Sex and Sunsets: A Novel by Sandlin Tim

Author:Sandlin, Tim [Sandlin, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2011-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

8

I drove to the Mental Health Center and sat in the lobby for over an hour, reading pamphlets with titles like What is Depression?, Alcoholism, The Shame of the Battered Woman, and How to Tell If Your Child Is on Drugs. Those brochures are like the Reader’s Digest articles on swollen livers and colon cancer. I can’t read the symptoms without noticing a few in me.

Sitting on the couch, I tried to remember what life was like before the day of Colette’s wedding. I know I drank, danced, washed dishes, chased waitresses. I talked to Cora Ann and Lizbeth. I listened to music, looked forward to Doonesbury, ate hamburgers plain with ketchup, but I couldn’t remember how I felt—what it was like to wake up in the morning. What I thought about whenever I was alone for a moment.

Colette had become everything. The first thought in the morning to the dreams at night. I couldn’t conceive of what I’d been before her. Or what I might be after her.

I mentioned this midway through the session with Lizbeth. “I’m unbelievably happy when I’m with her and miserable when I’m not with her.”

Lizbeth sat less than four feet away, looking at my face. She wore green. She had cut her hair a new way, which threw me off a little. Psychiatrists and mountains aren’t supposed to change. Too many people depend on them.

“What’s that mean?” she asked.

“Means I should be with her all the time.”

“You shouldn’t base your happiness on something outside yourself.”

“Why not?” After a couple of years of therapy, I’d learned what not to say to Lizbeth. I don’t know if those exasperated “grow up” looks were real or imagined, but I imagined she was giving me one then. I kept my eyes on the floor.

Lizbeth went into the speech we’d both heard so often: “If your happiness is based on something external, you can lose it, or you can become so afraid you might lose it that you aren’t happy anymore.”

I wanted to lie down real bad. Emotion wears me out. “What if your outside base is stable?” I asked.

“Is Colette stable?”

I thought about her eyes and hair and the way she walked. “She’s not consistent, but if she loved me and lived with me, I think she’d stay—a while.”

I could see Lizbeth’s hands. The right index finger moved up, then down, then out. Maybe she did isometrics to stay in shape while sitting all day listening to crazies whine over the same things hour after hour.

Lizbeth tried a different angle. “Have you slept with Colette yet?”

“Of course not. She’s married.”

“So?”

“It’s unethical to sleep with a married woman.”

“Is it ethical to steal a married woman from her husband?”

“If it’s for her own good.”

“You’re doing this for Colette’s good then?”

“She needs me.”

“It’s right to convince Colette to leave Danny, but not right to sleep with her.”

“Not while she’s living with him. Listen, could I lay on the carpet? I’m tired. My mind feels too fuzzy to hold me up.”

Lizbeth looked at me a moment.

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