And One Morning Everything Was Done
(excerpted from Last Exit, Grace Meadows)
Out of pain,
and pain, and more pain
we feed this feverish plot.
Mary Oliver
People came to Jim seeking answers—his answers—to questions they had about their own lives. Jim couldn’t tell them, at least not so directly, and not all at once, at the beginning of his relationship with them, that he didn’t have these answers and never would have these answers, that they would have to figure it all out for themselves. He couldn’t tell his prospective clients that all he could do was listen to what they had to say and perhaps offer a few helpful suggestions, and that it was almost entirely up to them to find the solutions to their own problems. Because if Jim told them that he would be out of a job.
Tyler used to say, “It’s incredible that people pay you so much money just to listen to them talk.” And once, when he was very upset with Jim—over what, Jim could no longer recall—Tyler had blurted out, with tears in his eyes, “I wish I had enough money to get you to listen to me!”
Now Jim was left alone with all of this, with the full weight of his inadequacy. And with the fact that he earned his living sitting in a chair pretending to be concerned about sometimes petty slights and insults, about wounded pride and fragile damaged egos, about relationships that should have been ended, when possible, long ago, and self-imposed and circular tortures that led people to do the stupidest things, both to themselves and to others, even the people they claimed to love the most, over and over again.
Whereas Jim had once believed that he really did care about his patients, he knew now that he didn’t care about anyone but himself, when it came down to it, him and his own losses. Which, try as he might to put these into some sort of perspective, always seemed so much more significant than anything else. As well as inescapable.
Jim was thinking about this, six weeks after Tyler had disappeared, about how impossible it was for him to conjure up the necessary empathy anymore. He felt no sympathy for himself either, none at all, determined as he was to avoid self-pity. And blame himself. Though this, of course—blaming himself—was, in the end, nothing but a perverted form of self-pity.
But it was precisely as if his heart had become a rock in his chest, cold and inert and rough-edged and unfeeling. Not the organ, of course, which continued to beat steadily and did not seem likely to let him down. But all of those emotional attributes we associate with the heart. Every one of them. They were all suddenly gone from Jim’s life now. Absent, possibly forever. Like Tyler.
Although Jim had considered taking time off work in order to search for Tyler himself, he didn’t do it. He decided instead to heed Detective Yutaka’s advice and stay put, in case Tyler came back. And following Yutaka’s advice he also decided to keep listening to other people’s troubles, in a bid to occupy his mind as much as possible with anything other than his own speculations concerning what had happened to his son. Because those speculations led nowhere.
The fact that nothing had shown up, that the police had discovered nothing more than a ping off a tower in Waltham and the high school janitor’s recognition of Tyler via a photograph, and that none of Tyler’s friends knew anything either, or had heard from Tyler since his disappearance, not Gina or Tamai or anyone else; the fact that nothing was missing from Tyler’s bedroom and Jim could find no clue to the mystery in the chaos of everything Tyler had left behind, nothing at all in the pages of the overdue library books or the pockets of the clothes that Jim wanted to leave wherever they had fallen, both dirty and clean, preferring to keep the room just as Tyler had left it rather than tidy it up and convert it into a monument to an absence he refused to accept; and nothing either in every single scrap of paper Tyler had ever scribbled upon, whether a reminder to himself to do something, or some abstract and apparently pointless doodling, or the lines to the song he happened to be dreaming inside his head; the fact that there was no indication in anything Jim found in that room or anywhere else in the apartment to indicate that Tyler had planned to run away, and no knowledge of anyone who could possibly want to harm his boy; all of this, whenever Jim did stop, whenever he quit moving, whenever he paused and his mind wasn’t occupied with something else, if only for an instant, thoughts that had nothing to do with either him or Tyler: all of this nothing brought on a wave of despair that was huge and unstoppable as an avalanche, burying Jim beneath the rubble of his guilt.
Jim’s last patient that day—six weeks to the day since Tyler had failed to come home—was a twenty-eight year old woman whose engagement to a man she described as “capable and willing to be my husband” was on the line because she was practically frigid now. Laura had gone through a period of her life, four or five years she said, before she met the man she thought she ought to marry, when she had experimented “wildly” with sex. She confessed to having had many sexual partners, including a few women, briefly, and of having “thrown” herself into each of these sexual experiences, desperate, in her words, “to erase myself so that I could finally feel something.”
From the beginning Laura seemed to have been trying to let Jim know that her father had repeatedly raped her while she was growing up, something she couldn’t even quite admit to herself. Making it difficult for Jim to suggest the possibility, since he was one of those therapists who never wanted to insinuate anything into the minds of his patients. And this despite being convinced of everything Alice Miller—the authority on parental child abuse—had to say with regard to the therapist’s potential role as a “helping witness.” And Jim’s firm belief in the vital necessity of every individual’s discovery of their own truth. Whatever that truth might be.
Instead, Jim’s preferred method was always that of drawing these delicate admissions out. By pulling gently, for as long as it took, and as unobtrusively as possible. The way a thread of silk is drawn from a cocoon.
But that afternoon Laura told Jim that the last time she’d gone home for Thanksgiving she jammed a chair against the knob of her bedroom door out of fear that her father might try to enter during the night. And now she felt guilty, as well as devastated, by the fact that all her dad had really wanted to do that night was speak to her privately. So that he could tell her himself that he was dying of cancer.
When she told Jim this Laura’s eyes filled with tears, though none of them spilled. Reminding him of that time Tyler said he wished he had enough money to pay Jim to listen to him.
Jim sat motionless in his chair and watched Laura cover her face with her hands, a gesture of shame. He was horrified to realize that he felt nothing for her then, absolutely nothing, although he had liked her from the beginning and did feel the urge to pry her fingers away from her face. Laura was a pretty girl, in a very ordinary sort of way, and when she recounted her sexual exploits, prior to meeting her fiancée, Jim had used the details she had provided him with to vividly imagine every one of those encounters. He did this in order to put himself in her skin and he felt, intuitively now, that her fiancée was to blame for her inhibited sexual desire, that he simply wasn’t the right man for her and didn’t know what Laura needed and how to give it to her. In Alice Miller’s phraseology, Laura’s body was telling her what her mind refused to acknowledge.
But instead of saying anything like that Jim said, “You had no idea that your father was sick. Right?”
Laura shook her head from side to side.
“You can’t really blame yourself for not knowing that, can you?”
Jim let that sit for a while. Laura sighed, and eventually lowered her hands. She lifted her chin and stared out the windows that lined one wall of Jim’s office. Then she drew the bent knuckle of her index finger beneath each eye, one after the other, in an effort to remove any trace of tears without smearing her mascara. Her lips, swollen slightly with the effort to smother her emotion, were more sensual, and sullen, than usual.
“I know it’s my fault,” she said, sitting up a little straighter, and alerting Jim to the predictable necessity of assuring her that it wasn’t. “I shouldn’t have let it go on for so long. I should have told my mom a long time ago. That’s what I should have done.”
Jim knew that the best way to proceed might be to ask Laura to clarify what she was referring to, what it was exactly that she should have told her mom. But they were running out of time, and he didn’t want to address this issue so explicitly with only a couple of minutes to go in their session. So he nodded his head, hoping that Laura would assume that he understood what she was saying.
But then she said, “That way I wouldn’t feel so wretched now. That way my mom would’ve kicked him out years ago. And he’d be long gone, and already out of my life. Now that he’s dying.”
Jim stepped off the T and crossed the tracks in front of the trolley. He waited at the curb for the light at the intersection to change, along with the crowd of other tired people in heavy coats and scarves and gloves gathering to cross the busy street so that they could go home.
The only thing Jim said to Laura that afternoon, the one question he had left her with, after she stated her preference for her father being removed from her life was, “Are you sure that’s what you would want?”
He wasn’t judging her, he said. He just wanted to know. And he told her that she didn’t have to answer the question immediately, that she should think about it and they would talk about it next week. Then he stood up, signaling with this abrupt movement that she should do the same.
Before Tyler disappeared Jim would have felt the inclination, the irresistible impulse and sincere desire, to offer this distraught young woman some sort of warm human indication of his sympathy, a pat on the shoulder, or even a hug. Jim had never been afraid in the past of being too friendly with his patients. He had never doubted his ability to stay on the right side of the professional line that separated him from them. But that afternoon he felt nothing as he opened the door to his office and ushered Laura out of the room.
Jim stepped over the scab of dirty frozen slush that caked the curb and tramped with the other pedestrians across the slick glistening street. Christmas had come and gone, and although he had seen his mom several times since Tyler disappeared Jim hadn’t told her yet what had happened. He figured that her dementia was one good reason not to tell her. But he wasn’t sure what the other reasons were for keeping this from her.
He had tried to track down Caroline through Ferengelli, because he thought she would surely want to know. But the man who had vowed to find Tyler if he was still anywhere within Greater Boston had come up with nothing on her either.
Jim understood that everyone in the world was alone, ultimately, that this was the human condition. As Conrad put it, “We live, as we dream—alone.”
What he failed to understand was how it was possible for one man to lose both his wife and his only son—fifteen years later—not to a certain death, which would be hard enough to live with, but to the cruel trick of simply vanishing.
As he approached the bookshop where he had seen that woman who reminded him so much of Caroline, he decided once again not to go in there. Jim hadn’t been inside the store since that night he saw the woman in the houndstooth jacket, the same night Tyler disappeared. But every time he walked by that bookshop he glanced inside, hoping to see her again.
When Jim looked this time all he saw—in the illuminated storefront window, where several popular books were prominently displayed—was the reflected image of a middle-aged man with stooped shoulders carrying a leather briefcase that looked like it was so heavy it might pull that man right down through one of the cracks in the sidewalk.
Jim corrected his posture by straightening his back. But whereas he’d been proud in the past of the way he had managed to stay relatively fit and carry himself, to walk so erect and tall now felt unnatural. Artificial and forced. Not to mention inappropriate.
These days it took all the determination Jim was capable of summoning to resist the urge to surrender and prevent himself from lying down and allowing his body to curl in on itself, right there, on the pavement. The way autumn leaves do after they fall to the ground, and begin to dry out.
When Jim got home he stood in the living room, near the windows that gave onto the courtyard. This is what he did every evening after work. Before eventually going into the kitchen, where he would stand for a long time and try to think of something he might be able to stomach.
Jim stood with a tumbler of Laphroaig in his hands, staring out the window. He never lowered the blinds anymore. So that Tyler could see that Jim was home. Still waiting for him. In case he walked by. And wondered about Jim.
There was nothing to look at outside. Nothing but the electric lamps illuminating the walkway. And the Christmas lights that hadn’t been taken down yet, blinking in the windows of some of the apartments on the other side of the courtyard, where the shades hadn’t yet been lowered against the night.
This was supposed to have been the last year Jim lived with his son before Tyler went off to spend the rest of his life on his own. Jim had been determined not only to make it as good as it could possibly be—to be as tolerant of the teenager as was humanly possible—but to wean himself during this last year together of his own dependencies on Tyler. He had set as one of his goals for the year the letting go of his need of the boy, and his sometimes irritating company. He had simultaneously looked forward to—and dreaded—the coming freedom from the challenges and habitual frustrations of a relationship he had fully accepted and committed himself to over seventeen years ago.
Jim had always known that he would be lonely come September. And that this loneliness would be unlike any other loneliness he had ever experienced. But he didn’t know that it would happen like this. And be so soon.
Jim lifted the whisky to his lips and swallowed half of it. More than looking—or at least seeing anything with his eyes—more than thinking about anything, he was simply listening again. To that peculiar silence of absence that he knew he would never get used to.
