Heidi Julavits - The Folded Clock - A Diary

Today my friend told me about her gay male therapist crush. The crush seems mutual and for obvious reasons safe for all involved. Their relationship sounded so enviable. Recently, after a ten-year hiatus, I’d decided to go to therapy again. I made this decision abruptly, at two p.m. on a Thursday. I left the library. I went home and checked my insurance’s website. I found an eligible provider within walking distance. I called her. She answered. She said, “Can you be here in an hour?”

The therapist, I’d discover, was a 1950s-era bohemian now in her seventies. She lived in a massive rent-controlled apartment on Riverside Drive that smelled of mothballs. She wore plaid shirts and jeans; she had wispy honey-colored hair that she seemed not to have brushed for decades, and that she’d twisted into a tiny knot atop her head. She had a crisp Katharine Hepburn properness to her speech.

She was also possibly senile. She seemed always to have left something she needed in another room. In the middle of our first session, her doorbell rang. It was a girl in her late teens. I heard the therapist whispering with her in the foyer. When the therapist returned, she told me that she’d forgotten she’d scheduled an appointment with the girl during my time slot. “But that was weeks ago,” she said, as if it were the girl’s fault for booking so early. She told me that the girl had abandoned college after less than one semester; that she was confused by life. The therapist did nothing to hide her disdain for this girl’s problems. She seemed to be suggesting that we were working on much more vital and complicated problems. Adult problems.

I quickly understood that I would never tell this therapist much of anything that mattered to me. I’d talk, but I would not seek her counsel or advice. Our hour crept by. The hour felt like three hours. I had to tell her about my “family of origin,” and she drew facile connections between my behavior and my relationship to my parents. At the end of each of our four sessions — I saw her only four times — she would pronounce that I needed medication, and that talk therapy was pointless for people like me, at least until I was on drugs.

I also sensed she didn’t like me. Or maybe it wasn’t that she didn’t like me — she felt overwhelmed by me. In truth I was pretty unstrung. Normally it takes me months to reveal any emotion to a therapist, if I ever do; I once had a therapist who accused me of treating our sessions like a cocktail party encounter. This was not an inaccurate description of how I viewed our meetings. I adored this therapist. I joked that I paid her by the hour to be my pal. I wanted to be the patient she most looked forward to seeing; I strove always to be entertaining and never to be a drag. I took tissues from the box next to her couch only when I had a cold.

Meanwhile, I showed up to my second appointment with this new therapist in hysterics. I’d been buying a coffee at the Cuban place around the corner from her apartment when I’d received some bad news that shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it did. I left the Cuban place without my coffee. I tried not to cry until I made it to her apartment. Then I lost it. I said crazy, nonsensical, not-entirely-true shit. I spun for her the most negative and hopeless account of my life and its prospects. I voiced interconnected paranoias. Once I started I couldn’t stop. I gave myself permission to be the darkest, most repellant version of myself. It was liberating not to care, for maybe the only time in my life, what another person thought of me.

The two appointments that followed were awkward. I was embarrassed by my breakdown. To compensate I was chatty and witty and entertaining. I told stories about my most outrageous family members; I told stories . Not lies, exactly. But I emphasized the interesting and salacious parts. She asked me at one point, “Do you love your mother-in-law?”

The fifth time I went to her apartment, she didn’t answer her door. I’d arrived that day with an ulterior motive. I’d brought a single shoe that I wanted to photograph on her couch. A German artist I admire often violates other people’s houses with her personal belongings. She put her nightgown in a friend’s closet and her diary under another friend’s pillow. Her art is a form of burglary where she adds things instead of subtracting them. I planned to do this when my therapist left me alone in her living room to retrieve something she’d forgotten in her kitchen.

When she failed to answer the door, I wondered: did she somehow guess what I’d planned to do on her couch? Then, more logically, I figured, given her track record, had she forgotten our appointment? I rang again. Nothing. I went home. I thought she’d realize her mistake and call me to apologize and reschedule. She didn’t. I started to worry that maybe she’d died. I Googled her name + “dead”; I found nothing. Maybe, I thought, she’s just expecting me to show up next week, at which point she’ll explain what happened. The day of my appointment I couldn’t decide whether or not to go. I could have called her, but I didn’t want to risk talking to her. (She was the only therapist on the planet who answered her phone.) I didn’t go. Certainly, I thought, she’d call me now. After our first session I’d signed a contract committing me to pay in full if I ever missed an appointment without twenty-four-hours’ cancellation notice.

The therapist did not call me. She never contacted me again.

Nor did I ever contact her. I was happy to have been freed from this unsatisfactory arrangement without needing to do or say anything (therapist breakups are such a meta-trial). I’ve often wondered what happened to her. What if she didn’t have a stroke? What if she wasn’t sick or hospitalized, and thus unable to make phone calls? What if she just genuinely disliked me? I had been to other therapists, most of whom I’d gotten along with well enough. But our relationships were predicated on my “putting my best face forward.” When I was sad, I’d make jokes about my sadness. I’d been so totally hilarious when I’d talked to my pal therapist about my then-upcoming divorce. With this new therapist I’d let my ugliest self show. Either she’d had a stroke, or she’d died, or she’d simply decided: I cannot help that woman. I cannot bear to be around that woman.

Today I visited a summer camp attended by a lot of wealthy New York City kids. I had not been around so many eleven-year-old girls since I was eleven. The campers were composed, and stylish, and, sure, in the Maine woods, where one of the main activities was “llama care,” their preternatural confidence and sense of entitlement struck me as pointless survival skills, but most of their lives weren’t happening in the Maine woods. I found myself harshly judging these children. They would get everything they wanted in life (real life), and would it even prove a challenge? Probably not as challenging as keeping the llamas’ fur from snarling. Probably not as challenging as sleeping in an incredibly spacious teepee. Achieving happiness, well, that was another matter, but isn’t it for everyone? In this elusive quest, the wealthy are not especially burdened, though perhaps they feel the failure more acutely. It is maybe harder not to get something if you’ve mostly always gotten everything.

Certain recent encounters with very rich friends (people who were rich from birth) have confirmed: we are, on a basic psychological level, different people, and these differences can rankle me morally. My moral rankle, however, is complicated. It’s disingenuous. It’s a form of self-loathing. Because for many years, I wished more than anything that I had been born rich. My family was middle-class and rich by the standards of many, including my friends. (I attended a public school near the projects; my best friend lived in a near-derelict apartment building that, in keeping with the occasionally benevolent ironies of Maine real estate, had a beautiful view of the harbor.) But I knew my family could be much, much richer. As an eight-year-old my fantasy was concrete, modest, and thus not beyond the realm of possibility, except that it completely was. I wanted to live in an old mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. Very specifically Greenwich, a place I’d never been. I chose Greenwich because each Sunday I read the New York Times Magazine ’s real estate section. I cut out pictures of mansions for sale in Greenwich and tacked them to my bulletin board. I knew, even as a kid, that a belief in one’s ceaseless entitlement could not be acquired later in life. Even if I managed to become rich, I would always be faking entitlement.