Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn (7 page)

“Do you want to see a therapist?”

This from a man who still asks me to go bowling and who has missed birthdays and anniversaries and who would most likely be hard-pressed to remember the color of my eyes if I turned around and he was not looking directly into them. But do I see him? Did I ever see him? Do I want to see him? There are hundreds and thousands of miles between us and I am so exhausted, I cannot—do not want to—go more than one inch. One single inch, and what will that do? Nothing. Not a damn thing.

“A therapist?” I respond without moving.

He looks at me and I see a blank television screen. Maybe the tail end of a cartoon with dogs and cats dressed up like people.

“Why?” I ask.

He is thinking. I imagine him scrambling around inside of his head, lifting up curtains, peeking under the couch, searching desperately for a pile of sentences that he can put together in an answer.

“I thought we could try and work this out.”

“Work this out,” I repeat back to him. “Work this out.”

“Yes,” he says forcefully. “People go to therapy, talk about things, see where they are headed. It happens all over the place. In fact, it's happening right now in dozens of places right in this city.”

A spark of anger rises inside of me. I think I could hit him. Really hard with the back of my hand on the edge of his chin so his head pops up. I actually have to hold my hand so I don't do it. I could actually hit him.

“Is that what you want, Bob?”

He doesn't hesitate, which is a bigger part of the answer than the answer itself.

“I'm not sure.”

My response comes as quickly.

“I will go to a therapist, but I will not go with you. I have to go. But, Bob, this has nothing to do with you. Nothing at all.”

There is a look of tight confusion galloping across his face. I can hear thundering horse hooves and the room is suddenly filled with dust from dozens of legs pounding in the stampede.

“I'm sorry, Meg,” he fairly whimpers. “Jesus God, I'm sorry.”

Once I loved this man. I could not wait to see him on Friday nights and the simple thought of him made me weak in the knees. We made babies together and I cried in his arms. One night, so long ago I could not begin to reach back and pull out an exact time, we stayed up for two entire days reading poetry to each other, making love and then reading more. Was I twenty? Who was I? What was I doing? Did I really love him?

Questions are piling so high around me, I have to stop myself, otherwise I will not be able to get out of the room. The door will be blocked shut, the windows sealed; any form of escape will be obliterated.

“Bob,” I finally whisper, but I do not go to him.

He looks up and what I see is him in that bed, our bed, and the woman under the red tent and his knees bucking and his head pushed back against the headboard and the bed moving and I slowly begin to back away from him.

“I can't help you now.”

He says nothing.

“I can't help you, Bob.”

“I'm not sure I understand, but I do understand that I deserve nothing from you right now, Meg. Nothing at all.”

“You will have to leave me alone,” I demand. “I don't know what will happen. I don't know anything right now. Do you understand that, Bob?”

“Yes.”

“Fine” is the last thing I say or will say to him for a very long time.

Katie calls late Friday and says she wants to stay overnight again at her best friend's house. I say yes and at the same moment am choked by a wad of panic that begins boiling in my stomach and rolls to the top of my throat. I am going to be home alone. Again. The quiet of my nights in the house, his house, someone's house, has risen up to haunt me, and in every room there are laughing echoes taunting me with voices I can barely hear.

“What?” I ask the walls through the beating drum of my own heart. “What do I do, where do I go?”

My feet listen. They know what to do. I push some money into my pocket, dislodge the house key from my ring set, lace on my tennis shoes and I start walking.

In three blocks with the summer air blowing in across Lake Michigan, sounds of neighbors putting away their grills and the rumbling conversations from open car windows, I realize with a great deal of glee that I am lonely. Maybe I have been lonely for a very long time. The house walls. My schedule, the absence of a husband, my daughter's exploding life—I am alone more than I realized.

“Not tonight,” I say out loud. “People. Just some people.”

I diagnose my malaise as loneliness just as the RadCalf Wine Bar and Café appears at the end of the block. Before I can talk myself out of going into the bar alone, before I remember how many years it has been since I went into a bar alone, before I realize the last time I was in the café was a year ago with Bob, who looked mysteriously happy when I had just gotten back from a conference, I pull open the door and walk inside.

The ambience always makes me smile. Scattered tables, old wooden floors worn thin from years of all the neighbors' footfalls, soft lighting and, most important, many open seats at the bar. I order a glass of Merlot and snuggle in to listen to conversations other than the ones I have been having inside of my head—alone.

Before I finish my second glass, another one arrives, and the bartender tells me the woman around the corner bought it for me.

“What?”

“Over there.” The bartender points and the woman—vaguely familiar, short brown hair, T-shirt, no makeup—smiles and salutes me. Without thinking, I wave her over, realizing as I do so that wine is a wonderful narcotic that can make the timid very, very bold.

It is a stretch to remember who she is, and as she wobbles from her seat, I smile, because she is just one drink beyond tipsy. “A friend,” I think. “Someone to flush away another hour with, someone who might listen, a kindred spirit, who hopefully will forget everything we say in the morning.”

I am quickly embarrassed because the woman tells me her name is Jane Souley and she has lived at the end of my block for at least a year and we have spoken maybe twice without even exchanging names.

“I think I'm drunk,” she says, beginning the conversation, and I laugh and tell her that's what I am apparently trying to do.

We quickly stretch, as women do, into that paradise of female familiarity—kids, jobs, periods, and touch fast, very fast, on that gliding force that bonds women everywhere. We are similar and yet totally different. Jane touches my arm. We are women, sharing hearts, time and everything—we are women sharing everything. We laugh, and then just like that, she begins to cry.

“What is it, Jane?”

“I'm so fucking unhappy . . . and . . .”

“Jesus,” I think to myself. “She's worse off than I am. Who is she? What is she trying to tell me?”

“And . . . what? Jane, what is it?”

“I know you.”

She tells me this and she looks away and now she is crying harder. I lift my cocktail napkin to her eyes and have this sudden urge to wrap her in my arms and let her cry until she is finished. This woman
needs
to cry. She needs me, and in a strange, awesome way, I need her, especially tonight.

“What is it?” I repeat.

“You might hate me when I tell you.”

“I doubt that.”

“But I like you, Meg. I have, like, no friends. My husband left ten months ago. I . . . I have to tell you.”

I'm ready. I think I am ready, but when she says it slowly, I am not really that ready.

“I know you from your picture.”

“My picture?”

She nods. Her speech has slowed to that place where drunks lie low and their words gather in rows at the back of their throats. A place I want to be.

“The one in your bedroom, on the dresser.” She looks away and cries harder.

“You were in my bedroom?”

She nods again.

“When?”

“Ten months ago. Just after my husband left.”

Oh my God. She slept with Bob.

Jane tells the story in halting sentences and I still do not take my hand off her arm. She was walking. He picked her up. They talked. I was at the damn conference and when I got back he took me here, here to this very café. She never did it again. She's been crazy ever since. What are the chances? What in the hell are the chances?

When she turns to look at me after the story, I wonder what other pains are lined up in her heart. She looks pathetic and I cannot hate her or let go of her arm even though I can barely sit myself, even though I am also lost, even though I have no idea what will happen tomorrow or how I will make it to the end of the week. I think only that she needs me and that I have already let Bob slip from my hands and that we most definitely need another glass of wine.

“I had to tell you, Meg. I almost died when you walked in. I am not like that, you know, sleeping with neighbor men, but I just got so messed up. I'm still so messed up. Why are you here? Why aren't you trying to murder me?”

I tell her, leaning in so we can support each other. We share our stories in sentences that dip and sway just like we do when we straddle the sidewalk down the block and to my house. We laugh thinking what it would be like to have Bob come in and find us talking in the kitchen, and then I put Jane to bed in Katie's room because she has left her key locked in her car, and when I turn to leave she takes my arm and she asks me if I will be her friend, because she will be mine.

“Yes,” I say, “I need you too, I do.”

My dreams that night are laced with shadows and questions and in the morning when I remember the night before I race to the bedroom and there is Jane, arms wrapped around Katie's pink kitten, her head tilted toward the door, pillow on the floor, and I tell myself she is real, that I did something, one good thing, and that whatever happens next will be okay. I tell myself this over and over, and then I do what I have done maybe thirty thousand times.

I make the coffee and I wait.

Dr. Cassie Breckwith has six stuffed dogs, a drum, a lava lamp, a pile of broken pencils, stacks and stacks of files, and an ashtray full of marbles sitting on top of her desk. Off to one side I swear to God there is a slab of concrete with a nail through its center, two Folgers coffee cans filled with dirt as black as midnight and an empty beer bottle. It's all lovely stuff and my mind is whirling. There are no cutesy-wootsy posters on the walls advocating the benefits of peace or love or anything in between. The couch is a sagging lump of green corduroy. There are no psychiatric magazines or pill bottles anywhere. The window has a full view of the asphalt parking lot, and when I walk into her office the first thing I see is her bending over a stuffed chair and whacking at a fly with her shoe. I like her instantly.

“Damn vents let in everything from mice to these flies,” she tells me, slapping like a wild woman at a fly that is admittedly the size of something that should not be able to fly at all.

“Need some help?”

She laughs loudly. It is a machine gun. This woman has one of those infectious laughs that makes you want to start cackling, which is exactly what I do after she says, “That's what I'm supposed to say.”

I have never been to a therapist and from the get-go with this woman I am immediately sorry that I have not discovered how screwed up I am much sooner. Dr. C has a kind intensity that overshadows everything and I watch her walk around her office and immediately know what her entire life must be like. She never makes her bed and there are always dishes on the counter. She was married, may still be, and has grandchildren who love to come over because she doesn't give a damn if the house gets messy. She drinks something with whiskey in it, loves to watch old movies and she has a beautiful singing voice. I have no idea if any of this information is correct, but I decide to latch on to it and make it real. She's what all our grandmas would call “a real peach.”

The preliminaries are already down on paper. Husband. Affair. Unhappy. Married young. Unhappy. Two kids. Works at the University. Unhappy. Fairly decent support system. Confused and unhappy.

She begins by leaning forward in her big chair, touching one set of fingers to the other and telling me how remarkable it is that this is my first trip to a therapist. “That's something,” she exclaims as if she has just found a missing hundred-dollar bill.