Female intelligence, p.16
Female Intelligence, page 16
Now he looked plain mortified. “I am not asking for directions,” he said, as if drawing a line in the sand.
“Why not?”
“Because there’s no reason to. The person I ask will probably give us the wrong directions and we’ll be worse off than we already are.”
“Oh, I see,” I said, having heard that one before.
“Besides,” he said, “if I had more time, I’d find the damn street on my own.”
“But you don’t have more time,” I reminded him. “So ask that woman over there how to get to Oak Street. Go ahead.”
“I bet she won’t know,” he grumbled.
“Ask her, Mr. Brock. You won’t complete the program successfully unless you do.”
He sighed and leaned his head out the window. “Miss?” An elderly woman approached the car. “Do you know how to get to Oak Street?”
She cupped her ear and asked him to repeat the question. He wasn’t thrilled. The indignity of it all.
“DO YOU KNOW HOW TO GET TO OAK STREET?” he said again, louder this time.
“No, I’m afraid I don’t,” said the woman, who then ambled away.
Brock glared at me.
“Ask that woman,” I suggested, motioning to another passerby. “But when you ask her, try not to bark at her, Mr. Brock. In other words, try to make her want to give you the directions. Women respond much more sympathetically when there’s a human-interest slant to a situation—much more so than they do to straight commands or questions. So this time, add a little information to your presentation. Say something like: ‘We were driving up from the city, because it’s such a lovely summer day, and decided to see the sights here in Pelham Manor. Would you tell us how to get to Oak Street, please?’”
“Human interest.” He relaxed a little. He was feeling less threatened, I could tell. He just had to be eased into the exercise; they all did. “Okay. How’s this?” He leaned out the window. “Oh, miss?” The woman approached the car. She was a pretty young redhead in shorts and a sleeveless top that exposed her midriff, among other treasures.
“Yeah?” she said, between chomps on her bubble gum. She was eyeing Brock in a sexy, seductive way while completely ignoring me. I did not experience the bond of sisterhood with her.
“We were driving up from the city today,” he began, sounding very jaunty. “We wanted to be out in the country on such a lovely summer day and smell the air, smell the flowers, smell the essence of the season.” God, he was laying it on a little thick. “Speaking of smells, that’s a wonderful perfume you’re wearing, miss.”
“Thanks,” she said. “My boyfriend bought it for me.”
“And a lucky guy he is.”
I cleared my throat, hoping he’d get the hint to stay on message.
“Anyway, our destination was Oak Street but instead we ended up here.”
“So you’re lost,” said the redhead.
Brock took a deep breath before admitting he was. “I was wondering if you could give us directions.”
“Nope,” she said. “I’ve never heard of Oak Street. Sorry.”
She turned and strutted back up the road.
“I think you were overdoing it,” I said, unable to resist. “Womenspeak does not involve drooling.”
He grinned. “I wasn’t drooling. I was just trying to arouse her…sympathy.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He managed to get the directions to Oak Street out of the third passerby, a man in his fifties.
“Good job,” I told Brock. “This was a difficult exercise today and you came through it very well.”
“Then it’s on to Oak Street we go,” he said cheerfully, pleased to have passed this latest test.
“No, it’s back to the city we go,” I said, starting the car. “It’s getting late.”
“What about Oak Street?”
“There is no Oak Street. That’s why you couldn’t find it on the map.”
“But that man just gave me directions to it, unless I’m totally out of my mind.”
I smiled. “Men would rather die than have other men think they don’t know something. He wasn’t about to let you think he didn’t know where Oak Street was, so he gave you bogus directions.”
“You mean the guy was one-upping me?”
“He was talking Menspeak to you. Same thing.”
Stunned, Brandon Brock sat back against the seat of the car and regarded me. “Are you like this with all men or just with me?”
“Am I like what?”
“So in command.”
I laughed to myself, remembering those months after Kip left when I felt anything but. “I’m not in command,” I said. “I’ve just been doing this kind of work for a long time. I have my area of expertise, that’s all.”
“I’ll grant you that, especially after seeing you in action today. As a matter of fact, I’d love to hear the story of how you came to be interested in the different languages that men and women speak—if you have the time to share the information, of course. I’d really enjoy listening to the genesis of the Wyman Method and the steps you took to market the program, as well as how you’ve helped so many men to become sensitive, caring individuals who are there for the women in their lives. I, for one, still have a lot to learn on that score.”
I stole a quick glance at him as I drove, just to be sure that the man sitting next to me, the man who had just addressed me in impeccable Womenspeak, was the man who had once called me snookums.
“Yes, Mr. Brock,” I replied, my voice quivering ever so slightly. “You do have a lot to learn, but not nearly as much as you think.”
17
During the ride back to the city, I told Brock about myself—because he’d asked and because we were stuck in traffic. I told him about my father’s inability to communicate, about my parents’ bitter divorce, about my graduate work in linguistics, and about my book and how it turned me into a media darling. I even told him about Kip and how he sold me out to the National Enquirer. That I told him not just because he’d asked, but because he was such a good listener.
Brandon Brock? A good listener?
You must think I’d lost all perspective with regard to him, but he was a good listener that July afternoon, and no one was more surprised by that—more proud of that—than I was. There was no doubt that the Wyman Method had changed him. He didn’t interrupt me. He didn’t try to switch subjects on me. He didn’t even make jokes whenever there was a lull in the conversation. (Well, except one. He asked me if Kip and I had ever had a special song. Ha ha.) What’s more, he posed perceptive questions and made comments that weren’t frivolous.
“Maybe you should spend some time with your father and hear his side of the story,” he said after I had described the acrimony between my parents. “It might sound different to you after all these years. It might occur to you, for example, that the reason he didn’t communicate with your mother at the dinner table was because he was unhappy, not because he was male.”
“I didn’t base my entire career on the failings of my own father,” I protested. “Study after study shows that a huge segment of the male population has problems communicating with women.”
“I’m only suggesting that your father’s ‘failings,’ as you call them, may have been his way of dealing with your mother, with whatever was wrong between them. Why don’t you have a talk with him and see?”
After we were done with my history and were still crawling down the FDR Drive, I asked Brock to give me a thumbnail sketch of his. He told me about his mother, who was beautiful but remote; about his father, who was a task master and had no use for a son who didn’t excel; about his sister, who still lived in Michigan, was the wife of a G.M. executive like her father, had three children, and thought it was high time her brother remarried and had kids of his own.
“Do you like kids?” I asked, trying to picture him changing diapers.
“Yeah. As a matter of fact I do.”
“And Kelsey?” I said, trying to picture her changing diapers.
“What about Kelsey?”
His tone confirmed what he’d told me in a previous session. He had no intention of marrying Kelsey. He didn’t love Kelsey.
It won’t shock you to learn that I was not broken up by this news.
The more Brandon Brock and I talked that day in the car, exchanged personal information as well as the occasional quip, the more I realized that we were engaging in real communication, not the sort of gratuitous, empty chatter that Kip and I were famous for.
What I also realized was that I was going to have to admit to myself what my friends already suspected, to confront what every reader of this tale has already guessed. Yes, I was going to have to face the fact that my feelings for my client had evolved, over the course of nearly six months, from contempt, to tolerance, to affection, to heart-pounding, pulse-racing, can’t-eat-can’t-sleep-can’t-wait-to-see-him-again passion. To put it another way, I was falling in love with the guy, and I didn’t know what to do about it.
I did nothing about it. Not right away. I just went on with my routine. I continued to see Brock, of course, continued to coach him and go over scripts with him and teach him new Womenspeak phrases and expressions. But I never let on that I was counting down, ticking off the days until that first Tuesday after Labor Day, his final session and the moment I was now dreading; never gave him an inkling that the thought of him disappearing into his life and out of mine was painful.
There was one afternoon with him that was especially difficult for me. We had just wrapped up a session in which he had learned that women want men to express understanding, not dispense advice, when he made a point of thanking me.
“For what?” I said, as we stood at the door to my office. He was planting his blue eyes on me. I was trying to look as if my insides weren’t churning.
“For being tough on me, not letting me bulldoze you,” he said, positioning himself at a respectable distance from me but not so far from me that I couldn’t smell his cologne.
“Oh, well,” I said with a phony little laugh. “It’s just my job. I’m a dominatrix, remember? I’m tough on all my clients.”
“I know, but there’s something extra you’ve done for me.”
“Something extra?” I said.
“Yes. When I first signed on here, I asked you to promise that you wouldn’t go running to the media about it.”
“And I haven’t gone to the media. I kept my promise.”
“I know, Dr. Wyman. That’s the ‘something extra’ you’ve done for me. See, I know how tempting it would have been for you to tip off a columnist about my coming here. Your career had taken a downturn. You needed clients, needed good publicity. Getting the word out that the CEO of Finefoods—Fortune’s poster boy for bad behavior!—had hired you to help him would certainly have heated things up for you. But you did keep your word and I assume you’ll continue to keep it. I respect you for that, and I thank you for it.”
Boy, that sounded like a goodbye, didn’t it? A nice goodbye, but a goodbye nonetheless. And I didn’t want to let him go, didn’t want to have to get my Brandon Brock fix by reading about him in the business section of the New York Times. But what was I supposed to do?
“Tell him,” said Penny when I finally caved in and admitted what she’d already surmised.
“I can’t,” I said. “He’s my client. It would be highly unprofessional for me to blurt out my feelings in the middle of a session.”
“He’s almost not your client,” she said. “Wait until his last session and then blurt out your feelings.”
“Tell him,” said Sarah when I confided in her.
“I can’t,” I said. “He’s involved with someone.”
“You mean that nitwit decorator you brought to my house?” She laughed. “The one who wanted to paint all the rooms red?”
“Kelsey, yes.”
“He doesn’t love her. She’s not the kind of woman men love. She’s the kind of woman men flaunt at their high school reunions, to show everybody they’re still getting laid.”
“Tell him,” said Gail when it was her turn to hear about my dilemma.
“I can’t,” I said. “He’s a successful, high-profile guy. He’ll think I’m after him for his money.”
“What’s wrong with having a little money? If Jim would get his ass out there and earn some, maybe I wouldn’t be so quick to divorce him.” So quick. They’d been married for years.
“Tell him,” said Isabel after I laid out the scenario for her.
“I can’t,” I said. “What if he doesn’t love me back?”
“Then get a cat,” she suggested, as she had so many times before.
At each and every remaining session with Brock I struggled with whether or not to tell him I loved him—with whether or not to even hint that I had more than a professional interest in him—and ultimately couldn’t find the words. Talk about another irony. There I was, an expert at getting men to share their feelings, and yet I was proving to be incapable of sharing my own.
Surprisingly, it was Diane, my assistant, who provided the solution; Diane, who had never struck me as a student of my work; Diane, who had seemed so superficial, shallow, interested only in her appearance; Diane, who turned out to be the most perceptive of anybody.
I was packing up my things one afternoon, tidying up, when she knocked on my office door, holding up that day’s edition of the Wall Street Journal, which a client must have left behind in the waiting room.
“Look, Dr. Wyman,” she said excitedly, pointing to the front page. “It’s your client, Mr. Brock.”
Apparently, the newspaper had done a piece on Finefoods and adorned it with a line drawing of Brock. As it was in black-and-white, the portrait didn’t do him justice.
“I’d like to read it,” I said, after thanking Diane for bringing it to my attention.
“I didn’t know he was famous,” she gushed, her lips painted in that dark brown shade that some women find attractive but I do not. “I mean, I knew he was a big-shot businessman but not, like, a celebrity or anything.”
“You knew he ran Finefoods,” I reminded her. “That’s a major company. So he’s in the news a lot.”
“It’s still awesome,” she said, “the fact that he’s famous and hunky.”
“Hunky?” I’d never thought of Brock in that light, exactly. Brawny, yes. Attractive, yes. Golden, yes. But hunky? Well, maybe.
“Way hunky,” she said. “And he’s gotten much nicer too, since he’s gone through your program, Dr. Wyman. He says hi to me now. He even told me the tube top I had on the other day was a ‘lovely color’ on me.”
“Did he?” I said, choking up suddenly.
“Yeah, and he did something else that was cool. I was eating a Hershey Bar at my desk and he stopped and said, ‘Don’t worry about your complexion, Diane. It’s a myth that chocolate makes a woman’s skin break out.’ Isn’t it incredible that a man would say that?”
My eyes misted. Brock and I had spent a recent session on the relationship between women and old wives’ tales.
“Is everything okay, Dr. Wyman?” Diane asked, noticing that I was on the verge of a meltdown.
For some reason—maybe because she had been with me since the beginning and had borne witness to my rise and fall and had never once shown anything but loyalty to me—I chose Diane as the person to whom I would unburden myself.
“No,” I replied. “Everything isn’t okay.”
And then I let it out, just started blubbering, just hurled my normally held-together self into her arms and unraveled.
“Oh my God, Dr. Wyman,” she said, obviously stunned to have The Boss slobbering all over her.
“I’m sorry, Diane,” I said, sobbing into her shoulder, which had been buffed and toned to that of a body builder’s. “But you’re the only one I can really talk to, the only one who knows Brock the way I know him.”
Don’t ask me what that meant. It just sounded right at the time. I needed to bond with Diane in a way we had never bonded.
“So this is about Mr. Brock?” she said, patting my back. Her acrylic nails kept catching on my cotton sweater.
“Yes,” I said. “Oh, Diane. I’ve fallen in love with him but I can’t find the words to tell him.”
That brought forth a torrent of tears from me and an actual gasp from her.
“You?” she said, clearly unnerved by this. “You’re in love with Mr. Brock?”
I nodded. “But I can’t tell him. I don’t know how to tell him.”
“You?” she said again. I was hoping she’d be a tad more articulate, given the significance of the situation.
“Yes, I,” I said, a little impatiently. “I am in love with Brock. I don’t know if he’s the slightest bit interested in me, but I won’t find out unless I tell him how I feel. The problem is, I’m blocked on this, totally blocked. Every time I even imagine sharing my feelings with him, I freeze up, can’t compose a sentence, can’t speak. I don’t understand what’s the matter with me. I’ve never been like this. Never.”
“Dr. Wyman?” said Diane.
“What?”
“You’ve always been like this.”
I picked my head up off of her. “What are you talking about?”
She took a seat, in the wing chair in which I customarily sat, then motioned for me to sit in the other chair, the client’s chair. “Why don’t you relax and I’ll explain what’s going on.”
She would explain? Warily, I sat. This was a new Diane, a Diane who smelled a shift in the balance of power.
“Okay,” she said. “Here it is.” She crossed her legs, made herself comfy. “You’ve been my boss for a long time and you’ve always been so…so uptight. You never showed any emotion, not even when your husband dumped you, not even when he sold your story to the Enquirer, not even when your business went down the toilet. Not a tear. Not a rant. Just the stiff upper lip. Just the same old Dr. Wyman.”
I winced. I guess it was the “old.” No, it was the bluntness.
“You’ve been so busy being the inventor of the Wyman Method,” she continued, “so busy teaching men how to talk like a woman, that you’ve forgotten how to talk like one yourself.”
