The Breakup Doctor (7 page)

eight

  

The newspaper assigned me an email address for reader mail, and when I checked on Monday morning to see whether anyone had written in, I had thirty-seven messages.

Seventeen were some variation on how happy readers were that our local paper finally had a relationship advice column. Eleven were questions from readers that I could use for future col­umns. Four were nasty diatribes against dating, the mental health profession, “ridiculous navel-gazing,” and me. Three were requests for a date. One was the most pornographic come-on I had ever read, offering to erase the memory of every bad relationship I'd ever had with his “tumescent love wand.”

And one was from a man calling himself “Duped and Dumped,” wanting to hire me to help him through a breakup.

That made client number three, and it looked like Sasha was right—I might have found my calling.

  

“Duped and Dumped” turned out to be Richard O'Flaherty, a kind gentleman in his late sixties. Over cappuccino at Daily Beans off Gladiolus, he told me he'd met “the love of my life, my soul mate” on an online dating site, moved her and all her belongings to his waterfront home after a single face-to-face meeting in her Omaha, Nebraska, hometown, and was devastated when she disappeared a month later with his computer, his wallet, and ten thousand dollars she'd cleaned out of his checking account.

“Richard...you gave her your PIN numbers?” I asked gently.

“She was my soul mate!”

My initial step was to combat his naiveté so he didn't get taken advantage of again. We spent the first half of our session together going over the ins and outs of Internet dating, and what danger signs to look for. I created a list for him of potential big red flags in online dating profiles. (“An old-fashioned girl who likes a real man to take care of her” could mean “looking for a sugar daddy.” A woman who made a point of saying she “believed in the institution of marriage” might be trying to put a good spin on the string of ex-husbands in her wake.) I made a mental note to devote a future column to the topic.

Then we finished out the hour talking about the woman who'd conned him, and the way it made him feel, and why he thought he might have been taken in by her. Richard seemed to be a good­hearted, sincere man who was looking so hard for love, he was seeing it even where it didn't exist. After he left I sat for a few more moments at our table, jotting down a game plan for our future ses­sions to help him slow down and wait for a relationship to develop, instead of trying to make it spring fully formed into life.

This was such a common relationship misstep that I wanted to write a column right then. Sasha did the same thing—had one or two dates with someone where she really connected, and then made the mistake of thinking she knew enough about the other person to be in a committed relationship. A
lot
of people did it, and while I understood the urge to connect and be known and loved, you had to travel the path of getting to know each other. There were no shortcuts to that destination. That was why I was taking my time to decide about moving in with Kendall.

  

I finally had to fold up my notebook to get to my next appoint­ment—with Tabitha Washington, who'd asked whether we could meet at her house after work, instead of somewhere public. I real­ized why as soon as she opened the door to me: Her face was blotchy, her eyes swollen, her nostrils red and chapped. She wore a pair of stained drawstring sweatpants and a quilted housecoat that had to have belonged to her great-grandmother.

I schooled my features not to react as I introduced myself, and Tabitha invited me inside. She led me to a sitting area with chintz sofas facing each other across a Pottery Barn coffee table, and flopped onto one of them. I sat down across from her.

Lisa Albrecht had started spewing invective against her hus­band almost before we were seated. Richard O'Flaherty had wanted to ease into talking about his breakup slowly. Tabitha simply got right to the point.

“So where do you want me to start?”

“Well...how about with a little background on your relation­ship?” I suggested. And we were off.

She'd been dating Cooper for five months—beginning not long after his wife cheated on him and then moved out of town. He was smart; he was kind; he was handsome. An emergency room doctor, he worked unusual hours that made it hard for them to spend a lot of time together, but the connection was real, and the sex, Tabitha men­tioned repeatedly, was phenomenal.

“But last week Maria showed up at Verdad, where I was meeting some girlfriends, and cornered me,” Tabitha said.

I knew the place—a Mexican restaurant downtown. “The wife?”

“
Ex
-wife,” she stressed, and then frowned. “Well...estranged, I guess.”

“They're not divorced?” She shook her head. That was a red flag, but I didn't want to form an opinion till I knew more. “Okay. What did she say?”

Her toffee-colored eyes welled up again. “That she knew who I was. That I was a home wrecker. That she was back to reconcile with Cooper.”

“I'm so sorry. That must have been awful to hear. Was it true?”

“Well, I asked him about it the next day—right after I talked to you, actually. He said they just had to work out the details of the divorce. We had a date Friday night, and I thought things were okay, but then Saturday he said he was busy, and I heard... Shit.” She wiped at her cheeks and stood up abruptly. “Would you like something to drink? I need one.”

I always advised against people using alcohol to cope with re­lationship troubles. It could so easily lead to the worst breakup behaviors—drunk dialing, rebound hookups—and it only helped make a depressed person feel more depressed. But I didn't know Tabitha well enough yet to comment. Instead I simply asked for a glass of water, and was relieved when she came back with the same for herself.

She sat back down and took a deep, shaky breath. “Okay. I've got a friend who's a waitress at the Gulf Grill down at the beach, and she said Saturday night Cooper and his ex had a really cozy candlelit dinner there. That's an awfully romantic setting to work out a divorce,” she said bitterly, taking a big gulp of her ice water.

There are no secrets in small towns—everyone knows every­one, or knows someone who does, and Cooper had to realize that something like that would travel right back to Tabitha's ears. This was not looking good.

“What happened next?” I asked neutrally.

“Nothing!” she wailed. “That's the last I talked to him. I ha­ven't heard from him since. I texted him when I went to bed last night—just a casual, ‘Hey, just wanted to say good night.' Then I called again this morning. He didn't answer.”

Tabitha looked miserably unhappy, and was staring at me as if I were the oracle at Delphi, waiting for me to dispense a magical solution for her. I leaned back on her sofa and thought.

When I was younger I used to love making drawings with col­ored pencil or Magic Marker, then covering the whole thing in a thick, waxy coating of black crayon. I always put the black pages aside in stacks, and later I'd pick one out at random and scrape away the crayon in various patterns, never knowing which bright-colored drawing I'd reveal underneath.

Helping someone dig down to the truth is like that. You can't see what's really there until you start scraping away slowly, care­fully, so you make sure to remove all the waxy black overcoating, not just smear it around the page on top of what's underneath.

The situation Tabitha found herself in was rife with impending disaster—the affair and breakup had happened too recently and too suddenly, and Tabitha had fallen for Cooper too fast. He wasn't just on the rebound; he was freshly on the rebound. His wife's tire marks had barely faded from the driveway. Even if he had worked out all his feelings about her betrayal (which I strongly doubted), he probably wouldn't be in any hurry to jump back into another relationship.

But the sex between them was
phenomenal
, Tabby repeated when I carefully voiced the thought, and I began to suspect she was blinded by it. Too often I'd seen women take great sex as an indi­cator of great love, and read a lot more into a relationship than was actually there. As Sasha liked to say, the heart muscle is directly connected to the vagina muscle.

Still, they'd been dating five months. After five months, I felt she was entitled to at the very least a phone call. The fact that Cooper hadn't bothered spoke volumes about his feelings. I would bet he wasn't remotely ready for the kind of relationship Tabby was looking for. Even though he might like her and enjoy her company, he obviously had a lot of baggage he hadn't even begun to unpack when they started dating. Now that his wife was back, they were clearly addressing their unfinished business. And Tabitha wasn't a character in that play.

But I couldn't come right out and say all of that to her. She'd have to see the truth for herself, so little by little we scratched away what was covering up the real picture of their relationship together.

“So how often did you and Cooper see each other before this?” I asked her.

“Well, he usually makes a date with me one night a weekend. And then we hook up sometimes for happy hour, or a quick dinner during the week.”

I nodded. “Okay. If you guys run into people he knows, how does he introduce you?”

She thought for a second. “‘This is my good friend Tabby.'”

Even now, five months in. I tried not to wince.

“Any birthdays in these five months? Holidays? How did you guys celebrate; were there gifts or a card?”

Her expression clouded over. “We spent Christmas and New Year's apart, because Cooper said he needed to see his parents and sister in Michigan. I got him a set of Le Creuset cookware; he gave me a sweater.” Tears formed in her eyes again, and this time spilled over. “On Valentine's Day he took me to brunch and gave me a single white rose and a card that said, ‘Thanks for all your kindness, caring, and compassion.' And afterward he dropped me off at home—I spent that evening watching
Love, Actually
alone with a box of Norman Love chocolates I bought myself and a bottle of red wine.”

She slumped back against the sofa cushions, her head tipped down, occasional sniffles piercing the silence I let fall. She was al­most there, and needed to figure this out for herself. Finally she looked up and met my gaze. “He's going to get back together with Maria, isn't he?” she asked dully.

I raised my hands and shoulders in a “who can say” gesture.

“But he's not ready for someone new.”

I didn't answer. It wasn't a question.

Tabitha made a noise between a groan and a scream and flopped back in the chair. “God, I'm such an idiot! How did I not see this?”

She drew her knees to her chest to form a tight ball with her body and buried her face in her hands—not crying, but obviously losing herself in self-recriminations. That was counterproductive—berating herself was only going to keep her mired in misery, and it wasn't going to help her see her relationship more clearly and fig­ure out what to do next, how to honor her own needs. I made a few attempts to draw her out and get her talking again, but Tabitha was too far down the road of self-reproach to respond.

I stood, took her glass, and carried it to the kitchen in one flow of movement. “Come on,” I instructed. Right now Tabitha desper­ately needed to feel better about herself.

So I took her shopping.

  

Sometimes it's the most basic solutions that are the most effective. And it's called “shop therapy” for a reason.

While Tabitha tried on designer outfits at Nordstrom and slipped on shoe after gorgeous impractical shoe, I kept her talking. Not about Cooper this time. We talked about her work—the time she'd gotten to interview Meryl Streep when she'd come to town for a benefit at the Harborside Convention Center. The articles she'd written about illegal immigrants in Laredo, Texas, for a series in her old paper in San Antonio—stories that had won her a Texas Press award. We talked about her family—her mom, struggling to get by with full-time care of Tabitha's autistic brother, whom Tabi­tha sent money back to help support. The advocating she and her mother and other two brothers had done for autism awareness and research. The feeling she got the few occasions her brother looked directly into her eyes.

I hoped she sounded as accomplished, capable, and kind to herself as she did to me.

She wore one of her new outfits home—a silvery gray pencil skirt with a ruffled teal sleeveless top that made her eyes glow like embers. The pretty, polished woman in front of me was a far cry from the bedraggled, beaten one who'd opened her front door a few hours earlier.

“You look amazing,” I told her honestly.

Tabitha stopped and checked herself out in a mirrored col­umn. “I do, don't I?” She straightened to stand taller, and made a quarter turn to check out her rear view. “I wish Coop—” She cut her­self off. “I'm going to call him when I get home. I think it might be best if we spent a little time apart. For now, anyway.”

I nodded and suppressed a smile. This was where I'd wanted Tabitha to get to, but if she was going to stick by it, the resolution had to come from her, not me. “That's a smart idea. Are you okay?”

She shrugged. “Not yet, but maybe in a while. He's got to fig­ure out things with his wife”—she grimaced at the word—“before he starts something new with me. Or...whoever.”

“Call me later?”

“If I need to. Thanks a lot. For everything.”

“Good luck.”

I watched her walk away toward her car, a little sashay in her hips. I wished it were always so easy to help someone figure out how to do what was best for themselves—most of us fight harder against seeing the things we don't want to see.