Memoir installment #17

That time my boyfriend and I saw the same therapist

Whenever I’m at a wedding, I feel like the bride and groom are briefly transformed into celebrities: glamorous, ecstatic, untouchable. Everybody wants a piece of them, but we get only moments and glimpses. At my first wedding, however, there was another person—not famous by any means and not glamorous, but still quite notable in my world—who everyone craned their necks to catch sight of. And that was Dr. Fiona Lowell-Greenblatt, the psychoanalyst my new husband and I shared. “Your story is like the plot of a movie I wouldn’t pay money to see,” our Rabbi told the assembled during the ceremony, and everyone laughed. And it was like the plot of a romantic comedy, except it was my life. 

My ex, Ben, and I had not met in her waiting room—a la the Sex And The City episode where Sarah Jessica Parker encounters Jon Bon Jovi that way—but instead, in college years previously. We’d been in a Contemporary American Poetry class together and, in those first couple of years after school, had gone out to lunch once or twice, then lost touch.

I was 29 when we reconnected in Dr. Lowell-Greenblatt’s waiting room, and I remembered my earlier assessment of him: that he was a sweet and smart guy, maybe a little boring. Still, I was impressed when he told me he’d gotten a graduate degree from the top creative writing program in the country. And when I asked after his mother, who was going through chemo for breast cancer when we’d last been in touch, I was sad to hear that she’d died.

Once Dr. Lowell-Greenblatt learned that we were acquainted, she was careful not to give us overlapping appointments, but occasionally I guess it couldn’t be helped, and we ran into each other on the street outside of her office the Tuesday before our college reunion. I had decided at the last minute to make the drive out to Ohio with some friends, and he told me he was going to take part in an alumni poetry reading there. I said I’d try and make it. 

 It’s a long and ugly ten-hour drive from New York to Oberlin, and we left the city crushingly early and arrived at around 4:30 in the afternoon. Ben’s reading had started at 4, so I rushed over to King Hall to see if I could catch any of it. And when I walked in, he was at the lectern, reading his last poem—one he’d written about a graduate school professor of his who’d been an influence before he died. I usually find poems exasperating and obtuse, but I could tell that this one was good, and was impressed. At a barbecue the next day, I ran into him by the keg and he asked me out, and I was by then so weary of interesting-but-exhausting men that I said yes. I also thought that somebody who wrote as well as he did was maybe pretty interesting after all. And possibly he was more sensitive than most of the guys I found myself with back then turned out to be, which would be a refreshing change.