Late Stories (14 page)

So what else? Probably, plenty. He doesn't talk much with people he knows. Lets others do most of the talking. He used to be funny, sprinkle his conversation with amusing or interesting anecdotes, but he doesn't anymore. Or else he relies solely on the anecdotes to be his part of the conversation—“That reminds me,” he usually says—ones he's told many times before, so they now come out sounding a bit too well-rehearsed, but he's mostly silent with people he knows: listening, smiling, laughing, nodding or shaking his head, pretending to be interested, but really bored and not saying much. What happened? He doesn't know. His wife's death changed him, that's for sure, because all this started after she died.

Also, he doesn't want to go away for even a week in the summer.
They used to go to Maine with the kids for two months. They loved it there. And it got them out of the heat and humidity for most of that time. Now he's anxious about driving long distances alone. It's a twelve-hour drive and he doesn't want to stay overnight in a motel on the way. It used to be fun with his wife, and relaxing—not having to make the bed or cook dinner that night. A simple breakfast, but actually much more than he usually had, the motel would have prepared for its guests the next morning. Maybe one or both his daughters would drive to Maine with him this summer and stay a week or two in the cottage he'd rent for a month. Wouldn't seem worth the trouble to drive to New York to pick them up—drive to Brooklyn, in fact—making the trip even longer if he didn't stay the night with one of them, and who'd drive back with him? Maybe one could drive to Maine with him and stay a week or two, if she could get off work that long, although, to be honest, she might not want to spend her entire vacation time with him or in Maine, and the other would come the last week or two, if she could get off work that long and same thing about wanting to spend her entire vacation time with him and in Maine, and drive back with him. But there would still be the same problem. He'd have to pick one of them up in Brooklyn when they leave for Maine and drop the other one off when they return. And he'd want to have both with him in Maine at the same time. They always have a better time together that way. His daughters can talk to each other, when he's not talking much, and borrow his car and go someplace, when he wants to stay in the cottage and write. It's a dilemma. He doesn't see right now any way to work it out. And would he want to be alone in Maine for even two weeks, if that's what it'd end up being if his daughters came up with him or left with him but could only stay two weeks? Alone, that is, other than for the cat. He has friends in the same area he and his wife always rented a house in in Maine.
People he liked seeing a few times each summer, when he used to go with his wife and kids for two months. Maybe it's not something a therapist could help him out with or would listen to him talk about with much sympathy or interest. He should be thankful, she might think, he can be in Maine for so long, even if alone, during what is typically such a hot month at home. Or maybe therapists don't think or act like that and always come up with something to say. His daughters would know. They're familiar with therapy. For him, it's all new territory. He should ask them.

Anything else? His neurodegenerative disease, of course, which he thinks he showed small signs of his wife's last two years but was first diagnosed for it a year after she died. His doctor said he'll never be cured of the disease but he won't die of it. He got it so late in his life that it'll never get that bad. His father died of it forty years ago, but the doctor said medications and treatments for it have vastly improved since then. Still, he's scared. Sometimes his right hand shakes. Some days he feels weaker than he does other days. He never stumbles but he has lost his balance a number of times during the same period his hand shakes and he feels weaker than usual. When he tries to run, he runs clumsily. That never improves. Short jerky strides; nothing like he used to do, and he can only run a quarter of a mile at the most before he has to stop. He wouldn't even call it running anymore. It's closer to something like speed-walking, but a little more than that. So he sometimes thinks he's getting worse. Is this something to bring up to the therapist? His fear? But the doctor said he's showing fewer signs of the disease than he did in his last checkup a half year before. “It might be that I'll only need to see you once a year,” the doctor said. He's also afraid he'll get sick again with the bowel obstruction he had two years ago and he had to be operated on twice in three days to turn a section of the small intestine around. He thinks that's what the
surgeon did. One operation to straighten out the kink in the small intestine and the second operation to see if the first one worked. Something like that. Almost every time he's just a bit constipated or he has even a slight stomachache, he worries the obstruction has come back. He doesn't want to go back to the hospital and be operated on again. And maybe twice in three days again, the second to see if the first operation worked. He doesn't understand. They couldn't have done that with x-rays? Did he ask? He forgets. He felt he almost died in the hospital. His regular physician said he could have with what he had. And the pain before he was operated on the first time was about as bad for twelve hours as he ever had in his life, but the pain after the operations was for a while even worse. They gave him pain medication that made him crazy for almost an entire day. He hallucinated, heard voices, thought he was in hell, that he was being punished for things he did in the past but wasn't told what they were. A woman in a lab coat stopped in front of his room and held up to the window a clipboard and pointed to a long list on it without looking at him. He yelled for her to help him, or thought he did, but she quickly left. He kept yelling for someone to help him, screamed sometimes or thought he did, but nobody came to his room. His door was wide open and he heard people walking past or standing outside it, talking about obscure things—space shuttles, metallurgy, a 16th century pope—all of it in a language he understood only a few words of. It sounded more like a combination of several languages of different origins plus pig Latin. He also pressed the call button a lot, or thought he did. Nobody came into his room or asked on the intercom, as they usually did, “Yes? What is it?” Then he remembered he had a cell phone and put on his glasses and found it and called one of his daughters—this he knows he did—for them to come and take him home right away or else he's going to escape from the hospital, in his hospital gown if he has to,
and make it home on his own. It was around two in the morning. They were at his house, a five-minute drive away. They'd come down for the operations. They called the hospital and he was moved to a room much closer to the nurses' station so someone could look in on him more often. The voices he'd heard turned out to be that of hospital workers on the floor, standing and chatting in front of the employees' lounge across the hallway from his room before they went inside it or after they came out of it. So how come one of them didn't check to see what was the matter when he was yelling for help, if the yelling wasn't part of his hallucinations? He's also worried he'll get very sick at home. Something he can't take care of himself. A minor stroke or a major one, or something equally as bad, and no one would be there to help him and he couldn't reach the phone or didn't have the energy to even dial 911. He'd die in his bed or on the floor. Who'd look after the cat in the time before they found him? He's serious. For how would anyone know he was dying or dead? After awhile his daughters, when he didn't answer the phone or call them back for a long time—a day, two, maybe even longer—would call a friend of his in the neighborhood who they know has a key to his house, just as he has one to his, and he'd find him, maybe alive, maybe dead. He worries about all of that. Also what it'd do to his daughters if he died that way. Aren't most of these good reasons to go to a therapist and talk about? Probably. He'd think so. He doesn't know.

One thing he doesn't need to go to a therapist for is his work. He's never had a writer's block for more than two days or three, if you could call that a block, and it only seems to happen after he's finished something he's been working on a long time and is having trouble starting a new work. But he knows something always comes, so it's never really a problem. It was more of a problem for the first ten years of his writing, which means up till about
forty years ago, when he didn't know something would always come. He writes every day, always gets something done. Page a day, most times; 300 pages a year, on average, enough for a book if he was writing a short one. That publishers, for the most part—major publishers and the prestigious small ones—aren't interested in his work, also doesn't bother him. Or bother him enough to stop him from writing for even a single day or slow him down. He still has a good time writing. Finds it interesting, what he writes: the contents and different styles and so on. He likes what he's doing—always has—is what he's saying, or maybe repeating. Likes what he writes. Though maybe, because he feels so good about his work, that that's something that should be talked about with the therapist. Why? Is that a problem? He has a high opinion of his work, maybe higher than it deserves, and a fairly low opinion of the fiction of just about every living writer he's read except for a couple in Latin America and one in Europe and maybe a few from some other places, or one or two of their books, but he doesn't say so about any of that either. He never says anything good about his work to anyone, or never beyond saying something like “Maybe I did okay with that one,” and rarely badmouths another writer's work, at least a living writer. But maybe he should say to the therapist what he thinks about his own work. “To be honest,” he could say, “since I think that's what's expected of me in therapy—absolute honesty,” he doesn't think his work is getting, or has gotten, the attention and honors it deserves. No, don't start something that might hurt his writing. That, above everything else, he wants to avoid. Skip the honors and big-time publishing. They really don't mean much to him. They once might have—thirty years ago, maybe; thirty years ago, definitely—but not now. It's enough for him just to continue writing and like what he's writing and getting published, no matter how small and little known the publishing house. The money that comes with major
publishing and honors would be nice to get, but not worth getting bitter and upset over and have that affect his writing. Talking about it won't help his writing—it doesn't need help, he feels—so what would be the reason to discuss it? So some things he might have to hide from the therapist. Things he knows would hurt his writing if he brought them up, or at least not talk about them till the time comes to. What does he mean by that? He doesn't know or isn't sure. It's obvious he's confused by the whole thing—conflicted is a word that's often used in therapy—that he remembers his mother-in-law, a psychotherapist, using a lot—which also might be worth talking about eventually, his conflict over this. One thing he knows is he always feels lousy about himself after he thinks too highly of his writing. So maybe he could talk about that, why he feels that way, or something close to it. But there he goes again. Of mixed minds about it. He should probably only talk about things with the therapist that he's sure he wants to talk about.

And he has enough dough. Money isn't one of his problems. He inherited a little when his mother died and his wife inherited even more than that when her parents died, and he also has income from his pension, Social Security and investments. He's invested wisely, he could say, or chosen the right financial advisor. And he does make, on the whole, a couple of thousand a year off his writing. It's not as if nothing comes from all the writing he does and has done. So he has enough money to live modestly on for the rest of his life, he thinks it's safe to say, and also to give to his daughters from time to time to help them out. He even tells them to use his credit card, the one they share but he pays the bills for, to take a cab anytime they want to when the weather's bad or it's late at night or just dark out. For things like that, and medicines, doctors, dentists, even yoga. Really, anything they don't have the money for or that would cut too much into their budgets but they think is important.
He thinks he can afford it. If he talked about that to the therapist, which he doesn't see any reason to—it would just be looking for praise from her, if therapists give praise to their patients—he'd say he's been generous to his daughters, but it's the only right and fair thing to be. Not just because he wants them to be healthy and safe, which would be reason enough, but because around half of his money came from their mother, so in a way it's theirs.

So he has enough things to talk about to the therapist, or to tell her, whatever the way it's said. More than enough for two or three sessions, he'd think. He's ready for tomorrow, though he worries that he doesn't need a therapist. That he can work out all the problems he might have on his own. He also does a lot of it in his writing. But he wants to make his daughters happy by his seeing a therapist. Not a good-enough reason to go to one, he supposes, if it were the only reason—he knows it isn't, or maybe he's wrong about that. But he can go to one at least once or twice, can't he? If it doesn't work out, if he doesn't think it's going anywhere, is useful and so on, after four to five sessions, maybe, because he has to give it some time—he'll say so to his daughters and the therapist and stop going. He doesn't want to waste the therapist's time, he'll also say. Though they might use that excuse as another reason why he should start therapy, or continue it: that he worries he might be wasting the therapist's time. Oh, just go. His daughters have already said they're proud of him for calling one of the three therapists they got from the
Psychology Today
online listing for his part of Baltimore County. When he told his sister on the phone what his daughters said about his agreeing to go to a therapist, she said “Isn't that why we do everything—to please our children?” “Not for me, it isn't,” he said, “or not everything, though part of what you say is true. Yes, I want to make them happy. ‘Proud of me' I don't care about.” “You don't?” and he said “All right, maybe a little. I
certainly don't want them to think bad of me, but by my not going to a therapist, I don't think they would.” “Can you repeat that in simple language? What you said is too complicated to understand, or the way you said it is. For the therapist, you'll also have to speak more clearly. Though if you don't, though I don't know why you wouldn't, she'll see something more in it than I just did.”