The beginning of an obsession never feels like an obsession. The beginning of an obsession is absorption so complete that the obsesser has no perspective on his or her own lack of perspective. The first week, I didn't worry about being infatuated with Keith. I simply was.
After he left my office for the first time, I was flush with energy; I was happy, excited, and warm. I recall that I had other appointments that day but I don't particularly remember them. I do know that I was reasonably focused on them and the day completed like basically any other day. But the flight home after work was lost to my memory, one of those commutes that never imprints itself due to some unusual flightiness of the mind, in which you arrive at your front door and realize you navigated the last hundred miles in apparent total unconsciousness. My thought as I stepped into the house was to find out if this fellow could really be a state representative. I didn't doubt his honesty on that count; my eyes simply hungered to see it in print, so I went straight for the goggles. I never ate dinner that night.
On the internet, there is always one more link to follow, and my greedy mind swallowed each shred of information about Keith's life in a five-hour binge. And as the feeding proceded, my sense that I knew the man grew, but so did my alienation from him. It was the very act of devoting all my energy into the search that night that accomplished this; in my striving to consume him I had as surely made an object out of him as I had made a man. Yet, looking back, I don't believe it could have happened any other way. I don't believe any of this could have happened another way, from the moment I signed into the Matchlinx. I couldn't have stopped myself because I had no desire to stop myself. It never would have occurred to me. It had to happen.
I was drunk on Keith. What a man! How devoted he was to the small farmer, how devoted he was to his wife, how brilliant, how funny he was when pressed for quotes. "The Committee for Business and the Environment is a five-legged giraffe with two heads, each of which controls two legs and vies for control of the fifth." "Politics is like a pomegranate orchard, only seedier and less useful." And handsome, of course. He had a sharp look to him that owed more to the expression in his eyes than to the actual lines of his face.
And I went to bed sated, for the time being. And I got up and went to work the next day, and the next, and he was little more than a pleasant tingle that stayed in the back of my mind throughout the week.
And I met with him again, delighted. It was the greatest good fortune that this man had come to my office. I was rapt, again. We spent almost all of that second visit telling stories... at least, he told stories, I smiled. I had the sense that the stories -- about drunken college nights, first jobs, his grandfather's death -- were no different in quality or substance from stories told by a hundred acquaintances over the years, and yet to hear the same from Keith was pure enjoyment. Maybe it was his silly and self-effacing jokes. Maybe it was that the whole time I was paying attention to him, I felt like he was the one paying attention to me. As if, instead of seeking therapy, he had come here just to chat with me, because he liked me.
And the reasons for his seeking therapy did dive below the surface for much of the time. Most weeks he seemed completely content to chat away the hour. Occasionally he'd swing into something more personal, and I was handed gems of some emotional clarity from somewhere inside him. And anytime he spoke about something he couldn't tell the other people in his life, I felt ridiculously privileged.
"Lysa has this friend, Jean, and when she comes over they'll huddle together snickering and give me a look when I come in the room. That just strikes me as juvenile. She makes me feel like I'm not welcome in my own home. I mean, come on. Right? It just annoys me." And then he'd be off and running into a story about skydiving. With every complaint delivered so naturally and generously, a little bit more of my professionalism peeled away. He liked me.
I have a special appreciation for the memories of that first month, before the shame set in, before the bitter discomfort set in. I was having great fun. I was having the time of my life and loving my job and not thinking about it. But then the leash began to grow taut, and the painful evidence of my attachment sprung to my attention.
Keith was changed in our fifth session. His essence, the him I thought of as him, was simply gone. His charm was absent. Suddenly we were therapist and client, not pals and confidants. He did tell stories -- many in the exact same vein as in weeks past -- but he no longer seemed to care about me the listener. Something warm in his eyes was missing when he glanced at me. Something in his body language was less engaging. I found myself scrabbling. There was a small panic stewing in my brain, a sensation I scarcely recognized. What was going on? Why wasn't I having fun? Why wasn't he paying attention to me?
None of these were questions I could ask. I couldn't even find a way to confront the change (What would I say? "Keith, is there a particular reason you're behaving more like a client than a a date today?"), though I did ask if anything was troubling him.
"No," he said.
I bit down on the "Are you sure?" Because I was suddenly not so sure myself. Why was I upset that he was behaving like a man meeting with his therapist? What had I thought his previous behavior meant? Why did I care more about his eyes crinkling when he looked at me than about what kind of a job I was doing as a psychiatrist? I wasn't falling for him, certainly. That had never happened to me. I hadn't even fallen for my husbands. Either of them.
The next week he was back to charm and animation, which my baser parts greeted with huge relief... and discomfort. I was now aware, barely. It was all downhill from here.
