by K. K. Beck
“Afterward, he came up to me and asked about her. He seemed really agitated. He wanted to know about her family and what kind of a person she’d been.”
“Really? Who was he?”
“We only knew each other’s first names. I think his name was Rick. He was an okay guy, I guess.” Judy sounded reluctant to concede that anyone was worth liking. “He kept saying he had a lot of guilt to work out, but I can’t remember much more about him. A lot of these people have pretty boring problems, actually.”
Jane imagined a circle of people on folding chairs, all waiting impatiently to discuss their own fascinating cases. “Thank you very much,” she said. “I hope this wasn’t too painful.” Jane hated thinking about her own past, even though she often felt a longing for other eras, even eras she hadn’t personally experienced. But to reminisce about people and places she’d lived through herself she usually found vaguely depressing, even when the memories were pleasant ones.
“Like I say,” said Judy, standing up and jamming her hands into the pockets of her jeans, “I’ve worked a lot of the rejection thing out. I’ve learned not to count on other people. Just my babies.” She smiled down at a drooling Lab and scratched its head.
As she walked Jane back to her car, she said suddenly, “That guy from group I was telling you about? Rick? I remember now. He was a special effects guy. You know. For commercials and stuff.”
“In Seattle?”
“That’s right. He was really interested in Linda. But after that session where we talked about her, he never came back. I remember wondering what had happened to him. I thought it might have been helpful for me to have him there while I talked about Linda’s rejection of me.”
Losers! thought Jane as she pulled away from the yapping dogs. Uncle Harold gets twins separated at birth and Russian spy impersonators, and I get the dysfunctional Donnellys and whiny Judy and Colonel Mustard, the crabby cat.
If Judy’s shrink had any sense at all, she thought, he’d tell her to start thinking about others—preferably others of her own species—for a while, and get the focus off herself. And, for short-term depression and self-loathing, the éclairs, magazine, and video cure could be very effective. As she got closer to Bellevue, she pulled over to a 7-Eleven store, bought herself a giant Coke, and flipped through an Eastside phone book. A Dr. Hawthorne was still in practice, and he was in downtown Bellevue. Jane figured it wouldn’t hurt to show up in person and try to get an appointment.
Chapter 11
After Calvin Mason had provided Jane da Silva with the name to fit the license plate she’d asked about, he was puzzled by a vague feeling of anticlimax. Oh well, he thought, she’ll call back to find out about the Fellowship of the Flame. It was this thought, somehow cheering, that made him aware of the reason for his let-down feeling. He wanted more contact with Jane da Silva. He found her intriguing, and he wanted to find out more about her.
But why wait to glean polite snippets about her from casual conversation? Shamelessly, Calvin Mason decided to devote a couple of hours to finding out what he could about her.
There wasn’t much. A couple of phone calls later he determined her dead uncle, in whose name the phone was still listed, had been one Harold Mortensen. A trip down to the King County Courthouse, and a glance at the probated will, didn’t tell him much more that he didn’t know, other than that Jane’s last address was care of American Express, Amsterdam.
Calvin liked that. He thought it spoke of a certain casual, transitory, expatriate life, rather at odds with the somewhat formal, cool woman he’d met. She acted self-possessed, like someone who had a good, solid address. Or maybe two.
He knew a lot of skittish women who kicked around and never settled in, whose lives were always in flux. Nice, often artsy women who bounced around from bad relationship to bad relationship, dragging a few kids with them sometimes, never having enough money and always involved in some low-level hassle. A lot of his clients were like that.
Calvin sometimes thought he had a sign on his forehead reading NICE GUY that only these women could read. They were pleasant, but clingy, with soft voices and vulnerable faces. Women who would never come out and ask you to take care of them and all their problems, but who nevertheless made you feel somehow guilty if you didn’t help them; and you never could help them enough.
Jane da Silva was polite, but on the other hand she had a kind of kick-ass aura about her that he liked. That, and her having been a singer, reminded him of some smoky old film noir, in which the heroine’s been around and can handle herself anywhere.
He left the King County Courthouse and wandered up Third Avenue, turning into a little brick courtyard between high rises. Like any odd little corner of Seattle, it had lots of flowers and an espresso stand and white plastic chairs and tables.
Calvin bought himself a double latte from a cheery redhead with a jewel in her nose and a row of tiny silver rings working their way up the cartilage of her ear. He sat down at one of the tables under a scrawny sycamore, and observed the full ashtray. Smokers loved these little spots around town. It was the last place left they could sit down and have a quiet cigarette. The tree above him shivered, and a breeze smacked him in the face. These damned high rises, thought Calvin irritably, had filled the city with pockets of updrafts.
He sipped the coffee, felt the caffeine jolt, and resumed thinking about Jane da Silva. It had long been one of his fantasies—Calvin Mason never shared his fantasies, but he wasn’t ashamed to spend a lot of his own time wallowing in them—to have some smoky female sashay into his office like Veronica Lake or Lizabeth Scott, some sultry type with a low voice who didn’t smile too much. He’d solve her problem and they’d end up in the sack. And it would be great. Naturally, this class broad would never presume to cling or need him too much. But she’d always be available and thrilled to see him.
Instead, he got all those nice, sweet, clingy overeducated welfare mothers. Instead of women with a cool, level, smoldering gaze, he got women who bent their heads helplessly forward and looked up at him shyly. All very appealing in its own way, but Calvin had to admit that his own life was clinging to the margins as it was, and he couldn’t afford to get tangled up with someone else in the same boat but even less competent.
Unlike his fantasy, Jane da Silva hadn’t come into the office wearing a black veil, suede gloves, stockings with seams, and tarty shoes with ankle straps. She’d been wearing jeans and a sweater. But then, if anyone wearing all that gear had shown up in his office in this day and age, Calvin would have checked the feet and shoulders and Adam’s apple to see if he was dealing with a drag queen. No one else would wear a hat and gloves nowadays.
Anyway, Calvin sighed, he supposed he’d better stop thinking about Mrs. da Silva. It would just get him all bent out of shape. In recent years, Calvin had postulated a model of sexual attractiveness and availability. He’d even thought a software program could be developed around his theories, which were based loosely on the behavior of lesser primates.
First of all, men and women were looking for different things. Sure everyone wanted love and companionship and all that, but men cared more about youth and beauty and women cared more about babies and security. And these were the bargaining chips with which the deals were made, especially as the participants got older. (Young kids and people out of town on business were the only ones who just went after each other out of sheer, happy lust.)
The idea would be to establish a curve and find out just where the trade-offs intersected. The older and homelier the guy, the more money and power he had to have. Which, thought Calvin Mason, probably meant that he and the da Silva woman weren’t in the cards. She had sex appeal and pretty good looks and class—and the confidence to carry it all off. If she was completely broke, she could still do better than Calvin, who figured that the points he got for being reasonably attractive and an enthusiastic lover and a nice guy and having all his hair and a flat stomach weren’t enough to squeak him into contention, what with
his lousy practice and his beat-up car.
The best thing to do was to get her off that stupid pedestal in his mind. And he knew just how to do it, too. After all, he told himself as he headed up to the library, no one is really like those torrid movie ladies, anyway. Everyone started out insecure, and part of them stayed that way.
He found what he was looking for. There was her twenty-year-old class picture in the Roosevelt High School yearbook. She looked pretty cute in her picture. Same eyes and nose and mouth, but softer, with fewer planes in her face. Not anybody you’d peg for a steamy film noir heroine. She said her ambitions were to travel and meet interesting people (implied in this goal was a certain contempt for the people she already knew). She’d been on the tennis team and in French club and in the choir. He flipped around some more and found her in the French club group shot, wearing a cardigan sweater and a pleated skirt. A good girl. Definitely. In the tennis team shot she was in the back row, squinting a little into the camera. Apparently she’d been absent the day the choir shot was taken.
She was just a reasonably intelligent, attractive woman on whom he’d projected yet another of his fantasies, Calvin told himself. And what was he getting all fired up about, anyway? After all, there was always good old Marcia, who was a lot of fun and liked to cook and bounced around a lot in bed. Marcia also had the good taste never to use the dreaded C words: commitment and call, as in, “You said you’d call. Why didn’t you call?” In fact, Calvin had the feeling she’d dump him in a minute if someone more solid came along.
Chapter 12
Dr. Hawthorne’s office was in a small, square building stained a milky pale gray and softened by vaguely Japanese-looking landscaping—low shrubs leading the eye serenely from the gravel parking lot to the heavy front door.
Jane had parked and was crunching through the gravel as a plump middle-aged woman in a plaid skirt and a polo shirt came out of the building. She was wiping tears from her face, working hard to keep the mascara on the bottom lashes from smearing. Jane sighed. Another unhappy customer. She shouldn’t be crying as she came out of the building.
Inside, the waiting area was gloomily tasteful. Artfully lit pre-Columbian artifacts sat in glass niches in the walls, their faces with startled eyes and round mouths looking suitably neurotic, or at least anxious. Vaguely sinister plants loomed in the corners. There were two long black leather sofas facing each other over a glass-topped table with Sunset magazines laid out in a neat, overlapping row. Track lighting sent bursts of illumination onto the sofas and the reception area.
Behind the desk sat an extremely serious-looking middle-aged woman with steel-gray hair and glasses. Jane thought she’d look serious, too, working in a space that resembled the set from the last act of a depressing play, or a sort of temple of malaise. Usually, Jane managed to avoid bleakness. Lately, she seemed surrounded by it. She hoped it wasn’t catching.
She gave the woman a kind, gentle smile, and asked in a genteel voice if it were at all possible to see the doctor, not on a professional basis but on another matter entirely. As she said this, it occurred to her the woman probably thought she was in deep denial about her psychological problems and was desperate for therapy.
“What is it concerning?” she asked flatly.
“I have some questions about a patient he had once. It’s a family matter. Linda Donnelly.”
The woman raised an eyebrow skeptically and checked a schedule book. “I’ll see,” she said.
She withdrew into an inner office and returned, apparently surprised. “Dr. Hawthorne says to come right in,” she said.
After the grim waiting area, Jane was surprised to see that Dr. Hawthorne’s inner office was an oasis of calm and diffused light. Across from his desk was a pleasant view, through French doors, of lacy green foliage against a cedar fence. (Of course, the patients faced him, so he had the view.) The walls were a glowing peach, and there were abstract pastel watercolors on the walls.
Dr. Hawthorne himself stood in the center of the room in a dark gray suit of fine wool. His abundant hair was silver, and he had a beaky nose, a light tan, perfect white teeth, and remarkable eyes. They were pale and piercing, but with a light in them that gave them a look of intellect and spirituality.
“I appreciate your seeing me without an appointment,” Jane said, shaking his hand. He indicated a chair facing his desk and sat down himself.
“You wanted to talk about Linda Donnelly,” he said.
“Yes. I’m a friend of her daughter, and I’m collecting some facts about her,” said Jane.
“And why are you doing that?” He tilted his head a little and looked at her curiously with his shiny eyes.
“Well, to be quite honest, I’d like to recover some money her mother had.”
“Yes,” mused Dr. Hawthorne. “There was an inheritance of some kind, as I recall.” He sighed. “I remember her talking about turning the money over to some odd group. She was under some pressure from her husband not to do it. Ambiguous family dynamics created unresolved conflicts for her.”
“Did you try to stop her from giving away all her money?”
The doctor smiled at her piteously. “I can see you’ve never been analyzed,” he said. “Of course I didn’t. The analyst doesn’t dissuade, persuade, suggest, cajole, wheedle . . .” He trailed off.
“No, of course not,” said Jane. “I also hoped you’d be able to tell me about her state of mind, around the time she died.” She paused. “If it wouldn’t be a violation of confidentiality.”
“We are allowed to speak ill of the dead,” he said with a little smile. “Or well of them. We are allowed to speak of them in general. But of course, we don’t have to, either.” He looked pensive, as if trying to decide whether to talk about Linda or not.
“Her daughter, would, I think, like to know more about her,” said Jane, trying a different tack.
“Her child.” Dr. Hawthorne gazed over Jane’s shoulder out into the garden, giving the impression he was thinking deep thoughts. Jane wondered if it really meant he was simply looking out the window. But with those eyes, it was hard to believe Dr. Hawthorne ever simply looked out the window. “It would be interesting,” he said, “to learn how the dynamics of Linda’s personality would affect the character development of a vulnerable offspring.”
“Leonora was raised by her father,” said Jane.
“Yes. I remember him. Passive. A classic oral-dependent type.” Jane detected a hint of a sneer. “Well, Linda was making progress, but she was at risk for suicide. She’d had an early loss, social isolation, critical parent introject. She was impulsive and rigid and emotionally labile. She used acting out as a primary defense.”
“So you think she killed herself?”
He shrugged. “She made many self-destructive gestures.”
“It’s funny, I had a different impression of her,” said Jane. “She was always searching for herself, and she seemed rather enthusiastic about the task at hand.”
“Yes, she had some defenses,” said Dr. Hawthorne. “But, although Linda was morbidly introspective, she never remembered her dreams, I’m afraid.” He gave a little frown of disapproval. “There was resistance on a subconscious level.”
“The cult she was involved with was called the Fellowship of the Flame,” said Jane. “Do you remember that?”
“Yes. Seething with hostility. They’re very angry people. Or were. I haven’t heard much about them lately.”
“And Linda was angry?”
“Oh yes. It was repressed anger. She had difficulties with her parents. Repetition compulsion made her a slave to her unresolved oedipal conflicts—or in this case, an Electra complex. The Electra complex is much less interesting than the oedipal conflict, I’m afraid.”
“I understand she didn’t get along with her stepfather.”
He nodded. “When the child makes tentative seductive moves that lead to rejection by the parent, the child needs to establish identification with the same-sexed parent. It make
s it much harder if the same-sexed parent is particularly weak.”
Jane nodded. Linda’s friend had told her that Linda’s stepfather had yelled at her that her skirts were too short. She had a depressing picture of a sullen teenager with one of those adolescent bodies bursting out of her clothes, miniskirt hiked up above her newly mature thighs, lounging sulkily on the sofa while her stepfather shouted at her, not knowing why, and her mother smiled grimly from the sidelines.
“It seems odd to me,” said Jane, “that she would continue to see you while simultaneously buying into the Fellowship of the Flame.”
“It happens all the time.” He smiled and spread out his hands. “There were many splits in her ego, allowing her to function appropriately in situations that are apparently contradictory, while experiencing no emotional conflict. Classic dissociation. And, because of Linda’s hysteria, the opportunities for self-dramatization the group would provide her would be extremely seductive.”
“It seems a shame they got all her money, though, doesn’t it? And apparently, they did.”
“Oh yes. She gave it to them all in cash. She told me how happy it made her to turn it all over. There was a whole suitcase full of it, as I recall.” He smiled indulgently.
“But do you think she was mentally capable of making the decision?” Jane felt impatient. “What exactly was your diagnosis?”
The doctor looked thoughtful, as if he was trying to remember. “Histrionic personality disorder with borderline trends suggestive of severe emotional instability.”
Jane had once spent six disastrous weeks imagining herself in love with a rich, handsome neurotic. Anthony had been a professional analysand, visiting his therapist Monday through Friday, and discussing his own therapy and psychoanalytic theory in general at great length on the weekends. Jane remembered some of the jargon.