Carrie Pilby. Caren Lissner
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and lovely. But the only people who get to live here are the folks who inherited these rent-controlled apartments from their rich old grandmas who wore tons of jewelry and played tennis with Robert Moses.
Petrov’s waiting room is like a cozy living room, with a gold-colored trodden carpet and regal-footed chairs. One wall is lined with classic novels, a pointless feature since one does not have the time to read Ulysses while waiting for a doctor’s appointment. A person would have to make more than 300 visits to Petrov in order to finish the book, which just proves that someone would have to be crazy to read all of Ulysses. But a waiting room is not the proper place or situation to read any book. All books have a time and a place. Anything by Henry Miller, for instance, should be read where no one can see you. Carson McCullers should be read in your window on a hot summer night. Sylvia Plath should be read if you’re ready to commit suicide or want people to think you’re really close.
On Petrov’s coffee table, there’s more literature: the L.L. Bean catalogue, Psychology Today, the Eddie Bauer catalogue, the Pfizer annual stockholders’ report. I admire Petrov’s ability to incorporate his junk mail into his profession.
The door to Petrov’s office opens, and a short guy walks out, lowering his eyes as he hurries past me. No one I’ve ever passed coming into this office has made eye contact with me, as if it’s embarrassing to be caught coming from a therapy appointment by someone who is about to do exactly the same thing.
Petrov stands in his doorway. “How are you doing today, Carrie?” he asks, waving me inside. There are books piled high on his desk and diplomas on the wall. Petrov sits down in a red chair and balances a yellow legal pad on his knee. I sink into the reclining chair opposite him.
“I’m fine.”
“Did you make any new friends this week?”
I think my father put this theme into his head. I don’t have many friends, but there’s a good reason for this, which I’ll explain in the near future.
“It rained this week,” I tell him, “so mostly I stayed inside.”
Petrov’s hand flutters across the page. What could he be writing? It did rain all week.
“So you haven’t been outside your apartment much. What about this coming week? Do you have any social plans?”
“I have a job interview today,” I say. “Right after this appointment.”
“That’s wonderful!” he says. “What kind of job?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “The interview’s with some guy my dad knows. I’m sure it’ll be mindless and pointless.”
“Perhaps by going in thinking that, you’ll cause it to be so.”
“If you’re trying to say it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy, that’s psychobabble,” I say. “If I tell you that the job might turn out to be mindless, then it might, or it might not. The outcome really has no relationship to whether I’ve said it.”
“It might,” Petrov says. “You put the suggestion out there.” He leans back in his chair. “I think you often thwart yourself. Let’s look at how you do it with friendships. Whenever you have met someone, you then tell me that the person was unintelligent or a hypocrite. Perhaps you have too narrow a definition of smart or too wide a one for hypocrite. There are some people who are very street-smart.”
“You can’t have an intelligent discussion with street smarts,” I say. “And even if I could find other people who are smart, they’d probably still be hypocritical and dishonest.”
It’s true. I went to college with a lot of supposedly smart people, and they’d rationalize the stupid, dangerous or hypocritical things they did all the time: getting drunk, having sex with lots of different people, trying drugs. Nobody did any of that in the beginning of school, but once the temptation started, my classmates got sucked in, then began making excuses for it. Even the self-possessed religious kids came up with ridiculous rationalizations. If they want to believe in certain things, fine, and if they don’t want to, that’s fine, too, but they shouldn’t lie to themselves about their reasons for changing their minds. The hypocrisy isn’t any better out of school, especially in the city.
“I want you to tell me something positive right now,” Petrov says. “About anything. Tell me something you love. As in, ‘I love a sunset.’ ‘I love Miami Beach.’”
“I love it when people sound like Hallmark cards.”
Petrov sighs. “Try harder.”
“Okay.” I think about it a bit. “I love peace and quiet.”
He looks at me. “Go on.”
“I guess you missed the point.”
He sighs again. “Give me another example.”
“I love…when I can just stretch out in my bed, hearing no horns, no chatter, no TV, nothing but the buzz of the electrical wiring in the wall. But sometimes I like the sounds from the street.”
“I like that,” Petrov says. “Now, tell me something that makes you sad. Something besides hypocrites and people who aren’t smart. Tell me about a time recently when you cried.”
I think. “I haven’t cried in a long time.”
“I know.”
I hate when Petrov thinks he knows things about me without my telling him. “How do you know?”
“Because you’re guarded. Because you were put into college at fifteen, when everyone was three to seven years older than you, and at fifteen, you weren’t socially advanced or sexually aware. All kinds of behavior goes on at college, people drinking, losing their virginity right and left, experimenting with who knows what. Some people respond by trying to fit in, but you chose to opt out of the system completely. Which was understandable. But now, you’ve been out of college a year and you’re still not experienced in adjusting to social changes. Being smart doesn’t mean being skilled at social interaction. No one ever said being a genius was easy.”
I hear it start to rain harder outside. Petrov gets up, shuts the window and sits back down.
“You’ve mentioned your father’s Big Lie a few times,” he says. “I think we should talk about that sometime.”
“Yes—”
“But not today. I have an assignment for you.”
I look at the rug. It’s full of tiny ropes and filaments.
“I want you to, just for a little while, be a little more social. Just to see the other side of it, to determine if there is such thing as a comfortable middle ground. I don’t want you to do anything dangerous or immoral, but I want you to do things like go to a party, join an organization or club. After you do some of these things, I want you to tell me how you felt doing them. You don’t have to start right away. You can wait a bit until you feel comfortable.”
“Okay. How about next year?”
Petrov smiles. “That’s not a bad idea,” he says. “New Year’s Eve would be a good night for you to spend time with friends. You could go to a New Year’s Eve party.”
“Maybe I should just vomit on Times Square,” I say. “Then I’d be fitting in.”
Petrov shakes his head. “You know I’m not suggesting you do anything dangerous. But I do want you to learn to socialize better. What you should do is work up to spending New Year’s Eve with people. We’ll start small first. A five-point plan.”
Petrov grabs a memo cube that has Zoloft embossed at the top. Some people will take anything if it’s free.
“First,” he says, “I want you to write a list for me of ten things you love. The street sounds were a good start, but I want ten of them. Secondly, I want you to join at least one organization or club. That way, you might meet some people with similar