Dan Wakefield - Starting Over - A Novel

What Potter understood he had seen was simply the same performance he had gone through a thousand times himself, with a woman; but for the first time, that evening, he was privileged to see it through the woman’s eyes. What he saw made him feel supremely silly.

Marilyn was in a real stew because her regular shrink had advised her to stop seeing her shrink-lover.

“Why?” Potter asked.

“He says I’m being self-destructive. He says I’m letting Herb take advantage of me. And that it won’t lead to anything. Then he gives me that bullshit about how I ought to meet ‘eligible men’ and he won’t believe there aren’t any.”

“So what the hell does he want you to do?”

“Well, he wants me to end it with Herb, and I said I wouldn’t. Then he wants me to go into this ‘Assertion Group’ thing. It’s a kind of behaviorist therapy technique that he says is getting a lot of results now.”

“And what did you say to that?”

“I said I’d try it.”

“That seems fair enough.”

“But Phil—”

“Yes?”

“I don’t want to go alone.”

“Now wait a minute—”

“I know, I know how you feel about therapy, but it’s only once. Just go with me the first time. Then, if you hate it you don’t have to come back.”

“You mean I’m supposed to be part of it? The therapy?”

“Well? Don’t you have any problems?”

“Don’t get smart.”

“It can’t hurt you. Phil? Please?”

The group met in a spare, brightly-lit little room in an office building on Boylston Street. Besides Potter and Marilyn there were only three other people, though the group leader, a bearded young guy named Bill Buford, said there would be more the following week. He explained that the purpose of their efforts was to work on specific problems of behavior by practicing troublesome situations with one another, and then act the same way when the situations arose in real life. He said they weren’t into a lot of Freudian self-examination, just clear-cut specific instances of acting in a more productive way with other people.

They all introduced themselves, and told briefly what they did, and a few told what they wanted to work on. To his surprise, Potter had an immediate feeling of community with this unlikely assortment of people, more so than he would have had he met them in “real life,” but being together in the room, it was as if by accident they found themselves in the same lifeboat, on a rough open sea, during wartime.

A woman named Adele volunteered to go first. She was tall, well-built, not beautiful but quite attractive, and charming. There was a genuine kind of warmth about her, a feeling that she liked you , and so it was easy to like her in return. She wore her hair swept up in back, and piled on her head. She was a legal secretary. She was married, and had no children. Potter guessed her age in the mid-thirties.

She said her problem was that her boss was very disorganized, and just before quitting time every day he gave her all kinds of work to do, and it made her rushed and nervous and she was inevitably late getting home.

Bill Buford asked Potter to pretend to be her boss, and had Adele come up to him and politely explain the problem, and say she would appreciate it if he could arrange things so that she could get the work earlier in the day and be able to finish by five. Potter thought she seemed calm and entirely reasonable, but he made some bogus protests and questions to give her “practice,” which she also answered intelligently and convincingly. Bill said she had done very well, and he was sure she could pull it off with her boss. Adele mentioned, as if in passing, that of course this was only a small, surface kind of problem compared to the really complicated things, the deep things that really bothered her.

No one asked what those things were.

Buford called on Joe, a young computer analyst recently up from Georgia, who spoke in a shy drawl about his problems meeting new women now that he was separated from his wife. He kept twisting the wedding band on his finger while he talked. He tried to practice picking up Adele, and Buford pointed out it was bad form to keep twisting his wedding ring, calling attention to it, maybe he should even get rid of it. Joe blushed, mussed his hair, and said “Shee-it.”

Potter began madly searching his mind for some kind of situation to practice if called upon. Rebuffing Sid Persons and trying not to make him feel bad? Making Gafferty reveal the identity of the student he was fucking? Nothing seemed suitable. He wondered, also, if Marilyn would try to go into the whole complexity of her affair with the shrink-lover in New York. Would she practice making him swear to get a divorce and marry her? Potter was relieved when Adele spoke up again.

“Do you have another situation you’d like to try?” Buford asked with enthusiasm.

“Well—I don’t have any more like the first one,” she said. “The thing with my boss—to tell the truth, that was easy. That’s nothing compared to what I have going on inside.”

“But internal feelings can always be externalized,” Buford assured her. “Try to explain what it is you mean. I’m sure we can work out a situation for it.”

Adele took a deep breath. “I don’t know what’s wrong. I’m happily married. I love my husband and he loves me. It’s what I always wanted. I never wanted to be a career girl. I don’t mind working, but that wasn’t my goal. I always thought that if only I found the right man, if I had a good home and a happy marriage, all these things that have made me miserable all my life would disappear.”

She paused, and pulled a wad of Kleenex from her purse.

“It’s like,” she continued, the words tumbling faster now, “where I read once that Dustin Hoffman used to walk around New York and see those theatre marquees and think if only he had his name on them, as the star of a really good movie, everything would be all right and he wouldn’t have to worry anymore and he could relax and enjoy his life. I don’t know if that’s exactly what he said but that was the idea. And then he got his name on the marquee and he walked around New York, and he saw it and saw the crowds waiting to see the movie, and yet it didn’t help, it didn’t change anything.”

Adele poked the Kleenex at her eyes. Tears were flowing down her cheeks.

The room was frozen in a kind of silence that was different than just a lapse, or an interlude, or a break in the session. No one moved or coughed or itched or blinked.

“So now I have what I wanted—my version of the name on the marquee—the love and warmth and the man and the home and all I dreamed of and there’s no real reason to be unhappy anymore, no reason to feel anxiety or fright or sorrow or loss but I am just like I always was it isn’t any different inside me it is still the same misery and now it’s worse because there’s no reason for it, nothing to blame it on.”

Adele rubbed the Kleenex over her cheeks. Not even the therapist spoke. Potter was grateful that Buford did not attmpt to “externalize” what Adele had poured out, into some “real life” situation that she could “practice on.”

Everyone in the room had slightly bowed his head, but neither that communal gesture nor the silence that followed it were born of embarrassment or confusion. And yet there was a tangible feeling in the room, a shared emotion, and Potter, wanting to name it for himself, realized it was not a word that appeared in psychology books. Maybe there was no word that covered it at all, but the one that came closest was reverence.

Potter stayed on Marilyn’s couch that night. He didn’t itch anymore and figured his crabs were gone, but anyway he didn’t take his clothes off and anyway Marilyn didn’t even ask him about his condition. When they got home they didn’t speak at all, they just drank in silence, and then Marilyn hugged him and went in to bed. It rained all night, a torrential kind of rain, and at dawn when it let up, retreating with the light, Potter opened the living room window. A warm, wet wind rushed in, carrying with it the sharp, poignant perfume of grass and fresh earth.