What You Could Have Won Read online

  Paris had been management’s idea, but the Box Set was all you. You couldn’t believe Henry had never seen The Sopranos (you thought you were the only one) and you took it as a sign. Of course it was Melfi that got him interested and he began by commenting on the length of her skirt.

  ‘Therapy will never open up a man like Tony,’ he said. ‘ReOrientation is the only way forward,’ as he pounded an ice bag, ‘backed up with ReThink.’

  ‘Psychiatry’s gone to shit,’ you whispered to Laddie, a stuffed fox in a cap and cravat mounted on your middle finger through a hole in his stitching. You hung your head over the back of the couch. ‘ReOrient this!’ You brought Laddie and your finger back in close and whispered, ‘What did drugs do wrong, hey buddy?’

  Henry returned from the kitchen with a drink and you almost suggested playing popcorn Rorschach. You started planning a joke about that last night in Greece, but you didn’t have the nerve for that either.

  ‘It’s undisciplined attention that’s the threat to his mental health.’

  ‘Not the family of ducks,’ you said.

  ‘Perceptions are choices. You should all realize this.’

  Henry and Gregor implicitly encouraged everyone to use ReThink. You wondered if he had always done the clinic smile? You couldn’t have fallen in love with that, even back then.

  Back then was when Catherine managed to get you and your band their first paid gig at the Eliot Perlman Wellness Center in Manhattan. Arriving early, you realized you may have been a little high to do a charity gig because when you left the elevator, you felt threatened by the ballroom chandelier and began a little trot to get away from it.

  The band squinted together at a banner: Eliot Perlman Wellness Center Welcomes Non-Invasive Psychiatry Practitioners. Looking at Catherine, you asked, ‘Is this us?’

  Just before the set, you began to regret the joint in the dressing room because you found yourself being stared at. Hard. You stared right back, first looking at his head then the suit, the hair. You did not tolerate not knowing and so you were over to him in a few steps.

  ‘Your kind of gig?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ he said, looking up and down the line of you. No shame.

  ‘What do you do?’ You were sweeping for clues. British? Light gray suit, charcoal shirt. No tie. Good pecs. White lacquered cufflinks. Myrrh in the cologne. Milk-fed.

  ‘I stare.’

  You sank a substantial portion of his red wine, placing the glass back into his hand.

  ‘What else?’

  ‘That’s what I study. What people fixate on.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Their dwell time.’

  There was a definite high-wire recklessness to him. You stayed silent, waiting for him to pitch one way or the other under scrutiny. ‘Then I train them to fixate on what really matters.’

  This guy had monkey feet.

  ‘Nice work, hombre,’ you said, taking the last drops of his wine and leaping up onto the stage, knowing that you were the expert here and had never looked better in your ten-year-old jeans. He might have spooked you, but his attention to you was so complete, so insistent, that you felt he had already put down a deposit. Dwell Time had crouched patiently in your mind. It would be the title of your first album.

  ‘Loose in LA’ opened the set, and for once, you held the note you always chickened out on too early, managed a move during Eddie’s solo that you hadn’t dared since leaving Lotus Falls, and made damn sure you didn’t search for Dwell Time in the darkness. The audience exploded after the song but quickly settled down quickly to a couple of mistimed whoops. During the encore you allowed him eye contact. He was the only one not begging for your attention so you pulled the mic close:

  ‘When I was twelve… back in Lotus Falls, a guy came to fix our TV.’

  Your tired-looking yellow hair covered your cheeks and shaded your eyes. The part you kept purposefully black.

  ‘My mom told him, “Astrid will always have a hole in her bucket.” This last song is for him.’

  Wild after the encore, you jumped down from the stage and stood before him breathing fast, the sweetness of red wine full in his face; not a single sour note.

  ‘OK,’ you said. ‘Tell me about it.’

  You grabbed his hand and tugged him through the clusters of associates and partners. You snuck him past security, out onto a balcony where neither of you acknowledged the magnificent view of downtown above the handrail. First, he made you laugh pretending to know about Electro. From this you got onto the tedium of cocaine compared to meth, next he had pressed into your hand what he said he had brought for himself. For a good half hour of speaking with him you hadn’t been able to tell if he was psychotic. Two hours later you were sitting at his feet.

  ‘A bird boy?’ you asked.

  ‘Not his official name,’ said Henry.

  ‘But this bird boy can read?’

  ‘He can’t move his eyes. His head moves like a bird’s to make up for that.’

  ‘Would a person be able to tell?’

  Henry thought for a second. ‘I have never seen a busier neck than his.’

  Your pupils spread like dinner plates at this and you felt the need to set up a recording of your conversation, imagining his answers ticker-taping from a tiny slot in the back of your head, gently parting your hair and coiling between the soles of your feet. Who says busier neck? You were falling for Busier Neck.

  ‘I started imagining a beak for him today.’

  Henry tapped his nose briefly on an imaginary piece of wood in front of his face.

  Silently you begged him. Don’t do that.

  ‘So his gaze is at the mercy of his neck, not his eyes.’

  ‘It’s all about where the eyes need to get to next. What’s important for him to know.’

  The bird boy emerged in glorious detail, the data explained in such delightful and unexpected terms that the ticker halted right there because, just like that, he had made a world for you to hold in your hand, a BirdBoy at its center. His choice of words split you up the middle and from that night on you would be holding in your guts with your hands. You were determined to ignore the unnerving feeling that he had known you were coming. His thoughts were made for you.

  You decided to test him. ‘What would you call your autobiography?’

  ‘How right I was, how right – exclamation mark, maybe two.’

  If he came up with that just for you, you will never let him go. Then he said, ‘I think perhaps Hole in My Bucket could be volume one for you.’

  You smiled lopsidedly.

  He hated the work ethic here in the US, despised the lack of holidays and the unspoken dictates of the psychiatry department he was part of, and the ass-licking robots that he worked with, but he was yet to specialize and so was still kowtowing to a cigar-smoking mentor, who made shameless millions in condoms and recycled paper in China and who insisted on calling him ‘Hank’.

  ‘What’s his name?’ you asked.

  ‘Frank.’

  You smiled. Full and equal smiles.

  Midnight brought the first real lull. You panicked, sure that it was because of the story you had foolishly told about yourself.

  ‘I could stay here forever’ – your words were steady as a lunatic’s, and when he laughed you laughed right alongside him. You sensed imminence: movement on a planetary scale, as if a new sky was being rolled out and under it; brutality, with the right kind of guidance and determination, might be avoided.

  You were upset at his surprise at your love of French literature. (You didn’t tell him that it began because Colette’s mother, like your own, seemed to have a fund of love for the world she never had to encounter.) Growing up in Lotus Falls you had smoked weed that was homegrown under plastic pitchers but was too strong to enjoy; you didn’t say that you thought it had changed you. You needed to confess to this stranger that after what you’d done, no one should push you to get perspective on yourself. You had fooled strangers by asserting you
r uniqueness but you didn’t want to fool him. You let him know you played the flute as well as the guitar and piano, but left out the news that you had remained indoors for a long period when a review of your first band described your performance as forced and emulatory, the reviewer concentrating instead on your tiny frame and the capricious switch from jet-black to yellow-ocher hair. You had no idea you and your loose-stringed guitar were soon to be plucked from the D Train by Lucien, an A & R man with a Hendrix-sized Afro from E&I Studios who looked as if he needed a bath. Recording the album in Nashville, relief would serve as well as regret to usher you into ignoring what you were really capable of. At the Eliot Perlman, neither of you would believe that you would one day lose the bump on your nose bequeathed you by your Greek grandmother (the miniature hillock of bone planed firmly away by a surgeon sick of your overexposure).

  It had become chilly on the balcony in the dark.

  You opened your hand on the ruined packet and allowed a pooling of anticipation. In savoring the ache of it you gained unnatural poise. You could wait! Spinning out the want, you asked him coolly, ‘What drew you to psychiatry?’

  ‘Dependence, mainly.’

  ‘All the fun’s in the waiting,’ you said.

  ‘Nothing beats it,’ he said, but wholesomely, so that you wondered if he was making you feel idiotic on purpose.

  ‘Or…’ you said, ‘anticipation is best when it ends.’ And hiding your chanciness, you got up and turned toward the bathroom, looking over your shoulder to flash your goofiest grin.

  There’s a pause after a drug-fueled sleep, just before the mind realizes there’s no taking back what’s been said. You had woken alone that first night, hurtling toward terror. Undone by something, you fought to fill the wilderness that had threatened you in sleep, feeling a need to keep terrible things at bay with your bare hands. Once awake, you continued to lope under an awkwardness, a mismatch: because you remembered from the night before the ease of talking with Henry, the joy of it, each revelation seeming as simple and smooth as the progress of a coin flipped into a fountain. You watched the flash/flash of a penny turning through water and then – who tells someone a story like that on a first date? – sat down sharply. The panic made you want to snatch that penny before it reached the bottom, to chomp your teeth into the chalky plaster at the bed of the fountain to get it, if you had to.

  Catherine calls you on your cell just after you switch off the news, telling you to ignore the papers and look at the sales, but the media, it seems, is unable to let you forget what happened in Paris.

  ‘Adriana’s dead and I don’t like it,’ you state baldly.

  ‘You should have stayed with Ray’s program.’

  Catherine has never believed that it’s an agent’s job to provide sympathy.

  ‘How’d you like a photographer groping your cunt?’

  She shudders. ‘I don’t want to think about it.’

  ‘What has the label said?’

  ‘Only if you tour again.’

  You think back to the last gig of the tour, the bonfire, the threats.

  ‘Sit tight.’ Catherine gave a little. ‘I’ll work on them.’

  You know it’s the truth, because Catherine is finally able to leave her husband and buy the house in Silverlake, all because of you.

  ‘But in the meantime, no going downtown. Those scarves are like flares to the press.’

  ‘I guess Combat de Coqs is out of the question?’

  Catherine wants no more risks.

  Since you flew back from Paris, Henry has been in meetings or on exaggerated calls with Greg about ReOrient and the book, leaving you looking out from the apartment, scanning the park and surrounding buildings for the black glint of long lenses and wondering why you thought that finishing the Box Set could help you. You began pawing through Henry’s things. The graph-paper notebook had been left on the bedside table and slotted into it was a Xeroxed psychiatry article. Scanning the title, your eyes jumped to Henry’s writing further down the page but he interrupted you looking for his good cufflinks, a present from a friend at college. You began reading aloud: The face does not age as one homogeneous object but as many dynamic compartments, which need to be evaluated, augmented and modified as such.

  Henry’s distracted smile hovered above the performance but he had found what he was looking for and was leaving to meet Gregor.

  ‘Why have you underlined that?’

  ‘They love that shit.’

  ‘Who does?’

  ‘NYU. Gregor’s patients.’

  The notebook felt poisoned and you threw it on the bed. If you can’t rewind, ReThink; it came naturally. Henry: the great coach.

  ‘Why do these patients need you?’

  ‘Mistakes need a ReThink.’ He made to kiss you on the top of your head and you turned from him so that the kiss was a shock in the cup of your ear, shrinking the skin over your shoulders. He picked up the notebook. When you heard the door, you padded quickly after him into the hall.

  ‘Hey!’

  ‘I’m already gone,’ he lilted.

  ‘Lucien’s coming over!’

  The door closed gently as if by an invisible hand.

  After seeing Tony Soprano getting a blow job at the Bing, you began dreaming of Tony as your therapist. Lucien was called round to check the locks. You touched Henry much less. And you became increasingly spiky when Adriana turned up on-screen. You called to Henry in the kitchen.

  ‘Hey, Hank! White jeans. Your favorite.’

  Henry had favored your navy over your white pants before his faculty garden party and now, instead of joining you on the couch, Henry sat on a chair, a declaration that he only did things that he chose to.

  The horizontal rips in Ade’s jeans were equally spaced, a punk-me-by-numbers for the mall. Henry leaned away from your childish tug toward a change of mind.

  ‘I would say white is fine.’

  Lightning at night shows the world just as it is but you must scan greedily because it will only show for a second, the rich wide territory behind someone’s words. Gone for good was the notion that you would ever have the power to get him to change his mind on anything that mattered to you.

  ‘She’s an informant! She has IBS for Christ’s sake!’ You wanted to scratch out the word fine with something sharp. Pausing the action, you jammed the remote now at the jeans. ‘That’s OK?’

  Adriana, frowning slightly, was captured at a point somewhere between a fox and a fawn and was dumbly beautiful. You felt your throat constrict.

  ‘It’s fine. In this case,’ Henry said, all effortful neutrality.

  ‘But not for your party.’

  ‘The navy looked better on you.’

  Adriana held still for you on the screen, everything you wanted but paused. She was all yours, captured forever if that’s what you demanded and she stayed there, accepting layers and layers and layers of looking at.

  In the episodes before Paris, Furio and Carmella had been falling in love behind Tony’s back and it was killing you. Henry sighed as a song struck up dramatically; old school Southern Italian, chaotic with melancholy. He began to smirk at you.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ you snapped.

  ‘Look at the shirt! I can’t work out if he’s a gladiator or a hairdresser.’

  ‘Who cares about the shirt? He’s exactly what she needs.’

  ‘He’s a murderer. From Naples.’

  ‘She loves him.’

  ‘They have barely ever been in the same room!’ Henry was openly laughing at you, the exasperation he had felt now transformed. You stared at him levelly.

  ‘Whatever happened to the insurmountable joy of anticipation?’

  Henry’s look was suspicious, as if he thought you were trying to play a trick on him.

  ‘Did I say that?’

  Maybe it was this. Or maybe it was when Carmella admitted her love for Furio to Tony, despite the shirt, the ponytail. Here Henry sniggered and you felt raw, unable, you had to leave your
seat, you walked blindly to the kitchen, bumbling into the counter, then to the bathroom, only then did you pause. From the living room came sounds of Tony punching through the wall and you considered getting clean, catching the briefest glimpse of how things might be if you were to save yourself.

  You could smell it was a hospital before you opened your eyes. From your hospital bed, the team had you sign a contract to attend and complete Hypno Ray’s program in Paris. Lucien stayed in the company apartment, near Rue de Surène, and to start with, because of Dwell Time album sales, you were given a suite at the Hôtel Costes, where the walls of the lobby were lined with velvet the color of eggplant. On the way to your suite, unwelcome thoughts pushed you to the walls where you put your hand up inside the guts of a thick dark satin tassel. The room Catherine chose for you was exquisite: beetroot, turquoise, gold and white, with dull gold curtains and a highly decorated pelmet. After a few minutes in the room, you ran downstairs to the terrace and scraped an iron chair into the sun as if the light itself would save you. A toned waitress whose hair had a liquid sheen, dressed in scarlet Lycra at 9 a.m., took your order without a word. You could see in her face that the hospital stay had not been kept private. Without returning your fake smile she brought your order of tartines and sliced olives and you commented on her hair, which she didn’t respond to either. Out of spite, you asked for french fries. Then you pointed to a flask of vinegar. For the first time, you could feel your anger rallying under Henry and went along with the idea that that’s where it belonged. The vinegar looked pink in the light which carved a twist of grief through you because, without drugs, wishing became impossible. It was the food stirring up trouble, that was all. Eating ravenously, alone, you had tilted in at yourself but you must look inward only if you are ready to deal with things. Wasn’t this a great hotel? The dining courtyard was a secret even from most Parisians but forcing yourself to feel this privilege made your eyes brim with tears. You finished the bread and looked through the sharp outline surrounding the sky above the courtyard while the thought of your room, two floors above, the colors just right, broke your heart.