counseling

The Pillows.

The counselor sat facing them in her large black leather chair, which looked quite comfortable, unlike that old brown sofa where they sat. Nicer than the one in the waiting room, but only just, and always holding too many pillows. Too many, at least, if anyone wanted to actually sit. She never knew what to do with the pillows.

Mark sat on the far side and told the counselor he was upset she couldn’t let the small things go. It seemed she had to comment on everything, he said. Or that was the gist of it. He used a lot of words while she sat silently and tried to keep her mind open. She too felt very upset.

What upset her wasn’t so much the facts underlying his frustration, he was often in the right, she often was inconsiderate and much too critical—it was (again) the fact that he hadn’t said anything to her about it until now. It was as if he had kept the evidence tucked away, hidden until he had someone to hide behind, avoiding her, which was the problem in the first place.

When she found out these things so late it seemed as if she were, unbeknownst to herself, living in imaginary spaces that didn’t actually exist. It was jolting to find you were living in fantasies. For instance thinking the whole week that he was content with her, when he was not at all content. Admittedly, a week was a much better than, for instance, the time between the present moment and a Saturday three years ago.

The three pillows were large and square and red with small orange flecks. She never knew what to do with them. Each time she entered the office, she was forced to prepare to sit, a process of gathering up pillows and moving them elsewhere. She wondered if the placement of pillows was some sort of test, a makeshift Rorschach. For instance, if she placed the pillows on the floor or on the back of the couch or between herself and Mark, or behind her head or to her right, did it mean something? The same way the crossing of arms or legs, or leaning forward or backward supposedly did? She wondered if the counselor made notations. Wednesday, June 03, 2013. Pillow placement: Hoarding/Regressive. Avoidant/Distancing. Resistant.

She did not want to exhibit anything by the movement of a pillow from here to there, but it often seemed as though everything was a mark of something else. Wasn’t there something about a cigar just being a cigar, she thought. But was that ever true? Of course, she was often the one busy thinking about what every cigar really meant, always searching, looking for more, never content with anything simple and plain. She knew. Projection. She knew what that was too.

She spoke to the counselor directly, addressing Mark in third person. First, she said, she was listening, she understood he was frustrated and why—but also: this didn’t seem fair. Why hadn’t he brought this up before? With her? Why now? She felt like she had been brought to the principal’s office.

Why couldn’t he address her directly? Look her in the eye?

It enraged her when he tucked things away. She’d have preferred he just confront her.

It would make her feel she could exist without destroying him, without him leaving her.

Wednesday evenings.

They dreaded it. Both of them did.

On Wednesday evenings, at the sound of the buzzer, Mark and she walked up the narrow staircase and sat on the futon sofa that lay too low to the ground, their knees practically in their faces, and they waited. A short distance across the room, an old fan rested on a wooden chair next to a pile of old Psychology Today magazines. On the small table to their right sat the only children’s toy in the waiting room, a curves-and-waves rollercoaster, its red and blue and yellow wooden beads hanging from curving wires at various low points.

Fitting for this office, she had thought more than once, staring at the static, but colorful beads, how many analogies and metaphors might reside in a toy like that?

At exactly six-o-clock the counselor invited them into her office. There, they took seats on opposite sides of an old brown sofa full of pillows, and faced the counselor. A bookshelf crammed with psychoanalytic texts sat in the far corner of the room and whenever she didn’t know where to place her gaze, which was often, she found herself staring at their spines.

They spoke about each other in second and third person interchangeably for an hour. Sometimes they would say you did/said x or y and sometimes they would look at the counselor and say s/he did/said x or y. Sometimes they would use each other’s names. She tried to work out whether or not there was a pattern to their use of second and third person, but she couldn’t keep track of how and when they used each. It seemed there was a lot to keep track of, even though there were only three people sitting in a rather sparse room and just one person speaking at any given time.

She noticed how far apart they sat from each other and how Mark folded his arms and crossed his legs and leaned back and also how he would take twice as long as she did to make his points. His points were not any more or less complicated than hers and she often predicted them long before he finished.

It was true that counseling was the hardest thing to do, especially with someone else. It required special care for her to keep her mind open during these types of conversations, ones that often focused on how wrongheaded she’d been at this moment or that, whether the moment under scrutiny was three years ago one Saturday morning she couldn’t even remember but was clearly important to Mark, for instance, or Friday of last week.

She listened to the others speak about her in second and third person, desperately fighting to control the counter-attacks rising within her, the series of Yes-Buts, the examples in which he had been Just Like Her—But he did the same thing!—Or the times in which he was responsible for her more unbecoming choices—If only he hadn’t, she wouldn’t have. Etcetera.

She did find it astonishing that Mark remembered so many moments, so many dates and times, in so much detail, and for so long. She envied his capacity to remember. And so specifically.

Once, upon a random request from their friends, he had counted from memory exactly how many Shakespearean scenes featured monkeys and described each in detail. Her friends left in awe. She didn’t much care for Shakespeare, but she, too, respected his cosmic knowledge of it. 

On Wednesdays his capacity for recall had its rather obvious disadvantages. The crisp memory of some Saturday morning three years ago when she had, standing in the kitchen, with a mouthful of cereal, asked if he ever considered going to a shrink, implying not so subtly a certain failure and incompetence on his part — it was not the thing she wanted remembered. Clearly, she supposed, since she herself had forgotten it.

The truth was: It wasn’t that he remembered. Or even that she looked so ugly. What upset her the most was that Mark slept next to her for so long, for so many years, without telling her. It was that she always learned about him so late.

And so, on Wednesdays, she often wondered who exactly was sitting next to her. It sometimes felt as though she didn’t know him at all. Sometimes when she wished he had told her this or that already, it was because she respected him more knowing it, however good or bad it made her feel. But sometimes when she learned x or y, she wondered how she could have ever loved him at all. Sometimes she hated him. Or herself. Sometimes, sitting on that old sofa facing the counselor, she felt it would never work. She thought all of it was pointless. Neither of them would ever change, would they? Did anyone? 

Somehow, regardless, at the end of the session, when they walked down the stairs outside onto the sidewalk, they hugged each other.

She always felt closer to him for having gone through it, for having gotten through the hour.