“Honestly, don’t hold back. Do you think I’m an asshole?” John asks as he sets down the bag with our lunches. He’s brought his dog Rosie to session today—her “danny” was ill and Margo’s out of town—and she’s on John’s lap, sniffing the takeout containers. Now John’s eyes are on me, as are Rosie’s beady ones, as if they’re both awaiting my response.
I’m caught off guard by his question. If I say yes, I might hurt John, and the last thing I want to do is hurt him. If I say no, I might be condoning some of his more asshole-like behaviors instead of creating awareness around them. The second-to-last thing I want to do is to be John’s yes-man. I could turn the question around on him: Do you think you’re an asshole? But I’m more interested in something else: Why is he asking—and why now?
John flicks off his slip-on sneakers, but instead of arranging himself cross-legged on the couch, he leans forward, elbows on knees. Rosie jumps down, positions herself on the floor, and looks up at John. He hands her a treat. “Here you go, my little princess,” he croons.
“You’re not going to believe this,” he says, looking back at me, “but I made a, uh, unfortunate comment to Margo a few nights ago. She said that her therapist recommended a couples therapist for us, and I said that I wanted to get a referral from you because I don’t necessarily trust her idiot therapist’s suggestion. I knew the second it came out of my mouth that I should have filtered, but it was too late, and Margo just tore into me. ‘My idiot therapist?’ she said. ‘Mine?’ She said that if my therapist can’t see what an asshole I am, then I’m going to the idiot therapist. I apologized for calling her therapist an idiot and she apologized for calling me an asshole, and then we both started laughing, and I can’t remember the last time we laughed like that together. We couldn’t stop, and the girls heard us and they came in and looked at us like we were a couple of crazy people. ‘What’s so funny?’ they kept asking but we couldn’t explain it. I don’t think we even knew what was so funny.
“Then the girls started laughing and we were all laughing about the fact that we couldn’t stop laughing. Ruby got on the floor and started rolling around, and then so did Gracie, and then Margo and I looked at each other and we got on the floor and all four of us were rolling around on our bedroom floor and laughing. And then Rosie runs over to see what all the commotion’s about, and when she sees us rolling around the floor, she freezes, right there in the doorway. She just stands there shaking her head, like, You humans are too much. And then she runs away. And then we laughed at Rosie, and as I was rolling around on the floor with my wife and my kids and the dog is barking at us from the other room, I watched the scene, almost from above, like I was observing it and living it at the same time, and I thought, I love my fucking family.”
He basks in the thought for a second before continuing.
“I felt the happiest I’ve been in a long time,” he says. “And you know what? Margo and I actually had a really nice night together after that. So much of the tension that’s normally between us was gone.” John smiles at the memory. “But then,” John continues, “I don’t know what happened. I’ve been sleeping much better, but that night I was up for hours thinking about what Margo said about my being an asshole. I couldn’t get it out of my head. Because I know you don’t think I’m an asshole. I mean, you obviously like me. So then I thought, Wait, what if Margo’s right? What if I’m an asshole but you can’t see it? Then you really are an idiot therapist. So which is it—am I an asshole, or are you an idiot?”
What a trap, I think. Either I say he’s an asshole or I claim I’m an idiot. I think of Julie and the phrase that her friends wrote in her high-school yearbook: I choose neither.
“Maybe there’s a third possibility,” I suggest.
“I want the truth,” he says adamantly. A mentor once remarked that often in therapy, change happens “gradually, then suddenly,” and that might be true for John too. I imagine that as John tossed and turned in bed, unable to sleep, the house of cards he’d built for himself about how everyone else was an idiot came crashing down, and now he’s left with the wreckage: I’m an asshole. I’m not better than everyone else—special. My mom was wrong.
But that’s not the truth either. It’s simply the collapse of the narcissistic defense in the form of an overcorrection. John started out with the belief that “I’m good and you’re bad,” and now it’s being turned upside down—“You’re good and I’m bad.” Neither is right.
“The truth as I see it,” I say honestly, “is not that I’m an idiot or you’re an asshole but that sometimes in order to protect yourself, you act like one.”
I watch John for his reaction. He takes a breath and seems like he’s about to say something flip but then decides not to. He’s quiet for a minute, gazing at Rosie, who has fallen asleep.
“Yeah,” he says. “I do act like an asshole.” Then he smiles and adds, “Sometimes.”
Recently John and I talked about the beauty of the word sometimes, how sometimes evens us out, keeps us in the comfortable middle rather than dangling on one end of the spectrum or the other, hanging on for dear life. It helps us escape from the tyranny of black-or-white thinking. John said that when he was struggling with the pressure of his marriage and his career, he used to think that there’d be a point when he’d be happy again, and then when Gabe died, he thought he’d never be happy again. Now, he says, he’s come to feel it’s not either/or, yes or no, always or never.
“Maybe happiness is sometimes,” he says, leaning back on the sofa. It’s an idea that brings him relief. “I guess it couldn’t hurt to try that couples therapist,” John adds, referring to the one Wendell apparently suggested. Margo and John had gone to couples therapy for a few sessions after Gabe died, but they were both so furious and ashamed—alternately blaming each other and themselves—that even when the therapist brought up the police report on the drunk driver as a contributing factor in the accident, John had no interest in what he called the “pointless postmortem.” If Margo wanted therapy, he was all for it, but he saw no reason to prolong his own torture for an hour each week.
But now, he explains, he’s agreeing to couples therapy because he’s lost so much—his mom, his son, maybe even himself—and he wants to fight to keep Margo before it’s too late.
In that spirit, recently he and Margo have begun—tentatively, delicately—to talk about Gabe, but also about many other things. They’re learning who they are at this point in their lives and what that means going forward. And whatever the outcome, maybe, John reasons, a couples therapist can help.
“But if the guy’s an idiot—” John starts, and I stop him.
“If you begin to feel that way,” I say, “I’m going to encourage you to hang in there until you have more information. If the therapist is any good, the process might make you uncomfortable, and we can talk about that discomfort in here. Let’s understand it together before you make a determination.” I think about when I doubted Wendell, when I projected my discomfort onto him. I remember wondering what he was smoking when he first talked about my grief. I remember finding him corny at times and being skeptical of his competence at others.
Maybe we all need to doubt, rail against, and question before we can really let go.
John tells me that when he was having trouble falling asleep the other night, he started thinking about his childhood. Ever since he was a boy, he says, he wanted to be a doctor, but his family didn’t have enough money to send him to medical school.
“I had no idea,” I say. “What kind of doctor?”
John looks at me like the answer is evident. “Psychiatrist,” he says.
John, a psychiatrist! I try to picture John seeing patients: Your mother-in-law said that? What an idiot!
“Why a psychiatrist?”
John rolls his eyes. “Because I was a kid whose mother died, obviously, and I want to save her or myself or something.” He pauses. “That and I was too lazy to be a surgeon.”
I’m fascinated by his self-awareness, even if he still covers his vulnerability with a joke.
Anyway, he continues, he had applied to medical school with the hope of substantial financial aid. He knew he would graduate with tremendous debt, but he figured that on a doctor’s salary, he’d be able to pay it off. He did well in college, majoring in biology, but because he had to work twenty hours a week for his tuition, his grades weren’t as good as they might have been. Certainly not as good as those of his fellow premed students, the gunners who pulled all-nighters and competed for top scores.
Still, he got interviews at several schools. Inevitably, though, the interviewer would make some “backhanded crack” about how great his application essays were and then try to manage his expectations, given his good-but-not-exceptional GPA. “You should be a writer!” more than one interviewer said, kidding but not. John was furious. Couldn’t they see from his application that he had been working a job while doing a premed curriculum? Didn’t that show his dedication? His work ethic? His ability to power through? Couldn’t they see that a handful of Bs and that fucking C minus weren’t indicators of his aptitude but of the fact that he never had time to study, much less stay after class if the labs went long?
In the end, John got into one medical school, but he wasn’t given enough financial aid to live on. And since he knew he couldn’t work his way through medical school the way he’d worked his way through college, he declined the offer and planted himself in front of the television set, despairing about his future. His father, a teacher like his late mother, suggested that John become a science teacher, but John kept thinking about the famous saying “Those who can’t do, teach.” John could do—he knew he could do the science classes in medical school—he just needed the money. And then, as he sat in front of the TV and cursed his dismal predicament, an idea came to him.
He thought, Hey, I can write this crap.
In short order, John bought a book on scriptwriting, cranked out an episode, sent it to an agent whose name he got from a directory, and was hired as a staff writer on a show. The show, he says, was “absolute garbage,” but his plan was to write for three years, make some real money, then reapply to medical school. A year later, though, he was hired on a much better show, and the following year, he was hired on a hit show. By the time he’d saved up the money to get himself through medical school, John had an Emmy award on the mantel in his studio apartment. He decided not to reapply. What if he got into zero schools this time? Besides, he wanted to make money—the crazy money he could make in Hollywood—so his future kids wouldn’t have to face those kinds of choices. Now, he says, he has so much money, his daughters could go to medical school many times over.
John stretches his arms, rearranges his legs. Rosie opens her eyes, sighs, closes them again. He goes on to say that he remembers standing on the awards stage with the show’s staff and thinking, Ha! Take this, you morons! You can take your rejection letters and shove them up your asses! I’ve got a fucking Emmy!
Every year, as his show garnered more awards, John would feel a perverse sense of satisfaction. He’d remember all those people who hadn’t believed he was good enough, but now here he was, with an office full of Emmys, a bank account full of cash, a portfolio full of retirement funds, and he’d think, They can’t take any of this away from me.
I think about how “they” had taken away his mother.
“Who’s ‘they’?” I ask John.
“The fucking med-school interviewers,” he says. It’s clear that his success was driven as much by revenge as passion. And I wonder who “they” are for him now. Most of us have a “they” in the audience, even though nobody’s really watching, at least not how we think they are. The people who are watching us—the people who really see us—don’t care about the false self, about the show we’re putting on. Who are those people for John?
“Oh, come on,” he says. “Everyone cares about the show we put on.”
“You think I do?”
John sighs. “You’re my therapist.”
I shrug. So?
John relaxes into the couch.
“When I was rolling on the floor with my family,” he says, “I had the strangest thought. I was thinking that I wished you could see us. I wanted you to see me in that moment because I felt so much like a person you don’t really know. Because in here, you know, it’s all doom and gloom. But driving over here today, I thought, Maybe she does know. Maybe you do have, like, some kind of therapist’s sixth sense about people. Because—and I’m not sure if it’s all of your annoying questions or the sadistic silences you put me through—but I feel like you get me, you know? And I don’t want your head to get too big or anything, but I thought, you have a more complete picture of my total humanity than anyone else in my life.”
I’m so moved I can’t speak. I want to tell John how touched I am, not just by how he feels, but by his willingness to tell me. I want to tell him that I don’t think I’ll ever forget this moment, but before my voice returns John exclaims, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, don’t fucking cry on me again.”
I chuckle, and so does John. And then I tell him what I was too choked up to say a minute ago. Now John is tearing up. I remember an earlier session when John said that Margo always cries, and I’d floated the idea that Margo was doing double duty, crying for both of them. Maybe you can let Margo cry, I’d suggested, and maybe you can let yourself cry too. John hasn’t been ready to let Margo see him cry. Not yet. But given that he’ll let me see it, I feel hopeful about their couples therapy.
John points to his tears. “See?” he says. “My fucking humanity.”
“It’s magnificent,” I say.
We never open the takeout bag. We don’t need the food between us anymore.
A few weeks later, I’m on the couch at home, bawling like a baby. I’m watching John’s show, and the sociopathic character who’s become softer around the edges is talking to his brother—a person we hadn’t known existed until a couple of episodes ago. The sociopathic character and his brother had apparently been estranged, and the audience is learning in a flashback what the estrangement has been about: the brother blames the sociopathic character for his son’s death.
It’s a wrenching scene, and I think about John’s childhood dream of becoming a psychiatrist and how his grasp of exquisite pain is what makes him such a powerful writer. Was this a gift left by the pain of his mother’s death and, later, by Gabe’s? Or was it the legacy of the relationships he shared with them while they were alive?
Gain and loss. Loss and gain. Which comes first?
In our next session, John will tell me that he watched this episode with Margo and that they talked about it with their couples therapist, who, so far, seems “not particularly idiotic.” He’ll tell me that as the episode began, he and Margo sat in their den on opposite ends of their couch, but when the flashback sequence began, he didn’t know why, it was instinct or love or both, but something propelled him to get up and move right next to her so that their legs touched, and he wrapped his legs around hers as they both sobbed through the scene. As he tells me this, I’ll think about how far away I sat from Wendell on that very first day and how long it was until I finally felt comfortable enough to move closer. John will say in this session that I was right—that it was, in fact, okay to cry with Margo, and that instead of drowning them both in a flood of tears, it brought them safely onto land.
When he says this, I’ll imagine myself, John and Margo, and millions of viewers around the world lying on our couches, cracked open by his words—and I’ll think how, for all of us, John made it okay to cry.