23. Rome, November
ROME, NOVEMBER
Jean assured me that the anxiety and restlessness I felt, once we began our formal coaching, was perfectly normal. I was feeling compromised, apparently, because I was letting someone in.
“You’ve never done that before,” she said. “Or, no one has ever permitted you to do that before.”
Jean called our sessions my healing time , and her plush, white living room was my healing space .
We met in the middle of the day and talked until midafternoon.
Often, she took audio recordings of our conversations and shared them with me afterward.
When we were done, I’d walk back to the studio, or over to the Melrose school, playing them back to myself, something that Jean insisted I do as a way of sealing our observations into my subconscious mind.
This was the first of a series of rules she later came to insist upon.
But, of course, she didn’t call these rules at the time.
Like the homework she asked me to do, and the books I was to read, they were presented like common principles or terms of our engagement.
Here was one: Don’t tell anyone about our sessions, Gus, not yet. Keep it sacred.
And another: There’s no right or wrong in this room. No true or false. My only role is to listen and reflect back what I hear.
What Jean reflected back was the idea that most of my troubles were caused by other people: my parents, my teachers, my earliest friendships.
Such a seductive concept, or so it seemed at the time, to believe all my issues were not intrinsic to me, but had an external cause.
Finally, I thought, I could crawl out from under the weight of my own mind and look outward.
Initially, that felt brighter. For a while, my brain felt flossed clean.
Not only clean, but my mind developed a heightened sensitivity to everything around me.
I became hyperaware of the beating heart of everything, and everyone, I encountered.
Tripping along Corso Vittorio Emanuele after our sessions, the colors of Rome were never more vivid: The ice blue of the winter sky wrestled with the bright yellow facades of the stately government buildings; the suffering of everyone I witnessed was painfully evident, but also solvable.
When I went to galleries, the artworks acted like a narcotic, transmitting new meanings, bringing me to higher planes of understanding.
It was a fallacy, I realized, when people said therapy made you self-centered or too introspective.
For the first time in my life, I felt capable of looking outward.
And it was stark, how others had treated me, how I had treated myself.
And it was lightness: The root of my issues was them , not me.
Before long, the injustices began to accumulate. I found it hard to take responsibility for anything I did. Instead of feeling liberated, as Jean suggested I should, I began to feel defensive.
My peers on the residency were generally complimentary about my pieces, but, as the pressure built, I grew hotly aware of their criticism.
After one feedback session, where Thea and my classmates had criticized the handle on a vase I had made, I found myself coloring and turning away from them all, unable to face the brute truth that it just wasn’t good enough.
That evening, while I was trying to fix it, Thea approached me.
“Don’t take it so personally, Gus,” Thea said, clutching her scratched Vespa helmet. “I know it can feel a little raw, but we trust each other here. Honesty is part of the deal. It helps us improve.”
“Their negativity,” I said through gritted teeth. “It’s blocking me.”
Thea zipped up her leather jacket and looked at me with concern.
“I don’t understand what you mean.” Still sulking, I mumbled that it didn’t matter, and turned back to my work.
Thea continued, in the Italian accent I used to admire, “We’re here to play, Gus.
Not to be perfect. Before, you were braver.
You had a thicker skin. Is something the matter? ”
I shrugged and said nothing, hating how fractiously I was acting, the resentment that was growing, just because Thea wasn’t indulging me in the way I had grown accustomed to from Jean.
“ A domani ,” I said, in a flat voice.
Rebuffed, Thea wished me good night. I listened for the sound of her bike starting up, and then, only when I was certain that she wasn’t coming back, I picked up the vase.
I turned it over in my hand for a moment, feeling the innate failure in it; the lumps in its base, how unbalanced it was.
The sound of the bike died away. I threw the vase—the faulty, ugly thing—so that it smashed into pieces across my studio floor.
It made a chiming sound as it fell, a brief howl, then I stepped on the fragments, grinding them into smaller and smaller pieces under my feet until they turned to nothing, to dust.
I didn’t tell Jean about breaking my work.
Although our conversations were far-reaching, some things I still held back.
Time and again, she brought up my tendency to self-sabotage, not only with work, but also with Mary.
I couldn’t admit that I wasn’t evolving out of that mindset.
Unless I showed progress, I worried that Jean might feel she was wasting her energy and lose interest in me.
As I feared a day when Jean might grow impatient, I tried to chase those thoughts away by telling myself that she needed me as much as I needed her. I loved it when she explained that the patient-therapist relationship was reciprocal, and that we were in a healing cycle together.
“We’re a waltzing couple, Gus. You’re helping me as much as I’m helping you,” she insisted whenever I expressed gratitude for her insight, for her time, for her generosity.
Jean had often hinted about her frustrated desire for children, though I always felt hesitant to ask her why it hadn’t happened.
Then, one afternoon, she opened up about it.
We were in her living room as usual. On the ottoman between us were Jean’s infinite supply of tissues and a warm teapot.
There had been a miscarriage in her thirties, she explained, devastatingly late term.
In a half-sedated state, she’d been forced to deliver the fetus.
“It was my one real chance of a family. And I was going to have a girl.” Her gaze lifted over my shoulder toward the window, then back at me.
The plump look of her skin was gone; her under-eyes looked hollow and gray.
“Then, the strangest thing. The night after I met you, I began dreaming of my lost daughter again.”
I gasped, touched by the connection. It made me feel powerful, the fact that I could influence her dreams like that.
I leaned forward. “You know,” I began gently, “I read somewhere that when you have a baby, even if you never bring it to term, their genes stay inside you.” There was a pause.
The sound of the refrigerator in the kitchen, the jerking hands of her mantelpiece clock.
“So, whatever happened to your… daughter. You’ll carry that genetic code inside you forever. ”
“Oh,” said Jean, removing her glasses. “Like a Russian doll.”
“I don’t know if it’s my place to say, or if it helps to think of it like that.”
“It does, Gus, thank you. Goodness.” She dabbed at the corners of her eyes with a fingertip. “Look at me, blubbing. I do apologize. That’s not the way it’s meant to go.”
“It’s okay,” I said, smiling. “I’m so happy to help—”
“It should be me making you cry.”
I hesitated, feeling a stab of worry that I wasn’t producing enough tears for Jean. Next time, I would try harder, I decided. Next time, I would break down.
“How do you get over something like that? With the baby, I mean.”
“For years, I didn’t. I was so blocked by it. Not unlike you.”
I felt a shiver. “Then what happened?”
Jean’s eyelids flickered. “I underwent some very deep therapy,” she said. “It prevented me from looping over the memories of what had occurred. Being so haunted by the trauma.”
There was a pause, while I considered how that might go. “Was it like this?” I asked.
“A little more intense, perhaps,” she said, chuckling. Then she fell serious. “A little more productive.”
Jean explained it occurred under hypnosis and that, following her own successful treatment, she practiced it with others. “Those who are ready, I mean.”
“And it helped?”
Jean spoke quietly. “It has changed my life.”
I brought my legs up onto the sofa and crossed them beneath me. I wondered if I should be going deeper, revealing more of the thoughts I was holding back.
“How does it work?”
“Well, initially you relax. Then you go right back to your earliest memories. The things that first made you really unhappy. Our original traumas, if you like. You go over and over them.”
“Isn’t that hard?”
“At first, yes. Then you release it. You rewire them in a way that causes you less pain.”
“What if it’s not the past that’s troubling you, what if it’s just today?” My brain was swimming with all the things that worried me: my bank balance, the sitting later on with Mary, and the Melrose school Christmas party, which was fast approaching.
Jean shook her head gently. “It’s always about the past.”
I leaned back in the sofa and crossed my arms. “What if you’ve managed to forget all the bad stuff? What’s the point in dragging it back up again?”
Jean studied me with a serious expression. Her lips were making the small, trembling movements that occurred occasionally when something had captured her attention. Then she broke into a smile.