THE CONSULTING ROOMS of Dr Michelle Blumenthal and Associates radiated an aura of smug wellbeing. Everything about the waiting room suggested warmth, optimism and complex co-payments. They were, the decor suggested, worth the money. And, apparently, worth the wait. Violet couldn’t vouch for the value of the mental health service she was about to experience, and at any rate she didn’t care because Hunter was paying, but she was at least grateful that the magazines on offer were current, clean, and celebrity-free.
Although they had never discussed it directly, there was an undercurrent of blame on the domestic front surrounding Violet’s employment situation. Or rather, lack of employment situation. Hunter claimed to have had no prior knowledge of the ‘staffing restructure’ that had apparently swept through the studio, and Violet believed him. She was less convinced by his claim that he was ‘highly motivated’ to rectify the situation. While she could buy that Hunter was not in any position to hire or fire studio staff directly, the inordinate amount of time he spent with Aaron these days suggested a level of influence which could surely achieve a simple re-hire. It needn’t even be working for Aaron, she assured Hunter, especially if he no longer wanted her around.
Strangely, before she married Hunter, there was nothing Violet had wanted more than to quit her job and work part-time in museum gift shop. But as soon as she no longer needed to work for Aaron, she had begun to find the work strangely rewarding. Even Aaron himself had seemed less weird; more thoughtful. Or rather, more thoughtful in less weird ways. Now, what really pissed her off was that he hadn’t even called to her to discuss the matter. Which made her think that this new ‘thoughtful’ Aaron was all just a figment of his fucked up personality. And yet, according to Hunter, Aaron was just as upset by the restructure as she was.
This struck her as unlikely.
‘Violet?’ said a professionally polished voice. Violet looked up to see a tall blonde woman of indeterminate age wearing a white coat and carrying a clipboard. She identified herself as Karin, the wellness manager. ‘Would you kindly fill out this form for us?’ Karin continued, smiling with the lower half of her face as she handed Violet the clipboard.
Violet eyed it dubiously. She had already filled out her basic medical information and the sudden appearance of another form didn’t augur well for getting out of there before midnight. ‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘It’s a wellness survey. It helps us to help you,’ said Karin primly, handing Violet a brochure. The practice, it transpired, was attached to a ‘holistic wellness spa’, which essentially meant that it did a sideline in green juice and injectable dermal fillers, although the advertising materials didn’t sell it that way.
‘I thought I was seeing Dr. Blumenthal,’ said Violet. She didn’t mean to sound petulant, but she had been waiting for three quarters of an hour for an appointment she’d had strong reservations about keeping in the first place. If anyone tried to sell her a colonic at this point, she didn’t think should could vouch for her own actions.
‘Dr. Blumenthal helps your mind. We help your spirit,’ said Karin with a straight face. In fact, her whole face seemed hardly to move, while still managing to radiate a kind of glowing exuberance. To make her go away, Violet accepted the survey.
Question 1: How would you rate your overall wellness?
MORE UNWELL 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 VERY WELL
Violet scratched her head with the end of the pen. A scale of one to 12 struck her as an absurd allusion to the famous ‘These go to eleven’ scene in the satirical movie This is Spinal Tap. As with the modified Marshall amplifier, presumably the number 12 represented an amplified wellness, the wellbeing equivalent of feeling 120%. A number reserved for gurus, evangelists, people on ecstasy and Oprah. This scale also had the annoying feature of forcing Violet to recalibrate her natural predisposition towards metric approximations. If she were, for example, inclined to put a circle around ‘3’ on a scale of one to 10, on a scale of one to 12 she would then need to come up with a number approximately three tenths of 12. OK, four was probably close enough, but what if she were feeling more like a seven? What the hell was seven tenths of 12?
Giving up on the scale-related questions, Violet skimmed through the survey searching for questions with a binary outcome.
Question 5: Do you wake up full of energy and gratitude, looking forward to the endless possibilities of the new day? YES NO
Violet frowned. Unable to circle the missing third option, ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?, she resigned herself to failure. Presumably, being able to complete a wellness survey without wanting to take a bath with your toaster was a prerequisite for embarking on the expensive but self-evidently worthwhile pathway to improved wellbeing. By stumbling at the first hurdle, she had declared herself to be lacking in self-evidence. It reminded her of the oldest joke in her (former) profession, which still made her smile, after all these years:
Q. How many psychologists does it take to change a light globe?
A. Only one, but the light globe has to want to change.
It suddenly occurred to Violet that she might be depressed.
‘I think you might be depressed,’ said Dr. Blumenthal, thirty minutes later as she sat opposite Violet in her spacious office. ‘On a scale of one to 12 I’d say you were about an eight.’
‘So about 6.66 on a scale of one to 10?’ said Violet.
‘If you’d prefer,’ said Dr. Blumenthal evenly. Unlike Hunter’s private physician, Dr. Blumenthal liked to be addressed by her title and last name. Violet was fine with that. ‘I’d also venture to suggest that you’ve been depressed on and off for some time, probably since you were quite young.’
Violet sighed. It was something she seemed to be doing a lot of lately. The word ungrateful kept spinning around and around in her head. Why couldn’t she just be grateful for everything she had? Other people managed it, and they weren’t living in Malibu in a movie star’s mansion.
‘Tell me something,’ said Dr. Blumenthal, ‘Why do you keep referring to your home as Hunter’s house? You live there too, don’t you?’
Violet swallowed another sigh. It was difficult to describe the way she felt about living with Hunter without sounding like a caricature of a gold-digging trophy wife. But she really loved Hunter, and he really loved her. It was just that - ‘I feel like a guest,’ she blurted out. ‘I mean, I feel welcome and everything but I feel like he’s being so nice to me.’
Dr. Blumenthal raised her eyebrows. ‘You have a problem with your husband being nice to you?’
‘Of course not,’ said Violet, fighting back tears. She knew how this went. If she started crying now she’d be a blubbering mess and the rest of the session would be a write-off. For the first time she sensed the frustration her own clients must have felt, ploughing through the Kleenex, barely able to get a word out. But, just like puberty, it seemed to be a stage you needed to go through in order to get to the next level. All of her clients cried at some point or another; even those who tried to pass it off as hay fever. Except for Aaron, she realized all of a sudden. Aaron had never cried; never even looked like he had the sniffles. Conveniently, the weird juxtaposition of Aaron over the emotional disarray of her marriage was enough to stem the tide of her own tears. She took a deep breath. ‘It’s just that he’s always polite to me. Like he’s afraid of upsetting me or something. Like he’s taking care of me.’
‘You have a problem with people taking care of you?’
‘Of course,’ snapped Violet, annoyed by the question. ‘Doesn’t everyone?’
Dr. Blumenthal laid her pad and pencil on the table in front of her. Unlike every other therapist she knew, she hadn’t embraced technology as a therapeutic tool. Rather, she liked the soft scrape of graphite on paper. With so many beeps and boings permeating modern life, she liked to create an environment where clients could feel as if the incessant demands of technology were entirely absent. Besides, she had an astonishing memory and she always found that her overall impression of a situation was more accurate that any verbatim transcript of a client’s ramblings.
‘Tell me something, Violet,’ she said. ‘Was there ever a time in your past when you felt the same way?’
‘What way?’ Violet felt a small lump swelling in her throat, like she was just about to be given the bad news about her dental x-rays.
‘When you felt like you were a guest in your own house.’
Violet looked at her feet. She was wearing flip-flops, they were old and scuffed and she needed a pedicure. Not the kind of look worthy of a reluctant Malibu housewife. ‘I’ve kind of always felt that way,’ she muttered. Looking up, she saw sympathy and victory in the eyes of the good doctor. It was a look she had indulged in herself on many occasions, and she didn’t blame Dr. Blumenthal for giving it back to her. It was, after all, the natural conclusion of a successful line of questioning. Cops probably felt the same way.
‘Even as a child?’ Dr. Blumenthal asked.
‘Especially then,’ said Violet.
‘Before or after you had the dreams?’
Violet shrugged. ‘Around the same time I guess.’
‘Tell me about the dreams,’ said Dr. Blumenthal.
Violet tried to cast her mind back. It was a period of her life that lurked in a vague shadow, its events and emotions unformed and inconsistent. ‘I was only four or five,’ she said, ‘so I can’t really remember them anymore.’
‘Perhaps we can try something,’ said Dr. Blumenthal, ‘to help you remember.’
Violet shivered. If she had been in a movie, the shutters would have swung open as a cold breeze rushed through the room, blowing out the candles and tinkling the chandeliers. But she wasn’t, so the only outward sign of her inner chill were the tiny goose bumps that had suddenly appeared on the backs of her arms. ‘You mean hypnosis,’ she said flatly.
‘Have you ever experienced hypnosis?’ asked Dr. Blumenthal.
‘At college,’ said Violet. ‘It just made me want to go to sleep.’
‘That’s a perfectly natural reaction. It can be just like going to sleep, but on this occasion I’ll give you instructions to remember what we talked about, or what you experience. Are you OK with that?’
Violet nodded slowly. Like scooping the unidentifiable remains of last month’s takeout into the trash so she could recycle the container, she had a sense that whatever unpleasantness she was about to endure was for the greater good.
‘Wonderful,’ said Dr. Blumenthal, when Violet had settled back into what was, evidently, the hypnotherapy chair. Made of black leather and shaped like an elongated S, at the very least it gave Violet the sense that her emotional needs were being met in an aesthetically pleasing way. There were probably worse ways to spend an afternoon, she reflected, as she let her head fall back onto the headrest. Getting a root canal, for example.
‘I’m going to count backwards from ten to one, and as I count I’m going to ask you to relax a different part of your body. If you understand, simply nod your head.’
Violet nodded her head.
‘And if there’s anything you don’t understand, simply shake your head. Do you understand?’
Violet nodded.
‘Good. And now I am going to start with the number ten, and as I say the number ten, you are going to feel your feet start to relax. Your feet are starting to feel very heavy, very relaxed…’