And how did that make you feel?”
“Guilty. Stupid. I had no business lashing out at my mother. My sister didn’t help matters, but I can’t blame Jessie. We need her more than she needs us. Our mother, I mean. But I should be glad of that. I wish she took my work more seriously, but I agree with her too. Because it’s not real. None of it.”
“What isn’t real?”
“My work. What I do for a living. My so-called living.” He took a breath. “Which is why I want to give up writing and theater. It’s time that I do something real.”
Seeing your therapist was a terrible way to start the week, and ten in the morning far too early. The mind was too scattered, the tongue too loose. Caleb surprised himself by leaping so soon from his visit home to this new idea.
Dr. Chin, however, took it in stride. “And what do you want to do instead?”
“Shouldn’t you be asking why I want to give it up?”
She laughed, a light, musical titter. “Oh, there are so many reasons not to write or act or paint. But okay then. Why?”
Caleb was annoyed by her first question, which was the right question, the hard one. “I could give a hundred reasons,” he said. “But the real one is that my circus animals have deserted me.”
“But you broke off with Toby. He didn’t desert you.”
“I don’t mean Toby. I mean my bogies, my writing demons.” Why did people always bring up Toby? “There’s a poem by William Butler Yeats. ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’? Where he says he gave his heart to the theater, but he’s all burned out and his animals have run off. It’s the poem with the lines ‘I must lie down where all the ladders start,/In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.’”
“I think I know that one. Vaguely. The way I know most poetry.” She laughed again, this time at herself.
Caleb had been seeing Dr. Chin once a week for almost a year. She was a psychiatrist of no particular school, eclectic and pragmatic. He thought of her as “the Laughing Therapist” or sometimes “Dr. Chin, Medicine Woman.” She was Chinese, but the southwestern look of her office—Georgia O’Keeffe on the wall, Navajo blanket on the sofa—suggested wisdoms of the Far West rather than the Far East. His mockery of her included fondness and respect. He’d gone through all the usual phases in the therapeutic relationship: angry resistance, giddy infatuation, bitter disappointment. Now he felt at ease with Chin, relatively. She was so transparent, willing to make mistakes and admit them, open in her uncertainty, without guile or harsh judgments. She could be flaky, especially when she wasn’t paying full attention, but there were occasional flakes of gold in her musings. Caleb was rarely tempted to lie to her.
“Maybe you should go there,” she suggested. “The foul rag-and-bone shop.”
“Toby? No. Toby isn’t the problem. Toby is just a symptom.”
“You still believe that he was using you?”
“Or something. He wasn’t there for me. He barely knew me.”
“‘Using’ is such a slippery concept,” said Chin. “We all need help from other people. Certainly other people have helped you.”
“Yes. But I always knew who they were, and why they were helping. We helped each other. Or maybe we used each other. But we never called it love. We never mistook it for romance. Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I’m just not ready for another boyfriend.” He frowned and looked away. “I brooded all weekend about Ben.”
“That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“But his death was six years ago. I feel like I’m using him to justify self-pity.”
She thought for a moment. “A little self-pity now and then is no crime. You’ve been through a very painful experience. It’s natural that it reminds you of other painful experiences.”
“But I’m measuring Toby against Ben. Which isn’t right. I pretend the old love was clear and solid, but I know it wasn’t. It began as half-love, make-believe love. Then Ben became sick, and I had to live up to that love.”
“Like the couple in your play.”
Chin hadn’t seen Chaos Theory. She disliked theater, distrusted it, which was another reason why Caleb respected her. Unlike his mother, however, Chin read his plays.
“Yes. Yet another way that Chaos Theory is about me and Ben,” he admitted. “But I was using Ben there too. His spells of dementia in the hospital? I gave them to a schizophrenic. I made them funny. And then I gave my feelings of helplessness to the wife. I made us straight. Which is more universal, you know. More commercial.”
“We’ve been through this, Caleb. You do nobody any good by punishing yourself with these accusations.”
“I thought your job was to make people confront the worst.”
“In most cases, yes. But some of us use the worst in order to avoid looking at things that can be changed.”
“I’m not fishing for—oh, not compliments, but the it’s-okay-be-nice-to-yourself stuff. I hate hating myself. It’s boring. But there’s nobody else to hate. Except Toby. Only I don’t hate him, not really. And Kenneth Prager.”
There was a long pause from Chin.
“The reviewer at the Times,” Caleb reminded her.
“I remember. I thought we’d finished with him too.”
“Just a hack, I know. But I can’t find anyone else to blame. Except the jerk producers who insisted we open the play before it was ready. Jesus. I finally write an honest play. I make up for a phony play about sex with an honest play about love, and I get kicked in the teeth. Rejected. By a hack at the New York Times. It’s like you said last week. That he was trashing my life with Ben.”
“I didn’t say that! I said that for the world to reject your play might feel like they were denying your experience with Ben. Or words to that effect.” She returned to her notes. “I have no idea who this reviewer-reporter-critic person is. And he is not the issue here. You are the issue.”
Her vehemence surprised Caleb, confused him.
She cleared her throat. “Let’s get back to Toby.”
“Do we have to?” He tried to sound humorous.
“You said Toby was just a symptom, not a cause. You mean your breaking up with him was just a symptom?”
“No. My falling in love with him. He’s a blank. A kid. There’s no there there with Toby.”
“You once said that he was half saint, half whore.”
Caleb snorted. “I’m not so sure now about the saint part.”
Chin smiled but waited for a serious reply.
“All right,” he conceded. “It’s true. I was in love with him. But it was like loving a dog. It was all about me, not about him.”
“And you blame him for that?”
“No. I blame myself. Or if I blame him, it’s only because I was disappointed there was nothing in him to love. Just a blank, an empty space, like an empty stage. Most actors have that, you know. It’s where they play their parts. This big hole that they need to fill with make-believe and fame.”
She said nothing but sat there, thinking.
“You think I mean a different kind of hole?”
“What? Oh.” Her eyebrows twitched. “It sounded like the sexual side of the relationship was fine. And holes are holes.” She sighed. “No, I was wondering about your fear that he was using you, combined with your decision to stop writing plays.”
“It’s not a decision, it’s an inability.”
“Maybe.” She placed her finger over her mouth.
Caleb frowned. “You’re saying I want to fail? In order to test Toby’s love? To see if he’ll love me even if I were a flop?”
“It’s an idea.”
“But I’m not in love with him now. And I’m already a failure.” He began to laugh. “So what would the point be?”
“You’re right. There can’t be any possible connection.” Her sarcasm was as light as a feather. “But we’ll continue this next week. I see our time is up.”
Of course. He should have sensed the end approaching. Chin regularly finished sessions like this, with a new, often pesky notion for Caleb to worry around in his head over the coming week.
As he stood up he could not resist saying, “Shouldn’t you be encouraging me to get out of art? What’s Freud’s line? Artists are just weak souls who retreat into fantasy and hope to find there ‘honor, fame, wealth and the love of beautiful women’? Or men in my case.”
“You’re being silly. You know I have the highest respect for art and artists.” She opened the door for him.
“You once told me that books and art and plays are nothing but elaborate coping mechanisms.”
“I cannot believe I said ‘nothing but.’ There’s nothing wrong with a good coping mechanism. See you next week.”
Almost every Chin session ended like this: in a parting volley of unanswered questions and charges. Caleb’s head buzzed like a hive as he stepped out on West Tenth Street, their last words orbiting around him as if they’d just had an argument. He liked Chin, he trusted her. But sometimes, for a minute or so, after a final exchange like the one today, she reminded him a bit of his mother.
The sun was bright, the air soft, the street deserted. When he arrived here an hour ago, this quiet block had been dotted with men and women in business suits walking their dogs before they left for work, animals of various sizes and breeds, like four-legged ids on leashes. Now the dogs were locked indoors, asleep and dreaming; their owners were out in a useful world of money. Caleb had no chores or duties, only the challenge of spending another day in his own sorry company. Chin was often the social highlight of his week.
Her suggestion that he wanted to fail in order to test Toby was pure bull. He wasn’t in love with Toby. He probably never was.
Love, love, love. Why did everyone always want to talk about love? Even psychiatrists. People wanted songs about it, novels, operas, plays. All of Caleb’s plays had been love stories: Chaos Theory was about schizophrenia and love; Venus in Furs was about literary imagination and love; and Beckett in Love was about, well, Samuel Beckett and love. Caleb wished he could write instead a play about quantum mechanics or non-Euclidean geometry. Something pure and abstract, no words, only numbers. There would be no people onstage, only spheres and cubes and tetrahedrons. He wouldn’t have to trouble himself with actors.