Those hours spent in my office with him were the fullest of my life. My every sense was engaged and my mind immersed; I never noticed the ticking clock, or the grinding of cars coming in and taking off in the lot outside the window.
Keith told me about his life. He'd grown up sheltered -- private school, England in the summers, piano lessons, rich girlfriends. Yet the pasty consistency of his activities didn't dull his imagination. He loved Steinbeck and California, and had no desire other than to go West to stay at the first opportunity. He majored in English at UCLA. He wanted to be a writer.
"A couple things got in the way," he told me. "One was that I could never sit still long enough to write more than half a page or so a day. Not unless one of my professors was breathing down my neck." He gave me a lively grin, and his eyes told me he'd been friends with his teachers all the same. "The other was that my girlfriend at the time managed to convince me it'd be a good idea to get my M.B.A. She said that way I'd always have a backup. She made it sound so reasonable."
Halfway through the session Keith had sprawled himself back in the chair, unkinking his long legs to stretch beneath the table. His hands were alternately running through the hair on the back of his head and resting on top of it. He was at ease in his storytelling. I only wanted to listen.
"This was a girl I liked a lot. I thought I might marry her. I was already thinking about kids. I had all these visions... a big house in a cul-de-sac, some woods behind it, a treehouse, trips to Yosemite with the dog. So I thought, why the hell not. It's only a couple more years. And I hated it but I made it through, for us. But by the end of it I was so empty, and everything had begun to feel empty -- the relationship, everything. She was still wanting to go out to the same clubs we went to in college and I was already in that house with the dog and the kids. And it took me six months but I eventually got around to telling her I needed to move on. Broke my heart."
All I did was nod.
"You know how it is when you love somebody. Even if you know it's not going to work." His eyes were on mine, watching for a response. I resisted the urge to nod again or make an encouraging comment; I noticed I had his total attention, for an intense second, as he sought out some resonance in my eyes for what he'd said. Finally I broke.
"Two divorces," I said.
And he went smoothly on. "It took me another half a year to get it through my head, once and for all, that I didn't have the patience to sit down and write all day. I was pretty down by that point and I ended up taking a job that -- for the life of me -- I'm still not sure why I even applied for. A junior management position at Raleigh Farms in the Imperial Valley. I guess I had this idea that I'd be out in the country... farms and all... and it'd be a good way for me to get away from it all. And it worked, sort of. I was so busy for the next couple years I barely had time to think about writing or relationships. I ended up being promoted twice and had a bunch of other managers under me. It was kind of fun."
I scanned the developing crinkles around his eyes, pondering his age. Mid-forties? Forty-four, as I was to find out. But he might as well still have been in his late twenties. He had a loopy grin now and his posture had changed again. He was leaning dramatically over one arm of the chair, his whole body near ready to flow over onto the floor. He was right. He couldn't sit still. I caught myself grinning too, and didn't mind. I only wanted him to continue.
"But of course, the emptiness caught up to me there too." He toyed with a fraying part of the upholstery for a moment, then returned his blue gaze to my face. "Business. I had all these great ideas, about making a great place for people to work, a humane corporation that meshed with the community... reward programs, and ballgames, you know... and my superiors were into that, they really were. They were great people. But nothing ever got done! And I kept thinking, if only I had the willpower to figure out all the details, I could fuck the need for approval and just start implementing things myself. But I never did."
I watched his face. While the part of me that knows those things knew his improbable idealism wasn't a sham, the fist of habit was still holding onto the need for proof. But the proof had been in his tone if it was anywhere; he was angry, even now, after a decade and a half. And more. "You're cursing the business machine, but you blamed yourself too."
Keith shrugged weakly. The chair took a little more of his weight. "I was in a position to make things happen. I could have made life better for a lot of people."
My psychiatrist's mind was making the connections. The girl in me, however, was rapt in his mixed-up aura of middle-aged male responsibility and plain human vulnerability. His suit fit him perfectly. But here he was with his melodrama collapsing him over the arm of the chair, cursing the system. I started to feel more than keen interest. I started to like him, irrationally.
"That was when I met my wife," he said, and another grin broke over his face. He didn't pause to look to me for comment this time -- he was off like a river, noisy and unstoppable. "We had a series of meetings one month with an environmental group called FarmSmart that I had to attend. They were a little boring at first. I already thought of myself as an environmentalist. But these were real environmentalists. They had a tiny budget they used to travel around California and pressure agribusinesses into updating their practices. Lysa was one of the organizers. My first impression of her was that she was difficult. She had a habit of interrupting my boss whenever he was waffling, and once she walked out of a meeting when she thought we weren't taking them seriously. The more I listened, though, the more I developed this bizarre admiration for her. I heard rumors that she'd followed uncooperative industry execs and lobbed their own tomatoes at their cars, for media attention. She'd spent a few nights in jail. When I heard that, I had to get to know her. I had to know who this woman was." He finally paused a moment. "It didn't hurt that she was beautiful."
Keith went back to reclining in his chair, taking up half the space in the office. "I started talking more in the meetings, pushing harder for a compromise. She knew I was interested in her. Women know. My mother says I'm a charmer. I think I just get this dopey look on my face and women take pity on me." Absurdly, he winked at me then, and I was too caught off guard to make any response. "But I can't help flirting. I would be talking about the cost of deep irrigation and looking right in her eyes. I think I made her blush." His blue eyes were off mine now as he spoke of the past, but his presence in the room wasn't any fainter. I couldn't keep my own gaze off him. "It turned out well, since the more I got into the negotiations, the more things started to warm up and pretty soon we reached a deal. No tomato-throwing. And she asked me out first! In a roundabout way. I was head over heels. After we'd wrapped up she invited me back to the van to see some of the other stuff they did. My God. Just being around her was like... electricity. I couldn't even stop finding excuses to touch her, either. I was terrible. I had my hand on her back when we left the van for the office. And I asked her out for lunch. And she accepted!"
And I was smitten. Whoever the man was, he had the heart of a teenager and the ideals of a saint. And he'd made it half through his forties without flagging. There was no room left in me for my thoughts to run around, catch up to and capture his predicament, solve his problems. I only felt warm.
The armchair suffered another abuse as he wrestled himself around to pull one leg up to his knee. His foot was tapping. He was full of energy. "Lysa changed everything. At first my work suffered because I was spending all my time with her, sneaking out at lunch, always calling her. Then it began to suffer because in between all the dinners and the cuddling she was teaching me about her side of life, where she'd been alternately fighting or working with agribusiness since she was fifteen. It was who she was. At first I thought I'd be overwhelmed but I only came to have more and more respect for her. She's the strongest woman I've ever known. The strongest person I know. And about ten times smarter than I am, too. She had an answer for every protest about how much things cost in business or what the impact would be. She knew more about business than I did and I was the one with the M.B.A. I was already chafing at work from not being able to get human resource reforms passed, and now it began to seem like a prison. I truly liked the guys above me but more and more I saw us all as pawns of the system. I didn't want to participate in something that was damaging the environment or small businesses, and while I used to see Raleigh as a pretty good company... again, it began to look more and more like a system that had its own interests.
"Lysa taught me to care about the working lives of more than the people I was manager over. Not just the people in my office but the people out there running the farms that contributed to Raleigh. What we were giving them and what they were able to do with it. Did you know that you won't find a single small farm in California that's not at least eightteen thousand in debt? Never mind that we're still pumping enough nitrogen and phosphates into the ground to turn the Pacific into a solid mat of algae by the end of the century. The bigwigs at Raleigh knew all that, of course, but they liked to assure me there was no good answer. Something had to change. I felt like I couldn't keep up with Lysa. She has so much drive, she never takes no for an answer. But she inspired me. I ended up joining the town zoning board and a few months later switched to the town council." Keith looked at me once more. "That's how I got into politics. It all starts so innocently." His white-toothed smile flashed out again at me, but I was caught up at the crinkling by his eyes. Something in him was laughing, though he was quiet. I knew he wanted me to laugh. And I was. I couldn't help it. All he did was give me that dopey look, and I was mush.
It's a long way to fall. I'd worked my way up too, and nobody needs to know my story to know I thought nothing would take it away from me. Nobody could reduce again me to that homeless girl. I built myself up brick by brick. Where are the bricks now?
Keith was leaning in across the table. His eyes were so warm, I knew I'd met the meaning of the idea of basking in someone's presence. And I felt a blush around my ears. But he was lost in his own story. "I have that side of my life." His voice was soft. "My marriage was the happiest day of my life. Every day I go home to her is the happiest day of my life. She's the most amazing woman in the world. And my job?" He kept his voice quiet, but his intimate gaze chilled instantly to a serious intensity. "My job sucks. The further away you get from the grassroots, the more bullshit there is. Some days I eat so much shit even I don't believe what comes out of my mouth anymore. Even Lysa doesn't like to listen to me when I come home. I'm making her miserable. I'm miserable. I'm starting to hate myself."
That was when I opened my mouth. That was when I started to play psychiatrist, and that was when they should have put me away. Because I already had an inappropriate relationship with my client, before I ever gave him my first counsel. I would have done anything for Keith. I would still do anything for Keith. He told me he was a pawn; I say he was not. He never knew his own power. That, of course, was half the reason I loved him.
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