Patchwork dolls, p.12
Patchwork Dolls, page 12
The stranger sitting opposite her cleared his throat, perhaps to speak. She was careful not to look up but was conscious of his presence, in the way you might notice a person crossing the street from far away. He shifted on the orange-carpeted chairs, and she wondered if the material impressed itself on his legs the way it did hers, like little sunburns.
A door opened to their left and a tall, wiry woman stepped out. “Hello, please come in,” she said, making eye contact with both of them, and they rose and entered the room.
“Hello,” the therapist said again once they were all settled. The woman sat in her usual area, near the window, and the man took up the other end of the couch. They had been given instructions before the meeting. One was not to speak to other patients in the waiting area before the session. Otherwise, the CoupleTrue leaflet stressed, the therapy will not work.
“Today we’re going to focus mostly on background and context,” the therapist said, “but first, perhaps we can all introduce ourselves. I’m Charlotte.”
“Rachel.”
“John.”
All three of them nodded and smiled at each other.
“Wonderful.” Charlotte ran her palm over a sheet of paper on her lap. Her clipboard was a sharp yellow, Rachel noticed. The last time, it had been green. “Rachel, why don’t you begin? Please tell us a little about yourself—where you grew up, what you’re doing now.”
Rachel had already written this timeline before. She went over the basics: childhood and school in London, a semester abroad in France, her job at an accounting firm in Embankment. Charlotte asked about her parents, and she described them as they were: distant but harmless. “Your perceptions of them, I mean,” Charlotte corrected, and Rachel said, “Yes, sorry, these are my own perceptions. In fact, many people thought my father was a cold man, but to me he always seemed accommodating and polite.”
When it was his turn, John seized up. Earlier, he had looked for water but found no more cups, and so a dusty tickle in his throat remained—it made him cough out where he was born, as if he were afraid of it. He felt embarrassed explaining his Central Saint Martins degree, the punk anarchist band he had been in, the small interior design studio he shared with his friends, how he designed what he called “intangible objects.” He heard his voice shrink as he imagined the two women puzzling over this abstract theory. He began quoting from his own website, falling back on words he rushed out one early morning when he was high, a raw mission statement he had left unedited. “I’m interested in the architecture of in-between spaces,” he said finally. “The gaps of society, the invisible crevices between what we consider to be binary conditions.”
Although she barely moved, he felt intimidated by Rachel’s presence—the way she stared at him without looking. It seemed to him that she must be the type of person to keep everything in clear acrylic boxes sized just so to hold the required contents. She reminded him of his art school professor, who always wore her hair in a continuous, seamless braid. He had been afraid of her too.
After John finished mapping out his background, Charlotte smiled faintly. “Wonderful,” she said again. “And just to confirm: You’re both looking for long-term commitment?”
They both nodded solemnly. John was a little more hesitant. His friends had been persuading him to sign up for couple’s counselling for years now, and some part of him was still convinced he could find someone outside of the therapy unit. He didn’t do well with structure; it made him feel squashed and tight and out of control.
Rachel on the other hand had been in the same room so many times that she had compressed all her experiences into a hard, wet lump, a singular note of disappointment. The first man had also been called John. John the first had been kind and incredibly receptive to couple’s therapy, the effusive acknowledgments, exercises of tolerance and empathy. But in the end, he told her, there was no spark. “It feels like I’m throwing something on a wall, and it just keeps sliding down,” he had said. “Maybe if we had met somewhere else, like at a bar, it would have been different.”
After he left, she used the money saved for their first anniversary to sign up for more CoupleTrue sessions. There was a 10 percent discount if she booked twenty in advance. Since then, she had been in three serious relationships through CoupleTrue, all of which had eventually failed. John the second took up her fifteenth slot, and she told herself he would be the last one.
“Perhaps we could talk a little bit about past experiences and patterns you’ve noticed with other partners,” Charlotte suggested.
In the next half hour, they sketched out a Venn diagram between them. They were both thirty-three years old. John had suffered from depression and anxiety in the past; Rachel was obsessive and had difficulty accepting perceived failures. While Rachel was brought up in a two-parent household, John had not known his father from the age of three. Rachel’s family was working-class, but now she earned six figures; John’s maternal family was materially wealthy, but after they paid for art school, he had financially and emotionally emancipated from them. Both had issues with compromise and sense of self in long-term relationships.
After the session ended, Charlotte went over the terms of their contract. “CoupleTrue is insurance for long-term commitment. In exchange for our services and facilities, you agree to attend all suggested itineraries, activities, and therapy sessions. You understand that the cost of services is nonrefundable.”
She handed them the keys to their new apartment and told them to make themselves comfortable. “It’s just a temporary, in-between space,” she said. “Remember that. It won’t be your permanent home together. See you in a month.”
Neither John nor Rachel enjoyed the language with which she was already describing their nonrelationship. They laughed about it awkwardly on the train ride to their new home. “I was like, slow down a little!” John said humorously, and Rachel felt a grip in the back of her neck dissolve.
John seems nice, she thought, then wryly, at least that’s my initial perception of him.
Their new apartment was in a partly gentrified neighborhood that was still a confusion of hardware stores, one-person takeout counters, and coffee shops with concrete floors. Rachel made a mental note of which café she liked the look of, and John took a photograph of the opening times of the hardware store closest to their place. There was a ramen shop called So Noodle! adjacent to the communal garden which was—here both of them peered in, curious—overgrown with wild allium and small, purple fruits. The pigeons looked turgid, sleepy, and Rachel wondered which child neighbor was overfeeding them.
John had the keys. Opening the door to their new ground-level apartment, he expressed aloud his shock at the high ceilings, the overflowing amenities, the carpet with five little tigers hiding behind palm fronds. Rachel, following behind, tried not to reveal that she had lived in three other identical apartments. As she slipped into the space, she felt something collapse inside as her feet scraped the rough hardwood floors, the smell of artificial lemon sweaty and familiar.
The apartment was narrow but long, a series of rooms one after the other. The kitchen was the last and largest space, fitted with brand-new appliances that still had manuals attached. Rachel confessed she didn’t know how to cook, was afraid of cooking, although—and she pointed this out sheepishly—she had the exact same expensive oven model at home. They both liked that there was a vertical cabinet that stored a single-unit washer and dryer, a relative luxury. John was happy to see on the counter a large rice cooker. He had wanted to bring his own, but CoupleTrue allowed only the necessities.
“You know how to use it?” Rachel asked. She didn’t.
“Of course,” he replied, surprised at the question. Noticing Rachel’s discomfort, he continued, “My mother taught me.”
“Oh,” she simply said.
“I guess I’m a stereotype,” John said, trying again to make Rachel feel more at ease. “You know, I can’t function without my rice cooker, that kind of thing.” Earlier, they had briefly touched on their family background: John’s mother was from Japan, and his absentee father was American. Rachel’s parents were born in and had met in Suzhou before immigrating to London together. When she was younger, she visited distant relatives in China every few years, although most of them didn’t speak English, and she struggled to understand the dialect. Now she had almost forgotten all of her Chinese.
“My parents didn’t really cook,” Rachel said finally. “They worked a lot. Food wasn’t a big deal. We ate separately most nights.” She had a memory of herself as a young child bringing a ham and cheese sandwich up to her bedroom, but when she tried to hold on to that image, she felt only a neutral, plain color—the color of someone else’s work desk or a bathroom stall door.
She went to get two cans of beer from the fridge, which had been prestocked by CoupleTrue. They were still faintly warm, as if someone had placed them there while they were unpacking.
If they needed groceries, CoupleTrue would bring them. They mentioned that this act of service helped couples refocus while they were in the space, declutter their minds of the distractions of contemporary life. All they had to do was work, come home, and spend time together. Everything else would fall into place. It felt like a promise, or a vow.
John took a beer from Rachel, and they sat together on the sofa. Pulling off the tabs, they toasted each other and their new temporary home, the walls still smelling of paint.
* * *
THE DAYS PASSED QUIETLY. They discovered that John liked to stay up late, whereas Rachel preferred to get up early. They had no arguments about this; they both liked the time alone, although in the apartment, if Rachel stood in a different room, it already felt like John had vanished. At night, he sketched and watched obscure documentaries about sea creatures and woodworking, and she woke to follow the sun’s rise on her jog along the water. She had apps that monitored everything—exercise, diet, sleep—and twice a week, on Wednesdays and Fridays, she would have after-work drinks with her colleagues. Sometimes she liked to visit the coffee shops in the neighborhood, but she felt uncomfortable staying too long as the only customer in the café. The area was very quiet, she noticed. They were in a middle-class neighborhood, and she got the sense that people paid for the silence. There was never anyone lingering outside on the street. One time, John said to Rachel that maybe everyone else inside their flats were cardboard cutouts, and they were looking at those cutout shadows in the windows. She knew it had been a joke, but it freaked her out, and she avoided looking into other apartments from that point on.
They had a couple of uninterrupted hours together in the apartment when they were both awake, which they spent eating or talking after Rachel returned from the office. She liked to ask questions—about kids, which neither of them wanted, about living in other cities, about multiple futures—and if she asked them casually, she realized John was always receptive, and sometimes even opinionated in a lively way. It made her happy. In the past, the men she dated had been what her friends always called “husband material,” but for some reason those descriptions grated on her, and she tended to push those partners away. There was never anything to debate or to discuss—everything was too pleasant, like a stream absent of boulders, superficial in its smoothness.
It had been the same with her parents, with which she had an extremely cordial but distant relationship. They were supportive of her in the sense that they all looked good together in a digitally enhanced family portrait hung on a high wall. But beneath the film of ink and resin, there was only a piece of paper, and she felt that they didn’t, or couldn’t, understand her emotional self.
As a child, she had imagined a different sort of family unit. She saw a house, a painted doorway with a wraparound porch, a solid timber staircase and a large old bed, like the ones she had seen refined middle-aged couples lie in on Sunday mornings with their newspapers and immaculate trays of coffee and French pastries in movies. But as she grew older, she understood that fantasy to be a latent type of horror, one that was always teasing her with how similar she actually was to her father and the pledges of the good men who had eventually become sick of her. She remembered in one of her last CoupleTrue sessions with John the first, the one where they had a fight in front of Charlotte, he had called her “unlovable.”
“You can be so cold,” he had said. “You don’t give me much to go on.”
“And Rachel—do you have any final thoughts on that?” Charlotte had said, prompting her.
“I don’t mean to be,” she had tried to say, to defend herself, but already she knew by the way Charlotte was speaking that she was being guided through a breakup.
And so she convinced herself to enjoy whatever this was, even if it didn’t last. She talked with this John. She was fond of him; she liked how unpredictable he could be. But she tried to remain levelheaded, even though in the back of her mind she knew she was giving herself one last chance.
She did notice one consistency in that he was always on his computer when she arrived home. She wasn’t annoyed about this, but she was a little curious about his sketching and would have liked to see him with a pencil in his hand, although she realized that was an overly romantic notion. She did not know many artist types. At the door, she instead prepared for him to be sighing over the screen, his blue-light glasses sliding down his nose as he suddenly turned to her, breaking from his reverie. He always claimed that she wasn’t interrupting, that he had known she was due to arrive at 6 p.m., but still she couldn’t help feeling that if she stayed on that doorstep for an extra half an hour, he would still be in that same curled position, and he would react the exact same way when she entered. She had never known a person so unaware of the time, and she concluded that he must have been living alone for a long time.
One day when she arrived home, she did not find him at the computer or near his sketchbooks, which were in a neat pile by the box window. She walked through the living room, into the bedroom and bathroom, and then, finally, the kitchen, where she found him crouching near the wall.
“There’s another door here,” he said, and she saw that his forehead was slick with moisture.
“A door?”
“Well, more like an opening. A trapdoor, maybe.” He stepped to one side, and she saw that he had moved the dryer out of its place against the wall. Behind him was a rectangle of lacquered wood, the height of a door for a child. She tapped on it: hollow.
“The dryer wasn’t working properly, so I moved it. It was also making these strange noises, like whompf whompf whompf whompf. Like there was something heavy inside, but I only put in our towels and some underwear. And everything was still really damp after an hour.”
There was something about the way John was describing the incident, something in his voice, that made Rachel uneasy.
“Anyway, I think I got the dryer working again. Maybe don’t put anything important in there for now.”
“You don’t think there’s anything strange about this?”
“The dryer? I can call CoupleTrue if you think it’s worth it. Or I can check in with the hardware store, see if they have anything that might help.”
“No—I meant the door.”
“Not particularly? I mean, I feel like apartments have more connected spaces than we think. Hidden fire escapes, old dumbwaiters, laundry chutes, that kind of thing. Someone probably made a mistake and then sealed it up later.”
“I thought you designed intangible objects, not generic apartments,” Rachel said flintily. Then: “I’m sorry. Just a little rattled. Still in work mode.”
“Yeah, that’s okay. I figured.” John wiped his face. “Anyway, I was thinking we could go out for dinner tonight.”
The suggestion surprised Rachel, and she was pleased. She liked surprises that were just for her. John said he had booked So Noodle! because it was walking distance. When they arrived, a young man with green hair named Alvin greeted them at the entrance—a narrow, discreet doorway carved into a large blank wall—and led them inside to the dark-tinted space where ovum-shaped bowls rested on pinewood slabs. They ordered a bottle of clear sake and tonkotsu ramen, which had been rebranded as “cloudy bone broth noodle” on the menu and was treated with a mist of shaved sesame by the server at the table. John begrudgingly admitted that the food was tolerable, even good, and they kept a watchful eye on the kitchen doors, wanting to see who the chef was.
The other diners were muted, very still, and seemed outwardly disapproving of their candor, the way they whispered and laughed. Although they were enjoying themselves, Rachel still felt something in her sharpen when she caught the glare of a nearby diner, and she became self-conscious about her posture, her dress, the accent she inherited from her parents. She recalled when a colleague had taken her to her first fine-dining restaurant years ago, and how every time still felt like a variation of that virgin experience. She was glad they lived close by and could just walk back and be themselves again in their apartment within minutes. She kept taking tiny sips of her sake, hoping they could leave soon.
When the check came, John insisted on paying. “Happy one-month anniversary,” he said. Their green-haired server nodded, as if pleased by their partnership, and explained that So Noodle! would change its menu seasonally, so they could come back in a few weeks to try their new items. They listened to him, smiling, and John signed the check. Shortly after, he kissed Rachel, and she was surprised at how much she liked it, how familiar and warm it was. It felt as if they had already been doing this for years.
* * *
CHARLOTTE WAS LATE LETTING them in at the clinic, and John was now observing the other people in the room. Only one other pair was sitting together; the others were spread neatly around the room, a chair between each person, offering just enough distance to appear respectful of personal space. When another woman entered, she saw that there were no more seats except for the ones in between people, and John watched as she halted, debating, hand on her bag, and instead went to the dispenser to pour herself some water. She drank it right at that spot, and he saw that she was flustered from the way her fingers trembled as she grasped the cup. Eventually she sat between another man and a woman, and John felt sorry for her, feeling that she had to squeeze into that space, deconstructing the carefully managed hierarchy of intimacy in the room. It didn’t help that she looked like his mother and was around her age too. If his mother were here, she would have told John to stop empathizing so much, the same way she would hurry him along when he stared at men with charred legs on the street or people eating alone at restaurants.
