The Story of R

Part One

How do you tell the story of someone you know, whom others know, when that story ends badly, infamously, even ignobly? How long do you wait before its telling is neither a betrayal nor a humorous anecdote, despite its inherent and obvious ironies (despite the fact that it actually is funny), but is rather a reasonably considered part of the fabric of your own story and therefore demands to be heard, that is, if someone were apt to make such a demand, like your publisher who is paying you for a book of personal essays?

Alright, so my therapist went nuts. There, I said it. Her life fell apart and she crinkled and crumbled slowly, before my eyes until I knew, for sure, I was cured.

She'd always been odd. She'd always been messy and bohemian, an earth mother in loose triangular velvet dresses and elaborate beaded necklaces. She wore large, buggy glasses and had long center-parted mussed hair. Her office was crammed with classic therapist voodoo: a large and valuable black and white photograph of a famous poet on one wall, a Tibetan blanket on another, two corduroy club chairs, a couch, plenty of books and a vast collection of exotic looking figurines that in time came to include those small rubber promotional dolls that come with Happy Meals at McDonald's. But every week more stuff arrived and over the three years I was with her the condition of her office went from homey-messy to creepy-filthy. The place became a dumping ground of her personal and professional detritus. A computer that didn't work, old blankets, lamps, piles of books and magazines, stuffed animals, real animals. Some time in my first year a dog appeared, a poodle-ish affair, and then later a cat, too, and then another cat, a skinny, icky cat. She once asked me if I wanted to buy this big black and white photograph of an orchard that she knew I liked. A patient had given it to her in lieu of payment. I considered it for several weeks until one day I saw it propped between the waiting room sofa and wall with a lump of what could only have been cat shit on it.

If ever a room was the manifestation of a troubled soul, this was it. If ever there was a textbook case of impending emotional disturbance, this was it. And she frequently took mysterious phone calls. She popped pills. Sometimes she fell asleep with her mouth open. I could go on and on but what's the point? The party was over. I was on my own. And still, I think she helped me. By the time I left I felt pretty together. Everything's relative.

I'd come to her because my idiot boyfriend had broken up with me so meanly, so damagingly, that in a brief moment of insight following weeks of despair (yes, it hurts to be dumped, even by a fool. That could be the title of a book—Yes! It Hurts To Be Dumped, Even By A Fool!) it occurred to me that I didn't want to devote my entire year to getting over him. Also, after playing two pathetic though not entirely un-ironic songs I'd written about him to my friends John and Sarah (not their real names), they wisely suggested I call a therapist, in fact, theirs.

Rule number 1: Never go to a therapist your friends go to.

This would be the first time I had sought the advice of a professional. I'd been so sick to death of hearing my friends quote their shrinks that I'd vowed to stay mentally ill for as long as possible. But, as they say, Time marches on, or is a winged something, so I promptly left a teary message for R, as I will call her. Nothing inspires tears so much as admitting to a total stranger's answering machine that you need help. I proceeded to see her once a week for the next three and a half years. Here was my diagnosis, for insurance purposes: DSM III Ð R: Axis I 300.02, Axis II 301.50. Look it up if you want. Our sessions were fairly cerebral; R was not a Freudian, whatever that means, but more of a Jungian, whatever that means, and I never became a fetus or pretended to be my mother or a tree or a wild animal. And I only cried when I arrived at her office immediately after witnessing something sad, as I did the day I crossed paths with a crippled young man on crutches, inching along to wherever, slug-slow but determined, just outside R's building. My capacity for self-pity is exceeded only by my capacity to pity others, and R and I went to work on both.

We talked about my self-image, my family, my work. We set little goals. Could I wear some beads maybe or a sort of sexy shirt sometime? I liked R because she never said "How did that make you feel?" to me and because we took time to discuss books and current events, like real people. Actually, now that I mention them, we also discussed Real People, as in people we mutually knew, some of whom were her patients. R hated the woman who had the appointment before me and she often spent the first fifteen minutes of my appointment venting. My hints to change the subject to something more relevant, i.e. me, went unheeded. One day R was positively incensed that the woman had criticized R's increasingly unhygienic surroundings, suggesting that maybe R give the place a coat of paint or have the floors fixed. At the time I sided with R in her righteous rage, but I secretly toyed with the idea of giving my co-patient some flowers and a note that said Courage, Friend! next time I passed her in the hall. The floor was, in fact, buckling from a small flood some months before and had not been fixed. The walls were marked up and the paint was peeling in spots.

Occasionally, R spent time updating me on the progress, or lack thereof, of a thirteen year old anorectic and her controlling, warring parents. Or, on more familiar ground, she like to chat about which among my friends/her patients were talented and which weren't. I didn't mind this so much, especially since we always came to the conclusion that I was exceptionally talented. (R was writing a play, so she said, and was always casting it and recasting it within our small theatrical circle; she liked being one of us, us creative folk, such as we are.) It was the breaches of confidence I found most unsettling, but I didn't have the guts to ask R not to make them. They were always prefaced with "I know he wouldn't mind you knowing this" or "I'm sure they are going to tell you" or even, "I think they would want me to tell you", which is how I found out that one friend's boyfriend had a severe drinking problem and two other friends, whom R saw individually and as a couple (isn't there a rule about that?) were having marital difficulties and were in fact separating.

Rule number 2: Be careful what you tell your therapist.

Still, I got along with R because I felt I was getting help without getting my guts vacuumed out. I'd had a boyfriend who did that. If I was unhappy with him he'd flip the thing around and force me to search myself for the source of my displeasure and together, with his urging, we'd scrape and scrape and suck and suck until I felt my vital organs rising up in my gorge. I'd eventually start to cry, could you blame me, and he'd feel vindicated. We wouldn't even have gotten at any truths, since the main truth was that he was an asshole. We would just hypothesize me into a coma. Anyway, since R didn't completely inspire my trust, I kept certain things from her, which was empowering in itself. Sometimes, before I told her something private, a little voice in the back of my head asked me if I wanted my friends to know this thing as well. Good practice for later in life, I should think. Thanks, R.

One day, R asked me for one of my migraine pills. She had a terrible migraine and was out of medication and couldn't reach her doctor. Now, it just so happens that I don't really take a designated migraine medication for my migraines, I take Tylenol 3, or for the uninitiated, Tylenol with codeine, which is a narcotic. It doesn't stop the headache itself but it almost always kills the pain. Okay, let's pause here for a moment and discuss narcotics. I am particularly partial to the combination of pain relief and seemingly paradoxical, but not if you know your narcotics, sleep slash buzz inducing element, where you lay down and talk your head off until you suddenly, exquisitely pass out. If you don't take a lot of them, because they are addictive and constipating, they are your friend. If you take a lot of them, they become your friend in that way a woman who is sleeping with your boyfriend becomes your friend—you want to get rid of her but you can't no matter how hard you try. That's just a theory because I'm not addicted, although I have experienced the latter, which is a nachtmare. That said, I gave her one.

R offered to pay me for the pill, which seemed ridiculous at the time, maybe even illegal, and I refused to let her give me back any of my hard earned money. Over the years, in addition to popping "aspirin", or something, throughout our sessions, she continued to "borrow" my Tylenol 3. There were weekends she left messages for me at home, asking if I could leave some downstairs with my doorman for her, she couldn't get in touch with her doctor, or she didn't have a doctor, or she was between doctors. Or she lost her wallet or her dog ate her meds. She actually used the wallet excuse several times but not the dog one, although that dog certainly looked strung out to me. (How did it sound when I used the word meds? Cool?) David, my new boyfriend, found the whole business entirely improper. But I felt strange refusing her so sometimes I just didn't tell him.

Rule number three: Don't share your prescription medication with your therapist.

A long time ago, my friend Kate wrote a performance piece about how shocked she was when she realized her therapist was seven months pregnant. She knew so little about the woman and the sessions so focused on her, she simply failed to notice. I knew that R was married, a second marriage and that there was a college daughter from the first and a son from the second. I only once saw R's husband, although he often showed up during my sessions and R would excuse herself and meet him in the waiting room. From what I understood, which, as usual, was more than I should have, he took care of their son a good bit of the time. If he didn't actually swing by, he would call R on the phone at least once, sometimes twice a session, reporting their whereabouts and planning the next time he would call in. I didn't know what to make of this, and it was pretty annoying to have to stop cold in the middle of an earth-moving epiphany so she could confirm her son was in the playground or at the library or at a birthday party. She would say "Okay, where are you going? And what time are you going to be there? Okay (she would look at her watch), call me when you get there." And then twenty minutes later the phone would ring. Besides making me privy to these strange reconnaissance's, R would also talk about how bright and talented her son was—at six, a natural actor.

I am not exactly sure when, but at some point during the third year, I began to get the impression that R was unraveling. She popped more pills and made more phone calls, sometimes asking me to wait in the waiting room, which was getting almost too disgusting to sit down in. Magazines and newspapers were piling up and animal hair was everywhere. And her office looked like the spot under a tree where you heap your belongings after your trailer has been overturned by a twister. I didn't want to touch anything there or have it touch me. I felt hemmed in, claustrophobic, during our sessions. The place had acquired a new mustiness. No longer content to be merely dank, as it had always been, it had become dank's evil twin, rank, and I had taken to trying to maintain a forward focus, so as not to get grossed out by something I might notice on the table next to me or on the floor. Actually, as I remember, R once claimed to have an office downtown. Could it be possible that this nightmare was replicated somewhere else? The subject of R's own apartment, which it seems was in flux and which was why, ostensibly, so much shit had found it's way here, came up during one session and then became a staple of subsequent ones. She told a roundabout and ever changing story about money paid to a landlord before a promised renovation, some sort of swindle, a safety code violation or mismanagement—to this day I still have no idea exactly what happened. It didn't dawn on me that she may actually not have an apartment until one day when I saw into the other room in the office, the door of which I had never seen open, and witnessed what could only have been a storage job subcontracted to the Beverly Hillbillies. Sometimes I still think it was a vision I saw in a dream—furniture piled to the ceiling, clothing and suitcases and maybe even cats. R occasionally mentioned that she and her six year old son had spent the night, "for fun", at the office. Yikes.

We continued to talk about her much more than I would have liked, which would have been not at all. During one session R actually fell asleep, sitting up, while I was talking. It was fascinating to watch. Her eyes got heavy and her mouth became lax, so much so that a gleam of saliva appeared on her lower lip and I was terrified she was going to drool. Finally her head dropped to her chest. I stopped talking, stared at her in amazement, feeling like I was in a movie, and then said her name sharply. She bolted up, mumbled an apology and we continued. Some instinct told me not to try to discuss what had just happened. Can you imagine anything scarier than opening your therapist's Pandora's Box? And then, with a shock, I realized it was already open and I was sitting in it.

Obviously, something was going on, had been going on, with R for some time. It was not like I hadn't noticed, it was just that I was more interested in how I felt than how she felt. That is how it is with doctors. We go to them because we have a problem and it is very inconvenient if they develop one that is bigger than ours. Best to just ignore it as long as possible. Which is what I did, and may I say not for nearly as long as some others, but I'll get to that later. I am more assertive now than I was then (thanks R) and these days I wouldn't have stood for any of that nonsense. But six or seven years ago, well, I was in transition and I didn't want to have to start all over with a new therapist.

Rule number 4: Always leave before the party's over.

Especially when the party moves to a hotel room.

One day R called me to tell me that she was moving offices and would, in the interim, be seeing patients in the living room of a suite at a hotel near 57th Street. It all seemed perfectly respectable, yet I was suspicious. Where was all her shit? The hotel room was immaculate—just me, R, and the requisite chairs and curtains, a desk, a coffee table. That's when I knew I had to get out while the getting was good. R looked fidgety and ill at ease. Like a dog on a waxed floor, she couldn't get a grip. While I was there some food arrived; R often ordered food during my sessions and then ate, messily. Then her son, who I didn't know was there but was in the bedroom, spilled some water while jumping up and down on the bed and called, guiltily, for his mother to come. I felt bad for him. It was the middle of the day. Why wasn't he in school?

What little was left of the session after these interruptions was devoted to me, but still, I had to think up things to talk about. This had actually been going on for some time. I found R and her mess so distracting that I just didn't feel that much like talking to her. She had become the friend you no longer like enough to confide in so you feed them little drips and drops of your life. Just enough so you don't have to go through the bother of actually ending the friendship. Also, she was so obviously worse off than I that it would have been like telling a starving child you've got a hankering for a cupcake. I always felt relieved when I had an excuse to skip a session, like a trip or an audition or if I was sick (a migraine, hooray!). All spring I kept trying to figure out how and when to end it.

I finally got the break I was looking for when I was accepted into an intensive and time-consuming Shakespeare workshop at a New York theater. I paid one last visite a` l'hotel and at the end of the hour I told R that I was feeling strong and happy, that I wouldn't have time to see her for a while, and perhaps this would be a good opportunity to take a hiatus. She did not rejoice in my wellness. She tried, but it is not easy to hide hopping mad. Although I told her I'd call her when the workshop ended, I left secretly hoping never to see her again.

I didn't. Which leads me to Part Two.

Part Two

Three months and a few extra weeks of procrastination later, I telephoned R, only to find her number had been disconnected with no forwarding information available. I was mostly relieved but vaguely alarmed, although not enough to pursue it, or rather, her. I was curious, though, and a few friends slash fellow patients confirmed that while R had fallen off the radar, she had not disappeared entirely. Evidently, she had so insinuated herself in the lives of several of her patients that not only did they continue to see her, but they allowed themselves to become entangled in her own disastrous affairs.

Here's what I know. Actually, for legal reasons, let me revise that. Here's what I heard: R borrowed approximately a total of $18,000 from three of her patients. One would have to surmise she borrowed more than that from patients I did not know, presuming there were any. She had neither an apartment nor an office and moved from hotel to hotel, including, at one point, the Helmsley Palace. Sometimes she had her husband call patients to ask for money or groceries. One night they asked a patient, a friend I'll call Howard, to pay their hotel bill so they would not be evicted. Another night R asked a young woman who had already lent her thousands of dollars to bring food to a hotel, claiming that she and her son had nothing to eat. When the woman asked R—through the closed door of the hotel room, as R would not open it—about being paid back, R threatened to call the police if the woman did not stop harassing her. Another patient I knew who was particularly dependant on and devoted to R, let's call him Mark, not only loaned her money but became actively involved in an effort to keep her and her family afloat. She preyed on his vulnerability, on his good-heartedness, entreating him to not let her "fall through the cracks" as so many do when they become homeless. On the face of this, it is not an unreasonable request. People get into trouble sometimes, their lives succumb to some sort of fatal disarray and they need help. Well, this wasn't that. Had it been, from all accounts the aid she received from her patients should have buoyed her for some time. Rather, the money was obviously disappearing as fast as it was coming in. When Mark was tapped out both financially and emotionally and had finally cut himself loose from R, he brought her up on malpractice charges with the appropriate body politic, The Office of Professional Discipline. In the course of this process, he actually discovered that R was not, at present, properly registered as a social worker. She had her credentials, she was licensed, but she had not kept up with her registration fees for years. Unfortunately, The Office of Professional Discipline so bungled the case that it is still unresolved. Something, Mark tells me, about their process server not dating a summons properly.

I wanted more information than seemed fair torturing Mark for, so I called The Office of Professional Discipline. I identified myself as a journalist (why shouldn't I?) but after giving them R's name was told they could not confirm there was any action pending against her. But you are not denying it? I asked. The woman understood what I wanted. (If I sneeze twice and you don't say GezundheitÉ) She went to talk to her supervisor and then came back and repeated that she could not confirm it. That was good enough for me. Besides, even though I didn't learn anything, it was fun to say I was a journalist.

I called Howard. He was still being treated by R through a good bit of this, and he confronted her several times regarding the money she had borrowed from him and from fellow patients. She told him variously that the money was not a loan but a gift and that she was not expected to give it back, that the money was an advance on future sessions, and that it was actually owed her because for years she had undercharged her patients. Howard's own therapy finally ended when the check R gave him to repay him for paying the hotel bill bounced. He never saw her again after that but he actually kept up with her by e-mail for quite some time. He was worried about her and although he was annoyed to hear from her that she had bought a PowerBook with money borrowed from her patients, he continued to try to help her. In response to his queries about her well being he received lengthy rants detailing her precarious circumstances. Sometimes R wrote messages all in caps that would trail off into nonsequitors or end abruptly, mid-word, as if she had just passed out at the keyboard.

What can we take away from all of this, I wonder? I spoke to Howard again recently and he told me a hair-raising saga about how R once encouraged, if not abetted, a romance between himself and another patient, only to destroy it when it blossomed by revealing each patient's confidences to the other. I find that the years have not mellowed his anger and confusion. John and Sarah, the couple who had originally recommended R to me, will always wonder how much she may or may not have manipulated the ups and downs of their marriage to suit her own purposes. And there must be countless others whose stories I do not know. My husband heard a strange but not unlikely tale from his own therapist about a patient of R's who may have, as it turns out, unwisely, loaned R her credit card.

God only knows what has happened to her young son.

As for myself, well, I am philosophical. I liked R quite a bit in those early years. She commiserated, which is something I needed, still need, perhaps more than therapy. Justification as Cure, that's me. You will remember that I didn't much like the idea of being in therapy in the first place. Considering R was not properly registered, I think it stands to reason that if all I did was pay a crazy lady seventy-five bucks a week to chat with me about myself, it may have been stupid, but it wasn't therapy. Hey, look at that, Justification as Cure really works.

Who was R? A lost soul or a manipulative user? Or both? A dedicated healer or a quacksalver? (Means charlatan—I found it in the computer thesaurus.) Perhaps all those phone calls she made and took, which I'd presumed from R's discreet one or two word responses to be patient emergencies, were actually drug communiquŽs. It is impossible to know. Whatever the case, I am sad and sorry about her dissolution. She helped me through some tough times by laughing with me at my oppressors, which gave me validation and built my confidence. I am a stronger, though not necessarily a nicer person for it, but I am working on that last part. Sometimes, now, when I am low, when I feel misunderstood or ill-used, I think of what R might have said to me, had I arrived for a session thus. We would have had a little therapy, talked about the new Alice Munro collection, and then maybe together we would have subtly put down a colleague or friend of mine, just enough to lift me out of my slump. And, of course, she would have suggested I put on a pair of dangly earrings. When R was good, she was very good. And when she was bad, well, she was sort of good, too.