"When does your current term in office end?"
"Next Fall. Not this Fall, but Fall of next year," Keith said, watching my face.
"Are you going to finish it out?"
Now there was a pause. "Well, yes."
"Have any plans for when the term's through?" There was a trafficless moment outside and it became quiet in our room.
"No... look... I don't know, I don't know what I want. That's why I'm here." He gave me a plaintive grin. There was some self-effacing pain in his eyes, and I struggled to judge what part was a patient's distress and what part embarrassment at the appeal. We were most of the way through my first hour with him then, and I already felt I knew him, but simultaneously felt that I could never stop learning about him. I was already hungry for all the things that made this astonishing presence tick. Here was a representative of the state government in my office, here was a tall and contained and winningly vulnerable politician looking me in the eye. Keith was a new species to me, an impossible mix of intelligence and maturity and idealism -- a man as willing to trust a brand-new therapist as he was to trust the computer system that pointed him here in the first place. I was giddy. But but he was still a person, and like all people he had particular ideas about his own life -- and I was still a psychiatrist with 20 years of schooling and practice, and at the end of his story I flowed into my role without needing to think about it.
I heard what he thought about himself when he spoke about his college sweetheart, about his inability to write, about his job at Raleigh, about his wife's drive. When he spoke about his current job, the pauses said more than the words did. I already knew where I would lead the conversation. Maybe Keith already knew too. People often know what they have to do with their lives, on some level. Sometimes they also know they need a little push to get them there.
"Tell me what you like about being a state representative."
"What do I like about it? I like that... I'm making the system of democracy real, I'm doing my part. I like that I have an excuse to meet and talk to so many different people every day. I like that sometimes I have a hand in actually helping out the little guy."
"And what don't you like?"
"And what don't I like." He rubbed a hand over the stubble of his jaw in a classic gesture of thought, yet the motion itself was thoughtless. "I don't like the phoniness. There's a stereotype of politicians being phony. Well, it's true. At first I swore I'd never fall into it. I saw all the other representatives changing their masks; they'd have sweet words for an old lady one moment and then turn around and tell a reporter something completely different. I didn't see how they could do that in good conscience. Now, what do you think I do?"
He stopped to take in an audible breath before he continued. "Of course I've gotten some good done. Every time I wrestle price controls on one more commodity back into the state's hands, I feel like I'm in the right place. But there's too little of that, and too much buttering up guys who are already filthy rich. But that's how you get things done here! And the sad part is, I'm good at it! And sure I enjoy it when I can talk my way into a deal. I'd rather win people over than force them into something. I want to please people. I've just gotten to feel so two-faced. Maybe it'd be different if I were more like Lysa." He'd stopped looking at me and was all eyes for the wall behind me now. "I had this one woman call me the greasiest thing in Sacramento. Another environmental activist. She saw how I'd have the agribusiness execs over for dinner and she'd also watched me pulling farmers aside and asking about their lives and their families. And she knew who Lysa was, and all it meant for her was that I'd go so far as to marry an activist for show. Like I'd conned Lysa too. As if everything I did and was was all for show, just so I could keep getting elected." And he looked back at me, his voice flattening. "Because state reps make big money, you know."
"The greasiest thing in Sacramento? Maybe I should have put a towel down on the chair."
"I know, right?" And he laughed, which made a splinter of warmth poke up in my chest. "Well, what do you think?" He leaned in over the table between us, focusing, the gaze of his blue eyes bolted to mine like iron. "If you... can bear to give up water rights for the next... two years..." And there was a heavy pause in which all he did was look in my eyes, and in which I had the time to notice that his hand was on my arm. I felt pinned to the chair. Whatever he'd said was only the background to his body language. I didn't even breathe, just watched him for a long second as he held his face in the most perfect representation of concerned earnestness I've ever seen a man wear. I was afraid I was going to blush again, entirely against my will. Then like a current a crackle of animation ran into his gaze, an impish squint took his eyes and he wiggled his eyebrows lewdly, pushing himself back into his seat. "Well, the state could be prepared to give you a tax deduction in the order of point-oh-five percent." He spread his hands. "If that's not sexy, I don't know what is." He smiled.
I was left to stare for another few seconds. I felt a lightning pang of confusion, a sense of intellectual deja-vu that brought back the harsh discovery of my limitations at reading people. What part of the man before me was real, after all? That was the first moment I felt a sense of powerlessness with Keith, a sense almost of being a child again, unable to grasp more than token control over the events in my life. Yet quickly my instincts remembered who I was and what I was here for -- and for perhaps the last time, a part of me considered my client's needs independently of their relation to my own, and I saw him as a stranger and a man who needed a reaction.
I smiled back at him. "Now how could anyone refuse?" The confusion had vanished; I still trusted myself, and his apparent ability to assume earnestness didn't dilute the aura of vulnerability that still, somehow, hung about him, even as the architecture that separated my identity as a psychiatrist from the heated inner parts of me began to dissipate. More than ever I wanted to help him. "But self-hatred hasn't led to too many benefits, generally, over the course of history."
He bit his lower lip before he spoke. "That's why I decided to call in the big guns. I feel trapped. Sometimes I think about just taking off, flying to Europe, screw democracy and responsibility and everything else."
"Have you thought about quitting before your term is up?"
That made him raise his eyebrows. "I'd feel too guilty." He thought about it, his gaze roaming the ceiling. "I'd think the people deserve to have the man they actually elected in office. Besides, what would I do? I can't just hang around the house all day. In my bathrobe, eating Twinkies."
He made me laugh, though his voice held all the pessimism that remains the default for any new consumer of therapy. It's a tone some clients never shake. But I wagered Keith was a man of action. "Tell me again why you used to want to be a writer."
"I can't be a writer. I tried, I just don't have the patience for it."
"Yes, but remind me why you wanted to."
He twisted in his chair, scratched at his sock, a slight grimace slipping over his features. "I was a kid. I thought it was romantic. Visit interesting places, write stories to inspire people. The idea of someone reading something I wrote and having it change their life. Of course, now I know the life of a writer isn't quite that romantic."
"I know it was a long time ago, but it's not easy -- or even the right thing -- to brush off the dreams we had of who we'd turn out to be. You say you feel trapped and I think you're right. Part of being stuck in an unhappy place is that we lose the ability to realistically imagine life outside it." He watched me with a slightly furrowed brow. "You may not be able to imagine yourself as a writer, or as anything else other than a politician. But from an outside perspective... you have a lot of experience with business, and politics, and the environmental movement. You're also older than you were in college and you've probably developed a good deal more discipline. Somewhere like a news magazine or nature journal could be the perfect place for you."
And he laughed. All he said was, "I wish! I'll never have the discipline for that" and then he was off into a story about a chem exam in college. The last minutes of the session ticked away. I told him to think about the changes he might like to make in his life. And he set up another appointment.
But he seemed happy when he left, and later he told me he'd known I was right the moment I spoke, but it took him five months to believe it. And I told him it takes most people a lot longer than five months to work up the courage for that sort of a change in their life. And it does. He is remarkable. But Keith averred, and may still, that I was a genius -- for seeing his true character and what he was capable of, and for knowing so soon, and having the guts to tell him. He used the word more often than I prefer to admit. He even once told a friend that I made his dreams come true.
And I never, not once, told a soul of his effect on me. The year that followed that day spun itself out like a dream, and from where I am now, it may as well have existed just as completely inside my mind. I would become very familiar with the impossibility of knowing how much of Keith was "real" -- and, by the end, how much of myself.
