Amie Barrodale - You Are Having a Good Time

“I’m just asking because I’ve never seen you look so tired,” she said. “I mean, that’s the polite word for it. You look like somebody beat you.”

“I flew home on a redeye.”

“Redeye from New Haven?”

Dr. Sheppard blushed. Debbie took a bite of cake and put her plate down. She’d eaten almost half a slice.

“Well. Did you have fun?”

“I saw old friends.”

“See anyone I’d know? I know lots of people in New Haven. Not that I’m like a New Haven asshole. I went to Bowdoin. I got into Yale, but fuck them. I hate those people. I honestly do.”

She looked at her cake slice.

“Do you know the name David Kehn? He’s an old roommate of mine.”

“Senator David Kehn? That guy’s so gay.”

“We lived together freshman and sophomore years, until he joined the art frat.”

“But you’re like prehistorically aged, no offense. I mean, you’re very attractive. But he looks like twenty years younger than you. Did you two get high?”

“Yes, occasionally we did.”

“Ha! My dad is going to freak out.”

“Why don’t you tell me what you did over your weekend?”

“Oh Christ.”

Dr. Sheppard waited. Debbie said, “If you want to know, I hung out with friends.”

“Tell me about your friends.”

“Just friends. I hung out with Emily and Trip and Amol. Emily came over and — she does this thing, whenever she comes into my house, the first thing she does is, she says, ‘I have to go to the bathroom.’ It’s so weird. It’s like, what the fuck? Once she went in there and a couple minutes later the fire alarm starts going off.”

“I don’t understand.”

“She’d lit a match to cover up the smell of her shit, and she was so uptight about it she put the match in the bin full of Kleenex and started a fire. I mean, and I’m the one on medication.”

Debbie laughed, and Dr. Sheppard watched her.

“I’m not avoiding the question, if that’s what you’re suggesting with that expression. Emily came over and we opened a bottle of wine. Trip called and invited us to the Wonkey Donkey — that’s this loft — so we went over there, and they had some red wine and vodka, so we made Stalins. Have you been drinking Stalins, come to think of it? You look like it, no offense. That was a joke. You can laugh any time. It’s not a job interview. So anyway, Emily passed out up in Trip’s loft, and Gandalf drank red wine out of my shoe, then I fooled around with Amol, and around sunrise Emily woke up and I got us a cab back home and she stayed over in my bed. Amol’s dad was a spy, or so he says. He’s a pianist. Sunday afternoon me and Emily watched HBO, and around ten I figured she wasn’t leaving, so I ordered us Indian food and opened a bottle of wine, and then we went around the corner to Scratchers. My relationship to Amol is a secret, by the way. Not even Emily knows. So we went to Scratchers and I asked this guy if I could look in his wallet, and it was full of old ticket stubs, so I told him he had a broken heart.”

“What?”

“Seeing movies alone means you have a broken heart.”

“How’d you know he saw them alone?”

“I asked him. Okay, your turn. Is Senator Kehn gay? I have a bet with my brother he’s gay.”

Dr. Sheppard looked at the ceiling and pressed his palms to his eyes. “Do you think maybe you could ask me something else?”

“Yeah. Why not.” She thought for a moment. “Okay. Here’s a good one. Do you look at pornography online?”

“Sure. I think we all do, these days.”

“And…?”

“And what? I usually have trouble finding the kind of thing I like, because I don’t want to sign up for any of the websites. It takes me a long time, looking at those tiny pictures.”

“Little pictures?” She laughed. “What kind of connection do you have, a dial-up?”

Dr. Sheppard shrugged. “I have a good connection.”

“Well, you know about free porn, right?”

“I look at DogFart. You can find those on Brazzers.”

“Whoa.”

He shrugged. “Does that make you uncomfortable?”

“It’s just weird to hear someone say it out loud.” She was quiet for a while. “It’s like even the word ‘Facebook’ is embarrassing. But how do you have trouble finding what you like? It’s got everything. You must be into something totally weird.”

“What’s weird?”

“Mm, I guess rape?”

“That’s a pretty common fantasy, especially among my clientele.” He smiled conspiratorially.

“Right, but it’s hard to find on…” Debbie trailed off.

“What made you ask the question?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It wouldn’t be appropriate to talk about it with you.”

Dr. Sheppard blinked.

“I can see that you can’t tell when I’m joking. That’s kinda funny, isn’t it? Because you should be able to read me by now. That’s like your job. Anyway, I just was thinking about porn because I used to never look at it, but since I broke up with Tom, I’m not having sex with anybody, and then you started me on these medications and my sex drive changed or something, and I started having less sex, like no sex drive at all, which weirded me out, so I started off with online porn, basically nothing, but in about a day I fell down a rabbit hole, and now I look at the totally fucked-up stuff, and I feel weird about it. I heard about this crazy vibrator and I got one, and now I’m spending hours each morning with it. Sorry. But still, I feel just kind of weird about it. I thought we’re supposed to be honest. Did I gross you out?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say it’s normal.”

“I feel like a sex addict or something.”

Dr. Sheppard shrugged. He didn’t point out the obvious, that she wasn’t having sex. It wasn’t out of a therapeutic agenda. It was because he felt uncomfortable. He was feeling turned on. That was unusual. He had many female clients, and most spent all their time in session discussing their sex lives and their romantic lives, and the ways those two things made them miserable. He had heard a lot of things. He did not usually shy away from the subject of sex.

Debbie got up and started packing his barely touched slice of cake in the box.

“Are you going to take that home and eat it?” Dr. Sheppard asked.

An angry expression flashed across Debbie’s face. She said, “I was putting it in the box for you.”

* * *

It was unseasonably hot, 90 degrees in April. Dr. Sheppard was regretting a text he had sent Isabel the night before. He had been drinking at the bar below his apartment, and he’d had the opportunity to sleep with an attractive young woman. She was twenty-three years old. He had texted Isabel to tell her. It was too embarrassing to look at the exact words. When his phone rang, he expected to be excoriated.

“Dr. Sheppard? Kitty here. Do you have a minute? Good. I’m calling because I’m concerned. I was in New York last weekend and I saw Debbie. We had given her a hammer — to be more precise, her younger brother had given it to her — and it was covered in rubber cement and paint, and I don’t know what all else. Apparently she’d loaned it to one of her bohemian friends? And a chair from the set I bought her was missing. I asked her about it, of course, and she told me she’d broken it apart for kindling. Now, Dr. Sheppard, I don’t want to get into a discussion about money, but what exactly is it we’re paying for?”

“Well, Debbie doesn’t seem to have a lot of friends.”

“She’s out with friends every night.”

“Oh, I mean she has Trip and Emily and Amol — people she gets drunk with. Emily is all right, if a little hysterical. And Trip seems like he basically shares some of her background. But I don’t really care for this Amol. From what I can gather, he’s an editor or a pianist or something.”