“Don’t put me on hold,” I said. “I can’t take the music.”
“Name?”
“Conrad Lonsberg,” I said.
“He doesn’t have a phone,” said Harvey. “That’s an easy one. Tycinker wanted to reach him a few months back about some case. No phone. I can give you an address.”
“I’ve got one. Harve, what do you think about AA?”
Pause and then. “They can help,” he said. “It’s like a religion if it works. I tried it, needed too much support, went cold on my own. So far so good. Why are you asking?”
“I’ve got a friend,” I said.
“Good luck. Talk to you tomorrow.”
He hung up and I checked my watch. I had five minutes, just enough time to stop at Sarasota News amp; Books, pick up two coffees and a biscotti. I paid Ann Horowitz twenty dollars a visit when I could afford it, ten when I couldn’t, and always brought her coffee and a chocolate biscotti.
She was just around the corner on Gulf Stream, a small office with a small waiting room. Ann had no secretary and a select few patients. At the age of eighty-one and with her annuity from Stanford University plus investments she had mentioned from time to time plus the money her husband Melvin still brought in as a successful sculptor, Ann could have retired two decades earlier. But therapy was what she did and enjoyed in addition to conversation, history, odd facts, coffee, biscotti, and opera. Ann and Melvin had chosen Sarasota because their only son lived here with his wife and two grown daughters.
Ann’s inner door was open. I could hear her talking. From the pauses, I figured she was on the phone so I moved to the doorway where she motioned for me to take my usual seat across from her.
Ann is a small woman with a tolerant smile. She likes bright dresses. Her hair is gray, straight, and short enough to show off her colorful earrings.
“No,” she told the person on the phone, “I’ll see you at four… no, you will not kill yourself… I understand… four. Did you read the book?… I gave you a book, Lost Horizon… No, I did not want you to rent the movie. I wanted you to read the book… You’ve got a few hours. Start reading.”
She hung up the phone and accepted the coffee and biscotti from me, placing both on the desk to her right, and looked at me.
I knew what she was looking at.
“I got slapped by a woman I was serving papers,” I explained as she examined the side of my face.
“And what did you do?”
“Do?”
“In response to being slapped. What did you do?”
“I got on my bike and left.”
Ann shook her head.
“What should I have done?” I asked.
“Getting on your bicycle is one thing. Getting angry is another. Saying something to the woman.”
“I wasn’t angry,” I said.
“You should have been. You should let yourself feel, but don’t worry. I’m not commanding you to feel. It doesn’t work that way. Here, take this with you,” she said, handing me a copy of Smithsonian magazine. “Article in there about gargoyles. Fascinating.”
I took the magazine. There was a grinning stone gargoyle on the cover, just the right gift for a depressed client. Ann took the lid off the cup of black coffee and dipped the biscotti.
“Can you do it today?” she asked, looking at me as she lifted the saturated biscotti to her mouth.
“Not today,” I said.
She wanted me to speak the name of my wife. I had done it only twice since she had died, once to Sally and two weeks ago when I managed to say it to Ann. Saying her name aloud had brought back images, memories, pain, the empty feeling in my stomach, the sound of my heart madly pulsing blood through my veins, my neck, my head.
“Feel better?” Ann asked when I had said my wife’s name.
“No,” I answered. “Worse. Much worse.”
“Of course,” she said. “This is therapy, not magic.”
I had gone through this opening session ritual four times since then with Ann asking me to speak the name aloud. I had managed it only that one session.
“Can you do it?” Ann asked, biscotti in hand.
I took a deep breath, felt the beat of my heart, closed my eyes, and softly uttered, “Catherine.”
“And you feel how?” Ann asked, redipping her biscotti.
“Sorry I said it,” I said, reaching for my own coffee, which unlike my therapist’s was strongly fortified with half and half and two packets of Equal.
“Of course you are. You are still in love with your depression and self-pity. You’ve held it around you like a child’s comfort blanket since your wife died. If you give it up, what are you left with?”
“We’ve been through this,” I said.
“And each week we become different people,” she said. “Sometimes different people with different answers. This time you said her name.”
“Without my depression,” I said. “The few times anxiety takes over. I shake. I can’t do anything. I walk till I’m exhausted. Even Mildred Pierce doesn’t help. I think… you know all this.”
“You would rather be depressed than anxious,” she said, continuing to work on my burnt offering.
“Is that a question or an observation?”
“Your choice.”
“Yes, I would rather be depressed,” I said.
“You owe it to Catherine to live depressed and guilty. You want to hide, not feel and slowly die, a hermit, a saint who does not deserve life.”
“I know.”
“I’m just recapitulating,” she said. “Do they have flavors other than chocolate?”
“Yes.”
“Next time if you remember, bring almond or something,” she said.
“I’ll do that.”
“Change is good, small stimulation from small changes. I just segued from my own taste to a metaphoric reference to your state of mind.”
“I noticed,” I said.
“You were meant to. You wouldn’t be one of my favorite clients if you couldn’t follow what I say.”
“I thought I was your favorite,” I said.
“You are part of an elite group.”
“Am I making progress?” I asked.
“Do you want to make progress?” she asked in return.
Good question.
“I don’t know.”
“You still seeing Sally?”
“Yes, tonight. Why?”
“You can turn in your blanket of depression for something else,” she said. “Like coming back to life with a real person.”
“I’m not giving up my wife,” I said.
“You said her name,” Ann said with a smile, pointing her finger at me. “Progress. I’m not asking you to give her up. I’m asking you to place her gently inside you where she belongs and go on with your life.”
I shook my head and said, “We keep saying the same things.”
“But in different ways and… tell me, Lewis, are you starting to feel different?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And it makes you anxious?”
“Angry.”
“At who? Who are you angry with?”
“You.”
“Say something about her,” Ann said, leaning back.
“What?”
“Your wife. Did she do anything that annoyed you?”
I closed my eyes, and shook my head “no.”
“She was perfect,” Ann said. “Nobody’s perfect. Remember the last line of Some Like It Hot? When Joe B. Brown finds out Jack Lemmon isn’t a woman? ‘Nobody’s perfect,’ he says.”
“She left doors and drawers open,” I said. “Medicine cabinet, kitchen cabinets, dresser drawers. All the time.”
“And what did you do?” Ann prompted.
“I closed them.”
“Never got irritated?”
“For a while. Then…”
“You liked her having little faults?”
“I guess,” I said. “I think I can remember everything in those cabinets and drawers.”
“Do you want to remember them?”
“No… yes. This isn’t fun.”
“It’s not supposed to be fun. You don’t know how to have fun yet.”
Ann stood up and jogged in place a few seconds.
“Knee tightens,” she said, sitting again. “You showed me her photograph. She was pretty.”
I nodded, seriously considering never coming back here again.
“Lewis, you are not pretty.”
“I know. We… she picked me. We had…”