This Dr. Rosen was the same Jonathan R. I’d met in a recovery meeting for people with eating disorders three years earlier. In 12-step meetings, people go only by their first name and last initials to preserve their anonymity. Twelve-step meetings for people with eating disorders are like AA meetings—members gather in church basements where they share stories about how food is ruining their lives. Like our more famous AA brethren whose meetings have been depicted in Meg Ryan movies and referenced in TV shows from The West Wing to NYPD Blue, food addicts collect serenity coins and get sponsors to learn how to live without bingeing, purging, starving, and maiming their flesh. Unlike AA, most of the 12-step meetings I’d attended were filled with women. In ten years, I’d seen only a handful of men in my meetings. One of them was the Harvard-educated psychiatrist sitting two feet away from me, waiting for me to open my mouth.
I knew things about Jonathan R. as a person. A man. A man with an eating disorder. I remembered things he’d shared about his mother, his chronically ill child, his feelings about his body.
A therapist is supposed to be a blank slate. There were smudges all over Dr. Rosen.
I swiveled my body so he could see me head-on. Once he recognized me, would he kick me out right away? His expression remained open, curious. Five seconds passed. He didn’t seem to recognize me and was waiting for me to speak. Now the Harvard thing intimidated me. How could I come across as both witty and tortured, like Dorothy Parker or David Letterman? I wanted this Dr. Rosen to take seriously my newly developed fantasies about dying, yet still find me irrepressibly charming and maybe also a little bit fuckable. I figured he’d be more willing to help me if he found me attractive.
“I suck at relationships and am afraid I’ll die alone.”
“What does that mean?”
“I can’t get close to people. Something stops me, like an invisible fence. I can feel myself holding back, always holding back. With guys, I always fall for the ones who drink until they puke or pass out—”
“Alcoholics.” Not a question but a statement.
“Yes. My first love in high school smoked pot every day and cheated on me. In college, I fell for a beautiful Colombian fraternity boy who was alcoholic and had a girlfriend, and then I dated a pot addict. There was a nice guy after him, but I dumped him—”
“Because?”
“He walked me to class, bought me copies of his favorite books, and asked permission to kiss me. He made my skin crawl.”
Dr. Rosen smiled. “You’re afraid of emotionally available men. I suspect women too.” More statements.
“Stable guys who express interest in me make me want to vomit. I guess that’s true about women too.” My mind flashed to a scene from the previous Christmas when I was in Texas visiting my family, and I’d run into a high school friend at Banana Republic. When Lia called out my name, I stood next to the blazers and oxford shirts, frozen, as she hugged me warmly. When she pulled away, a stricken look passed across her face—like I thought we were friends—and then she asked me about Chicago and law school. As we chitchatted among the shoppers looking for after-Christmas bargains, my mind insisted that she didn’t want to be talking to me because she was now a successful physical therapist without an eating disorder or a weird affliction that made her clam up when someone from her past offered her a hug. Lia and I had been close in high school, but I pulled away senior year when my eating disorder revved up and I became consumed with getting my first boyfriend to stop cheating on me.
“Are you bulimic?”
“I’m in recovery—twelve-step,” I said quickly, hoping not to trigger his memory of hearing me introduce myself as Christie, recovering bulimic. “The steps helped me with the bulimia, but I can’t fix this relationship thing—”
“Not by yourself. Who’s in your support system?”
I mentioned my sponsor Cady, a stay-at-home mom of grown kids who lived in the rural Texas town where I went to college. I was closer to her than anyone—I called her every three days but hadn’t laid eyes on her in five years. There was my random assortment of women like Marnie with whom I connected during and sometimes after recovery meetings. Law school friends who didn’t know I was in recovery. Friends from high school and college in Texas who tried to keep in touch with me, but I rarely returned their phone calls and never accepted their invitations to visit.
“I’m starting to have fantasies about dying.” I pressed my lips together. “Ever since I found out I’m first in my class at law school—”
“Mazel tov.” His smile was so genuine that I had to turn my head to his diplomas to keep from bursting into tears.
“It’s not Harvard or anything.” He raised his eyebrows. “And anyway, so I’ll have a great career, so what? There won’t be anything else—”
“That’s why you picked law.” His confident diagnoses were both disarming and comforting. He was no Paula D. with her questions about snakes.
“What’s the story in your head about how you became you?” Dr. Rosen asked.
“Every family has a fuckup.” I don’t know why I said that.
“Valedictorian of your law school class, and you’re a fuckup?”
“Being valedictorian doesn’t mean shit if I’m going to die alone and unattached.”
“What do you want?” he asked.
The word want echoed in my head. Want, want, want. I groped for a way to speak my longing in the affirmative, not just blurt out how I didn’t want to die alone.
“I want—” I stalled.
“I would like—” More stopping.
“I want to be real. With other people. I want to be a real person.”
He stared at me like what else? Other strands of desire floated through my mind: I wanted a boyfriend who smelled like clean cotton and
