This wasn’t Parker, was it? She never missed a chance for an insult. But no—of course not. It was a man’s voice. One, as usual, I couldn’t recognize.
“Identify yourself, please,” I said into the roof.
A rustling beside me as whoever it was sat down. “It’s your pal, Joe,” the voice said, closer and softer now.
“Hi, Joe.” For a second, knowing it was him made me feel palpably better. But then it occurred to me to wonder if he might be filming this moment for later blackmail, and I felt worse again.
“I’m no psychiatrist,” Joe said then, “but I’ve seen a lot of panic attacks. And this kind of looks like that.”
“I’m fine,” I insisted. I was always fine—whether I was fine or not.
“Okay,” Joe said. “A friend of mine—who clearly had a totally different thing from you—used to find it helpful for me to pat her back in moments that were nothing at all like this.”
“I’m not having a panic attack,” I said.
“Great,” Joe said. “Neither am I.”
“So I don’t need you to pat my back.”
“Cool. You don’t need it.” A long pause while he let that settle. “But we could just do it for fun.”
“Fine,” I said, too busy dying to fight.
And then he really did it. I felt a hand settle between my shoulders, and then I felt it slide down my spine till it reached my lower back, then lift up a second, and appear again back up at the shoulders.
He was basically petting me like I was a dog.
But, ugh. Okay. It felt nice.
If I weren’t feeling so nauseous, I might be struggling with all my cognitive dissonance about Joe. My first impression had been so unbelievably bad. But many of the impressions that followed had been good. Had that first impression been wrong? Or was he just hiding all the bad stuff really well to my face?
I guess I’d just have to take it one panic attack at a time.
“The fact that you don’t want me to help you,” Joe said, “really makes me want to help you.”
“That sounds like a you problem.”
“It totally is. It’s the reason my wife left me.” Then he corrected: “One of them.”
I admit that got me. “Your wife left you because you were helpful?”
“Yep.”
“I’m no wife, but that doesn’t seem like a thing wives normally complain about.”
“I am, apparently, too helpful. Problematically helpful. To sum up our many arguments: I help everybody all the time without discretion. Old ladies. Cub Scouts. Mangy cats. I have no helping filter.”
“But isn’t that a good thing?”
“She also thought I was a bad tipper.”
“Why?”
“Because I gave everybody twenties. Hotel maids. Valets. Everybody.”
“Okay, Daddy Warbucks. I’m with the wife on that one.”
“She felt it was a compulsion. Being too nice.”
I guess she’d never heard him say the word blubber.
“And it impacted her quality of life. Negatively.”
“I’m trying to imagine exactly how helpful you’d have to be for a non-insane woman to divorce you over it.”
“There were a few other reasons,” Joe said.
“Are you pathologically helpful? Did you give someone your car? Or, like, a vital organ?”
“Not yet,” Joe said.
“My last boyfriend was the opposite of helpful,” I said. “Your way is better.”
“That’s comforting.”
“I’m probably a good friend for you,” I said. “Because I never need help.”
“That’s a relief,” Joe said, continuing to stroke my back in a hypnotizing rhythm and kindly allowing me to ignore the irony.
I admit: It was relaxing.
After a while, he said, “My friend who had a completely different thing from you used to breathe while I did this, and it helped her a lot.”
“I don’t need to breathe, thank you,” I said.
“Suit yourself,” Joe said. But then he added, “Deep breaths are super healthy for you, though—even if you’re totally fine. I might take a few myself. Just to improve my already stellar health.”
And with that, Joe sucked in a big, loud breath, held it for about three seconds, and then blew it back out. “So refreshing,” he said then. “My grandma does this every day, and she just turned a hundred.”
He kept breathing like that, and what can I say? Peer pressure. I joined him.