Belly Up To The Therapy Bar!

[Teijo Dan]

There is a famous joke in therapist circles.

It goes roughly like this: two consulting psychiatrists meet up.  One is smiling and debonair, the other haggard and heavy-lidded. The first says to his sad colleague, "What's going on?"  "Well, my friend, I have so many patients with so many terrible problems. They come to me with neuroses and manias and guilty self-destructive behaviors and self-loathing and nerves and psychoses.  It's so awful and nerve-wracking."  "Mm-hmm," says the first, "I have those too."  "What?  How can you hear all of that, and not feel badly for them?"

The first psychiatrist laughs, and says, "Who listens?"

Teijo hated that joke. He stared into the depths of his glass (bartender's choice: bartender had, in Teijo's opinion, chosen frivolously), and saw the ice cubes reflect all of his clients over the past week.  Understanding people, and helping them to understand and know themselves, and then occasionally dealing with the new metaphysical fallout, was no laughing matter.

He began sliding the glass back and forth across the bar between his hands.  What the hell.  It was only eight o'clock.  By now he ought to have a mild buzz on so he could begin sorting through the idea that none of his colleagues for the past year had ever been able to duplicate his id-exorcisms.

[Marina Chevalier-Roussau]

As the night progressed, more people showed up to drink.  There were many salarymen, and some small groups of people who'd booked a karaoke room but decided to drink a little in advance.

Marina happened to duck into the bar, because she had been wandering around at night on the whims of a general hunch that she should be um...wandering around at night.  All by herself.  But then she'd heard footsteps behind her and couldn't lose them.  Remembering her encounter with the man who'd spilled forehead juice all over her, Marina had opted to go to a place with lots of people, rather than wait for a taxi.

Who knew?  Maybe she might make a friend here.  Bring him home...or something.  Bah.  That thought made Marina far less excited than she felt like it would.  No one seemed to be smoking, either.  Literally or figuratively.  Marina wasn't about to go outside again for a smoke.

[Teijo Dan]

Part of the reason Teijo had chosen this bar is because it had a long art deco mirror behind the bar, tastefully highlighted by various cleverly-decanted liqueurs in pretty colors.  He'd had an undergrad roommate who had gone into sociology and semiology, and he'd had to hear many drunken amateur dissections of bar layouts.  "The pretty glints, Dan," Hideki had slurred, "is to awaken the id, which like a magpie goes straight for shiny things."

Teijo looked hard at a bottle of chartreuse, his eyes narrowed.  So far his id was just yapping about professional pride and the fact that he wanted another drink.  Score one for the bar-designer, he supposed. 

He glanced at another bottle of something purple and thick and disgusting-looking (probably some kind of cocktail mixer), and caught sight of a brunette in the mirror.  He smiled despite himself, and turned, and waved.

[Marina Chevalier-Roussau]

"Dr. Dan!" said Marina.  She remembered to bow a little.  But wait.  What else were you supposed to do when you ran into your therapist at a bar?  In Japan?  And he was waving at you?  She couldn't pretend to see someone else and walk off, because she'd already responded. 

Speaking of chartreuse, Marina had a shawl around her shoulders in the same blinding hue.  This was on top of a yellow dress that no one in their right minds would wear.  Marina wore a designerly baseball cap in the shape of a duck's head.  Those shades of colors should have not looked good with her skin tone and the duck hat should have looked childish.  Nothing matched, color or texture-wise. As ugly as the outfit sounded in theory, it worked on Marina for no reason. 

So Marina grabbed the chair next to the doctor.  Screw protocol.  Marina ordered a random beer in barely-intelligible Japanese, she was so nervous.  She couldn't look Teijo in the eye.

[Teijo Dan]

"Beer," Teijo said, approvingly.  "Kirin Ichiban's a good choice for starting, Miss Marina, already you're drinking like an Edokko.  Kanpai!" 

He turned and looked at her.  "Another interesting hat," he said, and politely didn't say anything about the rest of her outfit until he could figure it out.  Well, she was an architecture student, maybe they had a different aesthetic.  And she was French.  One of his clients said that everything fashionable came from Paris by way of Shibuya.

"So, you decided to stay," he said curiously.  He smiled.  "Good for you."

[Marina Chevalier-Roussau]

Marina was stalled by the amount of words coming out of Dr. Dan's mouth.  She was thinking so hard that while pondering his first phrase (something about beer), she was sideswiped by the comment about her hat.  Marina lost the train of thought completely once Dr. Dan followed it up with...whatever he was saying.

If there was one thing Marina understood, it was the toast.

"Kanpai," she said, wary, and raised her glass.

[Teijo Dan]

Teijo tossed down the rest of his drink without even wincing, despite his suspicion that Tabasco sauce and coconut rum weren't meant to go together except in shooters explicitly for frat boys, which he hadn't been in quite a few years. 

"Disgusting," he said, pointing at the empty glass, and smiling at her.  "Good drink to give underage kids to scare them off it."   

[Marina Chevalier-Roussau]

Marina said, "What?"

Because what the hell was Teijo even talking about?  Meanwhile Marina was preoccupied with trying to read any underlying thoughts behind his facial expression.  Her mind was so busy!

[Teijo Dan]

He peered more closely at her, and considered that maybe he'd had enough, even if it was the first drink of the night, if already he was incomprehensible.  "You're right," he said agreeably.  "Alcohol shows true faces, but maybe that should stay in the office. - Ginger ale, please."

He sipped at the ginger ale and tried not to look at the duck hat.  "Are you checking this bar's architecture? Because I've already taken some notes."

[Marina Chevalier-Roussau]

She caught 'architecture.'  But that was it.

"Huh?"  said Marina, and then she drank a lot of her beer.

[Teijo Dan]

"Architecture," Teijo tried, sure he wasn't slurring.  He waved his hand around at the bar and the ambience.  "The layout.  The room's design."  A thought occurred to him.  "Or you are here to watch people.  Good idea.  You'll want a glass of something harder, though, it will let people know that you're serious."

[Marina Chevalier-Roussau]

Marina set her beer down with a healthy post-swallow sigh.  "That?  Not architecture.  That's interior design.  I am not an interior designer," she said.  Her accent was pretty strong, but the words were Japanese, at least. 

"Interior design is not strong, I do not know what you are getting at," Marina continued.  She stared directly into Teijo's eyes.

[Teijo Dan]

Teijo considered his options.  "All right, so you really are just here for the people and the drinks," he tried, and decided that after all he wanted something better than ginger ale. 

[Marina Chevalier-Roussau]

"Yes," said Marina, and she finished off her beer.  "That is correct, Dr. Dan."

She was a little haughty because she wasn't sure of what else to do.  It wasn't like Marina spent a large amount of her time hanging out with boys...or men.  She couldn't help glancing at him sort of.  Okay yeah maybe she was checking him out and drinking her beer way too fast.  But pretending not to, at the same time.

[Teijo Dan]

Teijo looked a bit askance.  "You don't have to call me Dr. Dan when we're not in the office," he said.  "Out and about just plain Teijo is fine."  She was a foreigner; they set great store by personal names, he was pretty sure.  "So you did decide to stay in Japan.  That's good."