Louise had had herself a very long week. It was the week before her life would begin to dig its way sunward, the week she would begin to see a brand new kind of therapist for a whole new kind of therapy. But she didn’t yet know this, couldn’t possibly fathom it, actually; so, her mood was rather tense and her body followed suit.
Monday had woken her up in the middle of the night with such muscle spasms she feared she would incite her husband to call 911 on the spot. Poor Nick, she had thought, even as her habitual premature reaction was sending recognizable hatred and resentment through her nervous system. The way that he cared, she found it impossible to receive. She despised being seen in her pain, and despised even moreso watching another person try to suck some of it from her, as if they could possibly make it better that way. No, it cannot be sucked: then you simply have two people in pain instead of one. She knew that Nick didn’t have the proper support structures in place to make a transaction like that the least bit intelligent, helpful, or sustainable. It’s the sort of thing Shamans in the Amazon could do, she thought, but that man speaks only English, and Business English at that. How in the world does he think he can carry this for me? What conceit. What total ratshit. And, that night in bed trying to subdue her spasms with silent anger, she had met the guilt of this tortured chamber of Doom and Repression exactly the moment she was hit with a fresh bout of unbelievable pain, and she staggered into the bathroom to throw up.
Tuesday had not gone well at all. After spending the pre-dawn in tepid, salty bathwater, she had worked up a sense of self to match, which she felt did her no good in the go-get-‘em world of real estate. Louise’s coworkers seemed to be having a particularly successful time going and getting ‘em, which only made her feel more like the faded photograph of a grandmother’s scowl. She closed her office door, trying hard to stay busy and keep still by organizing her computer files. By early afternoon, the pain meds had again worn off and someone had come to knock on her door. She felt like hiding under the desk.
“WHAT.” She was surprised at the crack of her own whip. Pain cranks up the volume on everything.
A timid head poked in. It was Stephani, the youngest partner in the business. A real nice lady. A fucking go-getter. She probably had good news.
“I have some good news, Louise,” she apologized gently. “We’ve closed the deal on the 10th Street Market. Big bunch of going-green opportunists looking to put in some pricey organic shops and a wellness center, maybe even give Whole Foods a run for its money.”
“Oh,” sighed Louise, having held her breath without realizing it. “That’s good, Steph. Good job.”
Although it wasn’t a great stream of accolades, it also wasn’t a coffee mug in the face. Stephani closed the door with the look of a whiskey-n-coke: one part pissy and blue, having been let down by the one she loved, one part relieved and sweet, having come out on top anyway.
Wednesday wasn’t much different for Louise: lotta hiding, fair deal of organizing, bit of weary participation in office communications. Thursday, however, brought with it the particularly paralyzing sting that comes with too many days spent in uncontrollable, sporadic, unpredictable waves of numbness and pain. She had snapped off the heads of four people before her first cup of coffee. By lunchtime she had made several reckless deals, five of which were total longshots, two of which were joylessly finalized as she pulled long red strands of hair from her head. Louise, who had always been a rather handsome woman, was looking like a wax statue of her future undead self and acting about the same. From where she stood, the old neurotic habit of pulling hair had many benefits to offer: one, she got direct, physical evidence of being alive while she spoke on the phone with people who had no idea what was truly going on in her living body; two, she had a source of pain of which she was in control; and three, she watched herself declare, strand by strand, that her beauty was less important to her than the unquestionable reality of her pain. After knocking one of the long shots into an unexpectedly feasible range, she had a hairball the size of a newborn kitten next to her computer. By the time she closed on the second seemingly-impossible deal, the kitten had grown up into a toy poodle.
By afternoon coffee break [1], Louise was surrounded by a roomful of people who both thoroughly hated and ambitiously admired her. This must be what it’s like to be president of the United States, she thought, as a tiny intervenous gunman went on a killing spree along her sciatic nerve. The hairs that grew back where she had plucked them were gonna be white as the swan in her condo’s fake pond.
“Louise!!” shouted a gleefully uncorked Amy as she toasted her adversarial ally. “You won’t have to work for at least the next month!”
Ha ha ha, haha, ha. That’s right, Amy, it’s best when Louise doesn’t come in.
“Louise. Oh my goodness. Just when you think someone’s gone off the deep end, they show you what they’re made of.”
Nice backhand. Little did Bruce know. She was made of the deep end.
“I know. Really, Louise, it’s like you’re Mozart or something.”
Comment critique, uncut: Angela had seen Amadeus once, so in this regard she felt confident alluding to him as a tortured artist. She had not seen Frida or Basquiat, both of which would have worked in context, both of whose main characters were artists with whose work she was equally unfamiliar. The “or something” clause was thrown in because Angela didn’t seem to think that closing on two major real estate transactions in one morning while battling a particularly disruptive gang of MS symptoms was necessarily of equal value to the symphonies she had never personally taken the time to hear in their entirety. [2]
“Louise. What on earth have you been doing in that office—we thought you were playing online poker or writing your memoir. And all this time, you’ve been actually working. Way to show us up. Bravo!”
Bow-tie wearing Ben had gone for the razor-sharp compliment, as was his style. But it was the last straw in a game of short straws.
“SHUT UP,” shouted Louise. “All of you. Fucking wretched pretentious passive aggression fiends! Constipated competition hacks! I don’t have time for this bloodbath. Get back to work, and please, for the love of god, leave me the fuck alone!”
But they all kept schmoozing there just the same, completely unphased. Continuing their spiked praise and poison punch. Louise white-knuckled her coffee mug, realizing with a sickening flush of stomach acid, I must not have said it out loud. Shit.
“Louise!” “Louise.” “Oh, Louise!” continued on for another ten minutes, until she was finally able to zombie-walk back into her office, where she sat and ate pudding. The cold, soft sweetness was the only thing she could think of that would not offend her in that moment. She ate a four-pack of individual snack-sized lunch-box filler before she felt calm enough to cry.
Friday morning, after her husband left for work, she called herself in sick. Despite the disgusting response (“Oh honey, you deserve it!”) and the inner voice shouting defeat (You’re proving them right, you’re proving them right!), she felt like it was the only thing worth doing. She lay comatose on the couch all morning, until her wounded pride out-throbbed her nerve endings. At noon, she gathered the last of her sanity and rode the metro to a coffee shop across town where no one would know her nor expect her to smile. Then she ordered the most expensive drink on the menu just so she could taste it.
Plopping down in a giant leather armchair, Louise set about organizing her mind files. Getting it together. Being useful. She was ten minutes into the process before registering she was working pro-bono, doing for free the same shit she did at work, keeping busy and staying still. It stank of futility.
She sighed, sank back, and took a moment to look around. Dim lights cast their fake-fire glow across the faces of important business meetings, studious kids, and hand-holding lovers alike; the coffee shop is to gentrified art districts what the disco-lit karaoke bar was to the 80’s or the generic “bar & grill” is to the suburbs. People huddled together over unspoken underlying agreements, increasing their sense of self and generally trying to keep dry in the storm of cultural warfare.
One thing, and one thing only in this dreary commercial break, caught Louise’s attention.
Across the posh squat table sat a long-limbed olive-skinned beauty with mahogany eyes directed so far out the window it seemed that the time of the air around her was at least one hundred years ahead. Or behind. Something like a lush forest dripped imperceptibly in her atmosphere, almost visible the moment before blinking. Or after. Her breathing was noticeably deep and still, if she were covered in birds, snakes, a jungle cat or two. Perfectly, unshakably calm. Louise double-blinked to be sure: yes, there was indeed an actual bee buzzing back and forth on the woman’s orange pen, which itself buzzed in harmonious syncopation, back and forth on the thick pages of a hardcover book. She occasionally pressed her eyes and blood-red lips together into the closed focus of sensory deprivation, only to come open again more breathtaking, more ferociously alive with color and silent song.
Louise watched her for a gracefully long moment, mouth open like a child. Then, shaking it off, bringing her coffee mug sheepishly to her waiting lips, she glanced down into the liquid black pearl, hoping to see a reflection of some aspect of the beauty she saw in the other. Quite on the contrary, what she saw was a pair of tired eyes folded deeply into wary layered sockets of chronic fatigue. She put the mug down. When her vision adjusted from the shadow shapes of the black mirror, it flickered swiftly to register the pair of lit brown fire agates blazing back at her. Looking far too directly at Louise, the woman blinked the slow shine of a lighthouse weathering a storm, then, in no hurry, let her mouth bear the shelter of a small smile.
Delirious enough with her Circus of Fucking Exhuastion [3] work week, and mesmerized enough to have been caught completely in the headlights, Louise actually heard herself ask in the voice of a starry child, “Are you an angel?”
“No,” said the smile of Vanni Rigamonte. “I’m a therapist.”
**
1. …which is a funny, old-fashioned tradition in a place that breathes & pisses coffee all day long.
2. It’s important to be accurate.
3. CFE: Certified Fraud Examiner.