Reluctantly, the delete key in my mind erased my former image of a doctor in a white smock and rimless glasses. It also erased the pallid skin I had envisioned as befitting a man of medicine. My new image was tinted a natural brown, and all that framed his topaz eyes were thick, black lashes.
Dr. Mendez wore no ring or watch, his only embellishment, besides the boots, a large silver belt buckle with the image of a hawk taking off in flight. His shirt was denim, comfortably worn, and his proud bearing and bulk gave him the appearance of being tall; though I guessed, if I were standing, we’d meet eye-to-eye.
My carefully constructed world didn’t allow for surprises. I liked everything neat and orderly. Careful planning was my trademark, my motto. Yet now, I was confronted by a shaman cowboy.
The doctor stepped forward and, in a voice pitched low enough to calm a panicked nation, said, “Good morning, Miss Veil.”
I liked that voice, for once pleased by the unexpected. “Good morning,” I said.
He tilted his head, let time pass. Another surprise. In my world, time was like money and never wasted, each quarter hour in my daily planner faithfully promised. Action ruled. Yet . . . This lapse was such a pleasurable sin.
“Do you have any questions before we begin?” the doctor asked.
“No,” I said, although a thousand questions ballooned in my head—big questions, small questions, questions easy to answer, questions hard to answer, questions with no answers at all.
The doctor leaned against the corner of his desk and gave me a softened look. “Did you ask for references before you made your appointment, Ms. Veil?”
Not about to admit how desperate I’d been, I said, “While searching for a therapist, I came across a referral service here in Menlo Park for people experiencing . . .”
“Spiritual difficulties,” the doctor finished for me.
“Yes, the grad student who took my call actually seemed to know what I was going through. She called my condition a ‘psychic opening’ and referred me to you. I was so relieved that you had an opening the next day, I wasn’t really concerned about anything else.”
“And now?”
I started to slump in my chair but caught myself and straightened my spine. “You aren’t a typical psychologist, are you?”
He opened the folder containing my new footprints in the medical system and scanned the top page. “If you had asked, you would have been advised that I do things rather unconventionally.”
My face must have registered alarm because he winked before divulging conspiringly, “My methods are accepted by the forces that guide our profession, and I do have some degree of success, pony tail and all.”
As this information churned in my mind, I glanced up and, behind the doctor’s head, spotted a colorful illustration of a four-spoked wheel, denoting the four directions, the four seasons, and the four elements, bringing to mind the circle of life, where you can get lost and then find yourself again.
Dr. Mendez turned toward the framed poster. “Are you familiar with the Medicine Wheel?”
“There’s one in Wyoming, at Big Horn, once used by the Plains Indian tribes for some kind of ritual or ceremony.”
The doctor sat on the tip of his desk like an instructor about to begin a lecture. “The Medicine Wheel is indeed ceremonial but so much more. You could call it a mirror of sorts in that it helps you visualize where you are in life and what you need to work on to reach your potential.”
He paused and then continued at such a slow pace that I clung to his every word like a trapeze artist reaching from fly bar to catcher to fly bar on her return to the takeoff board. “When Native Americans use the term ‘medicine’ they are not referring to drugs and herbal remedies but to an inner, spiritual healing.”
Energy surged through me, an endorphin rush. The very mention of inner, spiritual healing and reaching one’s potential drew me like pain pills to an addict. But this particular type of healing would apparently not be part of my therapy. The doctor stood, walked to the other side of his desk, and sat in his chair. Lecture over.
“Now for the big question,” he said. “Why are you here?”
Mesmerized by his topaz eyes and Morgan Freeman voice, I didn’t answer immediately. I focused on my hands, surprised they lay flat and relaxed on the magazine’s surface. “Actually, I don’t know where to begin,” I said, which was true. It was also a way of stalling. Though disillusioned by the negative results of my usual lock-jawed stance on all that mattered in life, opening my mouth and putting my foot into it sounded equally unappealing.
I glanced up, expecting the doctor to register annoyance or dismissal at my reluctance to share, but his face gave nothing away. “Go on,” he said.
My muscles twitched. My palms began to sweat. I wanted to tell him my secret but feared nothing more than the possibility it might be true. That I was losing my mind.
“Tell me about yourself, Miss Veil,” he said, offering yet another opportunity to sidestep the issue of my mental health.
I took up the offer like a perfect pitch. “Doctor, I’m confused. I mean, by today’s standards, I’m sitting on top of the world. I have more money than I expected to make in five lifetimes, and it should be enough, but . . . I don’t feel successful in all that counts.”
“What counts?” His voice was so soft and low that I nearly missed the question.
“I don’t know. Serenity. Peace-of-mind. Freedom.” How could I explain? I had everything that was supposed to make me happy, yet . . .
“What kind of car do you drive?” he asked.
“A Jeep,” I said.
“Why not a BMW, a Mercedes . . . a Toyota?”
I didn’t answer. The referral service had been wrong in sending me here.
“Well?” he said.
Wrong question. Wrong therapist. My immediate impulse was to get up and walk out the door, offering an obscene hand gesture to boot. But, of course, I didn’t. I’d made it this far in life without a single scrape to the knuckles. Why start now? “I feel safe in my Jeep.”
“A Mercedes is safe,” he said.
“But I can’t take it just anywhere.”
“Where do you go that you cannot take a Mercedes?”
“Nowhere,” I said. “I take it to work and back home. I take it to the grocery store.”
Finally, he explained. “Sometimes you can learn about yourself through small things. Your choice of car, for instance.”
“Maybe I love my Jeep because I can pack it full of stuff and make my great escape.”
Dr. Mendez’s smile—no more than a quick upturn of his lips—suggested that I’d revealed something significant, but before I could delve into what that might be, he asked, “What are your emotional outlets?”
“You mean what do I do for fun?”
A nod and a barely perceptible lift of his hands, like a participant at an auction, who doesn’t want his competition to know he’s bidding.
“My life has been pretty much all work and no play,” I said, “which, until recently anyway, suited me just fine.”
The doctor picked up a pen, reopened the folder containing the medical version of my new life story, and began to write.
“I like puzzles,” I said, eyeing the pen. “Crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, a game of solitaire. About five years ago, I realized that investing in the stock market was like a giant puzzle. Believe it or not, I actually got high on the research. I took all the bits and pieces of information—you know, the ticker symbols, PE ratios, earnings-per-share, risk and reward—and put them into graphs and charts until pictures formed in my head of companies to invest in. For once, I took off without a plan and didn’t look back.”
“All this in addition to work?”
“In addition to work and school.”
“Very time consuming. Do you ever get lonely?”
“I like being alone,” I blurted and then shifted in my chair as though I’d just admitted guilt during a polygraph test. Where were these outbursts coming from? And what were they revealing about me?
“I am not here to judge you, Miss Veil,” the doctor said in a tone that matched his words.
What was he, a saint? Human beings judge. It’s part of their nature. Plus, it’s a psychologist’s job to judge. In this case, my sanity.
“Investing in the stock market is risky,” he said. “How do you handle the pressure?”
“I don’t know . . . I guess investing makes me feel free in a way I’ve never felt before.”
“And when you lose money?”
I smiled—couldn’t help it. I took pride in accomplishing this one small feat without the imprint of Cliff or my mother. “So far, I haven’t.”
No expression on the doctor’s face; a perfect soldier for the Queen’s Guard.
“When I noticed how large my portfolio had become, I handed it over to a financial advisor. He suggested that I replace my high-risk stocks with less aggressive options, taking out much of the risk.” I shook my head, feeling a familiar sadness. “He converted most of my portfolio into mutual funds, bonds, and CDs.”
“With the recent market downturn, he kept you from losing a lot of money,” the doctor said.
“Yeah.”
“But you lost your taste of freedom as well.”
I nodded, didn’t meet his eyes.
He leaned back and tapped the pencil on his desk. “What about your job?”
The mention of my job caused a hollowing in my chest. I focused on the Medicine Wheel as though I’d find an answer there. “While attending San Jose State, I worked part-time as an administrative assistant to one of the partners in a large venture capital firm. Nothing big, just calendar scheduling and the editing of reports and presentation materials. Anyway, it seems I also have a knack for digging up buried information. You know, the kind of facts about private companies that live under the radar. Stuff that’s invaluable to a VC looking for seed companies to invest in. Which then led to a job doing company research.”
“Are you still there?” Dr. Mendez asked.
“By the time I’d earned my teaching credential at San Jose State, I was making too much money to quit.”
He nodded, took more notes, then asked, “Tell me about your family.”
“Dad died of cancer two years ago, and I miss him.”
“With tragedy comes humility,” my father used to say while fighting the disease that killed him. Was this what he’d meant by humility, this loss of self?
“And your mother?”
“She’s a good person, and I love her, but . . .” I shook my head, smiled. “There’s always a ‘but,’ isn’t there?”
When the doctor didn’t respond, I said, “She wants to live my life for me, which makes her a bit hard to deal with.”
“Unlike your father.”
“Yeah, unlike my Dad.” If only he could see me now.
“Do you have any siblings?”
“No.”
Though Dr. Mendez had been taking notes throughout our conversation, he now wrote for what seemed a long time. I looked around in panic, sorry I had come.
“You said you like being alone,” the doctor said, “but I need to ask. Are you in a relationship with someone?”
I swallowed hard, shook my head. “I was engaged to a guy named Cliff, but I broke it off. He didn’t take it well.”
The doctor waited, his gaze probing like a phlebotomist searching for the perfect blood-releasing vein.
“He was suffocating me.”
“Back to freedom again,” the doctor said, his tone so gentle that my throat clogged. “In order for me to help you, Miss Veil, I need to know. . . What have you not told me?”
He was right. I would gain nothing by holding back. I had come here for guidance, which I wasn’t about to get without sharing. And trusting.
“I’m hearing a Voice. As clear as if someone’s standing right next to me. Except no one’s there. It’s like ear buds are stuck in my ears, and I can’t get them out.”
I swabbed the moisture leaking from my eyes with the tip of a finger, ridiculously careful not to smear mascara all over my face, and then used the sleeve of my jacket to wipe my dripping nose like some snot-nosed kid.