The Road Narrows As You Go (17 page)

I'm so pleased to meet someone with an appreciation for an artifact like this.

Oh I can get into this stuff, she said. Your very own private museum, I suppose you could call it. I think it's cool you collect antiques and rare books. I love to read.

Do you?

Yes, why not? My childhood babysitter was the library, you know what I mean?

Would you like to take home an auction catalogue and see what's
coming up, perhaps something in there will catch your eye? Doug handed her a thick Sotheby's magazine and, seeing his gold wedding band flash at her before she could say no, politely put the catalogue in her sidebag. He added that he thought she would enjoy the atmosphere of an auction. During a round, a hypersensitivity to motion slows down everything, so what looks frantic to the outsider is actually happening at a beautifully slow and exciting pace to the players, like in a sport, for those of us who have something at stake. Once in a while an object's make and provenance combined with its rarity and beauty tells me, it speaks to me, says I must become its protector. That's how Doug Chimney described it as he returned the three-hundred-year-old novel to its vitrine.

After her heavy deposit and surreal conversation, Wendy ran straight across the street to Clown Alley and ordered two bacon cheeseburgers and sat and stared at the front doors of Solus First National Savings & Loans and considered the insane idea of going back in there and ravishing the manager of the bank. She was a millionaire. Inside those walls lay her fortune. She wanted to make a bed on the carpet in Douglas Chimney's office out of hundreds of thousands of dollars and fuck him on that money mattress. What was her problem? Why didn't she just go home? She was already halfway through the second burger when she realized she'd eaten the first. Obviously Doug Chimney was hitting on her—he asked her to join him for Sotheby's auctions. She wasn't attracted to Doug Chimney or his position of power so much as she was attracted to the idea that he wanted to risk the troubles of infidelity for an hour with her. This propensity for illicit flings kept her single and perhaps if not lonely—after all she had us—then miserable anyway. At night her teeth grinding was louder than the creak of the old floorboards, we thought she was sleepwalking in her room until the dentist alerted her—the jaw pain and sensitive molars were why she had an appointment later that day with Dr. Samantha Collins, who clarified right away that she was a
post
-Jungian talk-based therapist who specialized in patients suffering from bruxism, vestibulodynia, and dystonia.

Dr. Collins had a private practice out of her home on Palo Alto Avenue near the water reservoir, an eggshell-white set of Modernist cubes unevenly balanced on top of one another, offset by sheets of tempered green glass. She charged a hundred and twenty dollars for fifty minutes on a warm cracked leather couch facing a view of Golden Gate Park. For that price, Wendy did more than talk about the nocturnal dreams she had while grinding her teeth. She told her doctor about daydreams, random agonies, and even her sex fantasies.

If Jonjay won't, then I imagine having lots of flings and affairs because then, you know, that's easy. I'd rather go to one of these orgy rooms downtown. Steamrooms. I'm too busy for a steady man, I've got drawing comics to think about. So that rules out the mistress role for me, too. I don't want guys to think I show up twice. Is that crazy? Sometimes I think the aura of free love brought me here. Teeth grinding aside, what I want you to tell me, Dr. Collins, is if you think I'm crazy.

So
did
you return to see the bank manager? Dr. Collins inquired politely, with a medical persistence, her legs crossing and recrossing inside her skirt, a Bic pen poised over a fresh page on a yellow legal pad.

I told him I wanted one more look at his
Simplicius Simplicissimus
.

She saw Dr. Collins for four more sessions and then moved on to a new type of treatment when it didn't stop her teeth grinding, or clenching the mouthguard when she remembered to put it in. Once she was given this go-ahead to seek out therapy, even from a dentist, Wendy let herself indulge in all of its forms, sampling from therapy's many options, and meeting eccentric and well-to-do practitioners one after the other. She seemed to derive some kind of entertainment value from these expensive visits. This, and her dream of an animated cartoon, were what she spent most of her money on. Not clothes or furniture or expensive vacations. The rest of her income got socked away. Even with the expense of therapy, she didn't burn through her escalating income half as fast as she made it.

She shopped for therapy with the same open mind and restless curiosity to try on all trends that she took to the malls, the salons, the music she listened to. In therapy she paid for the deeper attention sex in San Francisco couldn't provide her. In the Yellow Pages under
Therapy
and related searches she found enough names and promising leads in the Bay Area to entertain her for months if not years. Instead of seeing therapy as something to commit to with one doctor, her plan was to commit to seeking therapy from all kinds of different doctors and mentalists, to find out which of these practices and practitioners worked for her, and this way slowly, over the years, winnow down her auditions to a select cast of rotating geniuses who together might unravel her problem.

By way of introduction to her new doctors she would ask, What is your usual approach with the average everyday commonplace upwardlymobile middleclass single art-type woman with psychothenia, homebody tendencies, neurastheniac at the best of times, teeth-grinding sex-addicted insomniac such as myself, with a half-Jewish theatre mother, half-mystery father of rosy complexion and fine sense of humour.

Dr. Blair's office walls were decorated with framed photos of mountainviews. She gazed at these snowcapped rockies and then at the sharp peak of the doctor's head and its white tufts of hair blowing under the air-conditioning vent in the ceiling. Dr. Blair referred with gravitas to her psychic avalanche, and to periods in life, usually at the age of thirteen, twenty-one, thirty, and then again at forty-two, and so on, when the searing cataclysm of some tragedy, a trauma buried a generation or two ago, combined with the steeper and steeper responsibilities of one's life to melt and thaw giant continents of icefrozen emotion and send them hurtling towards our bowels—fear, anger, resentment, shame, regret, loneliness all come shitting down the mountain of self. That cost Wendy seventy-five dollars.

Another eminent specialist of nervous diseases, with an office in a large private rehabilitation clinic in West Menlo near the Stanford campus,
offered Wendy a seat and asked her some questions with the bright-eyed, ditzy demeanour of a third-generation hair salonist about to shampoo her hair. When the doctor rose from his chair behind his oak desk to touch his reflection in a mirror, it was revealed he was no taller standing than sitting. You were once a fetus, he said, and a womb was your first home. His cute, tanned face was the result of deep cosmetic effort to resemble saddle leather. His powdery-Valium blue eyes matched nothing about his dyed brown hair or to-the-neck sideburns.

Sometimes a person must return to their first home to find the answers. Yes, yes, he said and pressed his hands to Wendy's forehead, then her neck, then her chest, then her stomach (her chest!). Like a faith healer, godless, but totally convinced of his powers. Then he returned to his black leather upholstered swivel chair. All very common, my dear. The usual symptoms. See if you can picture this, Wendy, the central nervous system is like cable television with a hundred thousand channels, but sometimes the body won't pay the bill and some choices get shut off, and the longer you don't pay, the fewer channels you get, until one channel's left to watch. Now your teeth can't stop from chattering. And previous to this you say your best friend and roommate died. No doubt related. But let's try to find out what your friend's death triggered. I want to put you inside some blankets and I want you to imagine you are back in the womb and that you are struggling to be born, and while you are struggling I want you to think of who is being born. I want you to lie down on the floor, Wendy, on top of that blanket, I'm going to roll you up in the blanket, Wendy, then I'm going to put another blanket on top of you, Wendy, and I want you to roll up into that blanket, Wendy.

And because he was an eminent specialist and this was an hour-long session she followed the doctor's orders and rolled up inside the blankets. Then he rolled another blanket on top of that.

Wendy said the claustrophobia inside the doctor's wrapped-up rebirthing blankets was so intense, wrapped as tightly as a burrito inside a
burrito, the absolute worst horror of her life, she started to suffocate. It was pitch-black. There was no air. She kept sucking woolly fabric that tasted of nicotine into her mouth. She couldn't move. When she screamed, nothing happened. She could not tell up from down. She lost feeling in her toes. Her nose ran with a torrent of mucus. She screamed and she could not breathe. It was the worst kind of dark. She couldn't move her arms or legs at all. She couldn't move anything. Her hands were pressed tightly to the sides of her chest. She was about to faint, die in these blankets. And the doctor was sitting on her. Muffled, she could just make out the doctor's voice yelling, Tell me how you feel! Tell me your feelings, Wendy!

I'm going to die, she cried. I'm dying. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. Let me out. Let me out!

That's good, she heard the doctor's muffled voice say, that's excellent. You're almost there, Wendy, push push push. You're being born, Wendy, fight to be born, fight, Wendy, fight your way free of the past.

She started to scrabble on the ground, not thinking anything other than how much she wanted to murder the doctor who was pressing his knees against the top of the blankets to pin her in place. She screamed and howled and the sweat poured off her and she shit herself, a whole damn avalanche of shit, and then she passed out for real.

When she awoke she was in the emergency ward hooked up to an oxygen mask and a brain monitor. Apparently she'd gone into a coma for more than fifteen minutes and remained unconscious for another hour. The nurse told her she should sue.

She never saw the doctor again but his bill arrived. The fee in this case was four hundred dollars.

There were other doctors.

Hopi therapy in a teepee. Dr. Paulson dressed as an Indian witchdoctor or shaman. All people share one thing in common regardless of culture or race regardless of religious dogma, the desire to reach as close to a permanent state of euphoria as possible.

Finally she heard about a fellow all the way in Berkeley who sounded almost exactly like the last thing you'd want to try. His whole theory was to do nothing other than listen to you talk. He would spend an entire session without saying a word except hello and goodbye. On her second meeting with him he asked a question: What's the worst that could happen? Then in the weeks to come the occasional question was peppered with an observation. This specialist was employed through the Nervous Disorders Department of the university and had an office on campus. He was tall and wore his hair and beard the very same length, about half an inch. Wendy said she liked that he maintained an even smile, a smile with perfect equilibrium that only ever got wider when you told him something shocking and true about yourself and only ever disappeared completely when he knew you were avoiding something on purpose. His questions sounded rhetorical, except for they weren't. The first question he asked Wendy was not to tell him about her mother and father. Instead he asked her, What's so bad about that?

She told the quiet doctor she never knew her father and that her mother died a few years ago and honestly, she didn't remember much about her, except that her mother had an old credo of her own: Don't say no to a good opportunity.

If somebody gives you an opportunity, take it, her mom said. Wendy remembered being about six or seven years old and the two of them were snug together on the squishy chesterfield watching early-early-morning cartoons on black-and-white TV (both mother and daughter had difficulties with bedtime). If there isn't any work then I volunteer. That was her mom's explanation for why she was so busy working as a stage manager and also broke. But she didn't tell the quiet therapist about Reagan. That fact, she thought, seemed too absurd in the context of this therapist's domesticated quiet, and might make her look certifiable.

14

It's not that it didn't occur to Wendy that most cartoons were pitched as scripts to television networks. Network producers ordered projects, they didn't buy one premade. Normally the producer would buy a script, then give it to a cohort of professional animators toiling under the rubric of a large brandname studio, who would revise the script under the guidance of the network producer to complete the project in a palatable fashion, below budget, and on deadline. And so we kept asking her why she wanted us to make this cartoon, when nobody made a cartoon like this, not to mention we didn't know the first thing about animation.

Not true, she said. This is the way the
Peanuts
Christmas special was made, Wendy told us. Charles Schulz went to the bank for a loan, made his cartoon independent of network support, then sold the final product. That's what I want to do. I want my creative control.

Twyla said, That's all fine and dandy but did Schulz's animators at least know what they were doing? I never animated anything in my life. I still don't know if I can draw.

Wendy said she would learn. We would all learn. She reminded us, all animation is a picture of one drawing after another.

That pressure is kind of heavy to put on us, though, don't you think? Twyla said. She was flattered, but outside Wendy, her drawings had been rejected. There was an event held in a local comic store to launch an issue of
Black Goliath
where she showed her portfolio to Vince Colletta, an artist at Marvel, who rejected her at a glance—proportions were fine, adequate muscles, but he wanted to see how she put panels together before he offered her some fill-in work, and gave her his card. She called and left a message and had not heard back. After a few months of this kind of rejection, living on next to nothing, she picked up a hundred bucks drawing fishing rods, various brands of camping gear and lacrosse sticks, football shoulder pads and hockey sticks, and all kinds of balls for a sporting goods store brochure. As soon as she got paid, she wanted to give Wendy eighty dollars to pay her back some of what she thought she owed her for the room and food and the rest.