16
Los Angeles
After fighting with John over who would pay the check for lunch, he dropped me off at my therapist and left to run errands in the meantime. I had two hours scheduled for today and knew she would grill me because I hadn’t been to see her in over a month.
Alone in the private waiting room, nothing but old magazines, daytime TV, and a coffee maker to keep me company, I checked my messages.
The floors were being redone in the guestroom, and my supply shipment would be delayed another week.
A few messages before that, my dad asked me how to share something to Instagram for the dozenth time.
No matter how many times I showed him, he couldn’t quite grasp social media.
Then my assistant had checked in and asked if tomorrow was ok to meet with Rome.
My stomach flipped. He was being persistent.
I agreed to noon at a coffee joint of his choosing.
Someplace remote, his side of town. It almost seemed like a drug deal.
I drafted a list of things to discuss with him at length.
First on the agenda, music. I wanted to know everything.
Where he wrote, when he wrote, why he’d chosen the subjects he had.
Instruments, melodies, producers, co-writers—everything.
I wanted to know how much had been written before he left the band and what had been written after.
I wanted to know how much of it was about me.
I wanted to see his studio. I wanted to see his bedroom.
I wanted to see his Beverly Hills haunts and hideaways. I wanted to show him mine in the hills.
It was important I didn’t overwhelm him.
He scared easily, socially speaking. One question too many and he’d be searching for a reason to excuse himself from the discussion altogether.
Next to nothing could keep him engaged if he lost interest in you.
My next line of questioning would veer towards family.
How were they? Parents, sisters, cousins, aunts?
One thing I was glad of when he left the band was that it enabled him to reconnect with his family.
Their absence in the years we’d spent on the road took a bigger toll on him than any of the other boys.
Although he was an island, tending to thrive in isolation, he adored his people and needed to be around them, or else he lost touch.
As for his mum, she offered solace not only in her words, but also a doting, infinite supply of home-cooked Italian cuisine.
Eggplant parmigiana, bolognese, risotto, soup—you name it.
And, fuck’s sake, she had a carbonara to die for.
The thought of him getting his fill in her care put me at ease in the immediate aftermath of his departure.
I’d seen too many days in 2015 and 2016 where he wouldn’t eat for days at a time, making it difficult for me to eat without a sense of guilt.
Sometimes I didn’t eat either. I hoped those awful habits had been reversed the moment he got home to her.
“Rafe?” my psychologist called, standing in the doorway of the private lounge.
She pushed her glasses up over the short, silver hair and beamed at me.
Dr. Ehrmann was a middle-aged Israeli woman with the figure of a twenty-year-old and all the sagacity of a centenarian.
Long ago she’d told me to call her Naomi because we were more like acquaintances.
We had bonded over my Hebrew script tattoo upon first meeting in 2016, since her family were Jewish and my dad’s side was as well.
Although at some point in college she had defected, and now leaned towards a more agnostic worldview.
“How are things?” She grinned, grey eyes alight with a maternal affinity. “Nice hat.”
“Thanks.” I removed my worn Dodgers baseball cap and fiddled with it. “Yeah, things are good. How’ve you been?”
“Wonderful. Happy to see you again.”
I approached and kissed each of her cheeks. She smelled like musky perfume and hairspray. Her short grey locks gleamed beneath the glasses at the crown of her head, lending her a gamine appeal that only intensified her allure.
“Keeping out of trouble I hope,” she didn’t have an accent because she’d been shipped here as a kid and grew up with relatives. She reminded me of Natalie Portman.
“Always,” I muttered, following her down the hall past oversized still life paintings. Soon we bent into a commodious office that was minimally furnished. Not a single Post-it lay out of place. Her OCD was apparent, as was her love of floral prints and high-end oil diffusers.
I plopped down on a sofa covered in large blue flowers, refusing to lie on the chaise because I hated to feel like a patient.
She encouraged an informal camaraderie over the doctor-patient dynamic, and it was effective.
It made me unload on her like she was an old friend and not someone paid by the hour to clinically dissect my life.
Everything was cold and sterile. Particularly the outsized, steel-finished desk that looked as though it was made of lead. A glistening Newton’s Cradle sat atop it. I usually set the balls in motion the minute I walked in, but it slipped my mind today.
“It’s warm out,” Naomi said, removing her cardigan. “Much better,” she sighed, grabbing a pad and pen from the desk and joining me on the sofa. She liked to close the distance, and sometimes she liked to touch. It helped me to feel looked after.
“Coffee?”
“M’good, thanks. Had too much before I got here. Can I get you any?”
“I’m over-caffeinated too.”
“How’s Jamie?”
I spotted his pictures along the wall adjacent to the desk.
He was her only child and an American prodigy.
A senior in high school and a state-qualified wrestler—in the top 3 or top 5 contenders; I couldn’t remember which.
But she loved to talk about him as much as I loved to talk about music, and sometimes before our sessions we exchanged anecdotes.
“Oh, you know, still trying to decide where he wants to go in the Fall. He swears it’ll alter the course of his life if he chooses wrong, so he keeps vacillating.
Worrying himself sick. I told him if he doesn’t make up his mind, he won’t be able to go anywhere. Admission deadlines are nonnegotiable.”
“What’s he torn between?”
“We've narrowed it down to two lanes of thought, per se. Either wrestling or academics. In which case he leans toward Ohio State for wrestling, and Stanford for the rest.”
“Tell him to choose Stanford. I’ve never heard of the other one.” We laughed.
“Any news today?”
“Not really,” I played it coy, picking at my thumbnail.
“Rafe?” She smiled. “I know that look. What’s up, bub?”
“Alright…” I relented, turning and sitting on my leg. “I got a call.”
“From?”
“You’ll never believe…”
“Try me.” She set the glasses back into place and flipped through a few things we discussed last session.
“I dunno if I should…”
“How about some music then?” She grabbed a remote, flicking on a classical piece. Felt like we were trapped in an awkward elevator ride.
“Let me guess—if I may be so bold—is it the person whose feelings for you are…infinitesimal?”
I nodded. She read a little more.
“The one who robs you of both your confidence and self-respect?”
“Yeah.”
“And what shall we call her today?”
“Amelia.”
“Amelia?” she tried it out for size. “That’s a good one, bub.”
“Thought so too.”
“Are you ever going to tell me her real name?”
“Not yet.”
“Noted.” She flipped to a clean page.
The keenest humiliation I’d suffered in that office was finding an excuse to bring him up, then bitching out mid-sentence and referring to him as a female.
It was pathological. There had been so many names used already.
Anna, Olivia, Ava, Lisa, Lilly, Gwen, April.
I liked it best when he was April because I’d spoken about him a lot that day.
A load was lifted off my shoulders. Yet somehow, he’d returned to weigh me down now more than ever.
I’d hardly taken an unlabored breath since last night.
“What is it you fear about bringing her up?”
“Total immersion. There's just so much to lose, y’know? Mainly myself.”
“In what way? Be specific.”
“Giving her control.”
“In what way?”
“Speaking of her, mostly. Thinking of her, too. And although I know it can't be helped, I try so hard not to. I just can’t stop thinking of her. Especially not after I saw her again. She’s all that’s on my mind, day and night. Even in my dreams.”
My throat tautened. I cleared it and averted my eyes from the piercing gray boring a hole into my soul.
“But the way I do it…the way my brain works, uh, it feels… not normal. It's too much, I think.”
“Only because you've convinced yourself that it is abnormal. What do you mean by ‘normal,’ exactly?”
“Uh…all things in moderation, right? Well…with her, I can’t apply that concept. Everything is just too much all the time…and, uh, that’s what I mean by not normal.”
“And what would it mean for you, if you weren’t particularly normal? If the world were to categorize you as abnormal, what then?”
A pit formed in my stomach.
“I…” I faltered, pushing stray hairs behind my ears.
“It might mean…I’d end up alone? It sort of makes me feel alienated, I guess.
It makes me feel that if people knew the truth about how I think or what I think…
they wouldn’t…y’know…they wouldn’t like to be around me.
They might think I was mental, or sick in the head or something. ”
“It’s ok,” she assured me when I grimaced. “We’re just working through some of those rigid presuppositions. Internalized core beliefs.”
I nodded and she continued.
“So, you’ve come to think of her overmuch by denying yourself the opportunity to think of her at all without self-ridicule.
You’ve fallen into a mental paradox, thinking about not thinking.
And you’ve accomplished this by making yourself feel ashamed of contemplating things you cannot help.
Punishing yourself for experiencing things that are beyond your power to control. ”
"I don’t think I follow?"
“You see, Rafe, in limiting yourself from feeling, and by censoring yourself from expressing, you have given her every bit of the control you sought to maintain.”
“H-how?”
“Surely it would require far more effort to remember her and not to speak, than it does to allow those thoughts free reign, air them out, and create an opportunity for you to move past them.”
“But..." I puzzled. "How can I do that without letting him take over? Without feeling overwhelmed?”
“Think of her freely, without restraint, without apprehension of the consequences to come. You simply need to process. Allow your mind time to process the thought. Let it run its natural course. The fear and evasion of the thought is what makes it a recurring one. You must face it head-on and defeat it.”
She reached over and patted my hands, which were trembling atop my lap. I wrung them to hide the tremors.
“Tell me everything,” she whispered. “Let go, Rafe. You’re safe here, you know that. She can't hear you, she can't get to you.”
I choked up, hiding my face behind my hand and weeping unreservedly. I was an idiot. When you've spent so much time isolated with loathsome truths, afraid to make one false move lest it upend your life or the life of another, it was difficult to feel sane.
“I can’t…”
“You can. I know you're exhausted. Take your time if you must. But in the meantime, tell me what you’re feeling right now.”
“It just…fucking…hurts,” I managed, balling my hands into fists and hammering my head.
“Don't punish yourself,” she said, firmly. “I know it hurts, but it can be endured. Sometimes the pain may be too fresh, too relevant to contemplate. So why don’t we start at the beginning? As far removed from the trauma as possible?”
I swallowed thickly and faced forward, unable to look at her anymore. If I was actually going to revisit it all, I needed to avoid being unnerved by her stare.
“It was just supposed to be one night...” I began, staring entranced out the window behind the desk.