* * *
Back in the office, Debbie brought him a small cake from Dean & DeLuca. He worried about normalizing this kind of behavior. He watched as she sliced the cake in half, and he let her serve him a slice, but he took only a very small bite and then put it down.
“How was your weekend?” Debbie asked.
“It was all right.”
“You look like shit, no offense. What did you do?”
Dr. Sheppard looked at his telephone. He righted his prescription pad so that it was in line with his blotter and said, “I went to New Haven.”
“Oh, why?”
“I had my thirty-year reunion.”
“Did you drink too much?”
“Very funny.”
Debbie took small bites of her cake. She ate daintily, but without any shame. His gaze drifted toward her thighs, which were spread out flat on the armchair, and looked like elephant trunks.
“I’m just asking because I’ve never seen you look so tired,” she said. “I mean, that’s the polite word for it. You look like somebody beat you.”
“I flew home on a redeye.”
“Redeye from New Haven?”
Dr. Sheppard blushed. Debbie took a bite of cake and put her plate down. She’d eaten almost half a slice.
“Well. Did you have fun?”
“I saw old friends.”
“See anyone I’d know? I know lots of people in New Haven. Not that I’m like a New Haven asshole. I went to Bowdoin. I got into Yale, but fuck them. I hate those people. I honestly do.”
She looked at her cake slice.
“Do you know the name David Kehn? He’s an old roommate of mine.”
“Senator David Kehn? That guy’s so gay.”
“We lived together freshman and sophomore years, until he joined the art frat.”
“But you’re like prehistorically aged, no offense. I mean, you’re very attractive. But he looks like twenty years younger than you. Did you two get high?”
“Yes, occasionally we did.”
“Ha! My dad is going to freak out.”
“Why don’t you tell me what you did over your weekend?”
“Oh Christ.”
Dr. Sheppard waited. Debbie said, “If you want to know, I hung out with friends.”
“Tell me about your friends.”
“Just friends. I hung out with Emily and Trip and Amol. Emily came over and—she does this thing, whenever she comes into my house, the first thing she does is, she says, ‘I have to go to the bathroom.’ It’s so weird. It’s like, what the fuck? Once she went in there and a couple minutes later the fire alarm starts going off.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She’d lit a match to cover up the smell of her shit, and she was so uptight about it she put the match in the bin full of Kleenex and started a fire. I mean, and I’m the one on medication.”
Debbie laughed, and Dr. Sheppard watched her.
“I’m not avoiding the question, if that’s what you’re suggesting with that expression. Emily came over and we opened a bottle of wine. Trip called and invited us to the Wonkey Donkey—that’s this loft—so we went over there, and they had some red wine and vodka, so we made Stalins. Have you been drinking Stalins, come to think of it? You look like it, no offense. That was a joke. You can laugh any time. It’s not a job interview. So anyway, Emily passed out up in Trip’s loft, and Gandalf drank red wine out of my shoe, then I fooled around with Amol, and around sunrise Emily woke up and I got us a cab back home and she stayed over in my bed. Amol’s dad was a spy, or so he says. He’s a pianist. Sunday afternoon me and Emily watched HBO, and around ten I figured she wasn’t leaving, so I ordered us Indian food and opened a bottle of wine, and then we went around the corner to Scratchers. My relationship to Amol is a secret, by the way. Not even Emily knows. So we went to Scratchers and I asked this guy if I could look in his wallet, and it was full of old ticket stubs, so I told him he had a broken heart.”
“What?”
“Seeing movies alone means you have a broken heart.”
“How’d you know he saw them alone?”
“I asked him. Okay, your turn. Is Senator Kehn gay? I have a bet with my brother he’s gay.”
Dr. Sheppard looked at the ceiling and pressed his palms to his eyes. “Do you think maybe you could ask me something else?”
“Yeah. Why not.” She thought for a moment. “Okay. Here’s a good one. Do you look at pornography online?”
“Sure. I think we all do, these days.”
“And…?”
“And what? I usually have trouble finding the kind of thing I like, because I don’t want to sign up for any of the websites. It takes me a long time, looking at those tiny pictures.”
“Little pictures?” She laughed. “What kind of connection do you have, a dial-up?”
Dr. Sheppard shrugged. “I have a good connection.”
“Well, you know about free porn, right?”
“I look at DogFart. You can find those on Brazzers.”
“Whoa.”
He shrugged. “Does that make you uncomfortable?”
“It’s just weird to hear someone say it out loud.” She was quiet for a while. “It’s like even the word ‘Facebook’ is embarrassing. But how do you have trouble finding what you like? It’s got everything. You must be into something totally weird.”
“What’s weird?”
“Mm, I guess rape?”
“That’s a pretty common fantasy, especially among my clientele.” He smiled conspiratorially.
“Right, but it’s hard to find on…” Debbie trailed off.
“What made you ask the question?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It wouldn’t be appropriate to talk about it with you.”
Dr. Sheppard blinked.
“I can see that you can’t tell when I’m joking. That’s kinda funny, isn’t it? Because you should be able to read me by now. That’s like your job. Anyway, I just was thinking about porn because I used to never look at it, but since I broke up with Tom, I’m not having sex with anybody, and then you started me on these medications and my sex drive changed or something, and I started having less sex, like no sex drive at all, which weirded me out, so I started off with online porn, basically nothing, but in about a day I fell down a rabbit hole, and now I look at the totally fucked-up stuff, and I feel weird about it. I heard about this crazy vibrator and I got one, and now I’m spending hours each morning with it. Sorry. But still, I feel just kind of weird about it. I thought we’re supposed to be honest. Did I gross you out?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say it’s normal.”
“I feel like a sex addict or something.”
Dr. Sheppard shrugged. He didn’t point out the obvious, that she wasn’t having sex. It wasn’t out of a therapeutic agenda. It was because he felt uncomfortable. He was feeling turned on. That was unusual. He had many female clients, and most spent all their time in session discussing their sex lives and their romantic lives, and the ways those two things made them miserable. He had heard a lot of things. He did not usually shy away from the subject of sex.
Debbie got up and started packing his barely touched slice of cake in the box.
“Are you going to take that home and eat it?” Dr. Sheppard asked.
An angry expression flashed across Debbie’s face. She said, “I was putting it in the box for you.”
* * *
It was unseasonably hot, 90 degrees in April. Dr. Sheppard was regretting a text he had sent Isabel the night before. He had been drinking at the bar below his apartment, and he’d had the opportunity to sleep with an attractive young woman. She was twenty-three years old. He had texted Isabel to tell her. It was too embarrassing to look at the exact words. When his phone rang, he expected to be excoriated.
“Dr. Sheppard? Kitty here. Do you have a minute? Good. I’m calling because I’m concerned. I was in New York last weekend and I saw Debbie. We had given her a hammer—to be more precise, her yo
unger brother had given it to her—and it was covered in rubber cement and paint, and I don’t know what all else. Apparently she’d loaned it to one of her bohemian friends? And a chair from the set I bought her was missing. I asked her about it, of course, and she told me she’d broken it apart for kindling. Now, Dr. Sheppard, I don’t want to get into a discussion about money, but what exactly is it we’re paying for?”
“Well, Debbie doesn’t seem to have a lot of friends.”
“She’s out with friends every night.”
“Oh, I mean she has Trip and Emily and Amol—people she gets drunk with. Emily is all right, if a little hysterical. And Trip seems like he basically shares some of her background. But I don’t really care for this Amol. From what I can gather, he’s an editor or a pianist or something.”
“Oh God. This is appalling.”
“What? I’ve offended you.”
“The fucking pianist-errant.”
“The penis what?”
“Amol. He was accepted to Harvard Law, but he heard another student playing jazz music and he dropped out and moved to Morocco. Now he has a piano strapped to a pickup, and the last time I heard, it had rolled off and smashed up a Camaro.”
“You mean the Wonkey Donkey.” He laughed. “Well, that one’s a bit complicated, actually.”
“She’s seeing him?”
“They ‘hook up.’ Let me recommend an essay to you. It’s by Tom Wolfe, called ‘Hooking Up.’ It basically explains it to our generation.”
“Why are they so crazy about romance, Dr. Sheppard? I mean, you and I, we understood, it’s not about expression or freedom but finding someone who cultivates your dignity. Like Stephen for me, or Isabel for you. That’s all marriage is. What is it with these kids wanting to be artists?”
It was with the intention of reassuring her that he had begun, but when she mentioned Isabel, it caught him off guard, and he told her, “She was a beautiful woman. She is a beautiful woman. We’re separated, you know. Or I guess you don’t know that. It’s not something I talk about, outside therapy. And then all our friends are scared of me now.”
“The lone wheel?”
“The what?”
“You don’t have a place, a position in the world, so naturally they’re nervous.”
Two hours later they were still talking, and he had told Kitty everything that he knew about Debbie.
* * *
Over the next year, their shared secrets evolved into a bond. They conspired. Kitty called to ask about Debbie; he waited for those calls. Sometimes he texted if there was a problem that was pressing, and within a few minutes his phone rang.
Debbie improved. She went from a size ten to a size four. She was still too big to borrow clothes from her mother, but she began to dress like a woman. She wore dresses, and when she did wear an oxford shirt, it was bright white and starched, and she wore it with tight jeans and riding boots.
But Debbie didn’t seem to be aware that her shoes were unpolished. It was a pity, because anyone could see at a glance that all of her boots were exceptionally fine—some designer and some handmade. He didn’t know how to bring it up. During meditation one morning, he caught himself envisioning a trial. He was on the witness stand, defending himself. “And why,” a female lawyer asked, “did you choose that expression?”
* * *
“What are you over there thinking about?” Debbie asked.
“Oh, I was thinking about an apartment. I made an offer on an apartment. The seller accepted it. I’m supposed to hear later today if I can buy.”
“A loan.”
“No, it isn’t a loan.” He stopped himself. He hadn’t told Debbie that he and his wife were separated, and he didn’t know how to now. It wasn’t a secret he had meant to keep, but now he had known her for more than a year, and it seemed funny to say all at once that he was in the midst of a property settlement and divorce. He said, “What were you thinking about?”
“Oh, nothing.”
He waited. She said, “When you make that face, I have to tell you what I’m thinking.” And then she was quiet again. “Do you have bad credit or something?”
He let that go. He said, “Have you ever heard of shoe polish?”
“I don’t go in for patent leather.”
Dr. Sheppard looked at his shoes. “It’s a parade gloss. But you really can’t treat your shoes like that; it’s bad for the leather. Look.” He got down to show her. He lifted her shoe and turned it. “See this cracking you’re getting? You literally slap these shoes against the ground into water, salt, dirt, grease, and grime thousands of times a day. It’s not like your skin—the leather of your shoes only receives the nourishment you give it.”
She let him handle her legs and boots.
“Did you even condition these after you bought them? Surely your mother did.”
He went around to his desk and opened the top drawer. He dug around. “Shit,” he said.
“Dr. Sheppard.”
“Hold on—stay here, I’ll be right back.”
He went up front and came back a few minutes later with two rags and a jar of Vaseline. He closed the door.
“Don’t start with me,” he said, and he got down on his knees and worked Vaseline into her right and then her left boot. She was quiet while he worked.
When he was done, she said, “Thank you.”
“Oh.” He waved a hand dismissively, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
* * *
Dr. Sheppard was talking to Kitty while lying on the couch of his office. He said, “Kitty, I took them off her feet before polishing them.”
“Well, for chrissake, yes. I should hope so. I mean, I presumed. But nevertheless. Wait, you took them off? You mean she took them off.”
“Yes, naturally. She did. Anyway, I brought up marriage with her.”
“Did she attack you?”
“No, actually. She cried. She asked me how she could meet men.”
“Good. What’d you tell her?”
“I told her, you know.” Dr. Sheppard didn’t want to lie again, but the truth was, he wasn’t sure what Kitty wanted to hear. “I told her that she had to be open to it.”
“Open … She needs to get out of her apartment. She needs to lose a few.”
“She’s a size four!”
“I know, I know, with Trish, the Paltrow nutritionist. Do you believe Gwyneth had a fat ass? That’s the kind of thing a savvy woman can conceal. But I told her you can’t be on twelve hundred calories. It’s just not effective. I want a daughter who can wear belts.”
“I don’t know, Kitty. There’s a limit. Apparently Trish is over there measuring out servings of butter. I don’t eat butter, myself. My trainer doesn’t encourage it, but I mean, I think apart from the butter, she’s doing all she can.”
“Don’t knock butter. Butter isn’t a problem food. The problem foods are fruits and veggies. If you start in on one of those party platters, there’s no stopping. Watch next time you’re at one of your little … functions. The fatties gather around the celery. I don’t touch it.”
“What, may I ask, do you eat?”
“Whataburgers. I have one a day.”
“Kitty Summer eats Whataburgers?”
“It works. I order them dry. If I’m very hungry, I’ll get a packet of mayonnaise.”
“Like with your husband in Stockholm.”
“And then on my birthday I eat an entire white cake.”
* * *
“Dr. Sheppard? It’s me. Can you talk? It’s late here.”
He looked at his watch. It was after nine, so it would be 3 a.m. in France. He was still at the office, but for all Debbie knew, he was at home. For all she knew, his wife could have been right beside him.
“Who is this?” Dr. Sheppard said.
“It’s Debbie. Like you don’t know,” Debbie said. “You’re the worst. But hold on. I’ve gotta keep my voice down. My mother’s drunk. Hold on.”
He heard Debbie shuf
fling around. She said, “I’m back.”
“How is France?”
“France is cool. I mean, it’s okay. You know how it is, you get to the hotel and after about an hour there’s nothing to do but drink. It’s hard to actually enjoy it. Listen, is it okay that I’m calling you? I miss you.”
“Is there an emergency…”
“It’s weird, I think I need a session. Can you do a telephone session? What time is it there? Are you in the office still? It’s late here. Are you already at home? Are you in bed or something?”
“What was it you wanted to discuss?”
“I thought about you when I was taking my shoes off at security.”
Dr. Sheppard settled down into his chair.
“Are you there?”
“I’m here.”
“This security guard. Well, I mean, I thought about you on the plane, too. Hold on.”
Dr. Sheppard recognized the vacuum pull and clink of little bottles—she was in the minibar. He heard her unscrew and pour—was it three or four, surely three—bottles.
“I’m back. What were we saying? ‘What wuz we sayin.’ Oh. Yeah, you’re in trouble, man. I saw David Kehn and he doesn’t even go to reunions, plus he said you already had your thirty-fifth.”
“Debbie, are you mixing alcohol with your medication?”
“Hey, and speaking of which— No, Mom! I’m talking to Emily!” she yelled. Then she whispered into the phone: “She wants me to come back and watch Steel Magnolias with her. Hold on, I’ll be right back—well, no, you can come with me.”
Dr. Sheppard heard Debbie fumble with a door and curse. Then he heard a stream of water. It was interrupted by a toot. Debbie laughed, and finished peeing. She flushed the toilet.
“Debbie, are you all right?”
“Shh! I can talk in here in the bathroom. I locked the door and she can’t hear.”
“Why?”
“Don’t worry; it’s not weird. It’s like the size of your whole office. It’s got a swimming pool. It’s got a Jacuzzi. The swimming pool here is carved out of the mountain. It’s the best. You’ve got to come here sometime. We could come together if that wouldn’t be weird.”
Kitty was calling Dr. Sheppard on his other line. He said, “Debbie, could you hold on for a second.”
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