Dilworth looked at himself in the mirror of his unmarbled bathroom just off his consulting room. A hairbrush in each hand, he lightly stroked his graying temples and then leaned close to the mirror and studied the flesh around his eyes. Did he see something subtle there, an as-yet indiscernible thickening of the subcutaneous tissue, the precursor of sagging musculature? No, he didn't think so. Not yet, anyway. He surveyed his face above the white collar of his shirt. He had his Anglo-Egyptian mother to thank for his swarthy complexion. It was bloody well all he could be thankful to her four. She had been a fractious, scowling woman of a stern demeanor who had driven his physician father to other women, not as a mere womanizer, but in search of solace, of that elusive peace that lay within the embrace of the vertical smile. And then he drank. And then he killed himself.536Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡKtcd9dHHw2
He heard the consulting room door open. Dana never knocked. He ran cold water and washed his hands and dried them. He turned out the light and opened the door.
She was smiling at him, sitting on the edge of the chaise in a Monet-patterned floral silk jacquard with pleated bodice. If he didn't think of the webby confusions of her depressing psychology, but thought of her instead as something to be consumed like a cool and colorful summer fruit, then he would say that the word "succulent" suited her totally.
"So handsome," she said, her contralto languid and seductive. "How do you see yourself, Jerry? When you look in that mirror?"
"What do you mean?" He feigned indifference, but he was curious that she seemed so pleased with herself.
"Do you see the young man you used to be," she asked, kicking off her shoes, "or the old man you're going to be."
Dilworth was deciding not to put on his sport coat which was hanging inside the closet. He would remain in his shirt sleeves. She was the last of the day. He looked at her. Yes, "succulent," that was the best word.
"Have you already tuned me out?" She was still smiling. "I haven't even been laid yet."
"No, I haven't tuned you out." Her pale gray eyes were picking up a blue light from the dress. He could almost see through them into her head. He could almost see through them into her head. And they were always open. She never closed them; even when they made love, she regarded their intercourse with the calm frankness of a mother watching her nursing child. Indeed, with Dana he sometimes felt like a child, and he even believed she could sense that and it pleased her, though the idea had never been voiced between them. And if she had ever asked him if it were so, he would have denied it.
"I see myself as I am," he said, to show her that he had heard every word he she had spoken. He walked over to his leather armchair and sat down. "And sometimes I see myself as I will be. I don't believe I have ever seen myself as I was. I never look back in the mirror."
"Ohhhhhh. How well balanced of you."
"It doesn't do any good, though," he added, looking at her shins. "There's no salvation in the past."
"Salvation?"
"There's no profit in it, I mean."
"When I look in the mirror," she said, "I see something different every time. I'm not sure I've ever seen just what I am."
Yes, he thought, he could well believe that. Her mind was so fractured, so shattered and scattered, she might never see herself---ever. Those pale, limitless eyes would likely never behold the true terrain of their source.
"You don't think an old dog can learn new tricks, do you, Jerry?" She was still smiling, as if she knew something amusing about him and was teasing him with it. "You believe that we are at an impasse here, you and I. Psychotherapy can be a lengthy enterprise. I know. You told me. It takes time, sometimes a lot of time, to gain 'insight,' you said.
"That's right," he said, feeling as if he were speaking to a child. "And you've got to want to do it. You've got to commit yourself, be dedicated to it."
He heard echoes in his words of sincerity long ago abandoned, and it caught him by surprise. Dana was the first client he had ever despaired of. It wasn't that he'd benefitted all the others. Certainly not; there had been many mover the years he knew he couldn't help. But Dana had been the first he had wanted to help so desperately that he had risked his own emotional balance to do so. It'd been a fool's endeavor, and that was why she meant so much to him.
"So how do you think I've done?"
"Since when?"
"Overall."
"You've made good progress," he lied. As if inadvertently (was it?) her forearms, which rested on her upper thighs as she fiddled with a hair clip, had worked up the hem of her dress, and the little faces of her knees stared back at him like twin creatures guarding the approach to Helen's Well.
"You think so?" she asked, and he thought he detected a mocking tone.
He looked up at her face. She was still flying. That was something new for Dana, this self-satisfied manner, as if she'd eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
"If I had a scotch," she said, "I could tell you a story."
"I think you must've had one before you came here," he said, observing her.
"Jer-ree," she chided, as if he were a little kid.
"Jesus." He hoisted himself out of the deep armchair and went to the liquor cabinet. Why did he let her make him feel this way? His back was to her as he made the drinks----he made one for himself as well and (perversely, he made them both vodka---and he could feel her looking at him. He even thought he could feel a small breath of her on the back of his neck, and any moment he expected to feel the wet flesh of her tongue sliding into his ear. It didn't. He turned around and carried the drinks over to her. "Enjoy in good health," he said.
She took the cold glass, saw that it was vodka, and looked at him standing in front of her. Her smile had faded somewhat and then faded away altogether as he put his right hand on the inside of her left knee and moved it up her thigh under the soft jacquard, along her thickening inner leg until he was almost there. She put a hand on his forearm, her small tapering fingers gripping him, stopping him. She maneuvered away from him and straightened her dress, but left the hem just above the knee. She nodded toward his leather armchair.
"Let's pretend," she said, "that I've come here for psychotherapy."
It was a cutting remark and he felt his face flush, but he knew she didn't mean anything by it. At least, nothing he should be hurt by. But he was, a little. He sipped the Stoli, cold and biting. Unlike Dana, it was his first for the day. He returned to his armchair and propped his feet on the hassock.
She sipped her drink, looking at him over the top of her glass the way she liked to do. It was a seductive act, though he knew she didn't intend it to be. But it was. The pale gray stones of her eyes peering at him over the veil of ice and glass and clear vodka couldn't have been interpreted any other way. Dana was seductive the way a fox was sly. She didn't have to be conscious of it; it was just her nature. And because of it----again like the fox----she was always in the narrow borderlands of some unidentified danger.
"Why have you never married?" she asked.
Dilworth felt a flash of anger which he quickly checked; he knew his face hadn't betrayed him. She had done this before, a number of times. Maybe no other woman had tried more often to dig into his past, and he detested it. At times Dana had almost gone too far in this direction, and it was precisely this suspect that had almost destroyed their relationship a couple of years earlier.
"Why, Jerry, have you never married?"
"Why have you never stopped marrying, Dana?"
"Oh, no. We talk about that all the time. We've talked about that for five and a half years." She lowered her glass to her lap where she held it in both hands. "I want to know about you. I mean, if I'm supposed to listen to you regarding these things, shouldn't you have some credentials, something to establish your authority? Priests, for instance. You know, the stupidity of having celibate men given sexual and marriage advice. God knows you're more qualified than a priest in matters sexual, but what about in matters marital?"
She kind of laughed at the way she put that, liking it. Dilworth looked at her and wondered why she was doing this. Did she need to? It was clear from what she had said about her husband
on her last visit that she was on the cusp of another divorce. If he had been good for nothing else, he had helped her through two of those.....the first had occurred before Dilworth had met her. Whatever the reason for her recent capricious mood, he knew that the emotional trials of another divorce would soon take precedence over all else. She would begin wanting to see him more frequently......Dana's divorces were a financial windfall for him, as well as for her.....and she would become sexually voracious. This sexual aspect of her divorces had shocked him the first time he realized the relationship. Yes, it had shocked him, but it hadn't prevented him from indulging himself. The second time he helped her through a divorce he had behaved disgracefully, like a satyr, and when it was all over he had had to face the fact that he had peeled back yet another layer of his shadow, and it had nothing to do with creativity. Dana had shown him more about himself that he had learned in his own ten year encounter with psychoanalysis.
"Jerry...."
"I think," he blurted, showing more impatience than he had wanted to show, "that the institution hasn't gotten much to recommend it."
"Marriage?"
"Yes. Yes, Dana, Marriage. Weren't we talking about marriage?"
"Oh, so you haven't married because you see people like me all the time, so many bad marriages."
"It gives me pause for thought."
"But what about most people?"
"What about them?" He had checked his temper, his sudden frustration.
"People who come here----we're not like most people."
"Who the hell do you think 'most people' are?" His tone was morose, but he couldn't help it."
Dana fell quiet. She nursed the Stoli, keeping the clear ice cubes back with her lips as she drew the clear liquor from the clear glass, looking at him.
"You never married?" she said finally.
"Never."
Again she fell silence. She swung her legs momentarily, like a child, then drew one of them up on the chaise and he caught a flash of her powder blue panties. Powder blue. She drained her glass with this one leg poised between where it had been and where it was going and she laid the empty glass on a small table on the other side of the chaise. She lay down.
"Would you answer me something, honestly, about yourself."
"All right," he lied.
"Have you ever had a homosexual experience?"
"No."
"Have you ever wanted to?"
"You know that story I told you about my aunt?"
"Yes."
"That wasn't exactly true, what I said."
Dilworth waited. Dana was an Arcanum for whom there were no initiates. She knew it, and it horrified her, and made her desperate. "But you told me it was true," he said.
"It was, but not quite."
"Fine."
"The truth is that when I walked into the room everything was like I said, but I didn't find a strange man there. It was a woman."
Dilworth swallowed the Stoli in his mouth.
"She was in the chair, but she was totally naked, bending to put on her stockings. She smiled, as I said, and she put her fingers to her lips for me to be quiet. But she did it casually, softly, without alarm, as if she had just gotten a baby to sleep in its crib. Nothing in her gestures or her face indicated the least inhibition. It was all perfectly natural."
"Then why did you tell me it was a man?"
"At the last moment I couldn't do it."
"What?!"
"It was all part of a plan, a scenario. The story was just an introduction."
"Introduction?!"
"To----my own---story."
Dilworth stiffened.
"Well," she said.
She was staring out to the sweep of green grass that sloped gently toward the river which, in contrast to the manicured and domesticated lawn, lingered along the margins of property in a shapeless pool like something feral and vaguely dangerous, overgrown with cattails, sharp brambles and gnarls of untamed vines, its black mud a womb for brackish water. "She's younger than me.....I had no idea what I was getting into, what----beauty I had been missing."
"I had never known, never suspected, you see, that I could feel such things, tinglings and quiverings, cool and warm waves washing over me as real as water, electrifying me.....Things I had never, ever, felt with a man. And the peace, a complete absence of anxiety. I hadn't managed touching another woman like that----but----when it came to it I was totally at ease. It is so----right----I----you could never understand how it is. I don't think it's possible for you to understand. I hardly believe it myself."
Dilworth was speechless.
Dana Anderson smiled once again, but it was not at Dr. Dilworth. She smiled at the incomprehensible good fortune that had come to her at this middle age of forty-two, just as her life once more was about to be uprooted by divorce, and the failure of her fourth marriage loomed before her as confirmation yet again of her unloveliness and of the smallness of her worth. She smiled at the memory of only that morning and of the recent weeks when she had made a discovery as earthshaking and inspirational as anything she'd ever experienced as a teenager. Everything she had searched for and longed for in her relationships with men, but which had proved to be so heartbreakingly elusive, she had found in another being whose mind and body were a mirror image of her own.536Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ6bvQnUAS85
