Patchwork dolls, p.13
Patchwork Dolls, page 13
In their session, Charlotte asked them each to describe the other in third person, an exercise John found absurd. They were instructed to face each other while they spoke.
“Rachel has dark hair,” John said. “Er … she’s an accountant. She likes to be prepared.”
“John is an artist—”
“I’m just an interior designer.”
“I think you’re an artist! You’re an artist. I’ve seen your sketches.”
John tried not to let his surprise show, because he had not taken the time to show her any of his papers. For some reason, he had trusted that she wouldn’t look; perhaps he had lived alone for too long. He had forgotten how spaces could bleed together. He did feel as if he wasn’t being entirely honest with Rachel, but he was also afraid of revealing too much too early. He cared what people thought. It irritated him. He hated how sensitive he was to expectations. Once, when he was a student, he had spent three days color coordinating the pencils at his studio just so that when his friend visited, they would be more convinced that he was a working artist. In the end, they hadn’t even looked at his shelves.
Rachel began again. “John is an artist, and a very observational one at that. I feel like he not only notices things, but he takes care of them, even small acts like putting the mail in the right place on the lobby table or making sure his toothbrush faces the same way every night. He’s deeply empathetic. He loves to cook.”
Charlotte nodded in approval, and she gestured to John to speak. He thought to himself that it had felt good to hear Rachel acknowledge him, to rewrite his fixations as a type of care. It was a quality of hers that he liked very much—her ability to take a step back and reassess logically, in contrast with his all-consuming waves of anxiety.
“Rachel is an accountant, but I think if you get to know her, you’ll also realize that she has many other interests. She reads a lot. Her choices in literature always surprise me. We both like Ishiguro, for example, and Orhan Pamuk. She doesn’t cook, or rather, can’t,”—here John smiled at her, and she reciprocated— “but she’s super interested in the science behind everything, whatever I’m cooking. She always asks why this thing reacts with the other thing, how it breaks down, why something tastes the way it does when it’s baked or fried. And actually, I treat my projects in a similar way. I always like to ask, why does this material react with the other in this way? What are the limitations here?”
Charlotte seemed neutral after hearing their respective comments. She revealed a printed-out chart of success rates, noting that they had successfully made it past the first four weeks of cohabitation. However, she stressed, this was expected. Relationships typically enjoyed a honeymoon phase that dropped off around the five-week mark.
“I would advise you to focus more on the program,” Charlotte said, mentioning that they should engage in more CoupleTrue-approved activities, such as pottery classes, wine tasting, go-kart racing.
John found the whole thing vaguely stressful. If they liked each other, wasn’t that enough? Rachel seemed interested; she was always asking him questions. They had lively discussions, and they enjoyed each other’s company.
Still, he felt the cold stirrings of paranoia work their way into his body. Perhaps Rachel doesn’t feel the same way I do, he thought. Maybe she does want more of these conventional big romantic gestures. He gave her a small sideways glance, but she was just as brightly lit and upright as usual and didn’t notice him looking.
Before the session ended, Charlotte gave them each a tiny vial of pills, intended to help with intimacy. “Take one pill thirty minutes before you plan to engage in sex. The chemicals help remove any neurotic dispositions or anxieties that might occur with new partners. We want to encourage a familiarity, a routine, early on. You may experience boredom at first, but that’s normal,” she emphasized. John nodded but didn’t tell Charlotte that they had already broken one of the rules by sleeping together the previous week, after their dinner at So Noodle! They had kissed again outside of the restaurant in the dark and then outside their apartment, and in the hallway and living room, each time more prolonged and feverish, the spontaneity that began with the dinner invitation fuelling a slippery looseness between them. The only mention of CoupleTrue that night had been the small logo on the condom packet.
The lack of sharing with Charlotte was something they both agreed on prior to the session, although John noticed that Rachel had been hesitant, even fearful.
“It’s only because I’m generally a very private person,” he said, meaning to reassure her. “I don’t discuss those things even with my close friends. To me, it’s something that should be kept between two people.”
“I know, I know,” she responded. “I just feel, I don’t know, like I’m lying. Shouldn’t we be completely open with our therapist?”
“She’s not just our therapist,” John said. “I’m not sure what to call her … but I just feel like there are things that shouldn’t be judged or analyzed immediately.”
But they were judged anyway. Charlotte said in their session that normal, well-functioning couples should engage in intimacy three times a week, and she guided them toward an app developed by CoupleTrue. In her presence, John had downloaded the app and inserted his date of birth, height, dietary restrictions, and basic lifestyle choices. It physically pained him to be so direct and to see himself reduced to such tiny data.
“No more indecision or uncertainty,” Charlotte said, and again John felt a small part of himself react strangely to the locked statement. Was this what he really wanted? Was this what they had all agreed on? In his last relationship, he had struggled with expressing his own needs in relation to what was considered a normal, socially acceptable timeline. It hadn’t been a singular event that caused the unraveling of his relationship with his ex, but a series of missed meals, miscommunications, and lack of planning.
Part of his enjoyment of his night with Rachel was that it hadn’t been suggested by CoupleTrue—he had just done it, and the ease with which she reciprocated his affection had made him confident. That wasn’t something you could parse out verbally or in languages of logic. He liked that he had initiated something that worked just as well as a bullet point activity on a leaflet or a footnote in an email. It was also true that this was something he did at work all the time—finding creative, rebellious solutions to projects that seemed rigid to the point of failure— and he relished those satisfactory moments.
He then found himself horrified at the prospect of treating Rachel like a project. He had, in the past, made it a point to never compromise in relationships—it had to do with his family and how strict they were with him as a child—but now he sincerely wanted this to work.
“What are you thinking about?” Rachel asked.
“Nothing,” he said, shaking himself out of it. He took her hand. “Let’s not keep anything from them in the future. I feel bad about that.”
“Okay,” Rachel said, a little surprised at the turn of events. “Thanks.”
Now, outside of the clinic, John shook his vial in the evening’s fading primrose light. It was Friday; people were leaving work, umbrellas drawn like huge floating skirts for the incoming rain. The pills were buttery yellow, round, with a hard ridge down the center.
“Well,” he said, turning to Rachel. “What do we do with these?”
* * *
IT WAS TRUE, THEY became bored almost instantly. The tedium that plagued them was not one of irritation or frustration, but a softer, mellow kind, one that reminded Rachel of lying under her parents’ living room fan as a child in the summertime.
“I remember feeling this way before smartphones and the internet,” Rachel said. They were now both lying on the sofa, heads apart but feet tangled together. John looked up slowly.
“Yes … yes! And it also feels like, it feels like when you’re young, and you’re sitting in the car in traffic, and you start to fall asleep because it’s so warm …”
“Right, that too. Also, waiting for the rain to stop because you want to go outside …”
They talked a little more, then napped, then woke up again, pouring themselves enormous wobbling glasses of water that created raised liquid islands on the kitchen countertop. Rachel took another pill, John took three. She looked at him.
“Charlotte said it was fine! She said you could take up to six per day.”
Somehow, she found this funny, she found him sweet, and she laughed, holding his arm a little. His flesh felt wobbly, and it made her feel wobbly too. “Hey, John,” she said suddenly, “can we look at your sketches?”
She could tell that he was nervous at her request. In fact, she had thought about asking him a few times, but the moment never seemed right. She realized John responded better to spontaneity; he tended to work himself into severe anxiety if he had time to stew over things.
She continued: “I just feel like I want to get to know you better, and since it’s something you’re doing every day, I wondered if you wanted to share. But I’m okay to wait if you’re not ready.”
To her surprise, he agreed, but immediately became mute as he took out his papers, his books, and showed them to her wordlessly.
“And these are people you know?” she asked, trying to begin a conversation, looking at the various faces and limbs and bodies.
“No … well, they’re not exactly figurative sketches,” he said. “They ambiguate the space between figuration and abstraction.”
Rachel tried to understand as she looked down at a sketch. It appeared to be of a man crawling on his hands and knees, the head small, grape-sized, curled under his chest. The man’s fingers were elongated, merging with shadows or dirt, she couldn’t tell, and his hands were bent too far at the wrist. It was unclear whether the figure was reaching forward or pulling back. It’s not a person, she suddenly realized, it’s a scene of tension, of not being sure where you want to go, who you are.
“It’s how I felt after my mother moved back to Japan,” John clarified. “She lives in Fukuoka now. They wanted me to take over the family business. In metal scrapping.”
“Oh,” Rachel said.
“But we don’t talk anymore.”
“Oh.”
John began putting his books away. “Maybe I’ll paint from this sketch later. It might become part of a series about feeling in between, in between races, in between obligation and desire.”
Rachel put a hand on John’s shoulder to steady herself. She was burning up from the heat of feeling a certain way toward him, of wanting to embrace the inside of his body. How could she explain it? She was feeling empathy, and she was feeling sorrow, and she was feeling regret. Was it the pills? Or was she falling in love? She was afraid.
She decided that it would be nice to lie down on the living room floor, to ground herself. Taking deep breaths, she looked at the ceiling, the blank space on which the shadows from the television and the computer screen mingled and washed it blue. She thought of John, how he had formed these membranes, these elastic boxes around himself. You could push against them, she realized, you could pull and try to pry one open, and a peek inside would show you that he was a good person. She hoped he saw her that way too. That he would try.
Her thoughts continued to drift. She thought of the space above their apartment, which would be another apartment, and the space below. How each apartment, one after the other, felt just like another in-between space, another semitemporary holding meshed in with the others.
“He had another apartment. Just like this one. For his mistresses,” Rachel said.
“Hm?”
“My dad. He would bring me there when he was supposed to be looking after me. I would play in the kitchen. I’d pretend that there was a door in the back that would take me back home, to my mother and my real father. Like I was living in a parallel universe, and I could just go back to the real world, in the space behind that door.”
“Your …”
“Sorry?”
“You just said your ‘real father.’ Who is that?”
Rachel realized her mistake. She didn’t like speaking of this to anyone, not even Charlotte, who had brought up this question to her several times in the past. To her, the distinction was always changing. It was impossible to differentiate what was real— the truth that was prone to disappearance—and what was unreal, namely, things that were always present but artificial. She had two fathers, but she did not know how to treat either. One was her birth parent; the other raised her. Neither knew her fully. Her mother, at one point, had loved both, and, at another point, had despised both. What was real, what was the unreal? She had asked herself this often as a child when looking at the mirror in her father’s old apartment, and occasionally she would see a dark-haired adult woman shifting in the background, a figure that could have been herself in ten years’ time. The scent of lemon, the spray her father was careful to use every time. The accents that changed but also remained fixed to one axis, the lie that was a musical note. The adults that drifted in and out of her life as a child—she couldn’t remember all their faces, but she remembered the way they moved past her as if she were a cheap lamp in the corner of the room.
“I don’t really want to talk about this right now,” she almost whispered. She could feel the pill’s effect wearing away, leaving her: Goodbye.
As she prepared for bed, she thought she heard faint laughter. That’s odd. It disappeared. She watched sleepily as John switched off her bedside lamp, plugged in her phone, kissed her good night. But when he left the room, the sound came back: a muffled, muscular laugh, as if someone was playing a game or watching a late-night show in the other room. As she was pulled into sleep, shapes interlocked and burst behind her eyes; she saw shadows, she saw lemons. She saw John. Don’t leave me too, she said to him as her consciousness zeroed into squares, then dots, then nothing. Don’t leave me.
* * *
LIFE COASTED ON. RACHEL celebrated her thirty-fourth birthday. John went to yet another friend’s wedding and found some silver hairs in his beard. Rachel donated some clothing to a thrift store and cut her hair.
CoupleTrue sent more and more red-starred reminders and deliveries of increasingly romantic gestures—cases of red wine and blood-colored roses, vouchers for jewelry shops, recommendations of good tailors and restaurants. John was the main recipient of such reminders. He ignored most and instead surprised Rachel with drawings of gardens and pigeons, tickets to “An Evening with Ishiguro,” elaborate home-cooked meals, and reruns of Downton Abbey when she had menstrual cramps.
They received a letter. “Your nine-month anniversary is next week,” it stated. “Please accept this gift voucher for a couples spa weekend at Highton Moors retreat.”
Highton Moors was an hour’s drive from where they lived, and the voucher was only valid for one day, the anniversary of their first meeting with Charlotte and their moving into the apartment. Rachel knew it was a busy work period for John, but when he sighed aloud and said, I really can’t afford to stop working right now, she couldn’t help but feel offended. Still, she tried to call CoupleTrue to cancel, but a man told her that the voucher’s date simply couldn’t be amended and was strictly nontransferable.
When the car came to pick them up, shiny in the purple dawn, they had been in the middle of one of their rare arguments. Rachel knew that John didn’t really want to go but that her reasoning— that CoupleTrue had used their money on this trip, and it shouldn’t go to waste—wasn’t the full truth. Some part of her was also looking forward to the minivacation, to spending time with John away from their day-to-day lives, although she didn’t articulate this. She didn’t want to sound needy.
Arriving at the white-walled complex, they were surprised to see several other couples at the entrance, some already robed and drinking tea, others with luggage. Rachel saw that there was another Asian man and woman standing near the counter waiting to check in. They began talking to one another.
They were a very new couple, and they showed these signs outwardly by talking about their therapy sessions. According to the woman, they were a rare, destined match and so had been invited to come to Highton Moors earlier in their relationship. Rachel had not known that there was such a tier. Speaking with them, she tried not to let her irritation show. She hated that their names were Yan and Wing, their voices still glitched with an accent and their bags oversized and ostentatious, stamped with designer logos.
“Rachel, Wing is also from Suzhou,” John said. Wing began to speak excitedly to Rachel in dialect, but she shook her head curtly and said, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Chinese.” She didn’t know how to say anymore, so that was always the answer she offered. Wing then laughed. “Ohhh okay, sorry, sorry,” and Rachel thought it sounded like he was laughing at her. She excused herself abruptly and indicated to John that she wanted to go to their room immediately.
“What was that about?” John asked when they were out of range. “You were being rude.”
“I’m here to relax, not socialize,” Rachel said.
