A surprise greeted me as I opened the door to the waiting room. Craig was right where I expected to find him: in the corner chair, which was the location farthest from any other seat in the room. But sitting closest to the door was another patient of mine, one who didn’t even have an appointment that afternoon. It actually took me a moment to recognize her. She’d dyed her hair so that it was a shade of red that nature tended to reserve for flowers and fruits, and she’d cut it short enough that she wasn’t going to need a blow dryer for a while.
Sharon Lewis.
She shot to her feet, glanced at the hypervigilant man in the corner-apparently concluding that he wasn’t much of an adversary-and with enough pressure in her voice to power a hydraulic lift, she announced, “I need a minute. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but I just do.” Then she squared and faced Craig. “May I have five minutes with him? I know it’s rude, but this is an emergency. You don’t mind, do you?”
Without waiting for either of us to reply, she squeezed past me into the hallway that led back to my office and disappeared from view.
Craig was having a difficult time comprehending what had just happened. I couldn’t blame him for that. Finally, he said, “It’s okay. Really.” But his eyes were jumping with incipient panic.
“It’s not okay,” I told him. “This time is yours.”
Despite a daily cocktail of psychotropic medications prescribed by a psychiatrist who knew what she was doing, and despite twice-weekly psychotherapy with me, Craig remained one of the most disturbed patients I’d ever tried to manage in outpatient therapy. I’d begun seeing him as a favor to my neighbor Adrienne, who worked with Craig’s parents, both local anesthesiologists. They thought I would be the ideal therapist to treat their son, one, because I wasn’t a colleague of theirs, and two, because my office was only a little more than a block from the town house they rented for Craig on West Pearl Street. Craig’s pathology severely limited the geographic territory in which he felt comfortable traveling.
Sharon Lewis could not have picked a more vulnerable person to intrude upon if she had plotted her assault on my waiting room for weeks.
“No, no,” he said. “It’s okay. I’ll wait. She needs… it… you… more than I do. I’ll wait-wait here.” He didn’t look at me as he spoke. Not even a glance.
“I’ll take care of this as quickly as I can.”
“Fine. Fine.” Exhale. “Fine, fine, fine.”
“I’ll be right back out,” I said. A blind person could have read his body language. Craig was anything but fine.
He stuck his face closer to his magazine. I noticed that he was readingPopular Mechanics. It wasn’t a title that Diane and I supplied to the waiting room, which meant that he had brought it along with him. It could have been, of course, that he wasn’t fond of any of the magazines we provided for the waiting room. But I suspected the reality was that Craig wasn’t comfortable picking up a magazine not knowing who might have touched it before him.
Would he admit that to me? Not yet. But we’d been making progress on the trust issue lately. Progress that I was afraid this event might annihilate.
Sharon Lewis was waiting on my sofa. She appeared as though she’d been hooked up to a Starbucks IV for most of the day. Her acute agitation made me think of Lauren’s recent Solumedrol jolt.
“I should just go back to Ontario and hide.”
“Ontario? California?” I felt an imperative to adjust my therapeutic gyroscope. Asking an inane question or two would buy me a few seconds of calibration time.
“I’m from Canada,” she explained.
“I didn’t know.” I didn’t.
“Well, they know,” she said. “God damn it. They know. They know everything.”
I took a slow, deep breath trying to find words that would challenge her without being accusatory. “What you just did out there in the waiting room, Sharon, is the same thing that got you into such a mess at the airport a couple of weeks ago. It’s what we’ve been talking about. You impulsively decided that your needs were more important than anyone else’s, in this case the other person in the waiting room. You once again allowed a sense of urgency”-I could have added, but didn’t, “and a sense of grandiosity”-“to cause you to decide that the rules”-I omitted “of decency and compassion”-“don’t apply to you.”
“I said I knew it was rude. And I apologized to him.”
“The problem is that knowing that the behavior is rude doesn’t serve to deter you at all. And your apology sounded about as sincere as-as a campaign commercial.”
Her jaws were clenched. Despite my bluntness my words hadn’t dented her Kevlar facade. I hadn’t expected they would.
“They know who I am. Today on the noon news, Colorado’s fucking News Channel reported that the mystery woman who inconvenienced a million airline passengers-you know,the most selfish woman in America-they’re reporting that her name is Sharon, that she lives in Boulder, and-get this-they said she’s getting mental health treatment for her ‘condition.’ My ‘condition’! Jesus.”
The blood drained from my face. I guessed what was coming next. And I wasn’t disappointed.
Or I was.
“Did you tell someone?” She almost spat the words at me. “Did you tell someone about me?”
“You would like to blame me for the situation you’re in?” I thought I managed to ask the question evenly, with just the slightest hint of confrontation.
“Who else?” The subtext of her retort wasYou imbecile! Nobody else knows but you!
Yogi Berra once said that he couldn’t think and hit a baseball simultaneously. His point? Some things happen so fast that they must be done by instinct.
My reply to Sharon should have been one of those instinctive things. But it wasn’t. Why? Because I was absolutely frozen in place by the fact that one of my options was admitting to Sharon that I’d just had a listening device removed from the office in which we were sitting, and that it was likely that the little microphone and transmitter had carried her secrets out my windows or through my walls out into the world.
The fact that one of the local television news channels knew only her first name convinced me that the leak had been from one of our sessions. Rarely did I ever use a last name during treatment. But if I made the admission to Sharon about the listening device, I was certain that she would, rightly, accuse me of destroying her hope of confidentiality. Were she to accuse me in public, the notoriety of the case would bring me almost as much misery as she was about to suffer.
I sputtered to find words. Although I knew I’d eventually have to tell Sharon and all my other patients what I’d found in my cushion, I wasn’t ready to start right at that moment.
In ten quick seconds of therapeutic silence I saw my precious career vaporizing before my eyes.
What did I end up saying? I said, “I don’t know, Sharon.”
She actually started to cry. “I was going to turn myself in. I was. Now? It will look like I did it because they found out it was me. Hell, I’m screwed. Screwed! I’m leaving-I have to talk to a lawyer.”
A minute later I was on my way back out to the waiting room to retrieve Craig. I opened the door to discover that he was gone. I wasn’t surprised, and I began considering the words I’d use that evening when I called Craig’s home trying to repair some of the damage. I actually felt some hope that if he and I could deal with what had happened in the waiting room that day, it might ultimately be helpful in his psychotherapy. Nevertheless, I didn’t take much comfort in being the unwitting foil in the provocation he had suffered.