Unlikely Story

Chapter 1

The one upside of being a therapist is that everyone around you always assumes you have it all figured out.

Except, of course, your own therapist.

If I was in front of a patient, my hands clasped and sitting up straight, they would know I’m listening, engaged, and ready to help them conquer their problems.

But I’m sitting in front of Ari, and she knows that today it’s a tactic. It’s a way for me to stay quiet. She sees my thumbs gently circling each other and clocks that it’s a way for me to stay in motion unobtrusively.

“How was your holiday weekend?” I ask, hoping I can delay whatever Ari has for me on this Tuesday evening.

“It was fine,” she says without pause. “Anything happen over yours that you want to discuss?”

Ari tilts her head and levels her most patient stare at me. When she’s looking at me like this, she reminds me of my dog, George. Both are focused and unyielding, with wiry black hair sticking out without care. The only two creatures on earth who somehow see through my reserved facade.

Thank goodness one of them can’t talk.

Although that doesn’t help me right now, when I’m in front of the one who can.

“I had a barbecue with my parents and brother,” I answer, avoiding getting to today’s real topic. “And it was exactly as you’d imagine—my mom accidentally bought spicy sausages instead of hot dogs and left the ice cream out on the counter. So it wasn’t exactly a raging success, but we had fun.”

“I’m hoping that means you didn’t take on the meal yourself,” Ari says in her pointed way.

“Nope,” I reply quickly, leaving out that I did have that impulse. I wanted to take over the way I would’ve when I was a kid, whenever my hapless parents inevitably wandered away: picking up the tongs and standing awkwardly at the smoky grill so that my brother wouldn’t end up with only a bun for dinner. But Ari has taught me to use my ability to contain for my own good. So that wasn’t this weekend’s story, thankfully.

Instead I say, “My mom lit her illegal balcony grill; my dad cheered for her; she burned everything. And I just stood and watched.”

Ari cracks a smile because she, of course, is well aware of my parents’ ineptitude, so this back seat boundary drawing is considered a win. I know she’ll let it go as long as it isn’t hurting me.

I’m used to it at this point, so it rarely does.

“So. What’s got you all sullen today, Nora?” she asks, changing the subject now that she’s satisfied that my parents aren’t today’s problem, the dart she’s been aiming finally able to be let go.

“I’m not sullen.” I shrug. “I’m just tired.”

“If you say so,” she replies.

We sit like that for a few minutes. Ari is extremely capable of waiting me out.

In general, she’s much more talkative than the typical therapist (certainly leaps and bounds more than I am). She’s almost eighty and seems to have reached a stage of her life where she no longer cares to sit silently; she actually enjoys sharing an opinion more than most would. And that style works for me, I think because I’m the kind of person who needs the push. Since I never had pushy parents, Ari has actually been the perfect unsubtle bulldozer of a therapist for me.

But she can also go quiet when she wants to, and somehow because it’s her, it’s doubly effective.

Damn it.

I take a deep breath and think about my day. I think about the copyedits and the accompanying notes. I walked over here determined to finally tell Ari about J.

I like to believe that, in general, I’ve been a pretty honest patient. After all, what’s the point of individual therapy if you’re going to withhold?

In my work, with couples, there are all sorts of reasons for a patient to withhold. You may be reaching the inevitable end of a relationship, and you don’t want it to hurt more; you may not want it to end, and you’re withholding a secret that would upend everything; or you’ve grown so distant that the idea of withholding is simply second nature. But as an individual, it’s just a waste of your own time to keep things from your therapist.

So I’ve shared my life with Ari. She knows everything about my bumbling family and my own need to prop everyone up. She knows how to encourage me to be less of an introvert. She’s seen my inadequate relationships. She’s even understanding of my codependence with George.

But I’ve never told her about J because it doesn’t seem relevant to my real life. He’s not in my actual life.

Except maybe, after today, I want him to be.

“I’m not sullen,” I repeat, wondering if maybe saying it again will rev me up, an engine not quite turned on that’s trying to get into gear.

“Why don’t you start with the broad explanation and work your way up to whatever the actual feeling is?” Ari suggests, dart firmly in the bull’s-eye now.

For most adults, when you don’t talk about your feelings a lot, the vocabulary for it atrophies. When we’re kids, we’re taught to identify our emotions. We use color charts or characters or affirmations to help us go from useless blobs to fully formed people. We learn how to say “I feel blank when you blank. I want blank.” We work on expressing ourselves without throwing tantrums. But then as adults we get better at camouflage. We learn how to redirect so we don’t have to always feel so deeply. We comport ourselves so we can live in a world of adult feelings and expectations.

As a therapist, I’m used to coaxing emotions out of others. It’s my job to be able to identify the holes we’ve allowed to grow inside ourselves.

So I think I understand better than most how much of a crutch I’ve let J become. But there’s something different about saying it out loud to Ari.

It’s time to say it out loud, though.

“So you know the anonymous column I write?” I ask, starting small.

“Of course,” Ari confirms, with a small snort, as though I should expect better than to even question whether she knows these basic parts of my life. “I read it every week. I love seeing how good you are at your job, even if no one else knows it’s you.”

“Well, that’s not real therapy,” I deflect. “An advice column hardly scratches the surface of being able to help someone.”

“Nonsense,” she says with a wave of her hand. “We all need impartiality. And sometimes we need anonymity too. You give people an answer in a way you couldn’t if they actually knew who you were. We can sometimes, counterintuitively, be more personal as therapists when we don’t have a real relationship. So I think it’s a nice counterbalance to your regular work.”

I can’t pretend it doesn’t warm me a bit to hear Ari’s approval. My column for London’s Sunday Tribune started out as a favor for my friend Celia, their features editor. I went to college in the UK, so we’ve known each other forever. Ask Eleonora was an idea she had after realizing that most British advice columns were much more acerbic than ours. She said she wanted one with “the earnestness that only an American could provide.” I started it when I was right out of grad school and didn’t really have enough patients of my own. I didn’t expect it to become so popular that I’d still be doing it seven years later.

“Thank you,” I reply sincerely. “So . . . ,” I continue slowly, not sure I really want to keep talking. “I write it every week.”

“Yes, I think that part is obvious.” She gives me a mischievous smile and drums her fingers on her large wooden chair’s armrest. She’s not impatient, but she’s certainly encouraging me to get to the point. I look up at the ceiling because I don’t think I can say this out loud while she’s looking at me with so much knowing.

“Okay, so I’ve had the same copyeditor all these years,” I say. “And we don’t actually know each other in real life. I mean, I don’t even have his email because we do everything in the cloud—Google Docs in Google Drive, so everyone has access to the same files always. He just shows up as ‘J. W.’ But because we’re always sort of writing to each other about my relationship advice, we’ve kind of become . . . friends.”

I sneak a look back and see that the expression on her face is still as placid as a lake in winter. What I would’ve considered shocking information hasn’t fazed her a bit.

“Why are you expecting me to have a reaction to that?” She verbalizes my own bubbling question for me.

“Isn’t that weird?” I ask.

“Why would it be weird to have a friend?” she volleys back.

“It’s not weird to have a friend. It’s weird to have a virtual friend.”

“Lots of people have virtual friends,” she calmly points out. “My son is in his fifties, and I swear some of his closest friends are the men he goes on raids with.”

“What?”

“Video games. Groups you do stuff with in multiplayer games. I have no idea what the appeal is. But he’s always loved it.” She shrugs, and the lack of judgment is so evident it’s almost as simple as breathing. I’ve gotten pretty good at that myself with clients—after all, we see more than most people, so very little shocks therapists—but I don’t always have the same energy for myself and my family.

“Okay, well . . . it’s not a video game,” I reply lamely.

“I was merely saying that friendship comes in many forms.”

She pauses again, waiting for me to speak, even though I’m desperate for her to keep going.

“Right,” I finally say, even though I’m not sure I actually agree.

“Why would you be against having a virtual friend?” she continues. “It seems to me like you might be able to express yourself better to someone you don’t actually have to see or feel obligation to.”

I cringe at how obvious I must be to her. Her point is one I think about a lot when it comes to J. I’ve never been able to decide whether it’s a positive aspect or just another indication that I’m incapable of having fully honest relationships in real life.

“I’m not against it,” I reply truthfully. “But it wasn’t something I sought. It started from commentary on the columns, really. He would make his edits, but he’d also always leave a note at the end. It started with your average editor sort of stuff—a summation of what was missing, or encouragement if he thought everything was working really well. Eventually he started leaving his thoughts on the pieces too. Little things like agreeing with the difficulties of living with a partner, or expanding on his own story of a mortifying relationship event. I would always reply, because usually we would go back and forth at least once or twice anyway to answer questions in the edit. It felt like . . . it became a sort of ongoing conversation.”

Ari takes that in, careful not to speak too quickly like she normally does. Ari understands I’m a bit skittish when I bring up a topic I’m nervous to talk about. I can sense her need to not spook me into waving off this subject like I do with so much else.

“So why are you telling me now, after seven years?” she pinpoints. “What made it suddenly relevant to your day-to-day life?”

I take another deep breath and fiddle with the sleeves of my linen blazer, the green one I love so much, from that vintage store down the street where I’m always overspending.

I’m avoiding, thinking about breathing and clothes, instead of processing what to say. Because I know this is the part where maybe I lose her. This is the part that I’ve been wondering about for the better part of a year and have always thought sounded completely insane in my own mind. And I can’t believe I’m going to even try and say it out loud.

“I think . . . I think I’m in love with a man I’ve never met or even spoken to?”