All his files came up in pastel boxes. One of them was called Mad Money, another Nostalgia. He produced a little candy-wafer disk and tucked it in. A purple oblong with a tiny hourglass in it appeared on the screen. “This is going to change my career,” he said. The purple vanished, piece by jerky piece, revealing a cartoon of a man with a big pink head, trying to climb over a locked wall to get to a garden of flowers. The word DEPRESSION appeared over the picture. Then another oblong, with a woman’s face in it, bloomed on the screen. She was an attractive blonde in her mid-thirties, but she looked out of her oblong with the alarmed face of a horse in a burning barn.
“Millions of Americans are suffering from depression!” she announced. “Yet the sufferers feel terribly alone!”
“She looks like a lunatic,” said Margot.
“What do you expect? She’s a psychiatrist.”
“Depression is often accompanied by feelings of shame, of failure, of not-rightness.” The psychiatrist paused; her expression flared wildly.
“If I saw this woman at a party, I’d avoid her,” said Margot. “I’d cross the room.”
“You should’ve seen the other psychs I interviewed. I mean, yikes.”
“In the past, depression was seen as an incurable personal flaw, a distasteful matter to be borne in silence.” The psychiatrist furrowed her brow and pursed her lips. “But not now. Now there’s help.” She batted her eyelashes and pushed out her lips as she spoke the h of “help.”
“Oh, God,” said Margot.
“Come on, she’s good-looking and she’s warm, sort of. Most people like her.”
“Now you don’t have to be depressed!”
“Why didn’t you read the script?” asked Margot. “You used to act.”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Now,” said the psychiatrist, “you can be part of life again!”
“I’m not visually appealing enough,” said Patrick.
“I’d rather look at you than her.”
Patrick said thank you, but he hardened in his cross-legged slouch. Margot could tell that she had made him anxious. She tried to feel remorseful, but instead she felt righteous. She remembered a party she had attended in Ann Arbor, right after she’d moved away from the house she’d shared with Patrick and Dolores. She had casually entered a conversation among three girls who were telling stories about some ridiculous guy. It was a minute before she realized that they were talking about Patrick.
“But do you want to hear about the really awful thing?” The girl who asked had a plain face and a busy, bossy humor.
“Tell them,” urged her friend.
“He said I ought to just lick his balls while he jerked off.”
Everybody went “Oooh” or “Gross!” The plain girl stared at Margot, her speculative gaze a light tease. Margot blushed.
“Tragically, many people who are depressed don’t realize it,” the psychiatrist was saying. “Luckily, there are symptoms.”
“Okay,” said Patrick. “Let’s click on that.”
The psychiatrist, froze, with her mouth open. A box materialized over her, and then a man in a suit within the box. “Hello,” he said. “I’m here to discuss key symptoms of depression.” He projected out of his box like an enthusiastic dog on a tight leash.
“Patrick,” said Margot, “this is absurd.”
“Most common is lethargy,” said the man. “You are lethargic if—”
Patrick hit a button, and the man froze with his mouth open. “All right,” he said. “Tell me why you think that.”
“For starters, it’s condescending. You reinforce people’s feelings of passivity when you encourage them to think they don’t even know what they’re feeling and that somebody has to tell them. And it’s mechanical—”
“But a lot of people don’t know. I’m surprised at you, Margot, that you—”
“Do you actually think this abstract thing is going to help people? It’s so detached and . . . it’s just like the shrinks at work who give out meds instead of trying to connect on a human level.”
“Oh, barf.”
“It’s barf, all right. Patrick, you can’t even deal with your own sister—what the hell are you doing?”
He sat silently, in profile, staring at the static gray psychiatrist. “I can’t help my sister,” he said. “I’ve tried.” There was a tiny electrical hum in the room.
“Patrick,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
He didn’t answer.
“I was out of line.”
He didn’t say anything. He seemed trapped in his cross-legged position. Margot put her hand on his knee. He reached forward and ejected the CD-ROM. “It’s okay,” he said. “I should’ve known: it’s not your kind of thing.”
He turned to face her; he was smiling.
“I know it doesn’t have anything to do with Dolores,” she said. “But it seems. . .”
Still smiling, he extended his legs to the side of her. He took her hand and pulled her toward him. She went. She lay against him and put her hand on his chest. He felt sparkling and agitated, like someone who is trying so hard to tell you what he means that he is almost incoherent. She looked up at him. His face was smiling, but his eyes were tired and sad. Still, his expression was clear and deep—as if he was looking at her all the way from the bottom and, even more, inviting her to look in. He bent to kiss her.
“Patrick,” she said, “we don’t have that kind of—”
“Yes, we do.”
“What do you mean? We—”
He pulled her close. She pushed away. Too heavily, he stroked her hair and her face; his touch would’ve seemed imperious had it not felt so needy.
“Patrick,” she said, “stop.”
“I just want to hold you, okay? Please, just let me—”
“Don’t!” She sat up and put her hands over her ears. “Don’t,” she said again.
He lay back. She felt him take distance. “Okay,” he said.
She put her hands in her lap. They looked at each other in silence. His face looked strange to her. His forehead was heavy, almost oppressive; it seemed weighted with information that the rest of his face didn’t know about. His eyes and nose were arrogant and ignorant, his mouth was sensual and nervous, wanting to please. But his forehead was powerful, discerning, and strange. She felt she was looking at something very familiar and very unfamiliar at once. He reached for her carefully. He stroked her cheek with the back of his hand, barely touching her. His expression deepened a shade. The unfamiliar thing eclipsed the familiar. She could sense it more than see it. He was trying to show himself to her, to explain something. He didn’t have the means, but he was trying, silently, with his eyes. And she was trying too. It was as if they were signaling each other from different planets, too far away to read the signals but just able to register that a signal was being sent. They sat and looked at each other, their youth and beauty gone, their selves more bare and at the same time more hidden.
Gently, Patrick took the tips of her two forefingers. “I’ll drive you home,” he said.
The Blanket
Valerie had been celibate for two years when she met Michael, and sex with Michael was like a solid left hook; she reeled and cartoon stars burst about her head. The second time he came to her San Francisco apartment, he walked in with two plastic bags of fruit, extending a fat red tomato in one outstretched hand, his smile leaping off his face. “I brought you things,” he said. “I brought you fruit to put on your windowsill, and this.” He handed her the tomato and said, “I’m a provider.” His voice was full of ridiculous happiness. He was wearing shorts, and one of his graceful legs was scuffed at the knee. He was twenty-four years old.