one of my former professors wandered by. “I made them myself,” I said, before he noticed me. “I was in your class. This shirt with the subway graffiti,” I pointed, “was inspired by your ‘Walker in the City’ seminar. I’ve been rereading Alfred Kazin,” I added. He nodded and asked me what I’d been doing since graduation. “This!” I said too brightly. He looked down, avoiding my eyes, and said the shirts were nice. “Very clever,” he said, before moving on without buying anything. Before, blushing, I began refolding what he’d touched.
My shirts sold like day-old hot cakes: I sold twelve—pretty good. But after factoring in the fee for the table I’d had to rent, I barely broke even. Dejected and exhausted at 7:00 PM, I piled the remainder of my stock into a rolling suitcase and started home.
I was walking up Broadway, staring into nothing, when I found myself staring directly into a pair of eyes. There was Donald, coming from the opposite direction. There were those eyes—like Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s advertising contacts.
“Of course it’s you. I was just thinking about you!” he said.
“Really?” I pushed my hair out of my face (“It is a truth universally acknowledged that one only ever runs into the person one most wants to see when one looks crappy.”—Jane Austen). “What were you thinking?” I asked hopefully, forgetting that Donald never answered questions. He’d just act as if he hadn’t heard you and then go on with whatever he felt like talking about.
“The world traveler’s returned!” he exclaimed. “Where you coming from, Kid Smyles?”
“What?”
“Your suitcase.”
“Oh, that! No, I’m coming from nowhere,” I mumbled.
“Sounds suspicious. What’s in the bag?”
“A body,” I said, stiffening, deciding murder was less shameful than the truth. “I’m interning for a very prestigious hit man, if you must know.”
He tipped his head back as if to size me up. I tipped mine back further so that I could not even see him.
“Hey,” he said, waving his hand between my eyes and the sky. “Where’d you go?”
“I’m right here,” I said, facing him again. “God!” I sighed, frustrated by my consistent failure to impress. I looked down at his shoes and then up into his eyes, and then over the whole rest of him, swapping in the identical silhouette of the towering Maxim Man. Was it you, Donald? And if it was, do you know that I know that you know? “How’s publishing?” I stammered.
He looked across the street, as if he’d already lost interest in the conversation, then back at me. He squinted. “You still writing your poems?”
I shook my head, as if the notion were laughable. “I’m working on a novel now.”
I carried my heavy load down into the subway steps and took the train to Grand Central, where I walked underground toward the cross-town shuttle.
There, I came across a cluster of NYU graduates standing in cap and gown. They were laughing and posing for photos. Was it June again already? Their voices echoed through the tunnel. “Congratulations!” “Congratulations,” their parents sang. And I wanted to yell, “Don’t do it! Go back! You don’t know what it’s like!” Instead, I just watched them, and like a ghost haunting my old life, passed by unnoticed, the wheels of my suitcase whizzing in tow.
I planned to try again the next weekend but never made it. The weather was iffy, I was getting a cold, my alarm didn’t go off . . . I can’t remember the reason. It was the same reason, I guess, that I never finished those art classes at SVA or the two writing courses I started taking at night in The New School’s continuing education program. Always, I planned to go back, but then something would happen, and then, after that, nothing would happen, which made it all the more difficult to explain, which made it that much more difficult to return.
It was just like in college when, after seeing a lot of Woody Allen movies and reading a little of Freud, I decided to start seeing one of NYU’s staff psychologists. It was free as part of the university’s health services, so why not take advantage? Why not lie on a couch for a while and plumb the depths?
3
A wood-lined room stocked with old books, a doctor in tweed with a beard and pipe, a leather chaise on which I lay face up, my eyes trained absently on the ceiling’s crown moldings as I describe in detail my most recent dream: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderlay again, which is weird because I’ve never been to Manderlay. . . .”
Instead I was shown into a small gray windowless cubicle where the “counselor” had me sit in a plastic and metal hard-backed chair directly across from her, leaving a space of just a few feet between our knees. She looked into my eyes and after a pause asked me why I’d sought “counseling.”
Counseling? I’d come to be analyzed!
I began scrambling for something, anything to tell her, scrolling through the highs and lows of my life thus far, when the whole of it, suddenly, struck me as so unimportant, so completely lacking in tragedy. Where was the pathos? The tortured soul that foretold genius in all the really good biographies?
Compelled to tell her something, I finally told her I felt pressure to have sex with my forty-two-year-old boyfriend, some alcoholic from the dive bars in Hell’s Kitchen where I’d lately been spending a lot of time. (It was a lie. I’d been leading him on for the last month, but was perfectly happy to lead him on another month to boot.) “My roommate and I call him ‘Uncle Craig,’” I told the counselor, thinking this might shock her, before wishing I hadn’t said it, for it had shocked me more. “As a joke,” I added with a laugh, though the room seemed to suck the air right out of it. Her eyes remained steadily on mine.
What would I have said if I had ventured the truth? That I’d never had any problems I could not manage on my own, that I enjoyed good health and was basically an optimist? That I’d taken a class called Madness and Genius and learned that neither Virginia Woolf nor Ernest Hemingway had been captain of their varsity swim team, president of their student body, debate team founder, ballet dancer, or member of the honor society? That I was afraid that everything good about me was just more proof that there would never be anything great? I hadn’t come to therapy for a solution, but with the hope of acquiring a problem!
How was I to know, lucky as I’d been, that illness and grief find everyone eventually, that I wouldn’t have to work so hard to usher them in? How was I to know that the sickness for which I’d sought treatment was youth?
4
During that first session, my NYU-assigned psychologist and I had a big blow-up/break-through. In tears, I ran to the door, yelling, “I can’t do this!” I meant continue to lie to her; finding my own life inadequate, I’d begun to make up all sorts of whoppers. She yelled back, “You can walk out that door right now and give up, or you can face your fears!” Holding the doorknob in my hand, I paused; I’m not sure if it was to consider what she’d said or just act like I was considering what she’d said, but either way, it was all very dramatic, and after a suitable beat, I sat back down. I apologized for my outburst and made a follow-up appointment for the next week.
I had every intention of returning the next week, too, but then, when our appointment rolled around, I wanted to smoke pot with my roommate, so I phoned and said I was sick and would be in the week after. She called the day before our next appointment, leaving a message on my machine to remind me. I was lying in my loft bed, listening to her concerned voice, imagining myself seated across from her in that small room—her eyes boring into me, her knowing that I was a fraud—when I started to wonder if maybe therapy wasn’t for me.
I didn’t return to the street fair the following weekend either, nor any weekend ever again.