Wanting Rita (36 page)

Authors: Elyse Douglas

“Look, doctor, I know all the psychological babble and the tricks…”

She cut me off. “…and I propose, Alan, that you really know nothing. I propose that you really know nothing at all about anything.”

I saw through her trick and I grinned. “Okay, fine.” I sat down, rigid, feigning defeat, but furiously planning another course of attack. “Okay. I know nothing.” I crossed my arms, smugly.

“But we both know, Alan, that you
feel
things very strongly. You feel strongly about nearly everything that I can see. So what do you think about that?”

“Think or feel?” I challenged, glowing.

“Make your choice, but be honest with yourself. Are you playing games?”

“Maybe I am. So what?! Look, we know my father was calculating and arrogant. We know he was cold to me, warm to my sister and devoted to my mother. Okay, so I…” I slapped my chest, forcefully, “...feel that. For some reason, for some friggin’ reason that I don’t know, my father just didn’t like me. Okay, that’s simple and that’s just too bad. Most everybody has a rotten parent or two. But, as a result, I lacked a sure foundation emotionally. I know that! I never knew how to please him and no matter what I did, nothing seemed to work. Okay, I know that and I analyzed it and I thought about it when I took psych courses in medical school.”

“You thought about it?” Dr. Raskoffsky asked, with raised eyebrows.

“Yes, dammit, I thought about it and I
felt
about it!”

“Your father loved your mother?”

“Yes, deeply. I saw it, felt it. They were in love. When she died, he fell into a deep depression. I’m not sure he ever got over it. He had a stroke some months back, and has lost his will to live.”

“And you can relate to that?”

I considered her words. “Yes…I can.”

“And how do you feel about this woman you say you love? Rita?”

“That was abrupt.”

She shrugged it off. “So?”

I sighed deeply, and thought uncomfortably. “I feel… twisted by her.”

“Twisted? That’s an interesting choice of a word.”

“Yes. Twisted. Twisted around her. Molded to her, rings interlocking, breathing her breaths, wrapped about her like a vine…”

“So very poetic for a scientist.”

“But so scientific for a poet. Rings interlocking?”

She sniffed that away. “Perhaps you are clogging up your emotions with too many thoughts and words. What do you think?”

“Yes…clogging… maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m all clogged up with her.”

“Are you constantly finding some word to separate yourself from just letting yourself FEEL, Alan?”

“I feel, dammit! That’s the whole problem. That’s why I’m here. I’m here because my dead sperm killed everything!”

“So dramatic you are.”

I lifted my gaze and fired revulsion at her. “Go to hell!”

She didn’t blink and we sat in a deadening silence. My time was almost up. I sat back, squeaking the leather in the emerald upholstered chair, staring at the ceiling. I continued. “I believed, at least for awhile, that I could get Rita pregnant. I felt it intuitively. I really did feel it.”

“Obviously, you have given this a great amount of thought and you feel deeply about it.”

“And I’m here for a give-and-take conversation about it! Not to hear boilerplate psych talk!”

“So you couldn’t get her pregnant. So what? You’re a scientist. What does science say about such notions or feelings or intuitions?”

“I think science has a hard time answering questions like this. This is where science gets stuck or we just don’t have enough information to form a rational conclusion. How do you do a mathematical equation to prove intuition? How is that possible? But then it didn’t work out anyway, so, so what? Sometimes I just feel punished or shit on by the universe. I mean, despite all of your best efforts, your life just gets all screwed up or something.”

“You chose to see Rita again, did you not?”

“Yes…but I was just going back home to sell the house.”

“But you could have chosen not to see her again?”

“Yes.”

“Then did you choose to see her again?”

“Yes, I chose to see her again, but how did I know that it would lead to where it did and that it would converge in such a devastating way?”

“You can choose right now, can’t you?”

I switched around in the chair. “Yes… But.”

“So choose.”

I edged forward in agitation. “It doesn’t change the fact that the infertility destroyed both relationships! I mean, you know… there are some women who just don’t give a damn about having children! Why couldn’t Nicole and Rita have been one of those?! Why in the hell did Rita’s whole life—her entire recovery—depend on me getting her pregnant again!?”

“We choose, we choose, we choose, Alan. You can’t always choose the outcome but you can choose to think something else and to choose another course of action. Take charge of the situation and choose. Move the energy—your life energy—your thought energy into a different course of action.”

“We’re going nowhere, here!” I said, angrily.

“You are here, Alan. Now! Not in the past! Now! What are you going to do with all this new, ever-possible energy?”

I shook my head, overwhelmed. “Ah, the hell with it! Sometimes I think everybody just thinks too much about everything. My damned head is spinning.” I put my head in my hands.

“We can sit quietly and say nothing, if you want.”

I sat quietly for a moment with my eyes closed. When my cell phone rang, I snatched for it and shut it off. Pushing to my feet, I stalked the thick burgundy carpet, enveloped in anger and confusion. Finally, when I heard a siren screaming by outside, I spoke. “I wrote to Rita once, but I didn’t send it. I wrote it last winter, when I was on the beach in Barbados… It was all about silence. How the quiet of her always healed me somehow—not that she doesn’t have a temper—she does, but there is this inexplicable peace I often feel with her; that feeling of coming home.”

“What did you write about her? Do you remember?” the doctor asked.

I settled down into the chair. “…Yes, I remember.” I closed my eyes, hesitant and diffident. But recalling the words warmed and healed.

“Her silence was loud with fascination. Her greatest magic was her lack of words; the way she positioned her body on a blanket by the lake, or in a restaurant chair or on the bed, when she blew on my hand and it felt like sand trickling through my fingers. Her still eyes were constantly breaking the code of my heart’s secrets.”

Moments later, my eyes opened. Dr. Raskoffsky sat still. I sensed impatience.

“So are you a poet at odds with the scientist, Alan?” the doctor asked.

“I don’t know what that means.” My voice cooled and I sat up. “I learned recently, by looking at old medical records, that my grandfather had had an infertility problem. My father was born when grandfather was 22 years old. He was unable to have another child. They adopted my father’s brother. My mother said my grandfather was a severe man, and very hard on my father, even in his last years. You wouldn’t think so, would you? You would think that he would have adored his only begotten son. But he didn’t. He favored Raymond, the adopted son. Go figure.

“My mother said that my father basically despised his father. My mother also said, when she was dying, that my father had an obsessive love for her, right from the very first meeting at that country club dance. He told her that he loved her and that he was going to marry her, and he did.”

I stood again. My time was up. “So you see, doctor, it’s all just the silly games and play of good old DNA. Even a good or complete understanding of the genome doesn’t tell us what it means to be human.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, we keep killing, stealing, lying…”

“Are we talking about your guilt and your feelings of failure?”

“I’m saying that, even if we were to modify those 30,000 plus genes with which human beings are encoded, and we produced a race with Shakespeare’s brain power and Derek Jeter’s athletic power, we still couldn’t produce a race of angels. So where in the hell are we really going?”

“Alan. Are you talking about your guilt? Your failure to impregnate Rita?”

“I’m saying that it is extremely hard not to feel a victim of one’s own software program! That’s what I’m saying. I mean, I spend a lot of my time telling patients to be proactive with their health and not to be a victim. That’s what I’m saying. I’m saying that we all may be, in fact, victims, after all—victims of some “thing” out there or in here, and yet we’ve duped ourselves into believing and acting like we’re not victims.”

Dr. Raskoffsky folded her hands on the desktop and leveled her confident eyes on me. “And I say that is a cop-out. I propose to you this: now that your “house” has burnt down, you have the opportunity to find an original life. Isn’t that what you said about your quantum physics a session or two ago, that there are infinite possibilities just ripe for the choosing within the cosmic soup? So what do you feel, Alan? Want do you really want?”

By July, I’d stopped seeing Dr. Raskoffsky. I’d made a decision.

The first week of August, I called information to get Rita’s phone number. It wasn’t listed. I searched the internet but found nothing. Megan’s husband, Paul, a computer programmer, assured me that he could find Rita, and he did. The next morning Megan texted me the information: Rita was living in Sedona, Arizona.

I wrote to her that night.

Chapter Three

Dear Rita:

What would a true hero of the story do? Demand we meet again? Travel to Arizona, unannounced, and demand an audience with you? Does he wait, hoping without hope, that the heroine will call or write or send him another of her wonderful stories? Tell him he’s forgiven for failing you? For failing us?

What does a hero do when he doesn’t know what a hero really is anymore? When the “white hat guy” has dropped his hat in the mud and only finds mud with which to clean it?

Is the hero just a guy who, stumbling forward into a forest of obstacles, strains to learn some lesson that will make him “better” or “good” or “wise” until that fine day when he drops dead or, accidentally, falls into the pit of illumination?

Does the hero just sit and watch the movement of his mind, feeling its impulses, its desires, its fantasies, hoping they’ll just dissolve away someday, so that his true inner self can break out and shine in all its effulgence? What does he do in the meantime?

What does the hero do with his love, when she lives in his heart, but not in his life? She, the incarnate definition, reflection and heartbeat of his love; his life’s true path and purpose, feeding him, maturing him, marrying his heart and mind and making him complete, like duality joined to eternity.

“Wordy” stuff, my old therapist would say. Too many damned words. Feel it more with an honesty of simplicity.

Okay, Rita. Simple. I love you. I’d hoped that somehow my sickly sperm would come through for us this time, but it didn’t. I hoped for so many things.

Rita, I’d love to see you again. I waited nearly a year before contacting you. I miss you, I love you, I want you. Simple.

Can I come and see you? I’ll sit in silence and listen and not talk about the past. We know it all so well anyway, don’t we? We don’t even have to talk about the future.

I’m a better hero now, Rita. Better because of you. Because of us.

I’d love to hear from you…in any way you wish.

With love,

Alan James

Hero, who is looking for a clear, cool spring, where he can clean his dirty hat.

P.S. I’m taking jazz piano lessons. I can almost play
Twinkle, Twinkle

Little Star
.

I mailed the letter and waited, in agony, for a response. A little over two weeks passed before I received one. I tore open the envelope, drew out a single typed page, and read.