The same held true for Prozac, which I did end up taking, and was still taking in daily, sixty-milligram doses when I arrived that afternoon at Dr. Becker’s office. As I’d feared, it was hard to say how Prozac had affected my personality. I was a different person than when I’d started on the drug—higher functioning, certainly—but it was unclear how much these improvements had to do with the meds, and how much they had to do with the slow but consistent crawl of maturation. Besides, where had it gotten me? A stable mood hadn’t stopped my life from falling apart.
“We’ll just be a moment, Michael, no need to get comfortable.”
The ottoman slipped from under my feet and I almost fell.
“Why are they called ottomans, anyway?” I said. “It must have something to do with the Ottoman Empire. Which makes me think of Empire Chinese. You know that place? On Broadway?”
“This is not a session, Michael.”
Becker checked his watch.
“Who was that guy in the waiting room?”
“You know I can’t discuss another patient. What I want to talk about is why you’re here. You can’t just show up at my office. I know you know that, because you’ve never done it before. Is this an emergency?”
“I’m having a weird day.”
It seemed as good an explanation as any. I’d woken in the library, shivering cold, with that catnap feeling of time stretched and jellied. I opened another document, but couldn’t find my mojo. Ricky’s sure thing investment rattled in my brain. I pictured the movers packing up our apartment, Wendy’s face red with rage. I found myself walking to Becker’s, not really thinking, just moving my feet, mumbling: Before coming to prominence in the field of hip-hop, Marshall Mathers worked as a pizza chef at the Little Caesars Family Fun Center in the Detroit suburb of Warren, Michigan.
“I’ve been withholding,” I explained. We’d spent the last many sessions treading in irrelevance, rehashing childhood hang-ups. This was my doing. Becker had asked about Wendy and work and I’d deflected.
“Withholding?”
“For example: I lost all my money.”
“How?”
“I bet on America.”
“I see,” said Dr. Becker, though the calm way he said it, free of worry that I might now require some kind of subsidy in order to continue attending these sessions, made it clear that he did not.
“Did I tell you I got bedbugs?”
This got his attention. Becker surveyed the way I was positioned on his Eames chair, assessing the possibility of something crawling from my pocket and burying itself in the leather.
“Okay,” said Dr. Becker, who now walked toward the door.
“Wendy’s going to leave me,” I added, though it wasn’t something I’d allowed until that moment. But it seemed suddenly obvious. I’d woken that morning with a plan to mend my marriage—or, at least, with a plan to make a plan—but as I sat in the now-infested Eames chair and watched the sky darken through the window, I realized that I’d failed.
“I see,” said Dr. Becker again.
There was something infuriating in the calm way he said it while pulling open his office door to expedite my exit. He took a step into the hallway. I’d been coming here for decades. All he could say was I see.
Wendy
I returned to an empty apartment. I felt very itchy. I ran a steaming bath. We lived in a large refurbished loft on the top floor of an old canning factory. Shortly after moving in, I replaced the apartment’s original bathtub with an oversized claw-foot I found online.
When Michael first saw the tub, he said something that upset me. The deliverymen had just left after finishing the installation. I’d cleared the packaging and trash. I’d tested the faucets by running hot water over my fingers. I was taking in the tub for the first time.
The tub was beautiful: white with the mildest varnish finish, giving it the shine of a freshly dish-washed dinner plate. The claws were hand-molded by a sculptor in Dutchess County. They were lion’s claws with long toes arched to show off individual tendons. The tub was held on tiptoes, supported by the lion’s toenails, which started thick at their crescents, then thinned to slim points like sharpened pencils. I had decorated the bathroom in Matisse prints, an array of pastels. The windows were open and a breeze blew in. The sunset shone through the window.
I was pregnant then, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that, in that tub in that room at that moment, I saw the future flash before me. I imagined the drum of my belly covered in bubbles. I saw myself washing my daughter, running shampoo across her tiny skull.
Michael said that it, the tub, would be a good setting for wrist-slitting or death by overdose. He was standing in the doorway when he said it.
I said, “Go on.”
Michael entered the bathroom. He tried to touch my waist but I pulled away. He climbed into the empty tub and lay down, fully clothed. He closed his eyes.
Michael went on to describe our bathroom by candlelight on a cold winter night. He watches snow fall outside the window while the water runs at full heat, pinkening his skin. I am out of town for work and he has the loft to himself. Pain has overtaken him. Not sadness, he said. Not loneliness. But real pain, the kind he experienced before being medicated. The kind that only death’s stillness might relieve.
Michael said he would put on the kind of maudlin music that plays in movies when characters kill themselves: a softly fingerpicked arpeggio, a woman’s breathy voice, the buzz of a simple bass line.
He smiled. He thought this was funny. Or maybe he smiled because he’d meant it to be funny but had begun to scare himself, and was trying to salvage the
