“You’re not at the brass ring yet,” Dr. Rosen said. “But you’re on your way.”
I swept my arm around the room. “How come they’re all ready and I’m not?” Every other person in group had a significant other next to whom they fell asleep every night. “How long is this going to take?” I imagined myself growing old and feeble as I waited for the miracle of group therapy to transform my life.
“I don’t know how long it’s going to take. Can you celebrate the steps you’ve taken so far?”
No, I couldn’t. I didn’t want to celebrate until I knew how much was left to do. The realization that there was no shortcut to the mental health I was working toward crushed my spirit. I’d ceded to the group my isolation and my secret eating rituals. Those were my long-cherished coping mechanisms. Now, for every interaction, including every single date, I had to show up without my primary defenses, which sounded healthy in theory, but what it felt like that morning in group was a stunning, irrevocable defeat. There would be no more solace in apple binges, no retreats to my hermetically sealed life. There would be the bright light of Dr. Rosen’s and my group mates’ gaze illuminating all my deficits, but no secret cave to stash my feelings. So I had them right there in my chair: I wept for how lonely I felt and how deeply afraid I was that my life would never truly change or, worse, that true change would ask more of me than I could give. And had the session not ended at nine, I’m certain I could have cried my way to the lunch hour.
8
“You should tell the group about the Smoker,” Carlos said.
On the elevator ride up to group, I’d told Carlos about the Smoker—so named because he loved his cigarettes and because he was smoking hot—my newest crush at law school. He had a girlfriend, but she was never around. Her name was Winter, and she was a waitress. I’d hoped that she was ugly or dirty or mean, but when I finally saw her serving pitchers at John Barleycorn, I couldn’t deny that she was a willowy, fresh-faced beauty who offered a genuine smile to all of her customers.
The Smoker and I had struck up a friendship because we both spent hours in the computer lab, typing up our notes between classes. In our first encounter, he asked me to watch his books while he stepped out to smoke. Of course I said yes. I loved his five o’clock shadow, his smoky-smelling sweater, the shy way he looked away when he laughed.
“The Smoker?” Dr. Rosen cocked his head.
“This guy at school. Has a girlfriend. Smokes like a chimney. Drinks heavily. I’m falling in love with him.”
“He’s unavailable,” Patrice said.
Dr. Rosen paused, covered his mouth with his hand, shifted his position, and then put his hands on the arms of his chair. Finally he said, “Next time you’re with him, tell him the truth.”
“Which is?”
“That you’re a cocktease.”
I looked at Carlos. Was Dr. Rosen for real? Everyone in the circle shook their heads, like No, Dr. Rosen, she can’t say that. Rory blushed from behind her hands.
“You want me to tell the guy I have the hots for that I’m a ‘cocktease’? Then what?” Wasn’t the Smoker the tease? He was the one flirting with me despite his apple-cheeked girlfriend. If you would have asked me before this session if Dr. Rosen, my middle-aged psychiatrist with the rubber-soled brown shoes who knew nothing of pop culture (“Who’s Bono?” he once asked), knew the term cocktease, I would have sworn he didn’t. Now, as part of my therapeutic treatment, he was telling me to drop it into conversation with the guy I wanted to bed.
“We’ll find out.”
Two nights later, I sat in a speeding yellow taxi going west on Lake Street with the Smoker and his affable sidekick, Bart, a jokey kid from our law school class. The air was sticky but the sky was clear. A sliver of moon smirked at me. We rolled the windows down to cut the stench of the tree-shaped potpourri dangling from the rearview mirror. I leaned out the window and turned my face to the inky sky and its cheerful moon. A laugh caught in my throat—I held it for a few seconds and then let it out. Over the pulsing music, I sat upright, squared my shoulders, and turned toward the Smoker, who was sitting between me and Bart.
“I’m a total cocktease.” The “total” I added as a personal flourish to prove I wasn’t a mindless Rosen automaton.
The Smoker stopped chewing his postcigarette gum and froze. Then a smile spread across the horizon of his beautiful face. He kept his eyes fixed straight ahead. My skin tingled as I watched him take in my words. I wanted to wrap my legs around him and rock myself against him and his perfectly frayed Levi’s.
Bart craned his head around the Smoker’s chest and peered over at me.
“Say what?”
“You heard me,” I said, turning my head toward the window.
“No, I didn’t,” Bart said.
“Then why are you so determined to get me to say it again—”
“Because—”
“Because you heard me the first time.”
“Damn. You crazy, girl.” Bart’s cackle was picked up by the wind, and it dissolved into the night, right along with my pride.
The Smoker kept smiling and drumming his fingers on his long, ropy thighs. Mortification slowly set in as I realized the Smoker wasn’t going to make a move on me. He would hang out with me and Bart for another hour and then go home and slip between the covers to wait for Winter’s shift to end so they could fuck until dawn. I focused on the buildings we whizzed by along Milwaukee Avenue. Furniture stores, taco joints, Myopic Books. People waiting in line to hear
