Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [49]
Luckily, the shrinks were in a mood to blow off steam or if not to actually blow it off, to smother it with alcohol. So after about half an hour, they were all drunk and telling amusing stories about their very sick patients, all of which made me feel extremely mentally healthy and mature. “I just want to say to her, If I had your life, I’d want to kill myself, too!” one of the shrinks said, and the others howled and banged their knives on the table in recognition.
After dinner Mark followed me toward Third Avenue and then invited himself over, making this the second night in a row that we’ve spent the night together. And the puzzling thing is, we still didn’t have sex. And I still don’t know why. I do know that he’s interested in me, physically. But I’m apparently not interested in him. And yet we never discuss the issue. We’re affectionate, but when it starts to become sexual, I shut down. I withdraw. I get my tunnel-vision thing. And I feel like I’m being smothered by wet blankets. And then all thoughts drain from my head, and my face becomes hot, and I shake. This never happened to me when I was drinking, but now that I’ve been sober for a few months, my internal rot is floating to the surface. Mark must know something is wrong with me. But he acts as though my reaction is the most natural reaction in the world, which then makes me confused. He drifts off to sleep. And I remain flat, looking at the ceiling.
When he left this morning, he said, “Maybe we’ll talk before you go to L.A. for your shoot.” But I didn’t know if he meant talk about last night, about not having sex. Or talk in general. The odd thing is, I have no idea what he’s feeling. And he’s a shrink, for fuck’s sake. But I’m starting to go a little crazy, needing desperately to be in control of the situation and feeling terrified he won’t fall in love with me and knowing that I can’t even know what my own feelings are until I know that he’s safely in love with me so then I can decide.
I don’t want to know what my feelings are until I know what his are. Somehow I know this can’t be right.
Mark is strange, oddly disconnected. If you didn’t know he was a shrink, you would think that there was something wrong with him in a subtle way that you would not be able to put your finger on. Of course, then you would find out he’s a shrink, and that would be it.
Since I left the window open, we were both bitten by mosquitoes in the night. But here’s where our reactions differed: he said, “I’ve got bites on my hand, flea bites or something,” and I thought that I had created the bites myself, with my mind and my own anxiety. So that’s the difference between a neurotic who believes it’s all his fault and a trained medical professional who naturally seeks a cause based in the facts of reality.
He does seem to like me. He seems interested in my odd past life, what little I have told him about growing up. But he doesn’t yet know of my alcoholism and recovery and constant journal writing. He knows I write every day for hours but has no idea that all I’m writing about is me. It seems wiser to let him think I’m an aspiring novelist instead of just an alcoholic with a year of sobriety who spends eight hours a day writing about the other sixteen. Plus, I’ve had to “minimize” my past. So while he knows my mother had a psychiatrist and that I was close to his family, he doesn’t have any idea just what happened. I wouldn’t want him to think I had a thing for shrinks.
I love his hair. He looks like a disheveled Prada model or an indie film actor. He looks nothing like a shrink or any kind of doctor, a fact that now disconcerts instead of comforts me, because it makes him more difficult to read and understand, and thus manipulate and control as I’m compelled to do.
Mark the Shrink doesn’t reveal much about himself. Instead, he listens closely, which encourages me to chatter constantly around him like a patient. Then later he says something that shows he listened and took copious mental notes, all of which disturbs me.