by Diane Lawson
There was no denying that Camille Westerman looked happy. Way too happy. There was also no denying that she’d threatened to divorce Howard and that now he was conveniently dead. Some people have all the luck, I thought, getting their wish and sympathy to boot. My assessment was ugly, excusable perhaps in my circumstance by someone who understands human psychology. Most people in bad marriages do consider that an untimely spousal death would be a softer blow than divorce. There was also no denying Camille had suitors. It vaguely crossed my mind that even Richard might be interested, but I dismissed the idea.
By the time I made it to my car, I was sweating and had worked up a substantial outrage at the merry widow Camille. The hot door handle seared my hand. I dropped my key, which bounced and landed so far underneath the car that I had to get on my hands and knees to retrieve it. I groped, remembering Richard’s adage that only fools and Yankees buy black vehicles in south Texas. There were runs in both knees of my sticky panty hose when I got up.
A leering, fat-faced security guard, who had obviously found entertainment in my ordeal and exposed behind, called from his campus golf cart.
“Need help, ma’am?”
“I need a lot of help,” I said, slamming myself in.
I didn’t consciously set out to go by Howard’s house after the service, but there are only three exits from the west side of the Trinity University campus and Bushnell Avenue was the closest. The Westermans’ estate sits on the wide shady block of that high-class street running between Shook and McCullough, the very same block that contained Richard’s penthouse away from home. According to Howard, Camille had never forgiven him for insisting they live in Monte Vista so he could bike to work, complaining for twenty years about being forced to live in exile an entire mile across the Olmos Dam from her Alamo Heights friends.
The Westermans’ wrought-iron gate stood uncharacteristically open that day, the driveway cluttered with vans from Dinners by Design Catering and The Rose Shop. Preparations were well underway for the unofficial get-together of the people who really mattered to Camille, a list I was not on, of course. Something about the sight of those party preliminaries inspired me to do my own investigation of Howard’s workshop.
I drove past the house and tucked my car in front of an old Chevy pickup, obvious property of one of the three Mexicans grooming the yard of the Westermans’ neighbors. The man wielding the leaf blower along the curb, a tiny desiccated hombre in a brown plaid shirt and huge straw hat, pretended not to notice me, but politely idled the motor when I passed.
“Buenos dias,” I said.
“Buenos,” he answered.
I walked through the gate as though I had reason to be there. The house, near invisible from the street, loomed like a displaced British manor. The smell of charcoal and grilling beef and peppers, carried by what little breeze there was, added to the oppressive heat. As I got close, I heard the clatter of silver, the chinking of glasses and an urgent effeminate male voice shouting orders in broken Spanish. In a huge elm tree on my left, a dense flock of grackles did their best to imitate the sounds. Their cackles seemed to mock me.
Hoping to go unnoticed. I used the delivery vans for cover until I could slink along the hedges by the side of the house. I don’t know what I expected or wanted to see. From a distance, the remodeled servants’ quarters that had been Howard’s home laboratory looked intact except for a couple of barricades and runs of yellow crime scene tape that half-heartedly segregated the place. As I got closer, I saw the blown-out windows, and an acrid chemical odor hit me. Around back, the walls were gone, revealing a devastated dollhouse done in the smoke grays of twisted metal, broken glass and melted plastic.
The sight, the smells, the relentless fuss of the grackles overcame me. I went to my knees and ran my hands over the lush St. Augustine grass. Head down, I mouthed the opening lines of the Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer. Then I saw the bits, there at the root line. Bits of glass, stucco, wood, bits of ceramic Mexican tile. The brush of the stiff green blades on my palms vaguely comforted me. In slow motion, my thoughts went to Howard—how I’d become fond of him and hoped to help him. And then to Richard, about how I’d not always hated him. There had even been times I’d loved Richard, but I never believed he loved me. I hadn’t been able to believe that in the early days of our marriage any more than I believed it that afternoon. I knelt there, in the shadow of Howard’s demolished workshop, feeling sorry for myself and stroking the grass until a round object found my fingers. I held it up and recognized my patient’s lucky cat’s eye marble.
Making my way back down the driveway, I nearly collided with Camille and her eighteen-year- old twins. She lifted her sunglasses, squinting her eyes, as she searched for me in her mental rolodex.
“I’m Nora Goodman,” I said, giving her a break. “Howard’s analyst.”
“Of course you are, dear,” she said. “Howie pointed you out to me at…” She tilted her head back and stuck her index finger in my direction. “I’m guessing the Library Foundation gala. Right after your Richard joined our board. One of my better nominations if I do say so myself.”
So that’s how Richard got on the fancy board-of-the-moment. He’d been vague about the particulars of that bit of good fortune. Puzzle pieces appeared in my mind’s eye. Camille had been unhappy with Howard. Richard and Camille were cozy. Howard was dead. Richard sent an over-the-top floral arrangement.
What was up here?
Was something up here?
My mind refused to focus.
The twins in their matching navy blazers stood on either side of their mother, swaying in impatient synchrony from one foot to the other, scuffing their penny loafers on the asphalt, looking more like their late father than I was prepared to bear.
“Boys,” she said, “say hello to Dr. Goodman. You have her to thank for your daddy having shown signs of being human in his last few months.” She threw the words out between us like small change.
The polite move would have been to extend my hand, but I was holding tight to that marble, to all I had left of Howard. To make the moment even more awkward, I couldn’t come up with anything appropriate to say. In my mind, the urge to confess culpability for Howard’s death played tug-of-war with the impulse to accuse Camille of responsibility.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said finally. “It doesn’t seem real to me yet.”
“That reaction is quite normal, I’m told,” Howard’s widow said. “But look at me, telling you of all people that.” She gave a short laugh. “It’s ironic. Howie was always so very careful in his little laboratory.”
She held eye contact a bit too long, I thought.
Then—though admittedly she might have been reacting to the sun’s glare or the dusty west wind—I could have sworn she winked.
Chapter Three
I went right back to work the day after Howard’s death, just like nothing had happened. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t the wisest thing to have done, given my clinical performance in some sessions that week. Then again, what would have been the other option? To call my living patients and say I was canceling their time? Either lying about the reason or running the risk of violating Howard’s confidentiality in the process and—god forbid—revealing my own limitations? Inserting my personal loss and self-doubt into their treatment? No way. An analyst knows how to deal with her emotions. A real psychoanalyst picks herself up and gets right back behind the couch.
Without Howard in my schedule, however, my world felt out of balance, like a mobile missing a hanging part. I plowed numbly through the abbreviated workdays that followed, trying to proceed as if Howard were just on vacation, though the puritanical Howard didn’t believe in vacations.
Unlike Howard, Allison Forsyth was always late to session. She was late for everything, a habit she knew most people perceived as wealthy arrogance. And Allison did have a staggering mound of money. The exact number of millions her oilman grandfather had stashed away for her in various trusts and limit
ed partnerships was a matter of perpetual debate in the tight social circles of Alamo Heights. But it wasn’t just her net worth that made others resent her. It was her bearing, a distracted aloofness that people read as a refusal to be bothered with life’s ordinary concerns.
Of course, it wasn’t that simple. I understood that her depression made her move as if under water. Some days I’d watch her from my window as she sat slumped in her Range Rover, summoning the energy to pull her ninety-eight pounds up my stairs. Once moving, she’d hug close to her dusty vehicle, to the fence, to my building, her feet scraping along the flagstones. Hers wasn’t a runway walk, but that of someone who feared losing contact with earth.
Like Howard though, Allison had come for analysis because of marital problems. Her husband Travis Forsyth, a pit bull of a litigation attorney, had one day—out of the blue, from Allison’s perspective—declared himself fed up with her complaining, packed up his ten-piece set of monogrammed leather luggage and moved to a rejuvenated downtown apartment in the historic Majestic Theater building. Allison was undone. She’d assumed Travis had married her for money and had banked on his greed for her security.
Allison had made a meek eleven-minutes-late entrance the day after Howard’s memorial service and proceeded to lie on my couch as if in a coffin, eyes closed, shrouded in her trademark shapeless dress—this one a print of tiny blue roses. As usual, she seemed to have gone out of her way to be unattractive. She was thirty-five, passed for fifty, never wore makeup or styled her limp blonde hair. I spent sessions making her over in my mind, imagining how pretty she could be if she took care of herself.
For most of the three-plus years we’d worked together, Allison had complained that my “stingy forty-five-minute appointments” were too short for an adequate detailing of the pain wrought by Travis’ betrayal. In the beginning, I’d felt sympathetic. I had no reason to doubt that Travis was a cad. I’d seen him once or twice and found him good-looking in that hair-combed-straight-back, luxury-used-car-salesman kind of way. Certainly he seemed to possess all of the calculating confidence that his wife lacked. But as time went on, it became clear that Allison was a whiner of magnificent proportion. Our sessions became the repository of all shades of that darkness, from gray mopiness to black despair—especially after Travis began making the rounds with a bounteous supply of women (every one of them beautiful, of course, or at least well done-up), women that my patient tearfully referred to as “Travy’s professional bimbos.”
In the weeks preceding Howard’s death, however, Allison’s pattern had shifted from this non-stop complaining to a clock-stopping silence that gave me an overwhelming impulse to fidget.
“You’re quiet again today,” I said, after what seemed like an eternity.
“I don’t know why,” Allison said. “Maybe I’ve already told you everything.” Her eyes and mouth resumed the closed position.
I was restless, itching to make a grocery list, just to have something to do. No paper at hand, I settled for penciling the coming week’s schedule into my date book, only to give that up when Allison, perhaps having heard the soft scratch of lead, shifted position. At that point, I’d been with her for all of five minutes.
“You won’t believe this,” she said then, probably sensing my impatience.
Ideally, I’d have explored this comment in a deeper way, wondered with her why she chose those particular words when she might as well have employed Wait until I tell you or Fasten your seatbelt or any number of other introductions. An analyst knows to attend to the exact word used, to the unique choice of phrase. And she said, You won’t believe. She made believing the issue. I should have gone after the transference—the experience she was having of me—with a question like, What about this idea that I wouldn’t believe you?
Instead, I stayed on the surface. “What won’t I believe?”
“It’s such a small thing,” she said. “Last Friday, I was sitting on my porch with a glass of straight lemonade.” Allison had wisely given up alcohol when Travis added custody considerations to his list of threats. Far from disappearing after moving out—as Allison feared he would—he made a habit of calling several times a day (or having his secretary call, if he was in trial) with various promises on the themes of divorcing her, cashing in his prenuptial and taking his rightful place as San Antonio’s most desired bachelor. “Anyway, the sun was setting. Abigail and Travis Junior were in the pool. I had this moment of…” She paused for a good ten seconds. “Happiness.” She choked as she said it.
And happiness was certainly the last word I expected to come out of her mouth. Despair. Grief. Terror. Numbness. All of those words had floated through my mind in that preceding silence. But happiness? There was no place in my mental model of Allison for this concept.
“What happened then?” I asked.
Again, better psychoanalytic technique would have dictated staying with the feeling, being curious about this uncharacteristic joy of hers. But I didn’t go that direction. Why another lapse of the analytic focus? Of course, I would have been preoccupied on some level by my patient’s death, prone—like Howard himself would do—to concentrate on facts to avoid feelings. But almost certainly, it was a deeper issue: a countertransference, a distortion of my analyst-psyche by my own bullshit. Was I unconsciously resistant to hearing about an emotional state that I was far from having in my own life? What I remember telling myself was that I’d finally made her better. As pathetic as it sounds, after Howard’s death, I probably needed to give myself some small pat on the back.
“What happened is that I froze,” she said, in answer to my question. “Then I felt like I was floating off into space.”
“So the good feeling made you disconnect?”
“Made me think about my mother,” she said. “When I was too happy, her eyes glazed over.”
“Your mother couldn’t resonate with your joy.”
“Do you think she might have been depressed?” she asked.
Do I think she might have been depressed? Hadn’t I suggested this very thing to Allison about a thousand times? But patients are deaf to an idea until they’re ready to hear it. Often the insight penetrates only as it comes out of their own mouths. I kept quiet and leaned forward in time to see Allison’s face thaw. Tears, carrying flecks of mascara, slipped down her cheeks, soaking the tissue on the pillow under her head.
“Maybe my mother wanted to be there for me,” Allison said. “Like I do with my kids.”
We were both silent then, and I saw in my mind’s eye a multi-layered family portrait. There was Allison, eleven years old, frozen mid-step in her baton-twirling routine, thrown by the sight of her mother powdering her nose. There was Allison in her shade-darkened bedroom telling her own daughter Abigail, who’s dripping water and excitement, that she’ll watch her dive off the board later. There was me filling in my Day Timer with Allison expectant on my couch. And there was my own mother, oblivious to my yearning presence, standing guard at the window, mindlessly caressing Buddy her always-in-arms Yorkie, staring into the night as if her diligence could generate a magnetic force to pull my father home. It was a powerful moment, an attuned moment, a moment encompassing the present and the past, the transference and the countertransference. It was the kind of moment that psychoanalysis is all about.
Allison broke the quiet. “You need to know that I’m going to be okay. Killing myself isn’t an option anymore. I know you’ve worried over me.”
Had I ever. I remembered weeks when her desperate and demanding calls came in every hour—calls that made my blood pressure shoot up, calls that robbed me of sleep, calls that set my psyche swinging between the terrified conviction that she that very minute was killing herself to the angry thought that she was killing me. I had indeed worried over her, but I’d worried over myself too—about what would happen to my practice if I became the psychiatrist who failed to prevent Allison Forsyth’s suicide.
“Yes,” I said to Allison, “I’ve been concerned about you.”
In retrospect, I might have been more analytic here as well, might have wondered aloud why she was bringing up those old suicidal feelings, might have raised some healthy skepticism about this “cure.” But I made none of these potentially productive moves, asked none of the called-for questions. Why so sloppy? Did I consider myself immune to further professional tragedy? Was I counting on Howard’s sacrifice to have appeased some fault-counting, psychoanalytic deity? Most likely, I just wasn’t up to wading into the muck.
“I never thought I’d get here,” Allison said. “Maybe you wondered too. Don’t tell me.” She laughed and I didn’t recognize the sound. “I’ve needed to think at least you held on to some hope for me. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Usually Allison had to be pried off the couch at the end of her hour. Over the years, we’d devised a routine for that painful transition. I’d announce that our session was over. She’d sigh. I’d feel accused of not helping. She’d sit up, sigh again and begin a slow search of her purse for her keys. As the door closed, she’d shoot me the woebegone look that my dog Gizmo lays on me when I send her out in the rare Texas downpour. But that day, Allison popped up and was out of the office a minute early like she had somewhere else to be. I felt relief at not having to go through our guilty dance, but reminded myself that leaving early is as much resistance as coming late and made a note to talk with her about the quick get-away. Overall though, I felt we’d had a great session and that Allison’s psychic puzzle was finally coming together.
Done properly, psychoanalysis can be a brutally slow process. Even the analyst comes to doubt that change is possible. Big breakthroughs happen in the movies. Real-life therapy is like hiking up a dense mountain trail. I knew from training and experience to regard apparent progress with skepticism, but that day, with Howard’s name still written in ink across my weekly schedule, I reveled in the feeling that Allison and I had made it to a clearing and could finally see the view.