“Sure, I’ll just sit here on the bathroom floor. Maybe I’ll start a bath. For when we get off, I mean. Is that your wife?”
“Just a second.”
“It’s another patient?”
He switched over.
“Oscar? I’m sorry to call so late, but I’m worried about Debbie. She’s very drunk. Is she calling you?”
“Hi.”
“Debbie’s not on the other line, is she?”
“No.”
“Of course. It sounded like you were on the other line, and my daughter’s drunk and hiding in the toilet. Listen. I’ve got a little questionarooni. I don’t know how to put it delicately.”
Debbie must have hung up and called him again: he had a call.
“Kitty, I have another call. Do you think maybe I could call you back?”
“I’ll hold.”
Dr. Sheppard switched over.
“Did you hang up on me? I’m just getting in the bath; I don’t care. It’s not weird. Who was that? You’re always so weird. It’s not very fair. Which is my point. I mean, that’s why I’m calling, about this marriage thing, because I need to know. I don’t want you to give me your professional act. What’s up? Why do you see me?”
“It is my job.”
“Cut the shit.”
“Debbie.”
“You’re a liar.”
Kitty had hung up and redialed. Dr. Sheppard said, “Can you hold on, I have this patient on the other line. It will just be a second.”
He was so anxious that he made a mistake. He thought he had switched over, but he hadn’t. He still had Debbie on the line. He said, “I lied a moment ago. I’m going to level with you: I have Debbie on the other line.”
“Still me,” Debbie said. “What a total fucking giveaway. It is your wife! Listen, I’m running a bath, is that cool? If your wife’s jealous I’m calling, just tell her I’m crazy. You should be home, anyway. It’s late. Are you in the office? ‘Tell me what you’re wearing.’ That’s a joke! Do you do phone sex with your wife? Can you do a session with me if I’m naked?”
Kitty’s call went to voicemail. She never left a message. He wondered if she would call again. A text message rolled in. It was from Kitty. It said, “I’m lying in bed right now and you’re all I can think about.”
She sent a second. “Tell me to take off my panties.”
The other line beeped. It was Kitty. He said, “Can you hold on for one second?” and switched over.
“Dr. Sheppard, have you ever really been fucked?”
“Could you hold on a second?”
He switched back to Debbie and said, “Debbie, I think we should discuss this in my office. I appreciate that you’ve been honest, but I worry this isn’t the time for us to have this sensitive of a, of a, of a … discussion.”
“Look, Dr. Sheppard. Let’s just tell the truth for once. I fucking love you, okay. I love you. I think about you all the time. I mean, tell me I’m wrong. I fucking talk about you. I fucking think about you. I jerk off to you. I’m sorry. Jesus, I’m sorry. I heard it’s transference. It’s transference, that’s why I think about you—I’m messed up. I’m totally showing you my shit here. I’m fucked up. But the truth is, you’re in love with me, too. I know it. And you’re in love with my mother, which is fucking insane.”
“It isn’t transference,” Dr. Sheppard said. “Our connection is real.”
“Oh good. Oh, that’s really good. I know it is.”
“But I think it would be wise of us to discuss this at a different time.”
“I know I know I know,” Debbie said. “I know. Don’t start all that. What I want to know is, did you tell my mother you polished my shoes.”
“No.”
“Because that was this privately totally cool thing between us, and you can’t fucking share it with her. She’s so fucked up. Now she’s like jealous of me, because I’m not a size ten anymore and I can basically wear her fucking belts, and she’s—old. Like I give a shit about her belts or the fucking maître d’. You know? But it’s like a contest—who can nail the maître d’. ‘Fucking take the fucking—’ Jesus, is it my fault he comes on to me? I mean, who gives a fuck about the maître d’, Dr. Sheppard.”
“Debbie, can I have confidence you won’t hurt yourself?”
“You think I’m suicidal?”
“I mean, could you stop drinking and taking pills for the night.”
Debbie hung up the phone. He switched over, and Kitty said, “Hello.”
* * *
Dr. Sheppard came down with the flu, and had to miss three appointments with Debbie. When he saw Debbie again, he was scared. He didn’t know how to proceed. She looked good. She was wearing jeans and a polo shirt, and she had gotten sun. She even had some freckles on her breastbone.
She said, “I want to apologize for calling you, and for the things I said. I’d had a lot to drink, and I wasn’t really myself.”
“Oh, it wasn’t anything serious.” Dr. Sheppard waved a hand. “I mean, you don’t need to apologize.”
“I feel like I do. I mean, I was serious. Everything that I said was true.”
“I don’t think I follow.”
“I’m in love with you.”
“Sweetheart, you just don’t have any real friends.”
“I have a ton of friends.”
He raised his eyebrows.
She said, “What difference does it make?”
He argued that her love came out of loneliness, and she argued that all love came out of mutual loneliness. She said, “The deeper the loneliness, the deeper the love.”
She stood up. She picked up one of his Satsuma vases and threw it. Her aim was excellent, and it soared across the room toward the large window. It hit the window, bounced off, and landed on the carpet. Dr. Sheppard had expected it to shatter, but he stood and went around the desk and found it unharmed. He picked it up and held it.
Debbie was looking for something else to throw. She picked up a glass vase of cut lilies—a gift from one of his divorced patients—and chucked it against the wall. It sprayed dirty, rotten flower water across his desk, across the wall and the front of his shirt, but the vase did not break. It landed on the hardwood floor, the flowers still inside.
“Debbie,” Dr. Sheppard said. “Debbie.”
She turned over an end table and lunged for his other Satsuma vase. This one she raised above her head with both arms and threw down onto the hardwood floor. One of the handles broke off.
Abruptly, unexpectedly, she got a hold of herself. She looked around. She said, “I’ve got to go.” Then her mouth turned down involuntarily twice. She opened the door to his office and said, “Let’s go.”
“Is something the matter?” a woman’s voice said.
“He said we can’t see each other anymore.”
“Whatever for?”
Dr. Sheppard recognized Kitty’s voice. She said, “Debbie, hon. Debbie? Where are you going?”
Kitty was in the waiting room of his office. It was 11 a.m. and spring, but she wore stiletto-heeled boots, skin-tight leather pants, a cropped band jacket, and a matching polka-dot necktie and blouse. His secretary eyed Kitty with fear and anticipation. She had watched Debbie storm out and was no doubt looking forward to a show.
“Dr. Sheppard,” Kitty said, “Debbie charged off…” She smoothed her hair. “Why are you holding that vase?”
He realized he had the undamaged vase in his arms. He sat down with his arms wrapped around it. Kitty sat down next to him.
Kitty said, “I’m a little confused.”
“So am I.”
She smoothed her hair a second time. “Ever since we spoke in France, you haven’t been answering my calls.”
“I’m sorry, Kitty. It’s been a very busy time. My school responsibilities have been onerous. I’m a bit overwhelmed.”
“Is this because of what happened between the two of us?”
Dr. Sheppard cringed. “I’m not sure what you’re r
eferring to. I’d like to discuss Debbie with you, Kitty. But I’m afraid I can’t, as it would violate patient-doctor confidentiality. You understand that.”
“Patient-doctor what?”
“Confidentiality. My professional ethics.”
Kitty nodded. “Of course.”
She stood up to go. Then she paused. She turned.
She said, “There’s something I’ve always meant to ask you, Dr. Sheppard. Since we’re speaking as professionals.”
“Ask anything.” He shrugged, and put the vase on the coffee table.
“Why did your wife leave you?”
He started to explain to her about his professional success, and Isabel’s suggestion that he was arrogant. Before he could fully express his thoughts, Kitty said, “Isabel is a very beautiful woman. I think it’s much simpler than all that, Dr. Sheppard. Did you ever think it might have had something to do with your being fat?”
“I’m—I beg your pardon?”
The conversation wasn’t going well. It would be better to go back to his office. Kitty caught him as he rounded the coffee table. He kept his arms around the vase. She pushed him down onto the couch.
He tried to get back up, and Kitty grabbed his shoulders. He shoved her, and the vase fell to the ground, but it did not break. She punched him in the throat. He fell backward onto the couch. Kitty must have taken self-defense classes. He was having trouble breathing. She gathered her handbag from his desk, brushed her hair with one hand.
She turned on a heel and strode out. As she was opening the door, he said, “You cunts.”
She turned her head slightly, but caught herself. He read the expression on her face. She was fascinated.
Night Report
After they made love he said, “Ema, I’ve been reading a new book. Well, it’s an old book, but no one knows about it anymore. It’s a great book, though writing it ruined the author’s career. She’s a fascinating woman—she was—Sloane Newam, do you know her?”
“I’ve heard the name,” Ema said. “I think I read something by her—she wrote that thing about a television show, didn’t she?”
“Night Report on ABC. But the book is about a whole network!”
“That’s right. Night Report, that thing, bum-BUM-bum.”
“You would like this Sloane Newam. She’s funny. She reminds me of you.”
“What do you mean?”
* * *
At the airport the next day, he gave her a copy of Sloane Newam’s memoir and said, “Read it and you will see.”
She began reading in the line at check-in. Halfway through the novel, flying over Missouri, she came to a fight between Sloane Newam and the head of her network. Mid-sentence, Sloane Newam wrote, “This may be the wrong time to say that I loved him. I did.” Ema pressed the book to her chest.
“Are you all right?” the woman beside her asked.
Ema wiped her cheeks and nodded. She turned away from the woman. She’d drunk several small bottles of scotch. She didn’t want to be rude, so she turned back to face the woman and said, “It’s pretty, huh? Out the window. It’s Missouri. Get it? Mis-uh-ry? Misery. It’s like—I’m so happy, I’m over misery—Missouri. Ha.”
The woman seemed embarrassed and turned away.
* * *
Sloane Newam had written two novels. They were out of print. One was on sale on Amazon for a penny, plus shipping, and the other was priced at $109. Ema ordered both.
They came the day before Christmas. Ema made her champagne sorbet. It was made by pouring two bottles of champagne into a bowl and putting it into the freezer, then stirring every half hour. She ate her champagne sorbet from the bowl, in bed with a spoon, and read Sloane Newam’s novels.
The second was about Sloane Newam’s lifelong affair with a married man. Sloane Newam had captured what Ema could not. She had captured the way loving someone who wasn’t there made the world seem funny and enchanted.
Was the married man trying to tell her this? Ema didn’t think so. She didn’t think the married man had read the novels, and if he had, it was unlikely he would understand them. For him the affair was an escape valve. For her it was poetic. She had once tried to tell him, “You are in the fabric of everything I see. When I see three young men in denim jackets, I am already describing it to you. Before I describe it to myself, I am in a dialogue with you.” He hadn’t been able to make it out to L.A. for a few months after that.
But Sloane Newam expressed it, because she barely talked about her married man at all. Instead, she described scenes from her life. She described being stranded at an airport in France, in the ticketing area outside of the terminal, and having to spend the night sleeping on a long bench with a group of French hobos. One offered her apple wine, and told the others, “She is normal. She is normal. Nothing happens to her.” She told a story of a bat that flew into her bedroom and perched on the exposed-brick wall, and how she took him out by hand. Her novel was a defense of adultery, and a rejection of the commonsense stuff everyone spouted—that he had to get a divorce, that she had to leave him. Sloane Newam did neither. At the end of her novel she asked the married man, “Do you ever wish I was the one with you?” He said, “You are.”
Ema completed that novel at 3 a.m., and she wrote a long text message to the married man. When she clicked send, her phone’s screen went blank. She flipped from the main screen back to the message screen. It had lost her text!
Then the first two sentences of her text rolled up. They had gone through, she guessed, but the rest of the text was gone. Horrified, she reread the two lines. They were weird and alone-looking.
I have been up reading Fiber Optics, Holy Places. I just finished it. It has this beautiful passage where she describes a kitten—she is Joan
Ema was confused. Two more lines from her text rolled up.
Newam—on the streets of Varanasi. It is so incredibly amazing—she’s there on assignment, and she’s just been to prayers at the
Ema understood. The married man’s old phone was cutting her single long text into twenty-one parts, of 144 characters each. She was powerless to stop it. She watched in a panic as another text rolled through, another 144 characters from her long text, to the married man in France.
In a panic, she turned off her phone to make it stop. She went to the oven, opened it, and leaned against the door. She could see into the bathroom and contemplated dropping her phone into the toilet. She turned it on, and waited.
She watched the screen as it loaded. She said, “Please. Please. Please.”
Then the texts really started to roll.
Ganges River, which she finds completely boring, and she’s just been coughing in the incense smoke and body odor, and then she
sees this adorable homeless kitten, like a stick with some fur, and she’s with the married man, and they look at each other and
know they have to take it—even though that’s completely crazy. And the kitten is so skinny and it’s actually in a puddy? so
they don’t even realize till they get it back to the very expensive room which they splurged—and they’re in this five-star
hotel, and have to bribe the man at the door, because they don’t think to hide this mud-covered CAT—that the kitten’s arm
is broken in three places. So they take it to the veterinary college the next day, and each of these darling, sweet Indian medical
students comes to feel the kitten’s broken arm, you know they’re studetnts right, and you can tell when they’ve found the break because
the kitten goes, “Mewl mewl mewl melw mewl mewl mwl mewl” and cries! So after about the fifth medical student squeezes the poor
thing’s arm, Sloane steps in and tells them to stop it, absolutely enough, and of course it stops. And there are all these diagrams of cows
right there on the wall, and a surgical theater, harness for the cows. But the diagrams are like colored in by a kid, and most rudimentary
things, but she realizes these students act
ually use them to navigate inside a cow. That these young men in coats go inside and surgeons
and so they have to shave her cat to the skin to amputate its arm because it’s an old broken. And to shave it they ask her to hold the kitten
down, and he’s terrified. She has him by his back, and the scruff of this is the worst thing that has happen, and when they’ve shave
the animal of his fur they ask if he has eaten any food at all in the past twenty-four hours, and Sloane and the man she is in love
with do not know, of course, so the cat can’t have his surgery, and they take him home to the hotel, but he won’t let them hold him
any longer. And then his arm removed, and he can make it through that, and she sneaks him home in this case, and he can make it
through that, but when**a month lateR**she has to go on assignment to Haiti, it is the last thing the poor little animal
can take, she can’t just leave him ALONE< and he goes off into the woods to die. Like Jesus into the dessert, she writes, and I was just crying,
crying, crying, and all this time there’s the mouse in my house, chewing the stove, the one I told you about, so it’s like sometimes life can be so
beautiful.
* * *
In the morning, Ema woke up on the sofa. She had her shoes on. She woke up innocent, then remembered the night before. She lunged for her phone.
At 5:15 a.m. the married man had answered all of her texts with two words, “Good times.” And then, several hours later, he had texted: “While I’m out of the country, email is best. I’m sorry. Roaming rates are insane. x”
Ema put a listing on Craigslist, to sublet her apartment, and she registered for a monthlong meditation program in the mountains of Vermont. The program began in three days, and her apartment was sublet by noon. This struck her as a sign.
* * *
Just after dawn, Ema rolled up her sleeping bag. She stored her foam mattress in the attic above the shrine room. Still in her pajamas, she went down past the lower living room, where several people sat in armchairs drinking tea, and an old woman with the body of a classically trained dancer did her morning stretches. Ema paused for a moment and watched her. The woman looked familiar. Out in the rock garden, a bearded man ran a rake in a circle through the pebbles around a large rock. Ema went to the service area off the dining hall and poured herself coffee.
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