In Need of Therapy Kindle Edition

Chapter 3

I was rooting through my desk drawers for a bottle of aspirin when my phone intercom buzzed loudly. I protested the noise by moaning miserably and covering my ears. Hangovers sucked. I hadn’t had many of them in my life, but thanks to my splitting headache and queasy stomach, I was having sensory-induced flashbacks to a few out-of-control keggers at UM. I vowed never to drink two cocktails in one evening again.

Taking a sip of room-temperature water, I responded to my receptionist’s call. “Yes, Margo.”

“Your 9:00 is here,” she informed me in a voice that sounded a lot more nasal and grating than usual.

Great. My new patient. I was going to make a wonderful first impression.

“Thank you. I’ll be right out.”

“You can do this. You’re a professional,” I told myself, but the pep talk didn’t work. I still felt like I was going to throw up.

Using the corner of my desk for support, I rose to my feet shakily and tried to ignore the nauseating way the room was spinning. My abuelos, Hernando and Luis, who, for two decades, had shared a bottle of Havana Club’s best aged rum every Friday afternoon when they’d gotten together to play dominoes, were probably in heaven shaking their heads with disappointment at their pitiful, liquor-intolerant granddaughter. Drawing strength from my memory of those tough old men, I muttered, “Mind over matter, Pilar,” and purposefully headed for the door.

Fortunately, I’d had the foresight to wear my Kate Spade pumps with the sensible 2-inch kitten heels, so I didn’t have any balancing issues. I took deep breaths in and out as I traversed my office, and by the time I reached the door, I almost felt human again. I tucked some stray pieces of hair behind my ears and self-consciously fiddled with the belt on my brown sleeveless dress before venturing into the waiting area.

My new patient was sitting in a chair on the opposite wall with his face buried in the latest issue of Sports Illustrated. He had long legs, encased in raggedy-looking jeans with holes in the knees and frayed hems, and he wore flip-flops. Nice, name-brand flip-flops, not the cheap, rubber ones that tourists bought at beach-front drugstores because they’d forgotten to pack them, but they were still flips-flops, which was a pretty odd choice of footwear for a doctor’s visit.

“Mr. Buchannon,” I addressed him.

He set the magazine down in the empty chair next to him and stood up.

Woah! My eyes almost popped out of my head. I’d seen plenty of good-looking men in my life, but this one put all the others to shame. He was tall, definitely over six feet, with tousled, sun-streaked hair that looked like it hadn’t been cut in a few months, bronzed skin, pale green eyes, and a couple days’ worth of stubble that was a few shades darker than his hair and drew attention to his full, sexy mouth.

“Call me ‘Mitch’,” he requested with a charmingly roguish grin that made the dimples in his cheeks deepen.

It took me a few seconds to recover from the stupefying effect of those dimples, but I finally found my voice. “Alright, Mitch, if that makes you more comfortable. I’m Dr. Alvarez.”

I offered my hand to him, and he shook it, his eyes never leaving mine. His hand was large and warm, and it felt a little calloused like he’d been working (or playing?) outdoors. I wondered if he was a surfer? He certainly had the upper body of a surfer - broad, well-built shoulders, muscular arms and chest, flat stomach. His tight, washed-out orange polo didn’t leave much to the imagination.

“Why don’t we go into my office?” I suggested, gently disengaging our hands, which was something he didn’t seem to be in any hurry to do.

“Sure thing.” He moved in that direction, which afforded me a very nice view of his backside, and I wasn’t the only one admiring it. Margo started to fan herself with her phone message pad after Mitch had strolled past her desk.

“A hot flash?” I teased her in a whisper as I passed by.

“I may be old, honey, but I’m not dead,” she replied. “And even if I was, one smile from that man would probably revive me.”

I chuckled softly. I didn’t know if Mitch Buchannon could resuscitate a corpse, but he did appear to be the cure for the common hangover. I hadn’t thought about feeling sick since I’d first laid eyes on him.

“Hold my calls until 10,” I told Margo, then stepped into my office and closed the door behind me.

Mitch was standing uncertainly by the couch. “Am I supposed to lay down here?” He pointed to the furniture.

“That’s up to you. Most of my patients prefer to sit.” And that’s what he did.

I took my usual seat in the chair I’d positioned next to the top of the couch. Crossing my legs, I picked up a pen and pad of paper from the table in front of me. While many therapists liked to tape their sessions, I was more old-school. I knew shorthand, so I could make notes quickly while listening to patients, and those on-the-spot insights and impressions were invaluable to me when reviewing cases and mapping out strategies for future sessions.

“Why don’t you tell me a little about yourself, Mitch?” My therapeutic M.O. was to ease my patients into revealing what their problems were. Asking for confidences upfront usually put people on guard and made it more difficult to develop a rapport.

Mitch relaxed back into the soft wheat-colored cushions of my sofa. “Okay, I’m 31 and I was born and raised here in Florida. I lived in Tampa until I was 20 and decided to move down here.”

I was surprised to hear that he’d spent his entire life in the Sunshine State. I thought I detected a little bit of a drawl when he spoke. Maybe he had a parent who hailed from Alabama or one of the Carolinas?

“And what do you do here in Miami?”

“As little as possible,” Mitch said, then laughed with naughty amusement at himself.

“So, you don’t have steady employment?”

“Oh, I work. It’s just that my job’s so easy, it’s almost like not doing anything. I’m a lifeguard.”

Aha, that explained the perfect tan, the swimmer’s physique, and the beach bum apparel.

“Family?” I prompted him.

He rubbed his palms up and down his denim-covered thighs a couple of times. A nervous tic? Or maybe he was just a tactile person? “Both parents are dead. No siblings.”

“How about a spouse or children?”

“None that I know of.” He reached out a hand and knocked on the wooden arm of my chair.

“Do you have a significant other? Someone who’s special in your life?”

Mitch shook his head and frowned unhappily. “That’s why I’m here actually. I think there might be something wrong with me.”

“In regard to relationships?”

“Yeah.” He scratched the whiskers on his chin thoughtfully. Definitely tactile, which meant that he relied heavily on his sense of touch in order to comfort and ground himself as well as to form impressions about people and his environment. That’s why he’d held on to my hand so long out in the waiting area. He was trying to get a sense of me via skin-to-skin contact. Interesting. Men were usually more visual than tactile, although there were exceptions to that rule. Creative men, such as artists and chefs, were very tactile.

“I was seeing this girl, Keri, and she accused me of being sexually compulsive.”

“Because you cheated on her?”

“I guess, which is stupid, because technically I wasn’t even cheating on her. You can’t ‘cheat’ on someone when you never made any kind of commitment to them or talked about being monogamous, right?”

“Either way, Keri obviously felt betrayed. The question is: Do you think you’re sexually compulsive?”

Mitch shrugged. “I like sex and I’m good at it.”

Clearly, he did not suffer from a lack of self-confidence.

“Do you have trouble controlling your sexual impulses?”

He leveled an earnest gaze at me. “Doc, I’ve got a job where I meet young, beautiful, half-naked women every day, and a lot of them come on to me. If I didn’t respond, I’d have to be gay or have some kind of medical problem.”

My diagnosis: Mitch Buchannon did not suffer from sexual compulsion or addiction; he was a man whore. I knew the breed well, having encountered many of its kind in the course of my dating career. As a rule, they were physically attractive, extremely self-assured, and had very little emotional depth.

“Mr. Buchannon—”

“Mitch,” he reminded me.

“Mitch,” I corrected myself, “you seem to be okay with your lifestyle choices, so why come to me?”

“Because I started to think that maybe Keri was on to something with the whole sexual compulsion thing. I mean, I’m over 30 and I’ve never had a serious relationship with a woman.”

My left eyebrow shot up. “Never?”

“Nope, I’ve always been a serial dater, going from one woman to the next, not staying with anyone long enough to get attached. I’ve never lived with a woman; I’ve never told one that I loved her. Meanwhile, most of the guys I know are settling down, getting married, having kids.”

“And you feel like you’re missing out on something?”

“Maybe. I’m not saying I’m ready to walk down the aisle or anything, but it might be nice to wake up with the same person every morning.”

Self-awareness and a desire for change and emotional growth? There might be hope for this man whore yet.

“Then, we need to get to the root of your intimacy issues and work on resolving them.”

“I’m game. Where do we start?”

Where do psychologists always start? “With your childhood.”

Our parents and their relationships with both us and themselves are the cause of so many of our adult problems . . .

* * *

Using the spare key my parents had given me when they’d moved into their condo on the 15th floor of the ritzy Bayshore Heights, I let myself in.

Mamá,” I shouted from the foyer.

Like a perfectly coiffed hurricane, my mother blew in from the living room; the unbuttoned red silk shirt that she wore over a matching camisole billowing out behind her, and the heels of her gold slingbacks clickety-clacking on the tile floor. “Oh, mija, thank Dios, you’re here!” she declared, then threw herself into my arms and squeezed me tightly.

Pulling back, she surveyed me with a critical eye, paying special attention to my midsection. “Have you put on weight?” she wondered. “You know you’ll never get a man if you’re too hippy.”

“I haven’t gained a pound.”

“Are you sure? Maybe you should weigh yourself? I have a scale in the bathroom.” Of course, she did. She also had tons of expensive makeup, lotions that did everything from erase fine lines to remove cellulite, a walk-in closet full of designer clothes, and two full-length mirrors to look at herself in. Not to put too fine a point on it, but my mother’s vain. And since her daughters are a reflection of her, she’s always been overly concerned with our appearances as well.

Mamá,” my tone was exasperated, bordering on irritable, “I rushed over here because you said there was an emergency.” She’d caught me on my cell phone when I was halfway home from work. The connection had been bad, and I’d lost the call right after she’d told me in a hysteria-tinged voice that I needed to come to the condo immediately. I’d raced over, imagining all sorts of terrible things like my father having a heart attack or one of my nephews drowning in a swimming pool accident.

“It’s your sister!” My mother blinked back tears and placed a hand tipped with red acrylic nails over her heart.

“Ana?” I started to panic.

“No, Isidora.”

My stomach sank. With my younger sister’s penchant for calamity, anything was possible. She could have wrapped her car around a tree or run off with some Mambo instructor who’d knocked her up. “What happened?”

Mamá’s lips quivered with barely restrained emotion, and I wrapped a supportive arm around her shoulders. “She hung up on me!”

I dropped my arm and gave her an incredulous look. “That’s it! You called me over here and scared me half to death because Izzy hung up on you?” Ladies and gentlemen, my mother, the drama queen.

“It was terrible! Before she hung up on me, she called me an ‘interfering witch’ and told me to stay out of her life.”

“She was probably just having a bad day. Maybe she was PMSing or something?” I tried to ease the sting of my sister’s rejection.

“PMS? Bah! That’s no excuse for being disrespectful to your mother. The way that girl talks to me is shameful.”

She walked back into the living room, and I followed, taking a seat on her plush white sofa while she fixed herself a cocktail at the small bar that my father kept well-stocked for company. “Do you want something?” She held up a bottle of white wine.

“God, no.” I rubbed my stomach, which still hadn’t recovered from my mini-drinking binge at Wasabi’s the night before.

“I just don’t understand why your sister hates me so much,” Mamá lamented as she joined me on the couch, perching daintily on its edge with her glass of Chardonnay in hand.

It was time once again for me to play my designated role in the Alvarez family. Ana was the bossy one, Izzy was the brat, and I was the mediator who had to step into the middle of everyone’s fights, soothe away all of the hurt feelings, and try to make both parties see things from the other person’s point of view. With training like that, it was no wonder I’d become a psychologist.

“Izzy doesn’t hate you. She’s just incredibly strong-willed and she doesn’t like to be told what to do.” Kind of like someone else I knew. Izzy had inherited her hotheadedness and stubborn streak from one of our parents, and it certainly hadn’t been my sweet teddy bear of a father.

“I never tell her what to do!” my mother was affronted. “I might make a suggestion once in a while . . .”

“You should stop. Don’t offer Izzy any advice unless she asks for it.”

“She could benefit from my years of experience if she’d only listen to me.”

“But she won’t, so you have to let her go her own way. And if she makes mistakes, that’s okay. It’s all part of growing up.”

“Isidora is already grown up. She’s 23 years old for heaven’s sake! Look at how much I’d already accomplished at that age.”

Uh oh, here we go, I groaned inwardly. My mother never missed an opportunity to talk about her glory days as a beauty queen. The tiaras, the parades held in her honor, the offers to model and do commercial work, and how she gave it all up to be a wife and mother. I’d heard it all a thousand times before.

“I was Miss Miami at 20 and first runner-up in the Miss Florida pageant at 21. I married your father that same year and had Ana when I was 22.” She smoothed back her salon-styled black hair as if to say, ‘See, it’s just as silky, thick, and gorgeous as it was the day I was crowned.’

“You were an early bloomer, probably because you were an only child and had to assume adult responsibilities at a young age. Izzy is the baby in our family, and youngest children tend to develop more slowly because they’re coddled by their parents and older siblings. I have a really interesting book on birth order you should read.”

“Bah! I don’t need to read a book. I already know what’s wrong with your sister. She’s lazy. She has no goals and no ambition. I don’t know why your father paid all that money for her to get a college education. What has she done with it?”

Izzy had spent her four years at the University of Florida partying like it was 1999. She’d changed majors three times, and her grades had been so sub-par that she’d barely managed to graduate with her degree in General Arts Studies. I wasn’t even sure what General Arts Studies were. The course requirements had probably included a few museum visits and a fingerpainting final.

“She just needs time to find herself and figure out what she wants to do with her life.”

“Find herself?” my mother scoffed. “What she needs to find is a husband. If Isidora had a good man to take care of her, your father and I wouldn’t have to worry about her so much.”

“23 is too young for Izzy, or any woman, to be contemplating marriage.” Oh, crap, had I just said that out loud? Stupid, stupid Pilar. Don’t ever discuss your views on marriage with your mother.

“Of course, you would say that, Miss Independent, Miss I’m A Doctor, So I Don’t Need A Man. You don’t care about having a nice house and a husband and children to love.”

“I have a nice house,” I reminded her. “And I never said that I didn’t care about having a husband and children. I plan to have a family one day.” Dear God, when had this conversation taken such a harrowing turn on to Me Street? I was much better at defending my sister’s actions than I was my own.

My mother eyed me skeptically. “You’re almost 30, Pilar. How many days do you think you have left?”

“I’m not ready to collect Social Security just yet. I still have time to wait for the right man.”

“You already broke up with the right man,” she said indignantly. “Victor was perfect! So charming, so handsome, such good manners. He has his own business, and his family has mucho dinero. When his father dies, Victor will probably inherit the yacht brokerage. Do you know how much that business is worth? Millions! You could have been married to a millionaire, Pilar. You could have lived in a mansion, driven a Mercedes, been a member of the country club—”

Mamá . . .,” I attempted to interrupt her, but she ignored me and kept right on delivering her long-winded speech on ‘The Many Virtues of Victor Liscano, and the 5-Star Life You Could Have Had With Him.’

“. . . and he doted on you. But no, that wasn’t good enough for you. You’re too picky. You think that rich, attractive men just grow on trees . . .”

Mamá!” I shouted this time, which startled her into silence. “Victor and I only dated for a few months. Our relationship was never that serious; he certainly wasn’t going to propose to me. And we were notcompatible. So, you’ve got to let . . . it . . . go.”

She sniffled and looked wounded. “Is it wrong for me to want the best for my girls? You’re so smart and pretty . . .,” squinting, she leaned towards me, “. . . are you plucking your own brows? You really should get them waxed; you get a much better shape that way. I’ll give you Shelley’s number. Nobody else in Miami can arch a brow like she does.”

I groaned and leaned back against the sofa cushions, clutching my head.

“What is it?” Mamá asked worriedly.

“I’ve got a headache. I should go home.” At that point, faking an illness was the only way I could think of to get away from my mother.

“You probably haven’t eaten all day, and that’s why your head hurts. I’m cooking Picadillo Estilo Cubano for your father tonight. He’ll be home from the office soon. Why don’t you stay?”

I could smell the seasoned meat simmering in the kitchen, and the aroma was delectable. My stomach grumbled, reminding me that I’d only had a few bites of salad for lunch, and it needed filling. I took a minute to mull over my options: stay at my parents’ for a delicious, home-cooked meal and listen to Mamá complain about Izzy, or worse, tell me how to run my life, or go home, pop a Healthy Choice in the microwave, and watch the Dr. Phil special on TV.

Standing up, I said, “Thanks, but I really have to go,” then made a beeline for the door before she could stop me.

“Are you sure?” She chased me into the foyer. “Your father will be upset he missed you.”

“Give him my love and tell him I’ll see him soon.” I kissed her once on each tanned cheek and slipped out the front door.

Sticking her head out into the hallway, she shouted after me, “Remind your sister that my birthday is coming up, so she can’t stay mad at me forever. I expect to see her at my party. The whole family will be here. If she doesn’t come, I’ll be disgraced. Ask Isidora if she wants her mother to be disgraced on her 50th birthday.” This would be the third year in a row we’d celebrated my mother’s 50th birthday.

“Yes, Mamá,” I dutifully replied as I stepped onto the elevator with my temples throbbing. At least, I hadn’t lied about the headache.



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