, theatrical brow. She remembered Patrick’s attention on her, a drop of traveling light. “Could you get her number for me?” she asked. “Could you try? I don’t know what I’d say to her at this point, but. . .”

“Of course.” The loyalty in Patrick’s voice was like a muscle that’s gone flabby but is still strong; it was loyalty for her, not Dolores, and it both flattered and troubled her. “It’s probably time for me to check in anyway. Who knows where she is now. Spiritually and emotionally, I mean.”

Margot thought of something Dolores had once told her. They had been sitting at the kitchen table, drinking sweet coffee and smoking. “When Patrick was a baby, I used to do this really mean thing to him,” said Dolores. “He was just learning how to walk. All by himself, he’d struggle to his feet with this earnest frown and start slowly fighting his way forward with his little hands balled. He’d be in this nightgown our mom used to put him in, and it would trail out behind him. I’d follow along and I’d let him get so far and then I’d step on his gown and he’d fall over with this cute little ‘oof.’” Dolores drew on her cigarette and left a wet red lipstick mark on it. “The funny thing is, he never cried. He’d just set his little face and slowly get up and toddle on. Sometimes I did it just ‘cause it was so cool to see him get up again.”

Patrick was saying that while he had enjoyed being a psychopharm, he was tired of it now and was looking for a way out. With this end in mind, he was working on a CD-ROM about depression, in which psychiatrists would appear on a tiny screen to explain to viewers what depression is and how to get treatment. “It’s going to be complex and layered,” he said. “Like performance art.”

Margot agreed to meet him for dinner that weekend, even though she wasn’t sure she wanted to. Their conversation had made her feel passive and nonplussed. When they hung up, she sat for a while and stared at the spray of greasy salt scattered across her plate, at the tidy little snarl of chicken bones and the minute pistil of broccoli. Her tabletop was red Formica. On the table she had a salt shaker in the shape of a mournful sheep and Magic Markers in a row and a dish of colored rocks mixed with cheap jewelry she’d worn when she was a kid. She liked her things, but now the sight of them made her sad. She always had arrangements of bright little things on her walls and furniture. Roberta had made fun of them, mildly at first.

Late one night, a woman Patrick didn’t know had called him and asked if she could come over. He told her that she could, but when she got there he didn’t like the way she looked, so he made her tea, conversed for as long as he felt etiquette required, and then asked her to leave. Margot had been asleep and, to her regret, had not seen the girl. She was fascinated by this story and by the casual way Patrick told it at breakfast; without knowing why, she found herself imagining, repeatedly and in varying ways, the girl’s face when Patrick told her to leave. She could not imagine calling anyone and asking if she could come over late at night, no matter how much she wanted them, nor could she imagine letting a person who made such a call come to her home.