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Presumably, the blandness of the waiting room is meant to be calming, but all it does is make it harder for Louis to concentrate on the copy of the New Yorker he is trying to read. The off-white walls and uni-directional overhead lighting are distractingly ugly and the abstract pastel-toned art, all of which looks like it was made in ten minutes from a ‘Twenty decorating hacks for less than $50’ video, offends his professional sensibilities. For what they pay per hour for this therapist, you’d think she could at least afford a couple of ferns and some mood lighting.
Who is he kidding? The waiting room is dire, but it is irritation at Lestat that is making it impossible for Louis to concentrate. The intensive, three-hour format of the therapy that they’ve undertaken since becoming parents—a weekly joint session, followed by their own individual sessions, one after the other—always knocks out most of the afternoon, but at least whoever has their individual session first can usually leave and get an hour of their time back. But no. This morning Lestat had gone into town for a meeting with his label by some method other than his own car, meaning Louis has to wait and drive both of them home. So here he is, wasting yet another hour of his one wild and precious life waiting for Lestat, because Lestat, in typical Lestat fashion, had only thought about if he wanted to deal with rush hour traffic and not about if Louis would be inconvenienced by his whims. Because of him, Louis has to sit in this awful room with nothing to distract him from thinking about the past two hours.
Their joint session had been, as usual, lively. For all that Lestat had readily agreed that they needed to do something about the extreme escalation in their arguments since Claudia joined their family—or as Louis would have put it, the extreme escalation in Lestat’s neediness, moodiness, selfishness, unreasonableness, recklessness, and libido—he has entered every session like it’s an argument they’re already halfway through having. And in that argument, Lestat is conceding nothing.
The chance to decompress afterwards with a paid professional who has borne witness to the convoluted turns of Lestat’s mind sometimes helps Louis not to strangle his husband, and sometimes makes his hands itch to close around Lestat’s scrawny neck all the harder. Today, the therapist had indulged her tendency to bothsidesism until Louis felt nearly as annoyed with her as he did with Lestat. Points were made, and Louis will think about them, but surely anything Louis does pales in comparison to the shit Lestat tries to pull?
If he was allowed to leave, Louis could put this all out of his mind and concentrate on the evening logistics of feeding, entertaining and winding down Claudia, who always comes back from an afternoon with Grace and the twins high as a kite on refined sugar, no matter how many whole-food snacks Louis packs for her. Instead, he has nothing to do but stew.
The usual end time for Lestat’s session comes and goes with no sign of his husband, and Louis gives serious consideration to walking out and texting Lestat that he’ll have to get a taxi home. Or hell, abandoning his own car for Lestat to use and getting a taxi himself. Surely he can’t be accused of rudeness if he’s left his own car? That’s considerate, if anything.
When Lestat does emerge, nearly fifteen minutes after he was meant to, all Louis’ irritation drains abruptly away. Usually, Lestat flounces out of the therapy room like he thinks he won something, alone and promptly, presumably so that their therapist can have five minutes of privacy to bang her head against her desk and reconsider her career choices. Today, he shuffles slowly out with slumped shoulders and a face so red and swollen he might be in the early stages of anaphylaxis.
Their therapist walks out behind him, looking more than a little ruffled herself. She has one hand hovering behind Lestat’s back like he might fall over or, if left unattended, walk into a wall. She gives Louis a significant look and mouths what Louis thinks is the word “breakthrough”. Or possibly “grapefruit”, but Louis lets the context guide his conclusions. He’s not entirely sure either option is professional, but it doesn’t seem like the moment to get into it.
It would be nice if the therapist could give Louis a little more guidance on what is going on, but as she doesn’t seem about to, Louis dismisses her from his mind. He tries to make eye contact with Lestat, but Lestat keeps his gaze firmly on the tastefully dull gray carpet.
They walk to the car in silence, Louis the one hovering in concern now. The silence between them has none of the tension of their recent interactions, when quiet is nothing more than a pause in the yelling. Lestat is distant, pre-occupied, almost absent. Louis guides him to the passenger side of the car and opens the door solicitously, grateful that Lestat isn’t driving himself alone. Right now he wouldn’t trust Lestat to navigate out of the parking lot, let alone back home.
What the hell had he talked about?
An hour earlier
“It is not uncommon for a spouse to experience jealousy when a child joins their family,” the therapist says. Her tone is so determinedly neutral it feels pointed. “And it is not entirely irrational. The love between you might be unchanged, even enhanced, but there is, objectively, a loss for both parties in terms of time and attention.”
“Yes, I am very selfish,” Lestat replies. “This has already been made clear to me.”
“Labels like ‘selfish’ shut down conversation,” she says. Something Lestat would welcome right now. “I want to look beyond that.”
“What words would you prefer? Pathological? Sociopath? Narcissist?” To quote just a few of the accusations Lestat has had flung at him in the past, by Louis and others. There is no point beating around the bush. Lestat knows where they will end up.
The therapist looks at him steadily. “I would say that you appear to be extremely afraid.”
Lestat laughs. “Afraid? Of you, or a small child?” He will give the therapist this much credit: that is not what he expected her to say.
“Of losing your place in Louis’ affections,” she says.
This hits too close to the heart for Lestat to laugh. It is not a possibility but an imminent reality, he can see that, as clearly as he can see that he is the one driving his slide into Louis’ disdain, far more than Claudia. She succeeds at being Louis’ favourite without guile or effort, because she is innocent and lovely. Lestat, by contrast, cannot seem to control himself and be better, no matter how much he wants to. He says nothing.
“We have talked a little about your own family, growing up. I would like to explore-”
“This is meant to be practical therapy,” Lestat interrupts. “To learn techniques, not how to blame everything on our mothers.”
That focus on the present, on how to become better parents now, when Claudia needs them, is the whole reason that Lestat agreed to see this woman. He has no patience for the American obsession with psychoanalysis, and even less desire to understand his own numerous, as they would say here, ‘issues’. If anything, he needs to know how to bury them more deeply, so that they will stop hurting his husband and daughter.
“I am not saying it will be our only, or even our main focus.” The therapist speaks evenly, giving no indication that Lestat’s rudeness had ruffled her. “The goal is still to help you both develop tools and guidelines to be better parents and partners to each other now, but in order for you to be able to do that, we have to understand the basis of your fear better. An intense, irrational fear such as this often has its roots in unexamined dysfunctional dynamics from your own childhood, or some other form of past trauma.”
The word ‘trauma’ makes Lestat bristle. Everyone wants to go digging for it in this country, as if bad experiences are treasure to gloat over, and boast about, and display. Why give the dark things in life more time and attention? Surely it is better to move on? But mental health professionals, he has learned, do not like to hear this. They prefer to talk about things like ‘accountability’ and ‘triggers’.
“I do not like to share,” Lestat acknowledges. “Perhaps that is what having two large older brothers who break your toys does. Or perhaps that is just how I am. I have always been a jealous person, you can ask Louis.”
The therapist tilts her head, thoughtful. “But Claudia is not a romantic rival. She is your daughter.”
The words knock all the air out of Lestat, as effectively as a kick to the solar plexus. It takes a moment for him to get his breath back. “I know that,” he snaps when he does, but the pause has already stretched out, incriminatingly long.
“You grew up in France, is that right?” the therapist asks.
Mechanically, Lestat answers her next few questions, outlining the members of his family and the broad strokes of how he grew up. Asset rich, cash poor, isolated. Two living brothers, who hated him. A father, who hated him. His mother, who loved him.
It is not until the therapist offers him a tissue that Lestat realizes tears are streaming down his face. Once he is aware of them, they flow even faster, so thick that soon he can only talk in short, staccato sentences, squeezed out between sobs.
Even for Lestat, an experienced and accomplished crier, it is quite the display. And it doesn’t stop. Several minutes in he feels none of the catharsis and release that usually comes with tears. He feels like he’s tapped a high pressure chamber of hot liquid under the earth that will geyser uncontrollably for several centuries.
When the crying gets so out of hand he can’t talk at all, the therapist lets him lie down on the couch, dims the lights, and starts talking in soothing tones about breathing. It is, at least, an escape from the infernal questions. And a chance to think.
Perhaps it is a sign of stupidity that in three weeks of intensive therapy Lestat has not made this connection, but nonetheless, this is the first time. ‘Your daughter’ and ‘romantic rival’. Two things that have nothing to do with each other. Two things that only someone so fucked up that they should not be allowed around decent people would ever have cause to connect.
Before this moment, Lestat would have said that he is aware that he has many flaws. He would have accepted that they have been on ruinous display since Claudia entered their lives, to an extent that confuses him as much as it does Louis. Lestat also knows he has to get himself under control, that is why is here. He wants to be better.
Unfortunately, it has been impossible to even admit his problems out loud. Lestat does not even entirely blame himself for that side of things. Nothing makes it harder to confess his sins, makes him feel more wild and wicked and unrepentant, than Louis’ impenetrable, unshakeable facade of perfection. Why should Lestat claim his share of the blame, when Louis will always not only deny his portion, but turn any reference to it into another crime? And if, as it usually is, the blame is uneven, if Lestat knows that his own share is not just fifty-five or sixty percent, but eighty or ninety, it is even harder. If such a small slice, a mere mouthful of blame, is too much for Louis, how is Lestat meant to choke down all the heaping platefuls of his mistakes? It is impossible!
And so, he has resisted. If Lestat cannot be as calm and perfect as Louis, he can match that calm with equal levels of unreasonable and infuriating. For three sessions Lestat has made every admission a fight, waiting impatiently for Louis to give even a little, denying even what he has already admitted when no such softening comes.
With those words—“Claudia is not a romantic rival, she is your daughter”—all Lestat's righteous indignation crumbles. It is his fault. It is all his fault. Not partially, not mostly, not almost entirely. All. Lestat has brought what does not belong, what is over and done, into his family and home, into the present. Things that made sense between him and Gabrielle then, that make sense if you understand the context of their unique bond, and what they went through, and the way that they love each other, have no place here and now, with his beautiful husband and his precious daughter.
That is why everything has felt wrong for the past year: because he is wrong. So corrupt that no therapy can fix him, not even for two hundred and fifty dollars an hour.
With ten minutes of the session to go, and the therapist clearly wishing she was qualified to sedate him, Lestat begins to panic. He is out of control, revealing the shape and size of things that must never see the light. He has to explain this.
Desperately, he manages to choke out a few more words. True ones. Painful ones. Enough to explain, to someone who already knows his tendency to hysteria, the tears. That the brothers who hated him, ten and seven years old already when he was born, so much bigger and stronger, were violent and jealous. That the father who hated him was the model for the brothers’ rage and violence. That his mother’s love, though sincere, was cold and intermittent. That he had found his place next to her more as a confidant, friend and protector, than as her child.
“I was my mother’s man, not her son,” Lestat hears himself say, and stops. He cannot go any further. He must not.
He waits, taking the deep, slow breaths the therapist recommends. Surely he has disgorged enough sordid, humiliating detail that they can move on? It is all his fault, he knows now. Equally, he knows that there will be no explaining the rest, not to this young, successful, well-qualified American, who has been trained to understand only one blueprint for love and family. Who strives for health and balance in all things, and does not understand survival and love that is worth ruining a part of yourself. There is no need for complete understanding. Now that he has grasped how deep the rot goes, what he has to push down deeper, he can learn to be better.
Thankfully, what he has given her is enough. The therapist praises his honesty and spills forth an avalanche of buzzwords. Poor role models. Insecure attachment. Enmeshed family systems. Fuzzy roles and crossed boundaries. She talks for so long that they run over the usual end of their session. Lestat must have made her nervous.
When Lestat can only respond to the torrent of psychobabble with a blank look, too exhausted for further performance, she slows and softens. “This was very good work, Lestat. We can talk about it more in our next session.”
Lestat nods. She frowns.
“It might not feel like it, but I promise you, this is progress,” she says. “During the week, I want you to focus on how much we’ve achieved, and how much more we will be able to achieve in the future.”
The words come as if from the other end of a tunnel. Lestat nods again, because some kind of response seems to be expected. She sighs and finally, at long last, releases him.
The therapist guides him to the door with a hand on his elbow and follows him out into the waiting room. The tears have stopped, but Lestat’s head feels hot and swollen. It seems to float, several inches higher than usual, above his drained, sluggish body, like a helium balloon that is tethered too lightly. He does not look at Louis as he enters the waiting room and Louis stands, only at the carpet, and then at Louis’s shoes. The shoes guide him out of the building, back towards the car.
The cool early evening air is grounding and Lestat begins to feel a little more real. Still, he is afraid to look at Louis. If Louis is still angry, as he has been for months now, as he has every right to be, Lestat might pop, or float away. If there is pity in his eyes for Lestat’s pathetic state, the geyser will gush forth once again in an instant, and Lestat cannot be completely sure that only tears will flow. What if he says too much? Louis can never know. Of everyone in the world, Louis must not know.
Without Lestat fully understanding how it happens, he is in the car. He stares out the window at the world spooling past, trying to understand what this all means.
It shouldn’t mean anything. Being a son and being a father have nothing to do with each other, not for him. They are worlds apart. An ocean and decades distant. What was natural in one situation is poison in another. Lestat should not have needed to be told. What does it mean that he forgot? Does it mean that after years of peace, he will return to the patterns of the past, unable to stop himself destroying those around him? What depths of destruction will he be able to wreak, now that he has so much more to lose?
In the normal course of things, Lestat considers that no torment he and Louis experience together can be worse than the torment of being apart. For the first time, he considers if it is better if he takes some time away. Not forever, he hopes. Not far. But he is so much worse than he thought, and it is not just them anymore. Until he can pack the past away where it belongs and curb his destructiveness, Claudia must be protected. Even Louis might be vulnerable. Although the likeness has long since been subsumed by the avalanche of Louis’ unique graces, Lestat sometimes remembers that when he first met Louis, it was Nicki he saw in him. Nicki in the captivating intensity of his eyes, and the shape of the cool, cynical smile Louis turned on the unworthy. And without meaning to, Lestat had ruined Nicki.
None of this must touch Louis and Claudia. That is the most important thing.
The sudden silence of the car’s engine tells Lestat that they are at home. Neither of them get out of the car.
Lestat takes a breath, ready to say it. There is no sense in delaying it. Perhaps he should be gone this very night. Perhaps he should not even enter the house. But Louis beats him to it.
“I realized something,” Louis says.
Will Lestat fail even in this, and force Louis to tell him to leave? Has Louis known all along that that is what must happen, or had the therapist told him? Lestat cannot remember if she and Louis had talked before they left, or to what extent confidentiality applies to psychologists, but she might have a duty to warn people if she believes they are in imminent danger. She might have told Louis that Lestat must go.
“I should probably save it for our next joint session, but I don’t want to give myself a chance to chicken out.” Louis runs his hands over the top of the steering wheel, a rare nervous tick.
Lestat should tell him it’s okay, he knows, he will not make it difficult. But he cannot speak.
“It’s not me and Claudia, a team of two, against you,” Louis says, in a rush. “I get that I make it seem like that sometimes, and then I act like it’s all in good fun, and just because I’m joking around it doesn’t count. But it’s not fair to either of you.”
Oh. Of course, Lestat knows exactly what Louis is talking about. The game that they always seem to be playing. Good Daddy Lou and silly Papa Les. Papa forgot to take the apple slices out of the fridge before we left. Papa didn’t look at the weather forecast before setting out for the park. Shall we check and make sure Papa didn’t do the wrong thing again? Shall we have a good laugh over how many mistakes Papa makes? We think Papa is overreacting, don’t we?
It is nothing, really. A tiny sliver of blame. Lestat is the one who not only forgot the apple slices, but then escalated a discussion about child-appropriate snacks into a public shouting match. But it is a tiny sliver of blame that Louis took.
Tears well up again, but they feel different this time, like they relieve the awful pressure inside. “Oh mon cher. What is a little teasing compared to how awful I have been? I don’t know how you have stood living with such a beast.”
“Hey, come on,” Louis says. He reaches out and takes Lestat’s hand. “I don’t think it’s safe for you to do any more crying, not before you hydrate.”
Lestat laughs more than this joke deserves, relieved beyond measure to hear any lightness at all. He pulls Louis’ hand into his lap and holds it with both of his, running his fingertips over the soft skin on the back, admiring the elegance and delicacy of Louis’ fingers.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Why I am so angry. Why I am so,” Lestat hesitates, but says it, “so afraid.”
“Well, we’ll figure it out,” Louis says, voice soft. “That’s the point.”
“The therapist, she thinks I do not understand how family should be. Because of my family, growing up. How we were.” Lestat continues to stare at Louis’ hand, afraid to look him in the eye, but nonetheless he can sense Louis grow tense and then forcibly relax, trying to hide it. Lestat does not like to talk about the past and never raises it voluntarily. Louis is probably afraid to spook him by seeming too eager, as if Lestat is a frightened horse.
It makes Lestat want to rear and kick, to fling Louis’ hand away, but he remembers Louis swallowing his small mouthful of blame, and only squeezes Louis’ hand tighter instead.
“What do you think?” Louis asks, cautiously.
“I think… maybe she is right,” Lestat admits.
“Okay, great,” Louis says, audibly repressing his excitement. Unfortunately, it is still obvious to anyone who knows him as well as Lestat knows him. If Lestat were any less wrung-out and repentant it would probably set him off, but here he is, a guilty dish-rag, submitting meekly. “We can talk about it next week.”
An elegant way of assuring Lestat he will not parlay Lestat’s admission into a week of probing, painful, personal questions. Truly, Lestat does not give his husband enough credit for his patience and restraint.
Louis shifts his body weight, ready to get out of the car and leave the discussion there, but Lestat pulls his hand closer.
“I am sorry for how I have been,” Lestat tells Louis’ hand. “I wish I could say I would stop, starting now, but,” Lestat feels his eyes growing hot once more and blinks, trying to cool them, “but already, I have not recognized myself, and I do not know how long it will take me to be better. I have been thinking,” the heat in his eyes turns to tears, which splash down onto their joined hands, “that I might move out.” Louis’ hand squeezes his, hard. “Just for a few months. Until-”
“No.” Louis’s voice is firm.
“Claudia should not have to put up with me, how I have been. You should not have to put up with me.”
This time, Louis tugs on his hand, so that Lestat is finally forced to look him in the eye.
“Absolutely not.” Louis has his determined, implacable face on. “We’re a team. You and me, that’s the deal.” It’s exactly what Lestat would have wanted to hear a few hours ago, but now he hesitates. A few hours ago, he hadn’t realized how unsafe he is for the people he loves. Perhaps sensing Lestat is unconvinced, Louis adds, “Claudia would miss you.”
At that, Lestat cannot contain a derisive snort. “Miss my tantrums and ineptitude? Slammed doors and tears from a grown man? That I upset you every day? She will be relieved.”
“She’d miss your stories, and how you do the voices, and always make her laugh. And how well you play her shitty little kids xylophone. And that you take her to the park everyday, even when it rains. And that chocolate spread I know you sneak her.”
“It is hazelnut, not chocolate, no worse than your peanut butter, and all French children-” Lestat begins, reflexively.
“I don’t want to be apart,” Louis interrupts. “No matter what.”
Lestat’s heart flutters in his chest, like it has grown wings, and would like to fly into Louis’ hands. I don’t want to be apart, no matter what. He knows that will join the list of things Louis has said that Lestat holds close and repeats to himself when Louis struggles to make his affection more explicit. All his concerns about Claudia melt away under the power of those words.
Slowly, Lestat lifts Louis’ hand to his mouth and kisses the back of it, once, twice, gazing into Louis’s eyes, as enraptured now as he had been the first time he saw them. “Then we will never be apart.”