Why would that make you ashamed? Your representative in the dream did something shameful. Not you.
But maybe it’s not a dream, she said.
Exactly right. It’s a fantasy. A fantasy that you’ve entertained while awake. Thus you cannot blame your subconscious. Perhaps this is why you’re ashamed.
No, no, it wasn’t a fantasy, Mary said. It wasn’t a dream. I’ll tell you what happened but you have to promise not to tell my mother…
I cut her off. I knew what she was doing. She rightly sensed I was about to call her on her deception, and she was trying to divert me with more promises of fake confessions.
What if I told you I don’t believe that K exists?
Mary didn’t respond.
What if I told you I thought you’d made him up? What would you say?
What would I say? Mary said.
I nodded.
Why don’t I just say it? she asked.
Fine, I said. Say it.
You’re exactly like my mother, Mary said. That’s both what I would say and what I am saying.
How am I like your mother, I said. Because you’re ashamed in front of me? You’re ashamed of your conscious fantasy life?
You can’t see what’s happening right in front of your nose because it doesn’t fit your worldview. In this way you are exactly like my mother.
What is my worldview, I said.
Your worldview, Mary said, is only about your world.
And that makes me different from you? That makes me different from anyone?
Yes, she said.
Interesting, I said.
Mary picked at the bald patches on her pants with a newfound neurotic intensity.
Your worldview makes you intrinsically deaf to my worldview. To explain the difference would be a waste of both of our time.
So you think you’re more empathic than me.
I might be, she said. Your head is ossified. I still have a flexible head. I still have hopes.
I wrote on my pad. Ossified Flexible Hopes.
I rested my pencil lengthwise along my thigh.
You’re diverting the focus from you to me, I said. As usual, the minute I strike close to a valuable vein of inquiry you divert the focus. What I am suggesting, Mary, is that you’ve been lying to me.
But aren’t you also the focus? she said. Aren’t your needs as important as my needs? Aren’t you a person too?
Real tears appeared. She laid a finger sideways beneath her bottom lashes, catching the overflow and flicking it away. The skin beneath her eyes had reddened and swelled, the result of her harsh dabbings with the tissue.
Suddenly, I understood.
I am a person, I said.
Mary didn’t respond.
That’s why you’re upset, I said. You’ve realized that I am a person.
I know you’re a fucking person, Mary said. It’s you who forgot.
How did I forget?
I told you I was ashamed and you responded with hostility.
I don’t think I responded with hostility, I said.
You responded with disinterest, and because it means a lot to me, this admission that I feel ashamed, I read it as hostility. How’s that?
Fine, I said. But I want to hear from you what you feel ashamed about. Deceiving people is a shameful business, isn’t it, Mary?
Mary’s eyes teared up again.
You’re attacking me, she said. I’m trying to tell you something important and you’re attacking me.
I’m not attacking you, I said. You’re in therapy. Did you think it was going to be easy? Did you think you’d be able to fool me the way you’ve fooled your parents?
The only person I’ve fooled, she said, is myself.
God! I said. I threw my pad to the floor. Don’t be so self-pitying.
I’m sorry, she said, sobbing now. I’m sorry.
Don’t apologize, I said. Tell me the truth. Tell me the truth.
I don’t know, she said. It’s so complicated all of a sudden.
You do know, I said. People do not forget the shameful events of their life. It’s all they can do not to think about them constantly.
Mary’s eyes overflowed. She wept without sobbing. Her face dissolved.
I allowed her to cry without interruption. Her distress had developed an engine of its own; she was distressed by her distress now, and the true cause would be impossible to unearth until she’d exhausted herself. I walked to the window and reopened it. I needed air. I stared at the dull streets, the dormant trees, the dirty snow. The early-April overcast sky. The ugliest day of the year and yet I felt inured to its ugliness—ossified, perhaps—in a giddy way.
In my pocket I could feel the business card that Craig Hoppin gave me on the patio of the Dibble Library.
Call me, he said. Call me and we’ll discuss your future over lunch.
And so we had lunch, martinis and cobb salads at a bistro on Newbury Street. I told Hoppin more about Helen’s niece. I sketched out my hyper radiance theory on a series of cocktail napkins: her family’s witch relative at the top, a black dot, Bettina Spencer below her, another black dot, and Helen’s niece below Bettina, an X. The two dots and the X were connected by arrows, the whole structure surrounded by concentric circles, each applying inward pressure indicated by many shorter arrows beaming in from the perimeter: Semmering Academy; the patient’s mother; the town of West Salem; the larger inherited Puritan mind-set of sexual repression; the even larger cultural distrust of women, which, I pointed out, could be traced back to mythological times and thus could even include Medusa.
Hoppin liked this. He smoothed the crumples from the napkins with the backside of a spoon.
I’m a visual man, he said. Now I understand. Yes, the arrows point inward, but they could just as easily point outward.
That’s exactly right, I said to him. These girls—these hyper radiants—they reverse the energy flow of the arrows.
I drew arrows pointing from the center X toward the outermost ring.
The increased pressure under which they’ve existed either crushes their spirit, or, as I suspect is a trend, their spirit rebels, it ingests this negative energy and reflects it outward as an act of intensive, even destructive, creativity. I can help them harness what currently manifests as a destructive tendency and transform it into a positive tendency. A work of art.
We ate our uninspired lunch, we ordered coffee and no dessert. Hoppin, as he signed the check, promised to get me a contract by the end of the week and the first installment of my “research grant.” Outside the bistro’s plate-glass windows, a collection of schoolgirls gathered. They stared at themselves in the windows, fixing their lipstick, pretending to forget that people sat behind their makeshift mirrors, observing them from inside their own reflections. One girl stared at me. Her lips gathered into a glossy pink sneer.
A slight uneasiness mixed with my excitement. Was this wrong? As the girl sneered at me, I wondered whether what I was signing up to do was justified. Hoppin had too many expectations that clashed with the truth. I would be saddling my professional reputation to a real girl who might not, when I was through with her, exist.
The girl’s mouth circled into a fishlike “O.”
I asked Hoppin whether, ethically, I had the rights to Helen’s niece’s story. Could I tell the story if it’s hers? Could I claim it as my own?
Who says it’s hers, said Hoppin. She’s a liar. There is no real story. We’ll just change the salient details. Her name. Where she lives. Even personal details that don’t fit the hyper-radiant profile. Everybody does it.
But ethically, I said.
Is it more ethical to co-opt the story of one lying girl, or is it more ethical to utilize a version of her story to help the many others who suffer from her condition? You’re doing the world a favor.
Right, I said.
It’s a matter of bravery, Hoppin said. You’d be surprised how brave you have to be to do something of note. You have to be willing to be
a bastard. Pour faire une omelette il faut casser des oeufs.
Indeed, I thought. This opportunity came, as did most opportunities, at a price to somebody. I tried to soothe my conscience by thinking about famous case studies. Because Mary had been fascinated by it, Freud and Dora came first to mind. I reminded myself that great case studies were made, not reported. I reminded myself that Dora was just the name of a fictional girl based on a real girl. The real girl had scarcely figured in the final product. That was the mistake of feminists like Roz, I thought. To defend Dora was to defend a fictional creation. To defend a fictional creation was to miss the point.
Girls’ lives don’t have points, I heard in my head. That’s why they do what they do.
The girl in the window put the back of her hand over her mouth. With a brusque motion she spread the lipstick across her cheek like a slash of war paint.
I experienced an impulse similar to the one I’d experienced in the company of Mary’s Aunt Helen; as I’d wanted to make the cigarette case disappear, so too did I want Mary to disappear.
I was not proud of this impulse.
I was proud of this impulse.
Her name, I said, wondering if Hoppin had seen the girl, too. But when I turned to the window again she was gone.
Her name, I repeated, suddenly fixated. I wanted to cleave Mary and her fictional representative in two. What shall we call her?
Our waitress returned to collect the bill. Her silver name tag flashed in the sunlight shining through the plate glass window, blinding me.
Miriam, Hoppin said. We’ll call her Miriam.
What Might Have Happened
The girl was bored. An improvement, the man thought as he soaked the encrusted soup bowls in the sink. Better than sad or despondent or demeaned. But he changed his mind when he returned to the living room and found the girl rummaging through a drawer in the Bavarian sideboard. Who knew what was in the drawer of the Bavarian sideboard. Certainly he didn’t know, and so he found himself wishing she’d grow sad again. He found himself thinking bored was the new curious. He’d begun to settle into his pre-nighttime routine, a blankly suggestive period in which sentences entered his head—the silence rang sublime; dinner was a squalid affair; bored was the new curious—and repeated themselves endlessly, refusing to leave until he celebrated the artificial beginning of the next day with a cup of coffee. Often these sentences were nonsensical variations on some oft-uttered phrase (defenestration was all the rage) or statements in the past tense, narrative non sequiturs that might or might not pertain to his day. He wondered if this new narrative impulse was a residue of his wife’s reclamation therapy. Reclamation therapy insisted on the past tense, the third person; in truth it was a creepy exercise that he’d endured only because it meant he’d have something to do. Bored had not been the new curious, he’d learned after the accident, bored was the new bored. So his wife had dragged him to this exact house and said, respecting the third-person recommendation of his doctor: He was a bugaboo for pressed shirts and shoe trees. He was deathly scared of infestations.
Then they had had sex. He and his ex-wife, on the guest bed, without sheets, to maintain the feeling of past-tense temporariness, the inviolability of a story that already had an ending. His wife said, as he entered her, The man never could satisfy his wife because he was preoccupied by the possibility of bats. He did not tell the girl about this encounter on the guest bed, but he worried she would discern it nonetheless. She’d divine it from random clues found in the Bavarian sideboard, from a paper clip and a coin of candle wax. Soon she’d be telling him a story in which he was having sex with his ex-wife on the guest bed while his ex-wife told him that he was too worried about bats to be a good lover. The girl would laugh at him and use this as another prod to suggest that he should kiss her or engage in some other form of sexual misconduct with her, so then she could prove to him that he was the illicitly passionate man she claimed he was.
The man looked at the girl as she sifted through the contents of the drawer. He found her very beautiful at that moment—her hair, ever dingier, catching the light from the nearby lamp and seeming to gleam, even to sparkle. But he quickly redirected this impulse toward the critical: Her outfit tires me, he thought. The field hockey uniform. The sweatpants. How could she expect him to fondle her while she wore a uniform? It was too much of a porn-movie cliché, to the degree that he understood the highly clichéd world of porn.
You know, he suggested, you might think about changing out of those clothes.
What? the girl said. Her head was practically inside the drawer. Her voice echoed woodily.
Those clothes, the man said. Do you really think I would molest you in those clothes?
The girl raised her head from the drawer.
Who says I want you to molest me? she said.
The man rolled his eyes. Dinner was a squalid affair.
Don’t roll your eyes at me, the girl said. Eye rolling means you don’t respect me. If you’re going to molest me, I demand your respect.
There are clothes in my ex-wife’s bedroom, he said. Feel free to wear anything.
Even her underwear? the girl said.
Your comfort level with a stranger’s underwear is something I can’t regulate, the man said.
You used to make me wear your ex-wife’s underwear, the girl said.
The man rolled his eyes again.
Sorry, he said, catching himself. But I respectfully think you’ve lost your touch. Your stories are becoming clichéd.
Your life is a cliché, the girl said. Who gets amnesia about their whole life? Who believes that cheesy plot twist any longer?
The girl dropped cross-legged on the floor and flicked at the hardened sole of his ex-wife’s sheepskin slipper with her fingernail. Click click click. The sound was repugnant to him.
Are you saying you don’t believe me, the man said.
I’m saying I don’t believe in forgetting, the girl said. Which is different from saying I don’t believe you.
Huh, the man said. I’m not seeing the difference.
I’m sure your amnesia feels real to you, the girl explained. I’m just not certain it exists.
The man didn’t respond. He decided it was time to have a drink.
Scotch? he said, busying himself at the wet bar behind the couch. I can also offer you peppermint schnapps, white rum, coffee liqueur, flat tonic.
I don’t drink, the girl said. But I’d take a cigarette.
Ex-wife didn’t allow smoking in the house, he said. Log cabin. Fire trap. Etc.
You smoked when she went skiing, the girl said. You hid in the attic and opened a window. You lit incense to mask the smell.
The man shrugged crossly. You’d know better than I, he said.
The girl took this as permission to forage for cigarettes. She scurried up the staircase which was carpeted in a rust-brown shag that, when trod upon, released the smell of mildew.
While you’re up there, he called after her, change your clothes.
Because if I’m dressed like an adult, she said from the landing, you can forget you’re molesting a child.
That’s right, the man said, raising his glass. Cheers.
The girl disappeared around the landing.
The man threw back the scotch while standing at the wet bar; the rule of drunks, he knew, dictated that each trip to the bar equaled one drink, even if each trip to the bar equaled three drinks. He refilled his glass, emptied it, refilled it a second time, returned to the couch. The scotch surged and settled around his heart. He was a threatened man. Threatened man. A redundancy. He was a man. A redundant man. He felt the need to stoke the fire with the poker, he felt the need to growl in a throaty, mucusy timbre, he felt the need to run upstairs and teach the girl a lesson. A redundant man with bats in his attic is nobody’s fool.
Upstairs, he heard the sounds of resistant drawers opening, the swelled wood popping loose with a mortally wounded rodent squeak. He imagined her holding up his wife’s clo
thing, item by mothbally item, trying to select an outfit he’d like. Or an outfit he’d dislike, an unsettling outfit. Or maybe the girl would opt for something predictable—now that she was fatigued her story lines were starting to fray—and emerge in a silky bathrobe and nothing beneath. She’d forgo the old sheepskin slippers in exchange for something less mutton-footed—his ex-wife’s leather sandals, perhaps, college-era hippie thongs that she wore around the house when the fire was too hot.
But most likely, he thought, the girl, if she wasn’t predictable in one way, would be predictable in another. Instead of mocking him via the overtly sexual, she would mock him through its opposite. She would descend the staircase with pajama pants turbaned on her head, the bunchy terry-cloth robe his wife stole from the Copley Plaza Hotel, an inherited pair of rubber waders, grotesquely interpreting adulthood like the child playing dress up that she was. The man tried to prepare himself for anything, because he was sensing that this evening had turned into a serious game. It had been a game from the second he’d opened his car door for her, but he’d taken it lightly—a larkish opportunity pursued by a bored man. But the evening’s larkish aspect had long ago expired. In the parking lot of the twenty-four-hour rest stop on the highway. As he hurried toward the pay phone and hurt his hip—which, now that he thought about it, hadn’t hurt at all since the parking lot. A side effect of his subterranean panic, which had since left his muscles, shifted to the surface, now made plain by his vibrating hands holding an empty scotch tumbler. Momentarily empty. He refilled it, listened to the no-noise of the girl in his ex-bedroom. Where was she? He shot a worried glance at the stairwell, half expecting her head, or rather her eyes, like those of a bat in the rafters, to be spying on him with unblinking animal disinterest. But no. The landing was empty. He waited for the clinking of his ice cubes to subside. Far above him—in the attic—he heard a hull-like creaking, a furry thump. Looking for cigarettes, he thought. That’s where she was.
He sipped his scotch economically. Usually the ironclad awakeness of insomnia prevented alcohol from affecting him, but tonight was different. Tonight his brain was muzzy, the hyperalert state that made every object appear spotlit and coated in titanium had rescinded its hold on him. This worried him. He worried that, muzzy-brained, he wouldn’t be up to the challenge of beating the girl. Beating the girl. As in defeating the girl, he said to himself, mentally squaring away any potentially misunderstood double entendres as if he would be called to the stand to testify against himself. Really this was all just a game; to consider it a game made him both less and more anxious. A game was fun. A game could be lost. He started to wonder if perhaps the girl had been put up to this game by his ex-wife. She was the kind of woman who laughed when people vomited into their laps on planes. It wouldn’t be beyond her.
The Uses of Enchantment Page 28