He Does Not Preach Pessimism
My workout is interrupted midday, when Mom descends the basement stairs and says I have an appointment with Dr. Patel. I ask if I can go later that night, after I have completed my daily weights routine, but Mom says I’ll have to go back to the bad place in Baltimore if I do not keep my appointments with Dr. Patel, and she even references the court ruling, telling me I can read the paperwork if I don’t believe her.
So I shower, and then Mom drives me to Dr. Patel’s office, which is the first floor of a big house in Voorhees, just off Haddonfield—Berlin Road.
When we arrive, I take a seat in the waiting room as Mom fills out some more paperwork. By now, ten trees must have been cut down just to document my mental health, which Nikki will hate hearing, as she is an avid environmentalist who gave me at least one tree in the rain forest every Christmas—which was really only a piece of paper stating I owned the tree—and I do feel bad now for making fun of those gifts and won’t ever poke fun at the diminishing rain forest in the future when Nikki comes back.
As I sit there flipping through a Sports Illustrated, listening to the easy-listening station Dr. Patel pumps into his waiting room, suddenly I’m hearing sexy synthesizer chords, faint highhat taps, the kick drum thumping out an erotic heartbeat, the twinkling of fairy dust, and then the evil bright soprano saxophone. You know the title: “Songbird.” And I’m out of my seat, screaming, kicking chairs, flipping the coffee table, picking up piles of magazines and throwing them against the wall, yelling, “It’s not fair! I won’t tolerate any tricks! I’m not an emotional lab rat!”
And then a small Indian man—maybe only five feet tall, wearing a cable-knit sweater in August, suit pants, and shiny white tennis shoes—is calmly asking me what’s wrong.
“Turn off that music!” I yell. “Shut it off! Right now!”
The tiny man is Dr. Patel, I realize, because he tells his secretary to turn off the music, and when she obeys, Kenny G is out of my head and I stop yelling.
I cover my face with my hands so no one will see me crying, and after a minute or so, my mother begins rubbing my back.
So much silence—and then Dr. Patel asks me into his office. I follow him reluctantly as Mom helps the secretary clean up the mess I made.
His office is pleasantly strange.
Two leather recliners face each other, and spider-looking plants—long vines full of white-and-green leaves—hang down from the ceiling to frame the bay window that overlooks a stone birdbath and a garden of colorful flowers. But there is absolutely nothing else in the room except a box of tissues on the short length of floor between the recliners. The floor is a shiny yellow hardwood, and the ceiling and walls are painted to look like the sky—real-looking clouds float all around the office, which I take as a good omen, since I love clouds. A single light occupies the center of the ceiling, like a glowing upside-down vanilla-icing cake, but the ceiling around the light is painted to look like the sun. Friendly rays shoot out from the center.
I have to admit I feel calm as soon as I enter Dr. Patel’s office and do not really mind anymore that I heard the Kenny G song.
Dr. Patel asks me which recliner I want to relax in. I pick the black over the brown and immediately regret my decision, thinking that choosing black makes me seem more depressed than if I had chosen brown, and really, I’m not depressed at all.
When Dr. Patel sits down, he pulls the lever on the side of his chair, which makes the footrest rise. He leans back and laces his fingers behind his tiny head, as if he were about to watch a ball game.
“Relax,” he says. “And no Dr. Patel. Call me Cliff. I like to keep sessions informal. Friendly, right?”
He seems nice enough, so I pull my lever, lean back, and try to relax.
“So,” he says. “The Kenny G song really got to you. I can’t say I’m a fan either, but …”
I close my eyes, hum a single note, and silently count to ten, blanking my mind.
When I open my eyes, he says, “You want to talk about Kenny G?”
I close my eyes, hum a single note, and silently count to ten, blanking my mind.
“Okay. Want to tell me about Nikki?”
“Why do you want to know about Nikki?” I say, too defensively, I admit.
“If I am going to help you, Pat, I need to know you, right? Your mother tells me you wish to be reunited with Nikki, that this is your biggest life goal—so I figure we best start there.”
I begin to feel better because he does not say a reunion is out of the question, which seems to imply that Dr. Patel feels as though reconciling with my wife is still possible.
“Nikki? She’s great,” I say, and then smile, feeling the warmth that fills my chest whenever I say her name, whenever I see her face in my mind. “She’s the best thing that ever happened to me. I love her more than life itself. And I just can’t wait until apart time is over.”
“Apart time?”
“Yeah. Apart time.”
“What is apart time?”
“A few months ago I agreed to give Nikki some space, and she agreed to come back to me when she felt like she had worked out her own issues enough so we could be together again. So we are sort of separated, but only temporarily.”
“Why did you separate?”
“Mostly because I didn’t appreciate her and was a workaholic—chairing the Jefferson High School History Department and coaching three sports. I was never home, and she got lonely. Also I sort of let my appearance go, to the point where I was maybe ten to seventy pounds overweight, but I’m working on all that and am now more than willing to go into couples counseling like she wanted me to, because I’m a changed man.”
“Did you set a date?”
“A date?”
“For the end of apart time.”
“No.”
“So apart time is something that will go on indefinitely?”
“Theoretically, I guess—yes. Especially since I’m not allowed to contact Nikki or her family.”
“Why’s that?”
“Umm … I don’t know, really. I mean—I love my in-laws as much as I love Nikki. But it doesn’t matter, because I’m thinking that Nikki will be back sooner than later, and then she’ll straighten everything out with her parents.”
“On what do you base your thinking?” he asks, but nicely, with a friendly smile on his face.
“I believe in happy endings,” I tell him. “And it feels like this movie has gone on for the right amount of time.”
“Movie?” Dr. Patel says, and I think he would look exactly like Gandhi if he had those wire-rim glasses and a shaved head, which is weird, especially since we are in leather recliners in such a bright, happy room and well, Gandhi is dead, right?
“Yeah,” I say. “Haven’t you ever noticed that life is like a series of movies?”
“No. Tell me.”
“Well, you have adventures. All start out with troubles, but then you admit your problems and become a better person by working really hard, which is what fertilizes the happy ending and allows it to bloom—just like the end of all the Rocky films, Rudy, The Karate Kid, the Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogies, and The Goonies, which are my favorite films, even though I have sworn off movies until Nikki returns, because now my own life is the movie I will watch, and well, it’s always on. Plus I know it’s almost time for the happy ending, when Nikki will come back, because I have improved myself so very much through physical fitness and medication and therapy.”
“Oh, I see.” Dr. Patel smiles. “I like happy endings too, Pat.”
“So you agree with me. You think my wife will come back soon?”
“Time will tell,” Dr. Patel says, and I know right then that Cliff and I are going to get along, because he does not preach pessimism like Dr. Timbers and the staff at the bad place; Cliff doesn’t say I need to face what he thinks is my reality.
“It’s funny, because all the other therapists I’ve seen said that Nikki wouldn’t be back. Even after I told them about the life improvements I have been making, how I am bettering myself, they still were always ‘hating on me,’ which is an expression I learned from my black friend Danny.”
“People can be cruel,” he says with a sympathetic look that makes me trust him even more. And right then I realize that he is not writing down all my words in a file, which I really appreciate, let me tell you.
I tell him I like the room, and we talk about my love of clouds and how most people lose the ability to see silver linings even though they are always there above us almost every day.
I ask him questions about his family, just to be nice, and it turns out he has a daughter whose high school field hockey team is ranked second in South Jersey. Also he has a son in elementary school who wants to be a ventriloquist and even practices nightly with a wooden dummy named Grover Cleveland, who, incidentally, was also the only U.S. president to serve two terms that were not back-to-back. I don’t really get why Cliff’s son named his wooden dummy after our twenty-second and twenty-fourth president, although I do not say so. Next, Cliff says he has a wife named Sonja, who painted the room so beautifully, which leads to our discussion about how great women are and how it’s important to treasure your woman while you have her because if you don’t, you can lose her pretty quickly—as God really wants us to appreciate our women. I tell Cliff I hope he never has to experience apart time, and he says he hopes my apart time will end soon, which is a pretty nice thing to say.
Before I leave, Cliff says he will be changing my medication, which could lead to some unwanted side effects, and that I have to report any discomfort or sleeplessness or anxiety or anything else to my mother immediately—because it might take some time for him to find the right combination of drugs—and I promise him I will.
On the drive home I tell my mother I really like Dr. Cliff Patel and am feeling much more hopeful about my therapy. I thank her for getting me out of the bad place, saying Nikki is far more likely to come to Collingswood than to a mental institution, and when I say this, Mom starts to cry, which is so strange. She even pulls off the road, rests her head against the steering wheel, and with the engine running, she cries for a long time—sniffling and trembling and making crying noises. So I rub her back, like she did for me in Dr. Patel’s office when that certain song came on, and after ten minutes or so, she simply stops crying and drives me home.
To make up for the hour I spent sitting around with Cliff, I work out until late in the evening, and when I go to bed, my father is still in his office with the door shut, so another day passes without my talking to Dad. I think it’s strange to live in a house with someone you cannot talk to—especially when that someone is your father—and the thought makes me a little sad.
Since Mom has not been to the library yet, I have nothing to read. So I close my eyes and think about Nikki until she comes to be with me in my dreams—like always.
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