Unexpected

        My 65 year old ex-therapist who actually looks like she is 57 started having an affair with her 53 year old boss, who is a major womanizer. They are both married to other people.  People who are liberal think that this is o.k. My mother actually thinks that it's fine. She felt that my ex-therapist wanted to do something exciting. My mother thought that her husband was probably dull. I said that her husband was probably wonderful and that my ex-therapist was a heinous trollope. My ex-therapist who I'll just refer to as "Pam" didn't seem like the type to sleep with her boss and cheat on her husband, and not show up to therapy sessions, so that she could have sex, instead. The experience made me feel as though I were placed somewhere between (or maybe overlapping) the Jerry Springer show and Wharton's House of Mirth. When had I become Lily Bart? Pam's pretty and she must've been prettier when she was young, obviously. Perhaps this is something she's always done. She wore her wedding/engagement ring set all the time, though. She'd bring her soggy cereal in Tupperware from home and place it on her desk. She started cancelling my appointments because she and her boss(who she had worked with for years) don't show up alternating days every week so that they can sleep together.  I wonder where they go? Sometimes I think that he drags her to motels on the New Jersey Turnpike because she seems so brainwashed. Or perhaps it's better then that - little boutique hotels in Putnam or Dutchess Counties across from the Hudson River, where he could say that he had had a meeting and charge the therapy place for it as an expense.  She never told me very much about herself. She wasn't a psychologist, only a social worker. She did tell me once that she didn't have sisters when I had mentioned something evil* my sister had done to me. I said, "You are lucky". She said that that's what women tell her who do have sisters. Another time when we were discussing womanizers before she had gotten started with hers, I had asked her why women get involved with them. She said, "It's a different part(the non logical part?) of your brain, and you can't resist it." At the time, I hadn't thought she was speaking from personal experience, from past womanizers. I thought that she was just trying to explain it. This affair also made her dopey so that she stopped listening to me when she did show up. I have depression but I had always made an effort to get to the therapy place and I paid my deductible on time. But now she was cutting out and not paying attention when she actually *did* show up.  I had seen her for a year and a half.  When she was going under the influence, she often gave out tells about her romantic situation, if she had known, she wouldn't have considering how private she had been, previously. Her romance with her boss came on the heels of my own infatuation with him. He had called me at night from his cellphone with a pretense. This was because two weeks earlier we had had a pretty intense starring/attraction thing. I took his pretense literally because my chrush was at a low ebb and he struck me as a married womanizer(which turned out to be true), and I thought that I was doing the right thing. Since the starring thing, he had always been around the waiting room area before my appointments. But after I blew him off, he had sounded sad, and he wasn't there the next time I went there. My appointment time had been changed due to inclement weather during the Winter. He had told me the new appointment time. Foolishly,I was surprised that he wasn't around at the next appointment. The plexiglass was up in the waiting room and I sat there alone. I  felt like I was in some kind of prison/hell. I missed seeing him and I  thought I had made a mistake and that I should find him before he found another woman. But he found Pam almost immediately and she didn't rebuff him, she just threw off her clothes, instead. So not only was it difficult to go to a therapist who wasn't there, sometimes physically absent and sometimes present but absent but now I had to watch her fall in love, which I rationalized as her making a big mistake. The last time, I saw her, she was 15 years old. She asked me what guys are my type. I knew that I couldn't say that her boss was. After that, I thought that we were going to braid each other's hair and paint each other's nails! Then she told me how she couldn't make it the next week. This would be the third time. Not consecutively, though. In fact she told me, "Why don't you skip next week." I said, "I need an appointment." She said annoyed and like she was doing me a great favor, "Let me see what I have on Friday." She gave me a Friday appointment which I later cancelled because I didn't like her attitude. She couldn't care less about me. When her boss finally called me because I had left a message with someone else there - a lesser administrator in the scheme of things- complaining about her absences because I knew she wouldn't get in trouble considering her situation, he was shy because of our last phone call. And when he suggested I speak to Pam about changing therapists, I explained that I no longer wanted to talk to her and besides he was in charge of changing therapists.  He said "but you have to speak to someone."  I told him, "I'll speak to you." We spoke several times. During one conversation he said that he would call me on Friday. When I found his voice mail - I had been at the library - he was angry, almost livid - that I hadn't been home to receive his call. He said angrily, "I told you that I would call you on Friday." It seemed that it had nothing to do with finding me another therapist. If I had known that Friday was such an auspicious day, I might've hung around. During his rant he said, "I won't be in on Monday" and then added angrily, "Neither will  Pam." Confirming what I knew already. He steadied himself and brought himself out of his anger. He said he would call Tuesday or that I could call him. I called him and he told me that there were no other therapists and that my only option was to go back to Pam. He said, "I talked to Pam yesterday, and she said that she'll take you back." He said, "Pam's life is changing." I said, "That happened to me once. My dentist gave me too many codeine pills. I took one and threw the rest out." I said, "You should keep Narcan up front." He said, "I'll call you again. I'll call you again. I'll call you tomorrow.  I'll call you Wednesday." He sounded like a lunatic. I wanted to say, "Dare to dream", ironically, but I kept quiet. Maybe I hung up on him and that's why he didn't call Wednesday - flashbacks of the other time I hung up on him when I blew him off. On Wednesday, I waited all day. I'm sorry to admit this. Maybe he was on the New Jersey Turnpike with Pam or someone else. Often when he called, there would be strange women's numbers on my caller I.D sometime before and or after his calls. For references? Is he on Yelp?? ***"He's sexy but I had to fake orgasm." By Friday, I was leaving my own lunatic messages on his voicemail and the other administrator's seeking another therapist. He left a message on my voicemail that he was looking for a therapist for me that would be the "best fit" because suddenly he had therapists?? He ended up giving me a therapist on a four week vacation. I quit the place before the women came back. I wouldn't have had a therapist there for seven weeks by the time that woman would've showed up. I wrote a letter to him, really, although it had been addressed to someone else, he did see it eventually, because someone had told me, saying that that was egregious - not seeing a therapist for seven weeks, and that I was quitting. That I would miss the no frills, communist waiting room with the free books, and how I liked to park on the hills amongst the two family houses. How I had liked talking to Pam before her dopamine got tricked out.  And that she probably had had a moment of clarity before she jumped down the rabbit hole and she should've listened to it. He had reminded me of a guy that I had liked, that I had gone to elementary school through high school with - but he was his evil doppelganger!

Sometimes the bad people win out. Sometimes the ethical people lose out. I'm between therapists now. I spend a lot of time on my lawn looking up at the painted bellies of airplanes. I spend time on crisis lines talking about my depression. If you didn't know, the mental health system is broken and it's difficult to find a decent therapist who takes your insurance.  I've auditioned several so far. I spend time trying to make people understand what happened and how truly sad I am but no one seems to understand the gravitas of the situation. 

And I learned that a man could have a really good voice but not be so good, himself.

*She hadn't thought whatever my sister did was evil. She thought that she had been giving me a "hard time". Pam always had difficulty wrapping her mind around evil.