She said to him, "I slept like a dead woman last night. I didn't dream; I didn't wake; I didn't move. Fifteen hours, straight through."
He said nothing, but turned slightly in his leather armchair and looked at the clock on the bookshelves. She had been lying on his chaise lounge for seventeen minutes and these were the first words she'd spoken. She lay facing away from him, at an angle, her arms straight to her sides, palms up, fingers relaxed as she looked past her feet, out the glass wall of his office to the woods that sloped down to the river, everything suffused in an apple green light filtering through the May leaves.
"I went to a movie and got home around 11:00; I was pooped. Culver was still out and Alyssa had already gotten the kids into bed. I took a cold shower, and when I got out I dried quickly and lay down on the bed, still damp. The windows were open, and I could smell the woods after last night's rain. I went to sleep."
He looked at the toes on her stockinged feet, the little tips of slightly darker nylon through which he could see her pedicured nails. Ankles as slim as a gazelle's. The dress was a shirt-waist of silk or rayon, a pastel rose so sheer it needed a full slip. Even so, it settled over her body with telling detail.
"It could just as easily have been fifteen seconds as fifteen hours. I was oblivious."
She stopped again. After a quiet interval, he asked. "What happened? Why this----long sleep?"
It was a rote question. When they told him they had experienced something for the first time, an emotion or thought or physical sensation, he asked them why they believed it happened. They pondered this question with serious self-indulgence, gratified that someone wanted to know how they felt, that someone cared why they did the things they did, even if he was being paid to do it.
"I haven't slept like that since I was ten."
Dilworth's eyes moved from her rose thighs to her face. She hadn't addressed his question.
"Ten?"555Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡaxqGV39GXG
She turned her hands over and placed them palms down, fingers spread tightly, the gesture of a woman suddenly wary, as though the chase had trembled inexplicably. But she wasn't frightened, her face betrayed nothing.
"Since you were ten?" he prompted.
Eve Mitchell had been coming to Dr. Dilworth for a little over two months, five days a week. He hadn't made much progress with her. From the start she'd been a resistant client, but Dr. Dilworth tolerated her recalcitrance, even overlooked the bleak prognosis for success. After all, he was not a strict interpreter of the classic forms of psychoanalysis, and if this woman didn't want to cooperate, he wasn't going to be rigidly demanding. He already had told Marissa and her spouse that the kind of therapy she had selected could be time-consuming and protracted. He'd let that prove to be so. Meanwhile, he was more than content to listen to her recitations which, up to now, had been evasive and vacuous ramblings (God, what a waste of time! But then, only a waste of time for her.). For his own part, he could not have wished for a more pleasurable hour, sitting quietly just out of her peripheral view with the freedom and leisure to let his eyes travel during the course of every sixty-minute session from one end of her long body to the other, imagining the exact texture and tones of the flesh beneath the sheer rose veil.555Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ7dVwqg4Y5L
Dr. Jeremias Dilworth was forty-nine.
Her hands gradually relaxed, and she turned them over once again, palms up, fingers curled gently without tension.
"When I was nine," she said, "I had a doll from Dresden. My father was in the army, and had been stationed there----or in Germany, anyway, and he brought her back to me. She was porcelain, her face was. I imagine she was expensive, though that didn't occur to me at the time. But thinking back, remembering the delicacy of her features, the detail, the luminous quality of her face, she must have been. She was blond, too, just like me. I thought she was the most beautiful thing in the world. The most beautiful."
Her tone of voice caused Dr. Dilworth to focus his attention on her face. She possessed an exemplary beauty, a firm jawline with high cheekbones and a subtly asymmetric mouth which he found appealing. She had a fashion model's straight nose. and widely-space hazel-green almond eyes which she lightly shaded about with a russet shadow that gave them a soulful appearance. Her hair was blond, not the strawy, bleach-punished white of the beauty salon, but rather the thick, butter-rich blond that occurs only as a genetic gift. Today she wore it pulled back in a loose knot, a style which accented the beguiling qualities of her features.
He found her so wonderfully appealing that he happily would have continued seeing her had she come only to lie on the chaise in silence, staring out at the sun-dappled grounds for an hour before departing grounds for an hour before departing in silence. In fact, the idea of that scenario was so appealing to him that he played it out in his imagination: a psychoanalyst has a beautiful client who comes to him three times a week, not to recite her fears and anxieties and to have them analyzed and explicated and demythologized, but to share her silence and secrecy, and through them, perhaps, to share her myths as well. The analysand becomes the analyst, and the analyst, the analysand. The psychoanalyst does not help the woman re-create herself through the emblems of her own words, but rather she re-creates them through the wise compassion of her silence.
But she did speak, and just now, for the first time in over forty hours of consultation, she had introduced the subject of her childhood. Over the years he had heard the childhood stories of many women. There were not many happy ones. After all, they came to him because they had problems, and many of their problems were, tragically, rooted in childhood. Perhaps the most depressing reality he had had to wrestle with in his profession was the banality of his clients' problems. Over the years he had treated hundreds upon hundreds of complaints, the same complaints over and over and over again: alcohol and drug abuse; anxiety-based disorders---phobias and obsessive-compulsive neuroses; mood disorders (Good Lord, he could've made a career out of depression alone!); sexual promiscuity; psychogenic disorders---anorexia, bulimia, ulcers; a plethora of sexual dysfunctions.....But these were not problems, they were only symptoms. Their cause was something else, something more complex than the symptoms, more traumatic. Like a psychic craven, this thing cowered in the deepest, darkest depths of the client's unconscious and sent emissaries----the symptoms----up to the surface of consciousness to harass the bewildered client on his behalf. Like an unsuspecting woman looking into a two-way mirror, the client sees only her own reflection, her own pain, and blames only herself for all that she sees. It was Dr. Dilworth's role to tear down the walls and to reveal the entity on the other side. It was not a role he always enjoyed, nor was he always successful.
"Actually, I'd gotten the doll when I was five," she said. "They'd just divorced."
Dr. Dilworth checked the little red light on his tape recorder across the room.
"He drank." She paused. "He was a very handsome alcoholic, and I loved him without reservation. A child can do that, once, anyway. I don't remember anything----no scenes, no screams, no quarrels. Nothing like that. But she told me about them later, and she showed me scars, which she said he'd made. I don't know if he did."
"You think she lied to you about it?"
"I don't know," she said with a trace of impatience. "I just don't know that he did it. And I never got to see for myself because we ran away. We left him in the middle of the night, in Montana, in a little town near Billings. She wouldn't stop until sometime next morning when we pulled off the highway onto a farm road. She made me stay awake while she went to sleep. When I finally woke her, it was early in the afternoon. We bought some barbecue at a roadside stand and kept driving. We didn't stop until it was night again, and we were somewhere just inside the Nebraska state line.
"And then for a year we lived like Gypsies while mother went through a series of waitressing and clerk jobs, staying for a little while in one place and then another and then moving on, dozens and dozens of cheap apartments, walk-up rooms, 'tourist court' motels, different ones all over the West. Mother liked to call it 'the Wide Open Spaces.' God, I've forgotten how many dirty rooms we stayed in, but I've never forgotten how they smelled. Disinfectant. Uric ammonia in the stale mattresses. The sour odors of others people's sweat and intimacies. At nights she would sob in the dark, and I would hold the Dresden doll, listening to her pitiful whimpering, breathing the smells of those stained mattresses----I don't know what she was crying about; she was the one who left."
Dilworth looked at Eve Mitchell's feet, her right one drawn back, the stocking wrinkling slightly across the top of her ankle. "You don't seem to have very much sympathy for your mother," he said, and looked at her face. She had turned her head a little away from him so that he saw her profile from an acute angle, what the artists call a profile perdu, only the outline of her cheek and chin.555Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡWFmKKhPYbc
"I missed him so much,' she said, ignoring his question. "Sometimes in those sweat beds at nights, the thought would come into my head that all my internal organs were slowly detaching themselves from one another. When I held my breath I thought I could feel it happening, things pulling away, stretching, little gummy strings of me getting thinner and thinner, about to snap. I would grow lightheaded, terrified that I would suddenly blow apart and all the tiny, unrecognizable pieces of me would zing off in all directions of the universe. They would never find all of me. There wouldn't be anything of me left for somebody to love."
She stopped. He could tell from the corner of the one eye visible to him that she was squinting slightly, remembering.
"I would lie awake in the suffocating darkness of those nights----waiting for that idea to come into my head, dreading it."
Dilworth no longer empathized with these stories. He had taught himself not to participate, merely to listen. His understanding of her story was purely intellectual and associative; he did not actually feel her pain or turn morose under the burdens of her childish loneliness. He hadn't always been so detached, but after twice succumbing to a nervous breakdown himself, he had learned that to help his clients he had to cauterize his own natural inclination to take their sob stories to heart. Like Odysseus, he had to lash himself to the mast of objectivity to endure the melancholy songs of broken women, songs that in the past had so easily seduced him. Still, even now, he often found them bewitching.
Dilworth believed that these stories were elaborate biographies, fabrics of the imagination into the warp and woof of which were woven fine threads of fantasy and reality. Every individual fabric had to have a proper mixture of these fibers to be successful, to give the lives they represented the stability of the one and the creativity of the other. But sometimes when the tale is told, when the fabric was taken from the loom, the storyteller discovered that she had so skillfully intertwined her strands that she could no longer distinguish between them, and what she was had become indescribable form what she wasn't. Therefore, Dr. Dilworth's task, an often arduous and tedious one, was to help the storyteller unravel the fabric of her imagination.
He was a man of sincere demeanor. he knew that; it was something he cultivated. He owed it to his clients, he thought, to present them with a personality that was receptive to their stories, that did not treat them their desperation lightly. Just short of six feet, he cut a handsome figure with a naturally well-developed upper torso which he kept trim with only a modicum of weight management. His complexion was dusky----he didn't have to punish himself in the sun to look healthy----and his hair was thick and wavy, graying at the temples in such a way that he believed it would be difficult to improve upon. He had it clipped slightly, but frequently, so that he never had that awkward appearance of having recently visited the barber. His nails were manicured. His wardrobe was expensive, but not flamboyant, tending toward the rich, sober constancy of European fashion.
"These feelings of panic," he dutifully persisted. "How long did they last?" He felt a loose cuticle on his ring finger and unobtrusively took nail clippers out of his pocket and began carefully to nip at the little shred of horny flesh while she continued.
"And you know what I remember?" she asked, again disregarding his query. " 'Are You Lonesome Tonight?' Elvis Presley. Jesus. I don't remember if it was on the radio or record player or what. I was only six or seven. I wouldn't have remembered the song either, except that she never let me forget it. Even after she remarried she would hum that song, or play it on the record player when he wasn't there. I don't know. You would have thought she would have wanted to forget it if it reminded her....I never hear that song that it doesn't bring back the memory of all those strange, dirty rooms in all the towns in the 'Wide Open Spaces.' We never stayed in any of them long enough to be anything but strangers."
She stopped. Dr. Dilworth was quiet, finishing his cuticle, and giving her time. But she was through. He could tell by her mouth, which was her most expressive feature, that she was not going to pursue this any further. He doubted that she realized that she had reached a critical juncture, or maybe she did and that was why she had stopped. And yet she seemed unmoved. She had spoken as if she had been reading from a book, as if the words had been someone else's.
"What happened to your father?" He unobtrusively folded up the clippers and put them away. The question might've worked, though he had never been able to coax her.
Eve Mitchell didn't move or answer. She raised her right hand and looked at her watch. It was small and delicate with an annulus of tiny diamonds around the dial. She wore it with the face on the underside of her wrist.555Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡTJZUXZoqKV
"It's 5:00," she said. She sat up and swung her leg around on the chaise facing him, her knees together, her stockinged feet spread apart to straddle her shoes which were side-by-side on the floor. Raising her arms she tucked at the strands of flax that had strayed loose at the nape of her neck. She bend down to slip on her shoes, and Dr. Dilworth watched her breasts fill the top of her scoop-necked dress. She immediately looked up as if sensing what he was doing and met his gaze. He didn't try to dissemble, nor did she pretend to be unaware or embarrassed or angered. Instead, she returned to her shoes, letting him look while she finished and maybe, he thought, he hoped, wishing for some sign of complicity, taking a little longer than was necessary.
"We made good progress," he said as she sat up again. "It gets easier with time."
She stood and smoothed her dress across the flat of her stomach. "Wonderful," she said without feeling, looking at him as he stood also, putting his notepad facedown on his desk to conceal the fact that it was blank. She turned away and picked up her purse from the antique Oriental table near the door. Stepping around behind her, he reached for the doorknob to let her out, placing his left hand at the small of her back, flattening it out to touch as much of her as he could.
"See you tomorrow, then," he said, feeling a stirring of excitement as he cupped his fingers to the curve of her torso. She allowed this, neither stepping forward nor turning slightly to finesse a disengagement. She hesitated for a moment. He thought she was going to speak, but then she moved through the door and was gone.
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