Edward C Rankin, MSW

Heights unnerve me. I get vertigo standing on tip-​toes. If I drink caffeine after 8 PM, I have warped, surreal dreams. They always end the same way: me, falling from a great height and snapping awake, cold-​sweating.
So today, at 45 feet in the air, against my will, my temper curdles. A crisp cold day in December. Flower Mound, Texas. I lie on the roof of the McMansion stringing the icicle lights at the behest of Her Majesty, who stands below, arms folded. Supervising.
She has a voice that is the very opposite of mine: a slightly reedy falsetto that carries no farther than the end of her nose. Every time I walk away from the side of the roof below which she stands, she issues some garbled, nearly inaudible command, but only after I’m nearly out of earshot. And every time she does this, I drop what I’m doing and walk back to the edge of the roof and yell «COME AGAIN?». And every time I do that, she scolds me for my angry tone.
This happens a half dozen times. My exasperation mounts with each vertiginous trip to the edge of the roof, until I yell at her, and she yells back, and things go to shit from there until Her Majesty, in an eye-​bulging seizure of florid rage, walks certainly over to the ladder I’ve propped against the gutter, and throws it to the ground, and yells a valedictory «FUCK YOU», and stomps into the house.
I’ve disappeared into this harmless little matrimonial squabble. But now it’s gone. The present resumes. In that present, the neighbors are arranged on their lawns. All of them. For miles. Taking in the obnoxious white-​trash spectacle of it all. Some with undisguised shock. Others with the appropriate sense of cosmic hilarity. One, an effeminate airline pilot with with whom I once quarreled over — of all things — the tone in which he addressed Her Majesty at a Cub Scout den meeting — raises his eyebrows. Supercilious triumph.
Because such clashes occur all too frequently between Her Majesty and me, I finally reconcile myself to the fact that a marriage that was supposed to grow has instead metastasized. Nothing surprising there. Happens all the time.
But what is surprising, very surprising, is that a few months after leaving the house, I simply stop doing anything that doesn’t suit me. Essential things. Paying bills.
I have the money. It accumulates. And from time to time, I look over at my desk, where the envelopes mount to a paper ziggurat and think: «Shit. I should pay that.» And then I don’t. I’m not sad; just sort of paralyzed. The phone rings. I pick it up. The people from collections. They always seem surprised when I respond to their template question –«How would you like to take care of that, sir?» — with the answer: «I’d like to pay it.»
This goes on a while. I decide it might be a good idea to go see someone to figure out where the fuck the last decade went. How I got like this. And luck would have it that Ed Rankin is the person I literally pluck from a list of names. He’s around my age. He has the face of a man who’s never missed a good night’s sleep or told even a harmless lie. A man of almost annoying rectitude — he once refused, on ethical grounds, to let me buy him a cup of coffee.
I walk into this whole exercise with a sour degree of skepticism about all of it,. Because I’ve known so many people who swore by therapy but for whom the talking cure seems rather elusive. What I learned is that, in the best case, a thoughtful professional may be able to help you recompose a coherent narrative of your life — a superficially trivial but possibly life-​saving exercise. At a weird time, Ed Rankin was useful to me, and I appreciate the decency and common sense and wisdom he brought to the effort.
A humorous little epilogue, if I may.
I stopped going to Ed when I went to work for a company that offered an insurance plan under which Ed was not an approved provider.
I started going to a guy I won’t name. He seemed very promising. He was an avuncular old Jewish man. Had kids. Highly educated. And God bless him, he truly wanted to help. But every now and again, in response to some odd and not very important disclosure, he’d seize up like a man who’d received a terrific jolt, his palms pointed upward, his eyes clinched shut in a way that evokes that famous picture of the blind great Borges (link below). And he remained in that posture for a very long time, an uncomfortably long time, a full minute, it seemed, until, snapping out of whatever empathic ecstasy he’d disappeared into, his body unwound and he said with wide-​eyed, spittle-​flinging zest: «And how did that make you FEEEEUUUUUL?»
He did this often. Because I didn’t find it helpful, I just stopped going to see him. But then it turned out he was a member at my gym, and we ran into each other all the time, which was awkward.