The man who came out of Ann’s closed office door wore a suit. He was short, fat, and moving quickly out the door, avoiding my eyes.
“Come in, Lewis,” she called from inside her office.
I went in and closed the door behind me. I had finished my biscotto in the waiting room while reading the four-year-old Smithsonian. I placed the white paper bag with the coffee and her biscotto on her desk.
“Chocolate?”
“Almond,” I said.
She nodded her approval as I sat in the recliner across from her.
“You’re wearing new earrings,” I said.
“My husband made them from stones we found on the beach,” she said, touching one of the earrings. “Crafted for hundreds of thousands of years by the sea. The ocean can be a great artist.”
I drank some coffee and she nibbled on her biscotto and took out her coffee.
“The operative word is ‘can,’” she said, smelling the coffee. “The ocean also produces a near eternity of shapeless, colorless rocks and shells. Nature is not selective. It creates the neutral, the beautiful, and the ugly. It is up to humans to search for the beautiful.”
“You’ve cheered me already,” I said.
“I can see that. Jokes,” she said, taking a sip of coffee. “You have jokes for me?”
“Someone just threatened to kill me,” I said.
“New symptom?” she asked. “Paranoia?”
“No,” I said and explained.
“All the more reason you should have jokes,” she said.
I took out my notebook and flipped to the pages where I had written the jokes people had told me over the past three days.
“I don’t tell jokes well,” I said.
“Why does that not surprise me?” she said. “You tell. I’ll listen.”
“I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather did,” I read. “Not screaming and yelling like the other people in the car he was driving.”
“You find that funny?” Ann asked.
“You didn’t even smile,” I said.
“I’ve heard it before. You think it’s funny?”
“I…no.”
“Tell me another one.”
“I went home last night and discovered that someone had replaced everything I own with exact duplicates.”
“And what do you think about that one?”
“I like it.”
“But is it funny? Never mind. Tell me another.”
“A new patient got an emergency visit with a therapist,” I read. “The patient said, ‘Doctor, I’m depressed. I lost my wife. My children hate me. I hate myself. Sometimes I have suicidal thoughts.’ ‘Well,’ said the therapist, ‘the world’s greatest comedian, Santoro, is in town tonight for one performance. Get a ticket to see him.’ ‘But, Doctor,’ the patient said, ‘I am Santoro.’ You’ve heard that one, too?”
“Yes,” Ann said, working on her coffee. “You find it funny?”
“Sad,” I said.
“Have you noticed people tell you sad jokes?”
“I seem to have a gift. You want more jokes?”
She nodded her head to indicate that I should go on.
“Mrs. Quan Wong had a baby. The nurse brought the baby in for the Wongs to see and said, ‘The baby is fine,’ the nurse said. ‘But there’s something wrong. This can’t be your baby.’ ‘Why not?” asked Mr. Wong. ‘Because,’ said the nurse, ‘two Wongs don’t make a white.’”
“You like that one?” Ann said, wiping crumbs from her fingers.
“No,” I said.
“I don’t think I do either. You have more?”
“Four more,” I said.
“Do you think any of them are funny?”
“No,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter. Do you know why I told you to collect jokes?”
“To cheer me up,” I said.
She shook her head no vigorously, and said, “It was to get you to make contact with people, to ask them for something that might help you, to let you know that people are willing to respond to a request for a little help. The important question isn’t whether the jokes are funny, but whether the people who told them to you smiled when they told you. Did they smile?”
“I think so,” I said. “I don’t know about the ones I got over the phone.”
“Next assignment,” she said. “Memorize these jokes and the other ones you have and tell them to someone you care about.”
“I can’t tell jokes,” I said.
“Of course you can. You just did. You simply tell them badly. Memorize them and tell them to someone.”
“You want me to do a stand-up comedy act?”
“If you want to put it that way,” she said. “Before we get together again you present your act to someone.”
“Who?”
“To Catherine,” she said. “Not the baby. Your wife. Imagine her responses. Come back and tell me if she finds your jokes funny, if she smiles, makes faces, groans.”
“I can’t,” I said.
“You can do it,” she said soothingly. “You can do it.”
“I’ll try.”
“Don’t try, succeed. You know who was a great teller of jokes and stories? General Patton. Loved to tell jokes and funny stories. I think he was depressed, too. I’ve been told he sometimes had his jeep driver completely naked when he drove him around after a battle. He’d pretend not to notice and people were too embarrassed to look at the driver or say anything. Patton thought it was hilarious.”
“That reassures me,” I said. “But I don’t think the world’s ready to see me walking around naked.”
“Sarcasm,” she said. “A small step toward recovery. A step to one side of comedy. Let’s try something. You’ve told me all the wonderful things about your wife, her beauty, wit, kindness, idiosyncrasies. Tell me things you didn’t like about her.”
“There are none,” I said.
“She was a human being, not a goddess. It is not disloyal to remember her as a human being. Besides, it is easier to tell jokes to a human being than a goddess.”
I looked down at my cup of coffee, cocoa brown with two packets of artificial sweetener. I drank.
“Start small,” Ann prompted.
“She left cabinet doors open,” I said. “I always had to close them. I told her about it at first and then I just gave up and did it.”
“You liked doing it, closing the cabinet doors?”
“I didn’t mind. Sometimes it bothered me but usually…”
“You smiled and did it,” said Ann.
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m not sure I’d count that as a fault, but it’s a start.”
“She told me what to do when I drove, told me if I was going too fast or too slow, or not passing other drivers when I should or passing them when I shouldn’t.”
“That bothered you.”
