Salter, Anna C

by Fault lines

  Not everything I said was a lie. Analytic jargon aside, Toby was what Ginger needed. She'd exploit any sort of interpersonal exchange, and Toby wouldn't give her anything to hang on to. And whatever else I thought about Toby, he wouldn't tolerate any boundary crossing.

  Too, he had the best access of anyone in the building to hospitalization—which Ginger needed periodically. No matter how crowded the inpatient unit was, amazingly, there was always room for the chairman's clients.

  "Well," Toby said. "Of course, if I could be of any help . . ."

  "I'm sure you could," I said. "Would you consider taking her?"

  "Of course," Toby said, as though there had never been a question. Right. As though every day of the week you could get the chairman to take a case from hell —particularly when it was a case where someone might actually kill him or herself: There were potential lawsuits when people killed themselves.

  "It's a very difficult case," I said. "She's periodically suicidal."

  "I'm happy to help." Well, what could he say after agreeing? What? She's suicidal? I've changed my mind. On the other hand, now he couldn't say he hadn't been warned.

  I left quickly, and on the way out I made an appointment for Ginger with his secretary for the next day. I wanted to get out of there and nail this down before Toby came to his senses.

  So why did Toby take a case that ordinarily wouldn't get past the secretary? He did it because I told him what a big, important guy he was and how much wiser he was than the rest of us lowly mortals. Give me a boa in the backyard anytime over this narcissistic stuff. It makes people blinder than a bat.

  On the way out I thought about it. Toby would buy a dead horse an}^ day. Not because he couldn't stand being alone or he needed anything concrete. He'd buy it because narcissists don't exist without a mirror around. It's not because they love themselves so much. It's because the only time they can see themselves, the only time they feel they have a self, is when they see themselves in the mirror of somebody else's regard. They are whatever the mirror says they are. They have the least sense of self of anybody on the planet.

  Toby had paid dearly for that look in the mirror I gave him today. The sad irony of it was, to him it would be worth it.

  19

  As I passed Melissa's desk, she said, "Carlotta called. She wants you to call her back. She's at work."

  I sat down at my desk and immediately dialed her number. Thank God for women friends. The friendship with Carlotta had always been a haven. I got a small knot in my stomach every time I called Adam: Both of my X chromosomes would start chirping, and I could hardly think with all that dithering about. Talking to Toby was like talking to somebody who saw me as . . . well, a part object . . . somebody who existed only to meet his narcissistic needs. Then there was Marv's betrayal, which just made me appreciate Carlotta all the more today.

  Whatever it was, Carlotta and I had differences that made yin and yang look like clones, but who cared? I was at my most warm and fuzzy when she came on the phone.

  "Michael," she said dryly. "You are a pain in the butt."

  "Excuse me? This is what I get for dropping everything to call you back right away?"

  "You have cost me more fucking sleep this week."

  "Like what? The thing with Willy?" Ginger was still in my mind, and for a moment I was confused about what Carlotta knew and what she didn't.

  "Of course, the thing with Willy. What else? There's something else?"

  "I'm being chased by the entire Russian navy," I said solemnly.

  "This could be true," she said. "Listen, I haven't told Adam yet. That's what I've been obsessing over. I spent the entire week trying to figure out whether to tell Adam that Willy's here —up close and personal enough for you to throw me out of my house."

  "Uh-oh," I said. I had completely forgotten she had threatened to tell him. Threatened, hell. Promised was more like it.

  "So?" I said. There wasn't any point in arguing. She had decided something.

  "I kept thinking you were probably right. It wouldn't do any good, and it would just cause friction between you and Adam. He can't protect you if you won't let him. Besides a fight with Adam would just make it less likely you would call him if you need him."

  "Exactly," I said.

  "But I decided to tell him."

  "What?" I said. "After all this? You were right the first time."

  "Yes and no," she said. "I finally decided —it's not that it will do you a damn bit of good if you're determined to get yourself killed—it's that I am not going to have an answer when we're both looking down at your dead body, and he says, 'You knew he was here? And you didn't call me?'"

  "I am just not going to live the rest of my life wondering if it would have made a difference. So, I'm having dinner with him tomorrow tonight to talk about it. You want to come?"

  "I do not think so." As in how many wild horses would it take? I was pissed, but there was nothing I could do about it. I was not going to control Carlotta. "Look, Carlotta. Do what you need to do. I don't think it's going to help, but, you know, what can I say? In the end, you're going to do what you want to do."

  "And so," she said, "are you."

  Marv came in and told me he had set up a meeting with Ginger for later in the afternoon. We were planning on seeing her together to present a united front. I had insisted. I was afraid Marv would do the apology thing on his knees if I wasn't there.

  I would have just enough time to see Camille at my private practice office and get back. Usually I didn't see private clients when I was at Psychiatry. But sometimes clients were in too much crisis to wait a week between appointments, and for those folks, I sometimes chased back and forth.

  As I approached my private practice office, I realized what a mess I was in. How could I go into that office and talk to Camille knowing that Willy might be listening to every word? How could I not tell that woman that somebody had some way of listening in?

  On the other hand, the thought of telling her a second sadist was running loose, this one listening to her therapy sessions, would put her into orbit. If she wasn't paranoid now, she'd be then. It would shatter any sense of safety and destroy our relationship. What was I supposed to do?

  And if this was true for Camille, it was true for all my clients. I had had a full day last Friday, and the fact was, I'd known that Willy could be bugging me the whole time. But, I reasoned, I had checked. I had swept the room for bugs between every single client.

  That didn't help last time, a little voice inside me said. You swept before the lying little twerp rapist, and Willy had still bugged him.

  I swallowed hard. For the first time in my life, somebody could bring me up on ethics charges and be right.

  It could be argued —maybe it would be —that I should have closed my practice immediately the moment I had a hint someone might be bugging me. Not a bad argument. But what was I supposed to do with all the folks I saw? I didn't have a caseload of surgeons considering career changes. I had a caseload of traumatized people. Camille was in worse shape than the rest, but nobody on my caseload could be classified as a functional person who would get better talking to a rock.

  I could see it now. "Roberta, I know your father tyrannized your life as a child, made you fill in fifteen-minute time sheets for weeks when he was away on business trips, and sexually abused you for eight years, but I need to tell you that a powerful, malevolent male could be listening to your every word. You think you're safe? Not even here.

  "Yes, Kiwi, I know your husband is beating the shit out of you, but somebody might be listening to this conversation who is far worse than he is. Somebody might be listening who likes to torture women and children. Would you like to hear some of the things he has described doing to them?"

  So I couldn't tell them. But I could have said I was sick and closed my practice down. Or something. The more I thought about it the more I realized I should have done something and now had to do something. But first I had to see Camille. There wasn
't anything I could do about the problem this second.

  I swept the office again for bugs. It was probably stupid. I had never caught anything with Danny's little bug-sweeping device. But it was the only thing I could do to feel safer, so I did it. I was just finishing when Keeter and Camille showed up, I mean Camille and Keeter. Somehow Keeter always got my attention first. She curled up in her usual spot, on the floor between me and Camille. I couldn't help remembering how she had looked crouched to jump when I walked into Camille's house. Remind me not to crowd this dog. I wrenched my attention away from Keeter and looked at Camille.

  I was always surprised at how bad she looked. This morning her hands were shaking and her eyes had a hollow look. I had seen that look before. It meant people were living someplace where nobody should even visit.

  I thought briefly of Auschwitz and the descriptions I had read of the blank look that people got as they became more depleted and felt more hopeless. Other inmates learned to recognize that look. It usually meant the person was going to just quit eating and die.

  And yet. Although Camille had long ago lost all her emotional fat reserves and had been using up muscle and bone, there was still something left. It wouldn't last forever. Nobody in the known universe was even close to invincible. If something didn't change, sooner or later, the flashbacks or the perp or whatever it was would grind her to a pulp. But she was a marathoner, and somehow I didn't think she was completely beaten yet.

  "How are you?" I said gently.

  "I'm okay," she said, "I think. Did you talk to the police?" "I did," I said, "and Chief Bowman wants very much to help you. He called the Boston police to find out more about what happened. Camille, did you ever hear anything more about this guy or any other attacks on anybody else after you left Boston?"

  "No," she said. "I never spoke to them again." "You never read the newspapers or anything?" "No," she said. "The newspapers are too upsetting."

  I noticed she didn't ask me why I asked. She didn't want to know.

  "You need to know that Chief Bowman has a very tough, experienced cop watching your house right now. He used to work organized crime in Boston, and I don't think even if the perp is back he can get past this guy."

  "He can get past anybody," she said forlornly.

  "We don't know that," I said. "Last time he picked on you, he picked on an unarmed woman. He didn't pick on anybody with a guard dog and a cop standing watch."

  Camille didn't say anything, but I could tell she wasn't reassured. In her mind, he was larger than life.

  "I know this is hard on you," I said, "but I need to know some things about the guy who attacked you. Do you think you can talk about him?"

  I hated doing this. It wasn't supposed to be my job to play junior cop. I was supposed to be a therapist. And yet, there were times when I had to use a little common sense. If there was a serial killer after Camille, she wasn't going to be around for therapy if he wasn't caught. And it was going to be a whole lot harder for her to talk to Adam than to me.

  "Maybe I could talk a little," she said. "I took extra Haldol this morning."

  "You never saw his face, right?" She nodded. "Did he remind you of anybody you knew? Did he sound or move like somebody you knew?"

  "No," she said. "He was a stranger."

  "How tall was he?"

  Camille's hands were shaking worse, and she started twisting a Kleenex, but she kept going. "Small," she said so faintly I almost couldn't hear her. "Not much taller than me."

  "How big?"

  "Thin . . . wiry . . . and very strong."

  "Camille." She had started to drift away when she said "strong."

  "Camille, how old was he? And then I promise I won't ask any more questions about him."

  Camille focused on the Kleenex she was twisting. "Young," she said. "I don't know how old. . . . His voice was young."

  "That's all," I said. "No more questions about him."

  That was all I could ask anyway. I couldn't really ask her any questions about whether he reminded her of Chris. I couldn't take the chance she was suggestible and would put the two of them together just because I said it. I couldn't even ask her in the same session to describe Chris. I'd have to leave that for another time and ask her to describe several people so she wouldn't know what I was driving at.

  But for the first time we had some kind of description of the perp, and the cops in Boston could match that against Chris or anybody else they had in mind. I'd tell Adam about it, and when he met with her maybe he could get a few more details.

  Camille agreed to meet with him, but I didn't want to do it today. She could only talk about this a little at a time. We'd done all we could on it today, and Adam w^ould get more information if we waited until tomorrow. It also gave me another excuse to check in with her.

  I walked her out after the session and watched her leave. I just had a bad feeling about this. It had changed everything when I realized there might really be someone out there who was still after her. I was still shaken up from Adam's description of what this guy had done to the next two women he got ahold of. Would I have realized he was back sooner if that son-of-a-bitch Willy hadn't been on my tail? Yes, I would have.

  That was the problem with people like Willy. They could affect you without laying on a finger. I had started worrying and fretting and orienting everything around Willy from the moment he showed up. In the meantime I couldn't see what was right in front of me. Camille had to ask me how it could be a flashback if it was about the future and not the past. Duh. The poor lady was in the fight of her life, and the only help she had was from an unethical therapist with —currently —the IQ of a gerbil.

  20

  When Ginger walked in the next morning, Marv and I were sitting quietly on opposite sides of the room. I had suggested we sit on the couch together and hold hands, but Marv didn't appreciate my sense of humor.

  Ginger looked tense, and well she might. Marv had only told her on the phone that we needed to talk to her together and that it was important. He hadn't said what about, but Ginger knew it couldn't be good.

  She sat down warily and looked from one of us to the other. I began, as Marv and I had agreed. "I want to thank you for coming in and being willing to see us together. Ordinarily we wouldn't meet with you together—if I were the client, I'd feel outnumbered—but this time we thought it was important that you talk with both of us."

  Ginger was too anxious to wait. "Why?" she said quickly, although it was pretty obvious that was exactly what I was planning on telling her.

  "Give me a second, Ginger. I need to go back first. When I transferred you, I told you the truth. I told you that I thought a male therapist might be able to help you more than I could. Partly that had to do with the fact that you lost your boundaries with me and were miserable when I wasn't around, and we talked about that part.

  "But we didn't talk about the fact that you crossed my boundaries and intruded on my private life. That alone was enough to terminate the therapy. In a way, it already had." Ginger looked surprised. She glanced at Marv for reassurance, but he didn't respond.

  "What I'm trying to say is that for a therapist to do a good job, she has to keep her own thoughts and feelings out of the therapy as much as possible. When you become a player in the therapist's private life, she —or he —loses objectivity. The therapist starts responding to you from her or his point of view, rather than simply focusing on yours.

  "And I have to tell you honestly. Ginger, having someone over and over again intrude on time that's supposed to be private kicks up a lot of bad feelings in the therapist. All that has to be put aside to be neutral and objective and supportive. If the intrusions go on long enough, the day comes when the therapist just has too many bad feelings to keep them out of the therapy. I lost faith that I could help you, not only because you had lost your boundaries with me, but because you were stepping on mine.

  "I should have told you all that. I didn't because you were going through such a hard time th
at it seemed like it would just be another rejection. But by not telling you, in a way, I set you up to lose Marv too. Because you started doing the same thing with him that you did with me.

  "Do you understand what I mean?"

  "Sure," Ginger said angrily. "You're telling me Marv's kicking me out too."

  "Not exactly," I said. "It's true that you've crossed too many boundaries with Marv to keep seeing him, and it's true you've been stalking me again . . ."I used the term deliberately, and Ginger exploded.

  "I did not stalk you. I was helping you. Marv told me about that guy."

  "Ginger, what guy? There's always a guy getting out of jail. I've worked with six trillion offenders. There's always somebody mad at me. It's not your job to take care of me. All you can do by stalking me is lose your own supports."

  "I was just trying to help." Ginger started crying.

  "I'm sorry. Ginger, but it doesn't help. It doesn't help to have somebody on a cross-country jumping course scaring my horse. It doesn't help to have somebody standing in the woods staring at my house."

  Ginger started crying harder and lay down on her side on the couch. She pulled up her knees and started rocking.

  "I'm sorry. Ginger, but I'm not going to do you any favors if I set you up to do this again."

  Marv held his hand up to stop me. "Ginger," he said softly, "How are you feeling right now?"

  "I feel like shit," Ginger said. "I feel like total shit. This has happened to me all my life. No matter what I do, I'm always wrong. I've never been able to do anything right. I should just die."

  I gave Marv a look. The look said, "Don't get her going or she will lock into that for the next ten light-years." It was true. Ginger was winding up. When she felt desperate, she got manipulative as hell. And she had that strange business where if she could make us feel bad, she felt good. It was as if depressed affect was some kind of ball that got passed back and forth. Ginger wouldn't have to feel her own emotions if she could just give them to us.