"So," Dan asked when he had unwrapped his own sandwich, "how was the conference?"
Abby rolled her eyes, "Skull-numbing and tedious, as they usually are. How's the rowing?"
"Fine."
She went over to pour the tea. After a minute he started up again, talking about how they'd switched people around within the boat and solved some balance thing. That first abrupt answer tipped her off, though. This was going to be one of those days.
It wasn't that Dan withheld information the way some of her patients did, trying to seem less troubled than she knew they were. Things were just such a weird mesh inside him that he honestly didn't know what was relevant and what was not. He was amazed that she would get worked up about things that he'd never considered strange, like his obsessive need to be liked by people he would never meet. On the other hand, Dan could become completely unglued over events whose significance Abby could never grasp: he'd come to her office totally manic and very nearly in tears over the inability to pronounce the name 'Yevgeny Kafelnikov.'
Abby had to guess a lot with Danny, probing where she thought there might be something more. Sometimes they were both surprised at what came to light: where did that come from? he'd ask, shocked at whatever he'd just said, what in the world made me say that, Abby? To be fair, Dan never tried to make the job more difficult than it had to be. He'd answered every question she'd ever asked him and, Abby knew, she'd asked some doozies. And she didn't plan to stop any time soon.
"What does Rebecca think about this rowing thing?" Abby asked suddenly.
As expected, the shift in conversation left Dan stranded only for a second.
"I don't know; I haven't seen her. I haven't, you know, been looking for her. She probably doesn't know anything about it. I mean, I wouldn't know about it except for that I saw the flyer on her floor. And since I took that flyer—I think Dana has it now, or maybe Jeremy—how would Rebecca learn about it?"
"So she doesn't come up to your floor anymore, she couldn't have seen it there?"
"No, not so much any more. I mean, she doesn't really have a reason to be up there."
"But you go to her floor? That's where you first saw the notice about this race?"
"Yeah, well, her floor is beneath…I don't go there so much as I pass there. On my way to up to our floor.
"Hmmm…got it." Abby let the silence settle. Danny hated silence, saw it as something to be broken as soon as possible, preferably with a joke. In a minute he would start protesting. Abby took another bite of roast beef, counting the seconds in her head. Damned if the man didn't know the best carry-out places for every kind of food. Three…two…
"It's not about Rebecca, you know, Abby."
There we go!
"No?"
"No. I told her I was ok with her trying to work on her marriage, and I am. I wouldn't have said that if I hadn't meant it. I mean, she knows I don't like Steve Sisco but, hey, Casey knew I didn't like Lisa for years before they finally got divorced. It's not like I expected my opinion to be a deciding factor."
"So why did you offer it?"
"What, my opinion?" Dan rolled his eyes like it was the most obvious thing in the world, but Abby noticed it still took him a minute to answer, "I don't lie to my friends," he said finally.
"Well, that's admirable, I'm sure, but if you don't expect your opinion to make a difference, why not just let the status quo reign? Why is it so important that Casey know you don't like Lisa…doesn't that just make things more difficult between you all?"
"What, you want me to lie so that they'll be more comfortable with me? Haven't we gone about twelve rounds on how I shouldn't care if people like me?" Dan chewed the last piece of his sandwich belligerently.
He saw no contradiction, so Abby spelled it out for him: "Look, we've established that you are a nice guy."
"Thank you," Dan said, suspicious that this compliment came with strings.
"And that you go to great lengths to be a nice guy, to avoid unnecessary conflict—with your father, with your fans, with me," Abby held up her hand to silence the objection she could see coming, "What I want to know is, why are you willing to be an honest-but-not-so-nice guy around certain people? People like Rebecca. And Casey, for that matter?"
"Hey, how did I end up being not-so-nice in this scenario? I mean, I'm no angel, but on a niceness scale, I bet lots of people would rate me higher than Steve Sisco." Dan sounded like he couldn't quite decide if he should be angry or joking.
Abby decided that angry might be more useful here, so she nudged him in that direction. "Is it important to you that people rate you more highly than Steve Sisco?" she asked in her best therapy voice.
"Ah, for the love of…" Dan stood up, crumpling the sandwich wrapper into a ball to keep from losing his temper. They did this every week: you want to be liked too much vs. what in the world is too much? Abby had pretty much beat this horse to a bloody pulp, but it simply kept being reincarnated. "Look, I don't care about Steve Sisco." He enunciated very carefully, "I don't particularly care about people who like Steve Sisco; I would actually prefer that those people not like me. Except Rebecca, obviously. But that is how low my opinion is where Steve Sisco's concerned. And the thing is, I don't really care who knows what I think about him. To hell with them; it's no secret." He chucked the balled-up paper at the trashcan, missed by a mile.
"Ditto with Lisa, I gather?" Abby added quietly.
"Lisa is…Lisa is, is a totally different story. I mean, I heard about how Steve Sisco treated Rebecca, but I know how Lisa treated Casey and it was just—I mean, I don't, I just totally don't…" Dan had walked over to retrieve the paper ball, but once he had it in his hand, he didn't seem to remember what to do with it so he turned just stood there, turning it over in his fingers.
Abby resisted the urge to point out that Dan was the one who'd first linked Casey's ex-wife, Lisa, and with Rebecca's estranged husband, Steve. She wasn't going to finish his sentence for him, either, even though it was hard to watch people physically struggle to voice their thoughts. Especially people like Dan, who lived with words; for them, it was like being abandoned by their very last friend. But when it happened she knew they were getting somewhere.
"I don't approve," Dan managed to get out, the smiled wryly at how prim that sounded. "I don't approve of the way these people, my friends, are being treated and I want that on the record, even if it's the, whaddaya call it, the minority opinion. I don't want them to be comfortable with it, or with me, 'cause I'm not comfortable with it. And someday, when they decide they're not comfortable with the relationship either, I want them to...to have that. To have the minority opinion so that they know there's at least one person who doesn't think they're crazy for leaving the famous prime-time husband or the little nuclear madonna-and-child!"
Dan looked so perfectly righteous at that moment that Abby seriously thought about leaving it there. It was true, that was how he felt, an d it was honorable. Just like his promise to support Rebecca was true and honorable. It wasn't the whole truth, of course, but what ever was? She could let him go with this; it was enough. They could while away the rest of the session on some trivial point, like why he always called Steve Sisco by his full name. After all, what was up with that?
At points like this, Abby always remembered the clinical truth that severely depressed patients generally commit suicide soon after they're put on medication. Before that, they are literally too depressed to kill themselves: it's that dangerous initial period when they have the drug-induced energy without the stability that comes from a long course of medication and counseling. One of her professors had called the phenomenon 'the post-crash crash.' That's how Abby always thinks of this double-whammy technique, her trick of harnessing the confidence and disorientation that come from a breakthrough, especially a positive one, and using it to dig deeper, to draw blood. Suicide is a bad metaphor, of course. The true crash is destructive, but not totally devastating. Unless, of course, she miscalculated either the force of the blast or the stability of the structure. Still, the risk was worth it. The true crash levels everything, even the ruins, so you can see the whole foundation all at once and build something lasting.