You came into my store and started this thing, us.
“Sometimes it gets so dark that all you can do is listen to that fucking mouse scramble around and eat your food and shit on your floor and it’s so dark that you can’t see the doorknob,” he goes on. “You forget there is a doorknob and what we do in here is we turn on the lights, Danny.”
“Right.”
“We set the traps, Danny.”
“Right,” I say, louder than before.
“And we open the door and we get the broom and we shoo that mouse out of there,” he says and he punches the air. “And sometimes, we don’t even need to do that because sometimes, we kill that mouse.”
Not this time.
“And it doesn’t happen in a heartbeat. I’m not gonna lie, Danny. But it’s doable.”
“You ever work in construction?” I ask. Most guys in our neighborhood did, at some point, and I like the idea of Nicky and I having stuff in common, being equals.
“Couple of summers back in the day,” he answers, and I was right. “You?”
“Couple of summers back in the day,” I say, too eager. What a loser and a copycat but Nicky smiles and I think of the past few weeks and the nights I spend on the floor against the wall with your panties in my hands, staring at the hole in the wall that I made because of you and covered because of you. “Yeah, Doctor . . .”
He shakes his head and I laugh. “I mean, Nicky. I need to find the doorknob.”
“You’re gonna find it. And if the house/mouse concept doesn’t work for you, you can also think of the video as a zit. You can pop it and it’s gone. Forever, no scars, if you take care of your skin.”
You are not a zit, you are a mouse, and I speak. “I thought you weren’t supposed to pop zits.”
“That’s bullshit,” he says and he looks at the clock. “So. Do you like Thursdays?”
AFTERWARD, when I walk down the street, I feel like a changed person, Beck. Fifty minutes with Nicky and it’s like I have a new set of eyes. The world looks different to me, like I put on 3-D glasses or smoked a joint or fucked the shit out of you. I feel high but straight and I head for the park where I watch the “Sea of Love” video for the first time in a long time. The girl in the video is kind of cute with the Bowie blond hair and therapy is working out already. I mean, watching this offbeat, trippy video makes me happy and I haven’t been happy in a while. And the best part is, that I’m not afraid anymore. You’re not sleeping with Nicky. You’re just experiencing transference. I know about it from The Prince of Tides. It happens. Nicky has a master’s and Nicky is the man and he’d never break the doctor-patient dynamic. It applies, even though he’s not a real doctor.
I walk to the subway and then walk down the stairs. I like life, Beck. I feel all this new patience. I can wait for you to call me. I am strong enough to give you time. I forgot to check your e-mail and your phone is heavier than it was this morning. I write to myself even though he didn’t tell me to:
Dear Joe, You have a mouse in your house and when she’s ready, you will kiss her and she will turn into the girl of your dreams. Be patient. Be open. Best, Dan Fox
I haven’t felt this close to you in two weeks. I love therapy, I do.
35
AT my next session, I told Nicky about how I feel high when I leave his beige office. He said my reaction is common—I’m normal!—and it’s all about a new perspective.
“I have a place upstate,” he said. “I get out there into the woods every couple of weeks. Not because of the fresh air, but because of the fresh perspective.”
In my third session, we talk all about the video (you) and Nicky tells me about what he calls the cat strategy. “I used to have this neighbor who rented her cat out. You know why?”
“To help depressed people?” I ask. Wrong.
“If anyone in the neighborhood had a mouse problem, Mrs. Robinson would lend her cat for a day or two,” he says. “And, Danny, the thing about mice, if they so much as smell a cat, they’re out of there.”
“So if I started watching something else, I’d stop watching the video.”
He nods. We don’t talk. Sometimes that happens in here, an abrupt silence. Nicky says it’s normal; you have to process things. I process the idea of a life without you. I’d date other girls (unimaginable) and go on walks and maybe I’d find people to play basketball with or sit in a dark bar watching the news and fall asleep in my bed without your phone in my hand and wake up without our phone pressing into my flesh. My hands hurt from obsessively checking your e-mail; maybe it would be nice to have fingers that don’t sting. I don’t know what it would be like to be here without you inside of me, Beck. I do know that you are a lot to handle. I am tired.
Nicky can sense when I’m done processing. He readjusts in his chair. “Give it a shot this week,” he says. “Journal on it and let me know how it goes.”
I like having homework and I leave his office and find that the world is full of women. So maybe I do want to find out about life without you. I’d almost forgotten about girls. They’re everywhere, Beck, on the subway platform there are college girls in tight jeans with their heads buried in Kindles and round old chicks hanging on to reusable bags of vegetables and middle-aged housewives heaving with raggedy bags from Macy’s and Forever 21, and there’s a hot blond chick who’s so little she makes you seem like a jolly green giant and she’s in scrubs and she looks freshly scrubbed and I’m totally fucking staring and she smiles. Game on.
“Do I know you?” she says and she has a little bit of an accent, Long Island City, I think.
“No,” I say and she walks toward me, not away from me and she smells like ham sandwiches and rubbing alcohol. I like her tits.
“You don’t know me at all?”
“Sorry, no.”
“Then why the fuck are you staring at me?”
“I don’t know,” I say and I wonder what Nicky would say. “I guess I must just like staring at you.”
The train screeches to a stop and her electric green beady little eyes home in on me and random women go onto the subway as random women get off and the two of us lock eyes like animals in heat. She has thin eyebrows and long painted fingernails, nothing like yours, which is good. I could never love this girl. But I sure can practice on her.
She starts, “Who kicked your ass?”
“I had an accident.”
“You had an accident,” she sneers. “That’s a good one.”
“I got jumped.”
“So you just fucking lie about it before you even know my name?”
“I guess I just felt like lying.” And I am good at this and Nicky would be impressed.
“Well, what if I don’t go out with liars?”
“Then it sucks to be you.”
“What the fuck is happening right now?”
“You know, who cares?” I say and I am on like Donkey Kong. “If this conversation were happening in a dark bar and we were both shitfaced it would be perfectly normal.”
Her name is Karen Minty and she bites her glossy lip and gets in my face. “And if your grandmother had balls she’d be your grandfather.”
Karen Minty decides right there that she’s going to have sex with me and I know it. She is so much easier to read than you are and I couldn’t ask for a better cat and it starts with an obligatory drink at some fuckface bar packed with NYU kids who drink American beer out of buckets. You’d hate it here but she loves this place. This bar was her choice so now it’s my choice and I take her to a hole on Houston that I know will impress her—I was right, she is from Long Island City—and she is impressed by Botanica Bar and she drinks Greyhounds and says shit you would never say like:
“Do you know how I know about this drink? Leonardo DiCaprio drinks these. It’s true.”