Chapter Forty
Alex
‘And what’s going through your head when you walk away in the middle of a conversation like that?’
Alex’s therapist asks him this question in almost an offhand way, so casually that he makes it seem like a minor thing.
‘Panic, mostly,’ he says.
‘Blank panic?’
‘Yes.’
Just thinking back to the moment when he left Jess’s flat brings him right back there: his palms are clammy; his heart is thumping. He wills it to stop, but it won’t.
‘Did you try the grounding technique?’
‘The thing with the senses?’
‘Yes.’
‘No. In the moment, I forgot. I told you. Blank panic.’
‘Okay. We need to figure out a way to have you remember to do that in the middle of these moments, so that you can stay and work them through.’
‘What if I don’t want to stay and work them through?’ He hears himself asking this in a small voice. The voice, almost, of a child.
‘Well, that’s a bigger problem.’
‘Why?’
‘You tell me why.’
This is the part where Alex always wants to roll his eyes. He’s paying a not insubstantial sum to an expert to fix him. If the answer was deep within himself all along, isn’t this a giant waste of time and money?
He shrugs.
His therapist waits. The clock ticks, each tick a not insubstantial portion of that not insubstantial sum. If Alex wasn’t writing this book, he wouldn’t be able to afford any of these ticks. But then, if Alex wasn’t writing this book, maybe he wouldn’t need to afford any of them.
‘Let’s assume I don’t know,’ he says eventually, when a respectable number of ticks have gone by. Fifty-one, to be precise.
‘If you keep walking away in the middle of conflict, how will that conflict get resolved?’
‘It … won’t?’
‘Bingo.’
Another silence. Another opportunity for Alex to, presumably, look deep within himself. And this time, he does find something there.
‘Unresolved conflict is a source of anxiety.’
‘Exactly.’
‘And we’re trying to reduce anxiety in my life, so that means being able to deal with sources of stress, like conflict.’
‘Yes. Also, it makes for better relationships.’
‘Ah.’
He can’t fault this argument. Walking away when things get tough has not pleased Jess, and he can’t say he blames her.
It’s a new thing, this anxiety that makes him unable to think straight.
Before he’d uncovered it all in therapy – when he was just internalising it with stomach aches and sweaty palms – it was easier to manage.
But now, it’s like a scab he’s started to scratch, and it’s bleeding, and Jess is somehow getting caught in the crosshairs.
Maybe having therapy wasn’t such a good idea after all.
Expensive and dangerous seems like an unhelpful combination.
Still, he’s here now. He might as well get his money’s worth.
‘So can you help me figure out why I was so anxious?’
‘Why do you think you were so anxious?’
Alex looks around for a pillow to scream into. Sadly, there isn’t one. He digs a nail into a palm instead, and that seems to help.
‘I don’t know. I was enjoying hanging out with Ivy. I like kids. I love being an uncle, and I feel like I’m good at it. I let her win at chess and she didn’t even realise that I had. Not to brag, but that’s a special kind of skill.’
‘But you didn’t know you were signing up to look after a child when you went into this relationship.’
Alex’s breath catches. Yes, this is it. The bait and switch.
‘And you’re not ready for that kind of commitment?’
That doesn’t feel like it’s what it is. Once he’s in with Jess, he’ll be all in. He’s always wanted children of his own. Some nights, and some days too, he’s even dreamed of it, dreamed of a baby with Jess’s freckles and honey blonde hair. ‘I don’t think that’s what it is.’
‘Well, tell me this. How did it feel when Jess dropped your writing session so she could look after Ivy?’
‘She didn’t drop it.’ It feels important to point this out. He is defensive of her. ‘It was just delayed. And then, admittedly, I walked out, so it didn’t happen. But that wasn’t her fault.’
‘But if she had cancelled it, would you have been angry?’
He looks down at his fists. He hadn’t realised he was clenching them. ‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘I suppose because I’m realising how often people put me second. And I know that if we commit to each other and have kids, I’ll be second a lot. But it’s the beginning of our relationship, and I’m just working through all this, so it feels, I don’t know, raw?’
‘Good,’ says the therapist, pushing his glasses up his nose. ‘Good. That’s good.’
‘It doesn’t feel good, though.’
‘It’s good that you’re recognising all of this. Also, let me ask you something else: is there a part of you that worries that Jess is putting herself second?’
‘Bingo,’ he says. Not a word he has ever used in his life, at least not like this.
His fists unclench; a weight lifts from his shoulders.
Even just understanding this about himself helps.
‘I love her,’ he says – and probably the first time he says this should not be to someone whom he is paying to hear it, but oh well.
‘And so I feel defensive of her, I suppose. And worried that she’ll be taken advantage of and have to give more than she’s prepared to. ’
‘Good,’ the therapist says again, and Alex does his best to suppress his irritation in the midst of this small cathartic victory. ‘So what do you think you need to do next?’
The answer is so obvious that it makes Alex want to roll his eyes. ‘Talk to her, I’m guessing?’
His therapist takes a breath.
‘Please don’t say bingo too,’ Alex says, and the therapist chuckles.
‘Okay,’ he says, and does a thumbs-up sign instead. Which might be worse.
It’s all very well saying that he needs to speak to Jess, but that requires her being willing to talk to him.
Alex has already done the showing-up-with-flowers trick, and while he doesn’t put it past himself to need to do that again sometime, it seems a little too soon since the last time.
A little unoriginal, which in turn smacks of insincerity.
Besides, it feels like this moment needs something bigger than just flowers.
Honestly, he is starting to feel ashamed of his inability to deal with the hard stuff of life, to stay and work through things.
He knows from his childhood, from his parents’ failed and then successful marriages, that relationships are hard and they require work.
He’s been exploring the nuances of that in his books for a decade at this point, and successfully so, if his critics are to be believed; and he has certainly always been inclined to believe them.
He takes out his phone and scrolls to Jess’s name, but a text seems so pathetic, and it didn’t impress her last time.
An email, maybe? But that’s so … formal.
So unromantic. They don’t have the greatest of histories with email, either.
And yet, if he could express himself in writing, it would definitely help his cause – help him to say exactly what he needs to, without stammering or stuttering or getting the nuance wrong and unwittingly digging himself into a hole or making everything worse than it already is.
Maybe he’ll put something in the book? Dedicating a book to someone is always a nice touch, something that tends to move people.
But you can’t dedicate a novel to your co-author; that’s just weird.
In the acknowledgements, maybe? That doesn’t feel quite right, either.
Maybe there’s a simpler answer than any of this.
Maybe he should express himself in the pages of the novel itself, write an ending that communicates to Jess how much he cares for her, how much he’s learned from her.
They haven’t finished the book entirely; there are pages outlined but not yet written.
There are more characters and relationships not fully fleshed-out that he could get some mileage out of.
He’d have to be careful not to be too obvious, not to be too cheesy – not to harm the book itself in pursuit of reconciliation. But it feels doable.
Okay. Time to get to work.