“I hate him.”
Candace smiled and nodded. She adjusted the gain on her speaker and clicked off her email to increase the bandwidth on the image. Sam came into resolution a little clearer.
“Are you still engaged?” Candace wondered.
Sam shrugged.
“You can’t spend this much time with someone and not get on each other’s nerves,” Candace offered to her patient.
“I am so glad this happened before the wedding.”
“But you’ve called off the wedding five times.”
“Fifth time’s a charm.”
“I hate her.”
Candace smiled and nodded to her screen. “Have you called off the engagement?” she wondered.
“By mutual engagement. You know, we were never well-matched. She’s got the PhD, ’n all.”
“Kind of like me.”
“Yeah, kinda like you.”
“We’ve talked about this before, Dennis. She doesn’t mind that you’re a truck driver.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I mind.”
Candace adjusted her screen so she could see both her face and her client’s at the same time.
They didn’t know about each other, Dennis and Sam. Dennis didn’t know that Candace was seeing Sam. Sam didn’t know she was seeing Dennis. And she couldn’t tell either of them. Ordinarily, for a psychotherapist not to disclose such an important fact would be malpractice, but the way the confidentiality laws were, Dr. Candace Owen was seeing the two halves of a couple, but couldn’t tell either half about the other half.
She couldn’t even bring up the subject. To do that would be a breach of HIPAA. Candace hadn’t discovered until well after she’d started seeing them both that they were partnered with each other. And she didn’t find out that they were engaged because of Sam’s paranoia. The confidentiality documents they signed online prohibited disclosure of their respective identities to each other. Of course, Covid didn’t help.
Sam would absolutely not allow Candace to disclose the existence of her case to anyone. She was running for office again and was zealous about her private life. In the initial interview, she only said that she sought therapy because she was having problems with her life partner. For the next 6 sessions, that was all she talked about. Candace didn’t know the gender, the history, anything about that partner until Sam offered Candace his name in their 7th session. And by the time Sam told Candace that her fiancé’s name was Dennis, she made it absolutely clear that there was to be no communicating with Dennis – in any way, through any medium. And Dennis didn’t want his fiancé to know he was in therapy either.
“I don’t like him.”
“Maybe that’s an improvement, Sam,” Candace said to the freckled woman with luxuriant red hair that shimmered onscreen. “During our last session, you said that you hated him.”
“You can only hate what you love, Candace. ‘Like’ is closer to indifference, don’t you think?”
“I hadn’t thought about that, Sam.”
Sam kept looking at something just below her screen. Finally, she lifted her fingers. She’d done her nails to match her lips. Flaming red.
Nails. That reminded Candace. She needed to nail that picket back to her fence in the garden out front.
“Are you and Dennis still living together?” Candace wondered.
“Of course, we’re still living together. He doesn’t have anywhere to go. He’s a truck driver who’s been laid off because of Covid. That means he doesn’t have any income. And even if he did, who the hell wants to move during a fucking pandemic?”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Well start thinking about things. I pay you $200 a session to think for me.”
“I can’t think for you,” Candace said. “But I am curious as to what moved you from ‘hate’ to ‘don’t like.”
“Something he said at dinner last night. He said that it was more important for him to listen than to be heard.” Sam sighed, poured herself some coffee and checked out her phone.
Something I told him to say, Candace reflected.
“So, I started talking, and then I started bitching. And he just sat there and took it all in, without saying a word. And when I was finished, he just said: ‘What I heard you say was…’ And then he repeated every word back to me. I mean, not word-for-word, but close enough to where I knew he’d got what I’d said to him. And then he added ‘Is that right?’ And it was right. He’d got it. The truck driver had gotten the lawyer.”
Candace made a note of it. She’d been coaching Dennis about how to listening. It seemed to be getting through to him. The note was for his file, not Sam’s.
“And then when I’m all done, he said: ‘Is there anything else?’ And I thought about it, and there were a couple a things I’d left out. So I dumped those on him, too. About how he dribbles urine in his underwear when he comes back from going in the middle of the night. About how he lets the hair grow out from the lobes of his ears and doesn’t use the electric shaver to get rid of it, and then when he does finally get around to it, he uses my electric leg trimmer to do it. So I dumped that on him. And he repeats: ‘What I heard you say was…Did I get that right?’ And he got it, for the most part.”
Candace scribbled the notes now. Some for Sam’s chart, some for Dennis’s.
“And instead of lighting into him, I cried. And it’s because I finally felt like he heard me. And he just sits there without eating my steak tartar and grabs my hand and lets me cry.”
Finally, some progress. It was hard doing couples therapy when they’re not both in the room at the same time, especially when they don’t know about each other.
“And then I stop crying, and then he waits a while, and then he asks me whether I’m finished, and I nod. And then he talks. And he tells me that he didn’t know. He didn’t know that it bothered me that he dribbled a little in his shorts, and he says that next time he’ll shake it a little bit more at 1 a.m. before he comes back to bed. And that he’ll use his own razor and trim his ears lobes once a week. And then he says he’s done.
“And I say: ‘What I heard you say was that you didn’t know that you dribble in your shorts and that it bugs me that you use my Lady Schick Electric. Did I get that right?’”
Sam, that’s how I’ve been training you to use active listening techniques for the last few weeks, ever since you told me that you had, in fact, a fiancé.
“And he says: ‘Almost.’ He says: ‘I knew that I left a few drops of pee in my shorts, but I didn’t know that it bugged you.’
“And I repeat that, and then he says that I got that right. And I started crying again, because nobody ever told me that I heard them right. And then we started talking about all kinds of things. Like how I feel about his getting forloughed at work, and how he feels about me running for Water Commissioner, and pretty soon we’re holding each other and kissing.”
Candace made a note: SEX?
“But we didn’t go beyond spooning.”
She crossed out SEX.
“And then this morning, I get up and feel the same way, or pretty near the same, like I did before we had that long talk.”
“But different enough to move from hate to don’t like,” Candace added.
“Yeah, I guess. But most of it went away by this morning. He was his usual shutdown self for breakfast.”
When Dennis had finally told Candace about Sam and the problems they’d been having, Candace asked him if he wanted to invite Sam in for couples counseling. He’d said no.
“I felt ganged up on in couples work when I’d done it with Sam before. We tried it with three different therapists.”
“Your fiancé’s name is Sam?”
“Yeah, why? She’s a girl and not a boy. I ain’t gay.”
Candace and Dennis were already into their 6th session together, and by then Candace already had strict instructions from Sam, who was two sessions ahead of Dennis, that under no circumstances was Candace ever to divulge to anyone, much less her fiancé, that she was in therapy.
So, she couldn’t tell Dennis about Sam. But could she tell Sam about Dennis?
The more she thought about it, the more of a dilemma Candace had on her hands. She referenced the books on ethics. She sought consultation. She’d need Dennis’s permission to tell Sam about Dennis. But she couldn’t get Dennis’s permission to tell Sam about him unless she told him why she needed it. Which would be to tell Dennis about Sam. So, she was stuck. She couldn’t tell either one about the other, and she had to go on treating them both. Neither one would consent to couple’s work. She was Cyrano de Bergerac, times two.
“I don’t like her.”
“You don’t.” It was half-question, half-sigh.
Dennis’s face kept jostling as the phone slipped on his truck’s dashboard. Dennis went out there for sessions so Sam wouldn’t know.
“I tried what you told me last week. I tried it last night.”
“The active listening?”
“He nodded.
“Did it work?”
“At first, yeah. I mean, I listened to every word she said, Candace. And she’s just goin’ on ’n on about how I pee in bed – which I don’t – and about how I steal her electric razor on purpose so I can shave my nuts. I only did it once ’cuz mine wasn’t chargin’.”
“U-huh.” You need a shave alright, Candace thought. You look like Fred Flintstone.
“And she’s just goin’ on ’n on about how this guy on her campaign staff is prob’ly a mole, and she starts cryin’. And we lay down and I even hold her.” He stopped himself. I could see the tears well up in his eyes. Of the two of them, he was the real crier. There’s one every couple.
“And?”
“And next mornin’, she’s the same. All bitchy and everything.” A couple tears fell down his coppery cheeks.
“You know, Dennis, there are a few stages in every relationship.”
“I know. Lust. Impotence. Separation. Divor—.”
“—No. There’s Eros. That is the chemical attraction that gets people together.”
Or you two would’ve never gotten together to begin with, she thought.
“That a Greek word for lust?”
She sighed. “Kind of.”
“Well, then what’s the difference?”
“It’s not followed by impotence.”
“Well it only happened three times. Then she starts bitchin’.”
“Have you resolved that issue?”
“I told ya. I got the blue pill, but she never gave me a shot. We stopped havin’ sex. I think she might be foolin’ around with that jerk on her campaign staff.”
“Oh she is not,” she said, then regretted it.
“Yeah, how would you know?”
“I…guess I wouldn’t. Has she given you any indication that she is?”
“Nah. Nah, I guess not. She’s true blue, like the pill. She’s OK.”
“He’s OK.”
“He is?”
“Yeah. Yesterday, he told me he’d do whatever it took to hold the house down if I won.”
“That’s always been a big sticking point between the two of you; who’s responsible for the shopping, cleaning, cooking.”
“Yup. Then he started talking about the stages in a relationship,” Sam said as she texted on her phone. She suffered from ADHD. “About the how the Greeks had different words for fucking. He talked about heros. He said that that’s what got men and women together.”
Or women and women, as in my case. “I think he may have meant eros.”
“The chemistry that gets people together, he said. And then, he talked about a bridge. Something called agape. How the Greeks would make each other’s citizens safe when they crossed out of their own city’s territory into the land of another city-state. He said it was kind of like détente during the Cold War, where the U.S. and Russia didn’t link all their bad issues together. He called that ‘linkage’ when each side links every issue to every other issue. But he said that with détente, each issue was negotiated, diplomatically-speaking, so that the two sides didn’t link it to any other issue where they weren’t getting along. He’s getting this from someone. I don’t know who. He said that agape was like when he used to ride.”
Candance shrugged. She didn’t know what that meant.
“You know, motorcycles. He said that if you were patched, into a club, you had to call ahead and let the other clubs know you were gonna be riding through their territory, so you didn’t get stomped. Then they’d allow you through their territory.”
“Give you safe passage.”
“Exactly. He said that that second kind of love – agape, which was really more like détente than the real feeling of love – allowed a couple to get through the tough times in their relationship. It was like a bridge, he said. I don’t know where he’s getting this stuff. He doesn’t read books. I know that.”
Candace smiled. “Maybe YouTube.”
“She’s really alright.”
That’s better than hating her guts, I suppose. “That’s progress.”
“She told me about Philadelphia. You know what that means?”
“The Liberty Bell?”
“No. The City of Brotherly Love in Greece. Get with it.”
Candace played dumb.
“She said that ‘philia’s’ the word for love without wantin’ anything back.” Dennis took a womper bite out of his sub and Candace could see the lettuce in his teeth. Yuck. She was seeing Dennis on his lunch hour. He was working again, which was good for the relationship since it balanced out his animus (the provider) with her anima (need to be taken care of).
“No expectations? Is that what philia means?”
“Exactly,” he said, and pointed at the screen. “She said it’s valuing somebody without expectations. She said that it was expectations – her expecting something – that always killed relationships. She said that the hard thing about couples stayin’ together was that you thought you always had a right to expect things from your husband.”
Or your wife.
“Yeah. She said that expectations are part of this K thing. Contract. ‘K’ means contract to lawyers. They got different words for everything, I’ll tell ya. Anyway, to death do us part is hard ’cuz you always thought you had a right to expect something in return for what you gave: ‘Not shaving with her razor. Take out the garbage. Shake your schwanz when you’re done peein’. Blah blah blah. It’s always something, she said. Either around sex or money. The sex part, she said, it made up a real small part of a relationship, but when it wasn’t workin’, it was big thing. You can’t win with sex. She always wants more than I do. We talked about that. She said she’d been unreasonable. Can you believe she said that?”
“Hmmm. You’ve said that it’s always been a big bone of connection between you.”
“A bone a something. Anyway, then she says that it’s either sex or money couples fight over. Sometimes kids, which we don’t got. And then she says it don’t bug her so much if I dribble a little bit in my shorts. And that it’s alright if I use her Lady Schick as long as I clean it out when I’m done. You believe that?”
“Sounds like she’s changing.”
“Yeah. She’s goin back to bein’ the girl that I fell for. And pretty soon, I’m tellin’ her I’ll shake it a few more times at the toilet in the middle of the night, and then I go out and buy her a new electric razor! We’re fallin’ all over each other, bein’ nice.”
“Things are changing.”
“Damn right they are. We had sex for the first time in weeks last night.”
Candace thought she’d seen that warm glow. “That’s real progress for you two.”
“Yeah, and we’re doin’ it all on our own. It’s like magic or somethin’.”
Or something.
“She’s alright, is what you’re saying, Dennis.”
“Yeah, she’s a little more than just alright.”
“I like him.”
“You do?”
“Yeah, he’s really changing. You meet somebody and you fall in love. I mean, who thought I’d ever fall for a truck driver. I’m a lawyer, running for Water Commissioner.”
Sam clacked her gum and drank her latte. “I met him standing next to a keg at a pig roast. I tell him that I can’t start my car and he says well let’s have a look. In less than minute, he iggles some wires under the hood and it starts. Right there, I look at the guy and know I could spend the rest of my life with him. He answered all my needs, all my wants, all my prayers.”
“Thought you didn’t believe in God.”
“I’m being metaphorical, ya dope.” She swilled the rest of the espresso and poured more. Sam drank five three-shot lattes a day.
Candace nodded, took off her gold spectacles to polish them, and smiled. She thought she needed a haircut, even though her curly chestnut hair barely made it over her ears.
“And then, somewhere along the line, after years with the guy, I wake up across the bed, and it’s like he’s a thousand miles away. He’s a stranger and I never knew him. He’s changed. He’s stopped loving me. He doesn’t even give a shit if he has ear hair.”
Candace just nodded and put on her glasses. She didn’t need to do much now but provide minimal encourages. Clients always did the work themselves after finding what they needed to find within them.
“And I think, if I see that in him – that he’s a stranger to me – he’s gotta see the same thing in me; that I’m a stranger to him, too. So I ask myself: ‘Why’ve we stopped giving each other what we need?’” She slabbed the purple bubble gum onto the side of her cup and with it came the pink stain of today’s lip shade. Sam had a different shade for each day of the month.
“Why do you think you two became strangers?” Candace asked, almost perfunctorily.
Sam shrugged.
Candace couldn’t spoon feed her. That defeated the purpose of therapy.
Sam pulled out her pipe, packed it with dope, lit it, and started tugging, always a sign she was working out a problem.
“I think,” she said. “I think I stopped giving myself what I needed a long time ago. And then I looked for it in him, and when he couldn’t give it to me, I blamed it on him. That’s what he said he’d done with me. Used me to try and fix himself.”
That was Candace’s therapeutic interpretation, too. She’d given that to Dennis to give to Sam.
“I like her.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. You mind?” he asked as he puffed his Cuban cigar to life.
“Well, we’re not face-to-face, Dennis,” Candace remined him as he smoked up the cab of his truck.
“She’s started changin’ again. Bein’ who she was before. She even did up her hair like she used to when we first met.” His great big eyes smiled as he recalled it. “And she asked me out on a date like she did the first time we met.”
“Sounds like you’re re-romanticizing your relationship. I’d told her to—” Oops.
“You told who to?” he inquired with winnowing eyes. “To do what?”
Candace had told Sam to ask Dennis out, but of course, he couldn’t know.
“How did you reciprocate?” she asked.
“I had this idea about that agape thing I read about.”
That I told you about, Dennis, she thought.
“I told her about it. She pronounced it like agape, like your mouth bein’ wide open. But I corrected her and told her it was ah-gop-eh. That almost led to a fight but I de-escalated with those Gottman exercises I read about.”
That I taught you about, Candace reflected.
“I had this dream the other night that agape’s just a bridge to another kind of land, another kind of relationship,” he said.
“Another kind of love?” She led him, just a little.
“Yeah, exactly.”
When a client responded with those words, a therapist always knew she’d gotten it right. That payoff, that feeling inside when she did get it right, it was why Candace did the work.
“I think I might love him.”
“You might?”
Samantha twirled her red hair the way a teenager might. She was in love alright, “But it’s not the kind of love we had before. Before, it was all passion and sex and romance. But that never lasts. I look at all these old couples that’ve been married forever, and they still get on each other’s nerves. My Auntie Gert’s been married to my Uncle Pat forever. She says she still gets in the car sometimes and drives around the neighborhood, because he still drives her nuts with his nitpicking. He’s never stopped telling her how to run her kitchen, and they’ve been married 6 friggin’ decades.”
“In a marriage, there are solvable problems and unsolvable ones.”
Sam snapped her fingers and pointed at the screen. “That’s exactly what Dennis said!”
Too on-the-nose, Candace. Be careful here.
“The solvable ones, he called them the things we can work on, like more sex and less urine dribbling at night and the Lady Schick on his ear lobes shit. But there are things we’re just gonna have to learn to live with, about each other I mean. Like how he hates how I’m running for office and won’t campaign with me, or how he’s always correcting me when I mispronounce a word. I mean, what right has he? I like Eugene O’Neil and Beth Henley.”
“The playwrights?”
She nodded. “He likes Two and a-Half Men. But tastes, he says, are unsolvable problems. He calls them workable realities. Where’s he getting this shit? From Charlie Sheen? I swear, he sounds just like you sometimes.”
“I’m curious what all this has to do with your Uncle Pat and Auntie Gert.”
“Well, they’re in their 80’s, so I’m sure it’s not Charlie Harper every night in the boudoir if you know what I mean. But they’re happy. They don’t seem to want anything from each other.”
“Desireless valuing,” Candace supplied.
“That’s what Dennis called it!”
“No, I think that’s what I told you it was. The third stage of love.”
“No, I don’t think so, Candace.” She eyed her therapist suspiciously.
Candace was forgetting which client she supplied what with to give to who. What information did she plant with Dennis to give to Sam? It was the danger of doing couples therapy without either half of the couple knowing about the other half.
“I don’t think so,” Candace bluffed.
Sam stared at Candace. Candace held her breath. It felt like a holding a hand of bridge with no points.
Finally, Sam shrugged. “Maybe you did tell me,” she concluded. Candace released a silent sigh as she muted her Zoom audio.
“Anyway,” Sam said. “Our engagement’s back on.”
Sixth time’s a charm, Candace thought.
“I think I love her.”
“Is that so?” Candace replied.
“Yeah. She’s finally comin’ around.”
Candace raised a clinical eyebrow. “How so?”
“Well, she asked me to marry her again,” Dennis replied as he applied deodorant under his work shirt in the cab of his truck. “And this time, I said yes.”
“Sounds like progress.” Candace smiled.
He nodded. “She’s really changed back to who she was.”
“Maybe you’ve changed, too, Dennis.”
“Maybe we both did.”
“Maybe so.”
“Yeah, so, maybe one more session. Whatdya think?”
Candace smiled, and nodded.
“I love him.”
“Really?”
“Yes. He asked me to marry him again.”
“You did.”
“No. Pay attention, Candace. He asked me.”
“Oh, my apologies.”
Sam flashed a victorious grin. “And this time, I said yes.”
“Sounds like all that hard work you’ve done has paid off.”
“He even agreed to go to campaign events with me.”
“Now that is progress, Sam. I’m happy for you.”
“Yeah, and I’m doing all the work. I don’t think therapy’s been all that helpful, to tell you the truth, Candace.”
“I’m sorry I haven’t been able to be more helpful.”
“And he said ‘Proust’ wrong and I didn’t even correct him. And he mispronounced ‘anonymity,’ and I opened my mouth, then I folded my tongue in half, and I said nothing. I can’t remember where I heard about that.”
From me, Candace started to say, but then folded her tongue. “What was the context, of him using the word ‘anonymity,’ I mean?”
“Well, he told me he’d been in therapy, and I told him so was I!”
Uh-oh.
“And I asked him what he talked about, and he said that it was anonymous. But I remembered from law school that it was confidentiality that applies in therapy, not anonymity. So I corrected him, and he thanked me instead of swearing at me! I told him my therapy wasn’t doing all that much for me.”
“Okay. So, do you think that maybe we can get ready to terminate, since that’s the problem you worked on here? You and Dennis finally getting married?”
“So then I asked him with who he had therapy? And he says that’s confidential, too. Then he asks me with who, and I said what’s good for one is good for the other. And we agreed to disagree. I came up with this idea of agreeing to disagree. Some problems are just unsolvable, ya know?”
“A workable reality.”
“A what?”
“You know, one of those unsolvable disagreements that even successful couples get into every once in a while. Like your Auntie Gert and Uncle Pat.”
“I gotta say: I learned more from them than I did from you. But I’m curious about who he saw in therapy. That therapist really helped him. God knows he needed to change.”
“You need to respect his privacy,” Candace suggested. “Just as he needs to respect yours.”
“So, can we make this our last session?”
Candace nodded, and smiled. Whew.
“I love her,” he said.
Candace just smiled and nodded.
© 2024 by Michael C. Just
Mike’s short story collection, Canyon Calls, was published by Zumaya Publications in 2009. Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.
Mike’s other titles, including his novels, The Crippy and The Mind Altar, as well as Canyon Calls, are available through his websites, https://justmikejust.com and https://canyoncallsthebook.com or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002
Five of his short stories have recently been published online:
Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)
The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW
I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October
Offload, has been published by The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within
You Get the Two has been published by Hellbound Books and is available in print, eBook, kindle or audio format at Kids are Hell!- Anthology (hellboundbookspublishing.com)