We Are Water. Wally Lamb
I think I’m finally getting over Daria. I joined Facebook? And me and this poly-sci major named Kim have been messaging back and forth. She might be potential girlfriend material. His posture wasn’t slumpy for a change. His hygiene and coloring had improved. For forty-five minutes, he sat there pumping his right leg up and down as if, now that he was feeling better, he was waiting for the starter’s pistol to go off so he could run out of my office and reengage in life.
There was a debriefing, as there is whenever there’s a suicide—a departmental review of Seamus’s case. These meetings are meant to be supportive of both the therapist who’d been treating the victim and the department as a whole. Suicide is hard on all of us, no matter whose patient it is. Several of my colleagues, including some of the ones who’d been shunning me, commiserated. Even Muriel, who was running the meeting, looked right at me when she said how much easier our jobs would be if we psychologists all had crystal balls. She and Dean Javitz had talked to Seamus’s parents, she said, and from the sound of it, they weren’t holding the department or the university responsible. “No inquiry, no malpractice charges, thank goodness,” she said. But absolved or not, I couldn’t forgive myself for having been so goddamned distracted by the Jasmine mess that I had missed the red flag Seamus had waved that morning. When a potentially suicidal patient exhibits rapid improvement—becomes suddenly energized—what it can mean is that he’s finally arrived at a plan that will free him permanently from his unbearable gloom. But I hadn’t probed that possibility. I’d accepted Seamus’s emergence from his emotional “quicksand” at face value. The “what-ifs”: they’ll do a number on you.
I went to Seamus’s wake. His father stood there, stoop shouldered and dazed. His mother hugged me and thanked me for all the help I’d given her son. “He spoke so favorably about you, Dr. Oh,” she said. “He appreciated how kind you always were to him.” Unable to look her in the eye, I looked, instead, over her shoulder, mumbling that I wished I could have done more. Then I walked out of the funeral home, got in my car, and drove away in tears.
That evening, I called my own kids to make sure they were okay. Safe. Ariane said she’d had a tough day—that one of her soup kitchen regulars, a meth addict, had come in agitated and gotten so verbally abusive that she’d had to call the police, something she hated to do. Andrew, who’s enrolled in a nursing program at Fort Hood, told me he was “stressed to the max” about an exam he was taking the next day and didn’t have time to talk. Marissa told me she was bummed because she hadn’t gotten the small part she’d auditioned for: a legal secretary on Law & Order: SVU.
“But everything’s good otherwise? That disappointment aside, you’re okay?” She said she guessed so. Why?
Ariane was the only one I told about Seamus’s suicide. I’d kept all three of them in the dark about the Jasmine situation. Hadn’t said anything to their mother, either, although Annie and I still talked every couple of weeks or so. I mean, why drag them into it? They all had busy lives, problems of their own. And frankly, I was too ashamed to say anything about Jasmine. She’s twenty-nine, not that much older than the twins. Not stopping her? Not getting the hell out of there? It made me sound so pathetic.
I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t concentrate. I kept forgetting to eat. In the middle of the night, a week or so after Seamus’s funeral, while I was wandering around from room to room in the four-thousand-square-foot home where I now lived alone, I took on my future. Did I even want to keep my job? Even if I stayed and fought it, beat the charge, it wasn’t like I’d ever be free of her accusation. There’d still be whispered rumors, assumptions of guilt. I’d be walking around that campus wearing the proverbial scarlet letter. And anyway, I was guilty, up to a point. Not guilty of what she accused me of, but guilty nonetheless. I couldn’t stop seeing her withdrawing her hand from between my legs, my semen between her fingers … Whatever was going to happen—whether the university would show me the door or not—my license to practice would still be intact. Maybe I could rent an office someplace and go into private practice. But I was weary. Dogged by self-doubt about my ability to help others fix their lives when my own was in shambles. And when a kid I might have rescued now lay buried at a cemetery up in Litchfield … No, I decided, screw the 80 percent I’d be able to retire on if I stuck it out for four more years. I’d quit. Just fucking quit. Relieved, I got back in bed and began to doze. That night I slept the sleep of the dead.
My resignation was handled discreetly, classified by Human Resources as an “early retirement,” rather than a resignation. None of us wanted to see it played out in the press, least of all the school, whose enrollment numbers were down in the wake of a run of negative publicity: a sports program scandal under investigation by the NCAA; a Journal Inquirer exposé about the epidemic of alcoholism on campus; a third consecutive downgrade by U.S. News & World Report in its annual ranking of colleges and universities. The agreement I signed in exchange for my willingness to go away quietly left me with a twenty-four-month extension of my health insurance coverage and a severance check that was the equivalent of two years’ salary.
The Counseling Services secretaries organized a little farewell gathering for me. Coffee, cake, and testimonials from several of my colleagues who had until then maintained their silence with regard to my sexual harassment charge. That’s what was reported back to me, anyway. I boycotted my own get-together. And since I wasn’t there to receive my “good-bye and good luck” card and the engraved pen and pencil set with the university’s logo, these were slipped into my mail slot. I retrieved them the following Sunday morning when I entered the building to pack up my office. Walking down the corridor, listening only to the sound of my own footsteps, I assumed the building was empty. Then Dick Holloway poked his head in the door and nearly gave me a heart attack. “So you caved, huh?” he said. “Well, sayonara.”
Unmoored from my life as I’d known it, I didn’t know how to fill up my days. That first Monday, I sat and stared at the morning TV shows, did the Times crossword, did my laundry. At noon, I drove over to the mall for lunch and human contact. Bought a turkey wrap at the food court and ate, a singleton among young couples, elderly cronies, and chatty young moms, their babies in strollers beside the tables. Back home again, I decided I’d read. A book a day. I walked around the house, pulling from the shelves books I’d meant to get to for months, even years. A couple of Elmore Leonards, a P. D. James, the Dennis Lehane that Ariane had sent me for Christmas the year before. Maybe I’d reread, too—Updike, Steinbeck, Thoreau. I stacked maybe ten or eleven books on the coffee table and ran my finger up and down the spines. I picked up Walden. Flipped it open to a page where someone—me?—had underlined the author’s mantra: Simplify, simplify, simplify.
Which I interpreted as: downsize, downsize, downsize.
I dialed Annie’s number and let her machine know I had decided to put our house on the market. (Our divorce settlement stipulated that I would make the mortgage payments and could live in the house for up to five years, at which point I could either buy her out or put it up for sale and split the profit 60/40.) When Annie called me back, I saw her name on my caller ID and didn’t pick up. In her message, she asked me why I’d made the decision to sell. I didn’t return her call, or her next one, or the one after that.
After the realtor did a “walk-through” with the first prospective buyers—a nice enough couple who nevertheless seemed like intruders—I knew I wasn’t going to be able to handle a whole summer’s worth of the same. Nor did I want to drop everything and evacuate at a moment’s notice every time the agent called to say she was bringing someone over. So I took out a month-by-month lease on a small furnished apartment downtown. At six fifty a month, I could afford the extravagance—not that this little place where I was going to wait it out could be called “extravagant” by any stretch of the imagination. It was more bunker than luxury digs. On the realtor’s advice, I left everything at our house “as is.” In a market this tough, she said, we’d need every advantage, and a “homey” place showed more successfully than bare rooms and bare walls. She even brought over one of those scented Yankee Candles. Banana bread, it was, so those would-be buyers could smell something not really baking in the oven. Our ace in the hole, she said, was that the house was beautifully decorated. This had been