Alice tosses the invitation down on the desk. “I can’t remember the last time I thought this much about a piece of paper. You’re at least going to go, aren’t you?” she asks, once she’s sat back down.
“Probably not,” Paul says. “Mark and I were already talking of plans that weekend.”
“The wedding isn’t until July eleventh.”
“And?”
“And today’s the first of May.”
“So what’s your point?”
“What life-changing plans could you possibly have made over two months in advance?”
In the background on his end she hears a gentle roar: a leaf blower, or a passing truck.
“We’re talking about going camping with Preston and Crosby. In the Poconos.”
Alice plants her elbows on her desk and cradles the phone against her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Did I hear you right? I couldn’t have. I actually couldn’t have. Because what I thought you just said was that you were going to miss your sister’s wedding to go gay camping in the Poconos.”
“Half sister,” Paul corrects.
“I can’t believe this.” She pinches her eyes shut and wards off the beginnings of a flash migraine.
“I can’t just drop everything every time Eloise decides to smother us with her own happiness, Alice. I have a life, you know.”
“You’re implying that I don’t.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to. That’s what makes it an implication.”
There’s a pause. Alice bookmarks the Bella Lettera website, un-bookmarks it, and then bookmarks it again before finally closing the window.
She says, “Please tell me you’ll be there.”
“I need to think about it.”
“Paul,” she says, trying not to plead. “Tell me you’ll be there.”
“I have to go.”
“PAUL.”
“Alice, I’m leaving now.”
She leans forward and lowers her voice to a whisper. “So help me God, Paul, if you hang up on me I’ll fucking come for you.”
Alice hears Paul sigh dramatically, and the line goes dead.
Paul
May 3
“What’s your anxiety level?”
“My God, this is disgusting.”
“Yes, I imagine it is.”
“No, but really. This is absolutely repulsive. It’s like you can actually see the disease. There, look, right next to my pinkie finger. Syphilis, crawling around, having a grand old time.”
This time Paul doesn’t answer. Wendy shifts her hands along the flanks of the garbage can, but she doesn’t let go. Earlier, during their first session of the day, she’d kicked the steel bin away after five agonized seconds and Dr. Goulding, Paul’s supervisor, had demanded that Wendy pick up each piece of trash with her bare hands. Three banana peels and a maxipad later, she lost it. Fell to the ground and started pounding her fists against the pavement. She wailed so hard and so loud about the pervasiveness of germs that a group of patients inside took breaks from facing their own fears to huddle in one of the clinic’s broad bay windows, where they looked on, mouths agape. The only thing that got Wendy up was when Paul, playing the nice guy to Goulding’s bad-cop shtick, had leaned over and said, “You’re doing great, Wendy—just think of how filthy the ground must be.”
Now, he hears himself ask again: “What’s your anxiety level?”
“A nine? A nine point five? A nine point nine?” She pinches her eyes shut, and Paul watches the metal fog up around her fingers as she grips the can tighter. “What’s higher than a nine point nine?”
“A nine point nine nine, I’d guess.”
“Can I go to two decimal places? Can I go to nine point nine nine?” Sweat beads in the shallow grooves of Wendy’s temples, and tears balance just beneath her eyes. Paul lets his gaze fall back to his clipboard: this is the part he hates the most, the moment right before the panic begins to slowly subside, when the patient seems so sure that fear and her own frenetic synapses might cause her heart to burst. When Paul, despite his knowing better, is blindly certain that, through some violent act of empathy, his own heart might burst as well.
“You can say it’s a ten, you know,” he says.
“No, I can’t.”
“If it feels like it’s a ten, you should say it’s a ten.”
Wendy shakes her head. In the sun, the roots of her blond hair are streaked with dull glints of gray.
“I can’t handle a ten. If I say it’s a ten, then I can’t handle it. I want to handle it.”
Paul tries to keep a straight face—Goulding throws a fit whenever one of his caseworkers reacts emotionally to something a patient says—but he can’t help it; he grins as he jots down “9.99” on a line marked COMPULSIVE FEAR AND ANXIETY CONTROL. He likes Wendy too much. Despite the fretful disposition, the need to wash her hands until they are blistered and red, the insistence on using a fresh toothbrush each night, there are other parts of Wendy that exist free of her compulsions, parts that Paul finds soothing: the frayed collars of her polo shirts, the chipped pearl earrings she wears every day. The creamy scent of the Yves Saint Laurent perfume that trails her around the clinic. All of it adds up to a sort of faded WASP aesthetic, like she’s been plucked from a year-old Talbots catalog. She reminds him, more or less, of the mothers of his wealthier friends from college. The sort of women who didn’t visit campus, but instead dropped by; who insisted on buying him dinner and laughing at his jokes; who always offered him a hopeful—if not entirely sober—form of kinship. He often catches himself imagining that Wendy could be his own mother, if his mother were, actually, someone else entirely.