He’s been told worse. Hell, he’s agreed with worse. He thinks that maybe, even though Mark’s home, he’ll have a cigarette, anyway. He’ll close the door and light some cloying, lilac-scented CVS candle so Mark won’t be able to smell the smoke from down the hall (he will, though; he inevitably does).
There are other reasons why he took the job. Reasons that are less righteous and more logistical, reasons that require less moral acrobatics. Namely: it was the only offer he got. Actually, no, that wasn’t entirely true. He deserved more credit than that. Revised: it was the only offer he got in the Philadelphia metro area. There were any number of other gigs he could have applied for back in New York, jobs that a few of his professors had pushed him to go after. They would have been more traditional in nature—a counselor at a high school in Brooklyn; an appointed caseworker in the Wellness Center at NYU—but the pay would have been fine-ish, and the hours comfortable. And besides, they would have allowed him the opportunity to actually help people, which is why he decided to forgo the sort of lucrative careers his friends were pursuing and instead become a social worker in the first place. Most important, Paul wagers, none of them would have required that he choke back an uncomfortable, guttural hybrid of laughter and tears while he watched some Daughter of the American Revolution bear-hug a trash can. But Mark had wanted to move to Philadelphia. He had presented Paul with no other option, really. Had said, in that coolly pragmatic, multiclausal way of his (which invariably made Paul feel slightly hysterical, no matter the context): “I’m going, and I’d love for you to come, but if you didn’t, I’d understand, and I’d wish you the best of luck.” Days later, over drinks at a basement bar on West Eighth Street, Paul’s graduate school friends, newly minted social workers with names like Anita and Deidre, had begged him to more closely examine Mark’s statement. They pleaded with Paul to confront the mixed messages that were inherent in phrases like “I’d wish you the best of luck” and the tinge of narcissism behind sentences that began with “I’m going.” Paul had drained his glass of Cabernet and promised that he’d heed their warnings and give Mark’s ultimatum some thought. Really, though, he left the bar and laughed. Therapy is as flawed a system as anything else, he thought to himself as he descended the subway stairs and started to make his way back uptown. More flawed, actually. More fucked. The only facts therapists have to base their conjectures on are the ones supplied to them by their patients—men and women who are, by their own admission, screwed up. And from that perspective, the whole process seems so cockeyed and subjective that you can count on it being about as reliable as a Ouija board. Which, okay, fine, is probably what drew him to the practice in the first place: facts terrified him, and objectivity he found cripplingly claustrophobic.
But in this case, in this case, facts are on his side: Mark wasn’t being narcissistic, or intentionally convoluted—he was being practical. He’d just finished his Ph.D. in behavioral economics at Columbia, where his dissertation on risk aversion and rational decision-making among the native Sami tribes of Swedish Laponia earned him not only the department’s highest honors, but also an assistant professorship offer at the University of Pennsylvania, where he’d caught the eye of the chair of that school’s economics department. It was an opportunity too good to pass up, and Paul knew this. He was happy to support Mark in it, even if his support wasn’t directly requested or expressly needed.
Besides, things had been going well: two years in they had finally moved in together, with Paul surrendering his studio on West Tenth Street in order to take up in Mark’s one-bedroom in Morningside Heights. And despite the horror stories he’d heard about the first six months of joint habitation (“just wait—you’ll learn things you can’t unlearn about him”), they had settled rather flawlessly into a predictable domesticity. A bliss, even. And so moving with Mark south, to Philadelphia, on account of some new, incredible job, was hardly an act of manipulation or narcissism, despite what Anita and Deidre and their forty-thousand-dollar theories professed. Paul had made a rational, self-possessed decision—and if working at Goulding’s clinic was a secondary outcome of that decision, then that was something that was entirely his choice and his doing.
And this is something he tells himself over, and over, and over again.
“So what now?”
“Pardon?”
Wendy stares at Paul. Her arms are stretched out in front of her, zombie-esque, and she has her fingers spread so far apart that the thin webbing separating their bases looks translucent in the sun.
“You said there was something else we were doing today,” she says, with a tinge of impatient dread in her voice. “So, what is it?”
“Right.” Paul sets his clipboard down on the grass and checks his watch: four fifteen in the afternoon. Behind him, twenty yards back, the porch of the clinic’s main building—a blue-and-white colonial revival—is darkened by shadows. Bugs, energized by the heat wave, buzz around the campus’s outdoor lamps. Paul swats a mosquito away from his right ear.
He says, “Okay, first, though, how are you feeling?”
“I was just molesting a trash can.”
“Yes, I know. But how are you feeling?” Paul notices that Wendy hasn’t reached for the gloves she usually wears once he’s told her to let go of the bin. He can see her thumbs poking out from the pockets of her shorts. “Where’s your anxiety?”
She throws him a look—they’ve both lost count of how many times he’s asked her that question over the past few hours—but then her face softens. She thinks.
“A seven, maybe,” she says. “It’s lower.”
“Okay.” Paul nods, encouragingly. “That’s good. That’s very good.”
Wendy smiles, but it fades quickly. “So, what’s next?”
“Before I tell you, I need to remind you again that you’re here voluntarily. No one is forcing you to complete any component of this treatment. Participating in any and all parts of Dr. Goulding’s form of exposure therapy is done entirely on your own accord. If at any point—”
Wendy interrupts him by raising an ungloved hand. Paul can see a few telltale raw, pink spots where she burned her fingers with scalding water while washing herself. She says, “Save your breath. I read the waiver.”
“Okay, then,” he says. “I’m going to need you to take off your shoes.”
She looks down at her white Keds.
“But this grass—”