Long Way Out, page 27
The irony of her husband’s self-deprecation evaded Tess. “Well,” she admitted, “It would probably be ill-advised for me to drive you.”
“First sensical thing she’s said since I got home.” Russell directed this snide remark toward Tommy, implying a wink.
“Okay,” Tommy responded, with another grimace. “I really don’t wanna get invol... you know...”
“No,” Russell interrupted. “Sorry, Man. You’re right. I shouldn’t have... I just thought, you’re a guy, and...”
“I guess,” Tommy interrupted, steering the conversation away from the disconcerting bickering of his hosts. “I guess I could give you a lift.”
“We’ll take him.” It was Mary Ann. “I can drive. I’ve barely had a sip.”
“I thought you were a Chardonnay girl.” Tess was suddenly having rare doubts about her hostessing prowess.
“Not really,” Mary Ann responded. “I’m more into the reds. Pinot Noir. Merlot.”
“I feel horrible,” Tess whined. “I usually have a nice red on hand.”
“I’m okay with a Chardonnay or a Sauvignon Blanc,” Mary Ann explained, “but...”
“Jesus Christ!” protested Russell. “Are you two really gonna stand here bantering about wine all night while a man bleeds to death?”
≈ ≈ ≈
“So, how bad does the other guy look?” The jocular ER doctor was snipping thread, having just finished the fourth stitch.
“Oh, she looks great.” Russell was only half joking. The doctor’s brow furrowed. If this was a case of domestic violence, he might be legally obligated to report his suspicions to authorities. “It was a cupboard door,” Russell explained. “My wife doesn’t seem to understand how they work.”
Okay, the doctor was thinking. Here’s yet another wrinkle in the “I walked into a door” gambit. Still, as the victim in this case was the husband, he decided to keep the banter light. “From my experience,” he joked, “it’s best to use one’s hand to close a cabinet, and not one’s forehead.”
“I’ll keep that in mind next time,” parried Russell.
The doctor snapped off his vinyl gloves and tossed them into the wastebasket. Before making his exit, he blurted a quick list of post-op instructions before instructing Russell to make an appointment with his primary care provider in 10 days to remove the sutures. “You probably shouldn’t drive for a day or so,” the physician advised. “Someone taking you home?”
“Yeah,” said Russell. “At least, I hope my friends are still here.”
Russell was still feeling woozy as he negotiated his way through the waiting area, sidling past moaning patients, coughing children, and tiptoeing around scattered toys, fast-food sacks, backpacks, and handbags. “Ready to head out?” Mary Ann was standing by herself, next to the exit door.
“Sure thing,” Russell answered. Stepping into the humid evening air, he inquired, “Where’s the Jolly Green Giant?”
“Tommy?” she replied. “He’s waiting at my place.”
“Seems like an okay guy.”
“I guess so. Yeah. But don’t get any ideas. He’s definitely straight.”
“What do you think? That I’m always cruising? That, every time I see a good-looking guy, I have no other thought but to...”
“Honestly, Russ, I don’t know what to think.” Her vocal inflection expressed a blend of emotions: one part exasperation, two parts surrender, wrapped in a shell of dead seriousness. There was a pause in the conversation long enough for them to cross the pedestrian bridge.
“Yeah.” Russell’s voice cracked. “I don’t know either.”
“Sorry?” said Mary Ann.
“I don’t know what to think, either.” This admission wavered with emotion. “I don’t have a fucking clue. I’m a fucking disaster, a mess. I honestly don’t know what...” Russell’s throat was constricting to the point that he was straining to get the words out. “I honestly don’t know what to do.”
“That’s good,” she said, with a tender, empathetic smile.
Russell wasn’t prepared for this response. “Good? What the hell are you saying?”
“Well,” she posited, “maybe you’ve hit rock bottom.”
“Oh,” he wondered aloud. “And that’s a good thing?”
“Sometimes, that’s what it takes. Only one way to go from here.”
“I’m about to explode my whole world,” he announced.
“Whoopee!” Mary Ann giggled. “It’s about damn time.”
TWENTY-NINE
“Lately, everything she does just pisses me off.” Russell’s hand automatically traveled to his lacerated forehead, fingering the stitches that were due to come out in three days’ time.
“What’s changed?” Dr. White inquired.
“Nothing, really.” Russell pondered the question. “That’s the weird thing. She’s not really acting any differently. But, even when she does the same ol’ stuff, it irritates me.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Oh, you know... like leaving a mat bunched up in the bathroom for me to trip on. When she reminds me to do a chore — putting the trash cans out, or changing a lightbulb — she might as well have given me an order to... I don’t know... to do nine-hundred push-ups in the middle of the street.”
“Did it ever occur to you that she’s not what’s irritating you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Okay,” the therapist said, preparing to choose her language with special care. “I’m wondering, struggling, as you are, with your sexual orientation and your cravings, if you believe you deserve Tess.”
“Interesting.” This insinuation had set off a chain reaction, one thought leading to the next. “You know what I think about sometimes?”
“Tell me.”
“It’s not that I don’t deserve her. It’s more that sometimes I can’t help but think, and I really mean this, that she deserves a better man than me.”
“Better in what way?”
“Well, straight, for sure.”
“Okay. What else?”
“Honest.”
“And?”
“Faithful, true, monogamous. All that.”
“Sounds like you’re beginning to come to terms with your infidelity.”
“Wow.” Russell grimaced at this spot-on observation. “It does, doesn’t it.”
“Is there anything about yourself that you could change to become more like the better man you’re describing?” Russell’s expression indicated that he was flummoxed by this query. Dr. White sought to provide clarification. “You say this better man — your words not mine — would be straight. But you can’t just decide to become straight, can you?”
“I would if I could.”
“Do you really mean that?”
“Well...” He took a second to reconsider. “Okay. I know I can’t deny who I am.” Dr. White sat silently, allowing Russell to hear the echo of this statement. “Been there, tried that, doesn’t work.”
“But, because you’re not straight,” the doctor suggested, “you think you’re undeserving.”
“Sort of,” he muttered, reluctantly, “I guess.”
“That seems like something we should examine more thoroughly.”
“I can’t change what I’ve done... or what I keep... wanting.”
“Exactly. You are who you are: not straight. And, you’ve been unfaithful. What’s done is done.” It seemed clear that she was priming him for some sort of reckoning. “So,” she continued, “what can you change?”
The answer was as obvious as it was inescapable. “I guess I could be more honest.”
“Excellent! Yes!” While this level of breakthrough can make a therapist’s entire week, Dr. White wasn’t about to rest here. “But, more honest? Or, just honest.”
“I guess that depends on what you mean by honest.”
She wasn’t about to let the patient get away with semantic game playing. “You brought it up. What does it mean to you?”
“Well...” Russell was about to be too clever for his own good and he knew it. “I don’t think any person is a hundred-percent honest. I mean, we all have secrets, right? Stuff we don’t want other people to know. If someone just blathered everything to everyone, they’d be... intolerable.”
“But, is that what honesty means, really?”
“Hmmm?” Pretending he needed further elucidation seemed a good way to further postpone confronting the question.
“Isn’t being honest with one’s self different, or at least somewhat different than being honest with others?”
“Still not following.” Russell’s mind was racing, scanning for an opportunity to veer off to a less-vexing topic.
“Being honest with Tess, or your boss, or a close friend isn’t about blurting out everything you’re thinking. Right?” Russell’s furrowed brow provided Dr. White the cue to make her point. “It’s when somebody confronts you with a direct question... isn’t that when your honesty is really tested?”
“Yeah, alright,” Russell concurred. “But what about when your conscience starts nagging, when you’re finding it difficult... even impossible... to handle the deceit?”
“Ah...” Dr. White took a sip from her tea cup. “So, you’ve practiced deception, you feel guilty, and the angel on your shoulder starts whispering that it’s time to own up to it.”
“Dang,” remarked Russell. “You’re really good at this.”
“Thank you, Russell. I appreciate that.”
“Well, you deserve all the kudos.”
“But this isn’t about me.” With his attempt at flattery failing to knock the session’s trajectory off course, Russell felt his anxiety level skyrocketing. It was as though he’d been bitten by a Black Mamba and the serpent’s venom was contaminating his bloodstream. Knowing where this dialogue was going, and sorely aware there was nothing he could do to avert the inevitable, he sat in numbed silence. This, Dr. White decided, was the moment for some tough love. “You’re going to get a lot more from this process if you...”
“I know,” Russell blurted. “I know! I know! I KNOW!” Each one of four consecutive “I knows” were expressed louder and more intensely than the one before.
“You sound angry, Russell.”
Russell wasn’t merely angry. He was furious; furious about having to sit there as this know-it-all therapist used her professional advantage and expertise to disarm his every attempt at evasion; furious at that framed diploma, for giving her license to puncture his armor without providing him so much as a dram of anesthetic; furious at his wife, for loving the man she thought she’d married, the man he knew he could never be. Ultimately, he was furious about finding himself painted into a corner, only to look down to see the offending paintbrush gripped in his own hand.
“I’m not angry.” Russell’s eyes darted around the room, hoping to discover a trap door. Instead, they landed on the clock. Half of the session still remained. He doubled over, clutching his midsection.
“Russell, what’s going on?”
“I hate myself,” he muttered, shaking his weary head and staring down at the paisley patterned Egyptian rug. “I’m an awful, horrible, pathetic person. An awful, horrible, pathetic excuse for a human being. A sad, lonely, closeted faggot!”
“What do you expect me to say?”
“Do your damn job. Tell me I’m not awful, that I’m just less than perfect. You know, flawed, like everybody else.”
“Okay,” Dr. White responded. “Russell, look at me.” Like a naughty child caught in the act, Russell lifted his heavy-lidded gaze. “Please, please, listen to me. You’re not awful, or horrible, or pathetic. And, you’re not perfect, either.”
“No shit, Sherlock.” Russell’s voice had been reduced to a raspy whisper. “What was your first clue?”
“You’ve got real issues to deal with. Still, don’t forget... and, this is important. People love you... your sons, your wife, your parents.”
“But they don’t really know me.” Extreme facial contortion broadcasted Russell pain. “They think they do. But they don’t.”
“They know your heart.”
“My heart is sick. It’s tainted.”
“Look, Russell...”
“Fuck! I hate it when people start a sentence with ‘Look.’ It sounds so goddam condescending.”
Dr. White sat back in her chair and drew a deep inhalation. “Noted,” she said, contritely, on her exhale. “You’re absolutely right. Thank you for pointing that out. I’m going to work on that.”
“Good.” The knot in Russell’s belly loosened. He couldn’t hold back a smile. “You should... work on that, because...”
“Because that’s the last thing a patient wants to hear from their therapist.”
“Exactly.”
“Excellent. Now that we’re both being honest...”
“Oh, Jesus!” exclaimed Russell. “Can’t we talk about something else?”
“Tell you what...” The tone of the kind woman’s voice signaled that she was about to propose a change in strategy. “I’m going to leave you alone... for, let’s say, ten minutes.” She reached over to a nearby shelf to pick up some blank note paper and a pen. “Your assignment is to start coming up with some language you might use to come out to Tess.” As he accepted the paper and pen, Russell’s shoulders slumped. Like a kid knowing there’s no escape from a painful booster shot, he sighed, gritted his teeth, squinted his eyes, and creased his lips into a pout of reluctant resignation. The time had arrived to roll up his sleeve and take his medicine.
By the time Dr. White reentered the room, Russell had scribbled a half dozen half sentences, only to cross them out. Everything he’d come up with had seemed half-baked, passive-aggressive, self-serving, and/or simply inadequate.
“Do you mind if I take a look?” she asked.
“You won’t be happy.” Russell predicted, handing her the sheet.
After scanning through the incomprehensible scrawls, she smiled. “It’s a good start.” Dr. White was betting that this exercise had served its purpose. She knew that simply jotting a few words on paper can function as a pump primer. Picking up the pen demands thinking about what to write. Actually writing something down — anything at all — is like tossing a pebble into a pond. The initial plop may seem insignificant as the stone plummets quickly downward, disappearing into the silt. But, back on the surface, ripples have been sent in every direction. Rejecting one way to say something signals to the brain that the search for a better way to say it has begun.
≈ ≈ ≈
Russell barely slept that night. After weeks of distraction, procrastination, and deliberate avoidance, his mind, now tasked with deciphering an unsolvable riddle, had taken the prompt to get busy.
A few minutes after seven a.m., Hank shuffled into the kitchen, bleary-eyed and yawning. Having picked Reptar Crunch as his breakfast du jour, he emerged from the pantry and, like a somnolent robot, snatched a bowl from the cupboard, a spoon from a drawer, and milk from the fridge. As he tilted the milk carton over the filled bowl, his sleepy eyes bugged out. “What the..?” he squealed. The alarm trigger was the peculiar specter of his father standing on the back patio, barefoot, and clad in nothing but a saggy pair of boxer shorts, staring out into the void, and mumbling to himself.
“What’s he doing out there?” asked Rory.
The unannounced entrance of his little brother startled Hank for the second time in less than 15 seconds. His involuntary response was a rapid, reflexive swivel. Centrifugal force sent a stream of milk across the kitchen counter, down a stack of drawers, and onto the floor. “Fuck, Dude!” Hank chided Rory. “Don’t sneak up on me like that!”
“Seen the Reptar Crunch?” Rory inquired. A younger sibling learns that ignoring a big brother’s reprimand tends to cause him even greater frustration. That, after all, is the primary role of the little brother, to exasperate the firstborn at every opportunity.
“Open your eyes, Dumb Ass!” snapped Hank, nodding toward the box on the counter top.
“Okay, that’s it!” Russell was stepping inside through the sliding glass door. “How many times have I told you, Hank? Warned you.” Hank, his mouth stuffed with sugary cereal, was incapable of a response. “First of all,” Russell lectured, “I will no longer let you get away with talking to your brother like that...”
“But, Dad!” Hank’s protest was muffled by the partially masticated glob. “He...”
“I don’t care what Rory did. I don’t care what he said!” Hank once again attempted to give voice to his own defense. “Nope. You don’t get to talk. Zip it.” Russell took notice of the milk waterfall cascading down over the kitchen drawers. “And, look at this mess! This is the last straw. Go to your room. Now. No video games.”
“For how long?”
“For a week.”
“A week? Why?”
“I guess you’ll have plenty of time to think about why.”
“Fuck you, Dad!” screeched Hank. “I hate you! You’re an asshole!” The irate boy lifted his bowl over his head with both hands and hurled it into the sink, sending shattered fragments of porcelain, brownish milk, and soggy Reptar Crunch splattering onto the walls and windows. To top off his violent tantrum, he deliberately knocked the milk carton off of the countertop. In the wake of this tantrum, a tense silence descended upon the Deacon kitchen.
“Do what your father says, Hank.” Tess’s voice was calm, but firm. She looked over at her husband, standing in his underwear, fists clenched and face flushed. Her baffled expression and confused head shake asked, What the hell is going on here? Glaring at Rory through squinted, spite-filled eyes, Hank began tearing off sheets of paper towels. “Leave it, Hank,” commanded Tess. “I’ll take care of it.”
“But...” the boy stammered.
“Listen to your mother.” Russell’s order was clipped and direct. “Go to your room.”
As a parting statement, Hank impulsively kicked the half-empty milk carton — “Oops,” he said, with adolescent scorn, “clumsy me,” — before stomping heavily out of the kitchen and up the stairs.
While waiting to hear the slam of Hank’s bedroom door, Tess took a second gander at her nearly naked husband. “Up at the crack of dawn, I see. No time to put on some clothes?” Russell stood, slack-jawed. Words escaped him. At this moment, any attempt to explain his state of mind to his wife would have been futile.
