The Unprofessionals (15 page)

I
HAD RECOMMENDED
he take an etiquette course to help him feel confident and act smooth with the aristocratic class with whom he wished to socialize when he got to college and found out about the Upper East Side. “Sounds like a good idea,” he said. He didn't know what etiquette was before I explained. Once, at dinner in his parents' home, he'd reached all the way across the table to get a basket of bread. He didn't know about not reaching.

“You'll feel more confident and your social path will be more streamlined,” I told him. I didn't mention the bread incident, a minuscule one in the background of his generally all-spooky behavior.

If that hadn't worked, at least he would have learned some better manners and prepared for this last act in a more considerate way.

I had a copy of
Letitia Baldrige's Complete Guide to the New Manners for the '90s,
but I didn't remember any advice on suicide planning.

After a few minutes of this conversation with the boy's father, the same conversation over and over in different versions, we were finished with all the ways we could say the same things. He took advantage of the break to say something else, on the next part of the subject.

I wasn't thinking ahead of the moments we were in, because we seemed unreal and outside life and time, like cutout paper-doll people pasted onto a page. In addition to other disorders, I had the obsessive-compulsive disorder. I could have stayed stuck for an hour on that pasted page.

But there was the next thing: “We're not having a funeral for him,” his father said.

The word “funeral”—I couldn't think of this word in association with the boy. “For him” had an additional cruel sound. I was glad to hear the word “funeral” quickly undone by the word “not” before it was uttered. I was getting more shocks from this new line of thought and all I could say was “Oh,” as I kept crying. I asked no questions. I wanted no answers. Don't have a funeral—good—because that will keep it in the realm of unhappening, was my reasoning.

The boy had recently mentioned the word to me in an unfeeling and chatty way.

“Did you hear about my grandmother?” he'd said.

I said I knew she'd been in what's called failing health for some time. “I haven't heard anything lately,” I said. “Is it the worst?”

“Yes,” he said. “Except it's really for the best at this stage.”

He used to describe her attempts to settle a family dispute over an inherited lamp. “Every night after dinner she says to the sixty-year-old nephew, ‘Now, Edward, about the lamp.'”

“It's too bad people can't live a long time in good health and then wear out and fade away in peace the way they do in Okinawa and some other islands,” I said as I thought of his grandmother.

“Yes,” he said. “But our comical monkey bodies dictate otherwise.”

I was admiring his sentence, so I laughed with an extra bonus of appreciation for his talent.

 

HE'D MASTERED
a combination—coldness and weariness, resulting from heroin use. He mentioned going to the funeral as if he were going out to buy a new cell phone.

His grandmother knew enough to be worried about him when he was twelve. She said he was like a fifty-year-old man the way he walked aimlessly through the room with his hands in his pockets while jingling the change around inside the pockets. She smiled, but behind the smile, or above it, in the area of the eyes, she was worried, and she said the boy's grandfather didn't think being precocious was a completely good thing. The grandfather was known for his wisdom, but by the time I met him, he was sitting and playing solitaire at the kitchen table while eating fruit salad.

“I was reading the evening paper,” the boy had said to me when he was twelve. I told this to his grandmother and she laughed, but not wholeheartedly. Good that she wasn't around for the last activities he'd gotten into.

 

“WHO'S THERE
with you?” I asked the boy's father.

“No one. Just us,” he said.

“Just you two?” I tried to see them alone together in their large house with this having happened.

“Yes. Some people were here, but they left.”

“What will you do now? Are your relatives coming?” I said.

“I don't know yet. We have to go to Philadelphia.”

I asked why. I didn't know what I was asking.

And then he said in his dark, low voice, “I have to bury him.”

Another part of the subject I wasn't following. There was no future for me in the conversation if it was going to go this way.

“I can't talk about this,” I said.

“Why not? We have to face it.”

“I'm not good at facing things,” I said.

“Well, okay, we'll talk to you later. I'll call you.”

“Is there any way I can be of help?” I asked, with that etiquette book in the background, but I didn't know what I meant.

“Not now,” he said. “There's nothing left to do.”

S
HOULD I TAKE
a Xanax? Should I drink thirty drops of valerian in an ounce of warm water? Should I take half of a Klonopin? Should I eat a peach? They weren't in season yet, at least the organically grown white ones, and regular peaches were on Dr. Andrew Weil's list of the dirty dozen most pesticide-sprayed fruits.

I'll have to stop crying at some point, so I should stop now, I thought. Because outside, in my workroom, I had no assistant to come and organize papers. My former assistants used to come and do everything wrong, partly on purpose and partly unconsciously, in the style of passive-aggressive experts.

The assistants would stay in the workroom, mixing things up, misfiling papers, writing with cheap mechanical pencils they'd ordered by the boxload so that their spindly writing in the light, thin pencil lead would be illegible. They'd put cards in the Rolodex without phone numbers, or write phone numbers without addresses, write names of people without the names of their businesses, or businesses without the names of anyone who worked there. Or one of their favorite techniques was to take contact sheets and negatives and pile them together under catalogs from Office Max, phone books, and sheets of bubble wrap, old copies of
Vegetarian Times,
and requests for money from Doctors Without Borders. It was all the same to them.

The papers never moved off the desk. The clock never got a new battery. It was always one o'clock during the years they worked there.

 

I SHOULD
wash my face, splash water on it without looking in the mirror. I expected the face would look like one of those inflatable red rubber pancakes used for physical therapy, exercise, or swim therapy. I'd been told by a facialist hundreds of times that Paul Newman put his whole face into a bowl of ice water when he got up in the morning.

I had only this one day to get organized without an assistant's help, or hindrance, because I had only four days to pack up and leave for the summer. I had to go on a work project for
Look at the Moon
—photographs of the sky and other natural wonders visible only on that island. And I'd be staying in the rented house where the boy had first called me the summer before to say he wasn't a drug addict.

Any friends of mine who'd met him were all at pressure-filled jobs and it would be bad manners to call them with this news.

At an antique-folk-art show on a New York pier in the 1980s I saw a wooden man-statue once used outside a men's haberdashery store in 1920. The man was an idea of a man, not a real man—the blue suit, the tie, the white shirt, the decent face many men had before our society became filled with the thugs and goons David Letterman mentioned while speaking to Letitia Baldrige the time she appeared on his show in order to promote her book. The men I knew were like that wooden man.

Didn't I know any females I could speak to? The narcissist—I didn't dare disturb her during the day. She'd be busy with crises connected to sending a cake to her son at boarding school.

I thought of a plan. I'd prepare people: I'd say, “heroin addict,” “in and out of rehab,” “getting more desperate”—and they'd guess. I wouldn't have to batter them down with the cruelest words.

 

I'D NEVER
had a professional assistant. When I first laid eyes on one at her main place of employment—a medical complex, office structure, or bungalow-barracks—she was hanging over a porch rail with a can of soda in her hand. From her appearance I thought that she must be a patient, or a relative waiting for a patient, but because of the proprietary air she had of belonging to the building-bungalow-barracks, it was clear that she had some rights there.

These rights were hers, I discovered, because she was the assistant for the entire barracks—six different kinds of “medical professional” offices. This most outlandish place is where I'd been referred for psychotherapy.

I accepted this setup, and continued on at the establishment, in spite of it, for a year of appointments.

The doctor I saw had mentioned that he had never smoked—that was reason enough for me to sign on there. This was the place to which my friend the boy had referred when he said, “I advise you never to go back there. It's unprofessional.”

The same day I saw the manager hanging over the rail with the soda can, I witnessed a more unbelievable display of behavior in the immediate vicinity of the medical bungalow.

It was a hot day in June, but this place wasn't far from the water, so a breeze almost blew and kept the heat down in the area, which was surrounded by fields and farms. That was why I went back there—location—weather, fresh air, green grass, wildflower meadows, unobstructed by high buildings and all that went with building life.

Outside the bungalow office a workman was painting the green trim of the windows. The man was big and hefty. He wore blue jeans, workman style and roomy—lucky for everyone that they were roomy. He wore a tight sleeveless white T-shirt, showing tattoos on his arms. His large midsection and back were partially exposed in the style made famous by Dan Aykroyd on
Saturday Night Live,
and I thought I spied some tattoo parts on the back area, too, before I looked away. Around his head he wore a yellow bandanna tied over long dark hair and he was smoking a cigarette.

A short, stocky fellow approached him—I assumed he was the contractor; he was dressed in regular khaki pants and a plaid sport shirt. He gave the worker some instructions and then said in a voice everyone could hear, “Don't be depressed. I'll try to get you some money.” Then the stocky, short man entered the building through the medical door. Seeing this was worth the trip there no matter how the appointment might turn out.

I was waiting outside in the hot air for the doctor because there was no ventilation in the waiting room, which smelled of toxic fumes and was filled with drug-company advertising brochures and the worst magazines known to mankind.

Some months later, I pointed out the collection of periodicals to the doctor.

“Yes, well, but how many people would read
The New York Review of Books
if we had it out here?” he'd said as he straightened out copies of magazines without taking note of the cover lines with the words
HOTTER
this and that, and even more.

The short man came out again. He looked at me and said, “Hello!” in a salacious manner. Since my forties were almost completely over, I wasn't used to the look or voice, and when I got home, I stood in front of a mirror to see what he might have meant. It must have been this: My linen skirt was old and washed thin, and a day like that one was too hot for a slip. Through the thin skirt, once light-green, by then faded almost to white, my two legs were completely visible.

The next day I went to the one underwear store in the whole town. I bought the thinnest cotton half-slip available and wore it under the skirt, although the two layers of fabric were too hot for the globally warmed-up days. On my next trip to a hot place I stopped near an abandoned farm and, while in the car, took the slip off and used a small scissors from a glove-compartment sewing kit to cut off a section from the knees down.

When I got into the psychiatrist's office, he had the window open, since the air-conditioning wasn't working right, or so he claimed—people use this alibi for all kinds of reasons. Smoke from the cigarette of the worker, who was still painting the windows, was blowing directly into the office.

“I smell cigarette smoke,” I said to the doctor.

“No one is smoking in here,” he said.

I told him about the outside situation. “I'll go right out and tell him he must stop immediately!” the doctor said. He leapt up from his chair as if he wanted to get outside and breathe some air himself.

When he returned, I told him what I'd heard spoken between the tattooed one and the stocky one.

“Well,” he said, and slowly, as if each word had weight and significance: “The…contractor…is…also…a…therapist.” Then he smiled and started to laugh, as if he thought it was one of the funniest things he'd ever heard.

“You mean he works here—doing both jobs?” I said.

“Yes, he does,” the doctor said.

Then I started to laugh. I couldn't believe I had stumbled into this place of delectable unprofessionalism.

“See, you don't know all the things we have going on here,” he said with a mad smile.

I couldn't know then that this madness with the psychiatrist would lead to the edge of insanity, or that one day the boy and I would discuss that we'd both been referred to the same sanatorium in Massachusetts.

“At least we'd have each other to talk to,” I'd said to the boy when we realized we might be in the same place someday, maybe soon.

“But I'd be in the drug part and you'd be in the psychiatric part,” he'd said. “I was there. I know.” Whenever he said the word “drug” in reference to himself, he said it really quietly.

“But isn't fraternizing between the wards permitted?” I asked.

“I don't think so,” he said. “The drug part is like a prison. So that's that,” he said with a sigh. “I advise you not to go.”

 

WHEN I
thought back to the day of the phone call, I thought I had splashed water on my face, or maybe I hadn't.

I remembered that I opened the door and went out to my workroom. The cleaning helper was there. I'd forgotten about her.

“You know about my friend the recovering heroin addict?” I said to her. “He killed himself.”

I guess she'd heard this kind of thing before. She didn't show any surprise. She kept right on working, moving piles of paper around from here to there. “Where?” was always the question after she left, always in a hurry to get to an Italian-named macaroni store on the highway before it closed—she'd said so.

“This is what they do. This is what happens with a lot of them,” she said as I told her a fact or two. She didn't look up at me from the stacks of paper. Now he was just one of “them.” He was no longer the person he'd been.