by Diane Lawson
In theory, the analyst occupies a singular position, privy to every corner of the patient’s interior world. But the analyst sees precious little of the patient’s tangible life. We poke around in his fantasy, in his memories, in his dreams, yet we know nothing of what gathers frost in his freezer or of the organization of his sock drawer. The analyst comes across only an odd fact here and there about the concrete realities of the patient’s life. A classical analyst assumes that it is this particular odd fact that merits knowing, that whatever the patient reveals is like the carefully chosen detail in a good novel, the little nothing that says everything. But this assertion, like most of analytic dictum, is mere conjecture.
I’d imagined my patients’ homes, of course. In this way, I saw John Heyderman’s bleak studio apartment, devoid of material comforts, single rollaway bed up against a window looking onto the identical apartment across the parking lot. I saw Lance Power’s compulsively groomed ranch-style home in Castle Hills—the last place someone would expect to hold an arsenal. I saw Renee Buchanan’s condominium in the park-embedded 200 Patterson building, the stunning view of downtown, rooms in suspended animation filled with oversized pieces from her two previous marriages awaiting the mansion she’d occupy with her yet-to-be-located next husband. I saw Yvette Cunningham’s pampered two-bedroom (one for use as a closet) apartment near the Trinity University campus. I visualized Morrie Viner’s place, the deteriorating, vine-covered Tudor in Jefferson left him by his mother, changed only by the piles of DVDs and VHS tapes of movies and old television shows that he relentlessly collected and attempted to organize.
I knew that the images in my mind were amalgams of random descriptive bits from the given patient and my associated emotional reaction. In theory, my construction would be true to my patient’s psychic reality. But was it really true? The voyeur in me was excited at the prospect of scrutinizing these private places with my physical eye, not my mind’s eye. Of course, I could always have driven by. But only Howard lived along one of my usual routes, and I’d always avoided staring even there when I passed. Some sense of psychoanalytic propriety always stopped any exploration. I wasn’t invited. Besides, the analyst’s territory is the intra-psychic world, not real estate.
Mike’s exploratory plan didn’t necessarily qualify as unethical, but it certainly ranked as boundary-straining naughtiness. Nevertheless, I was on board. Through my insomniac self-analysis, I realized that something in me shifted when I got a glimpse of Camille with her pearl-rimmed cleavage, when I learned about Allison’s affair with her attorney Bobby Tom Macon. Some illusion of my omniscience was shaken, some assumption of my competence undermined, some sense of what it meant to me to be an analyst shattered, putting me at odds with previously honored rules and regulations of my profession. Of course, I’d always known that there were aspects of my patients and their lives I could not access. Had known that in my head. But from that moment, the uncertainties, the questions unasked and unanswered, the blank spaces, began to taunt me. Why did I assume Camille loved Howard? Why didn’t Allison tell me about her new romance? Why didn’t the possibility of such things even cross my mind? Did my own situation blind me? Did the failure of my marriage make me deaf to hints of failed love, of new love? Even worse, did Howard suffer from my misapprehension of his situation? Did Allison sense a jealousy in me that made her mute? What else didn’t I know? What other psychic snakes lying in the high weeds of my patients’ and my own deceit were waiting to bite me?
I threw off the comforter, traded out one pillow for the other and started wondering about Mike again. Something really bad had happened to him. I was convinced of that. What else would account for him leaving the security and prestige of SAPD Homicide to become a hustling private eye? And it irked me that he felt he had the right to keep that something to himself. To keep it from me. Patients will always give some answer to an analyst’s question, even if it’s a half-truth or a lie. A bald-face refusal to say anything wasn’t something I encountered. With the exception of Lance Powers. With him, I’d probed and cajoled for over a year before he told me about his real role in the Vietnam War. I’d assumed he’d been a regular soldier. My pressing him about dreams, about detail, ultimately led elsewhere. Something about my persistence, he said, convinced him I could bear to hear the truth.
My starting to think about Lance confirmed something about Mike. Freud discovered that when one thought follows another, there is an unconscious connection between the two. Free association: The Golden Rule of Psychoanalysis. Just say what comes to mind. If I were to trust my psychoanalytically informed intuition, Mike had a horrible secret, probably a violent one.
I got out of bed.
The storm had passed, leaving the sky clear. A full moon, shining through the skylight, lit up my bathroom like an early dawn. I took a shower in that half-light, guiding the hand-held nozzle over my body. I let the water run down my back. Over my breasts. Into my navel. My now-old routine. Then, as if the water turned ice cold, a wave of shameful loneliness swept though me. Dr. Nora Goodman. Touching her middle-aged body as if no one would have her.
In defiance, I clipped the tags from a sea-green silk nightgown that I found crammed in the back of my armoire, one of Richard’s more subtle attempts to court my fading audience. I swept a brush through my hair, frizzed by the humidity of the shower and the just-passed storm and dabbed on the slightest touch of Bulgari perfume, also Richard’s gift. My shame taunted me, dared me on. And—not fully believing I’d do what I was doing—I opened my bedroom door and set out across the upstairs gallery. The moonlight sent ghostly shadows to the walls, the built-in bookshelves, the family photos and the stairs. The feel of the hard wood alternating with Richard’s treasured rugs teased the soles of my feet.
Light slid under the study door in a startling greeting. I hadn’t expected him to be awake. I turned back toward the stairs twice before I knocked.
“Just wanted to see if you needed something,” I said, cracking the door.
“Bullshit,” he said, but not in a mean way. “Maybe you need something.” He lay propped up on Richard’s couch like a reluctant patient, a book in his hand, his glasses sitting a little crooked on his nose. “Freud,” he said, lifting the book in my direction. The Interpretation of Dreams. “Do you believe this stuff?”
“That dreams have meaning? Absolutely.”
“I don’t dream,” he said.
“Everybody dreams,” I said, walking in, nudging the door closed with my foot. “Five or six times a night. You just don’t remember. Or try not to.” A dream image burst into my consciousness. “You know, I had a nightmare before this mess started.”
“So now you’re a prophet and an analyst?”
“Never mind,” I said. The soft call of a train whistle slipped in the window. Mike must have opened it. Richard’s antique clock made a mocking tick. “Get some sleep.”
“I told you. I don’t sleep.” His face softened and he took off his glasses. “Tell me your bad dream. Just as it happened. Did I say that right?”
I laughed and the dream image I was holding in my mind’s eye turned cartoon-ish. “A big black dog was on my analytic couch. He growled and showed his teeth. I woke up when he came flying through the air at me.”
“Hmm. Yes, I see,” he said, rubbing his beardless chin. “A dangerous beast on your couch.” He rose then and came to me. Hands on my shoulders, he put my back to him and breathed in my hair. “Did he sniff you?”
I stood still in front of the bright open window as he walked around me, taking in every angle, a sculptor judging the promise in a piece of marble. Behind me again, his fingertips began a survey: the top of my head, eyelids, nostrils, a thumb tasting my tongue, down my neck, sliding over silk to nipples, cuticle catching on fabric, palms resting briefly on hips. He knelt, putting his face against the small of my spine. I reached back to take his head in my hands and found his cheeks wet.
“Don’t,” he said, shaking me off. He took his hands from me
, then slid across the floor until he sat cross-legged, up against the foot of the couch, head resting on the padded arm. “Okay,” he said. “Better go upstairs.”
I hesitated, victim of my poor assumptions. Wanting him now, of course, but uneasy at the prospect of continuing this near my sleeping children, who still, on occasion, came for me in the night—a glass of water, an upset stomach, a restless canine bedmate, a bad dream.
“Why not here?” I said. “The couch folds out.”
“I’m sleeping here.”
“I thought…”
“I can’t, Nora.” He looked past me, rubbing the skin between his eyes with the three middle fingers of his right hand.
“What was all that about?”
“You’re the analyst,” he said, in a voice that was done talking. “Figure it out.”
“Don’t play with me. It’s not right.”
“Not right? Yeah.” He heaved himself onto the couch and laid with his back to me.
Okay. Okay. What now? Crawl in spoon-fashion behind him, perching myself on the edge? He might have allowed it. But I had some pride. Or so I wanted to think.
“Good night, then.” I tried to sound neutral, but the words came out pinched.
He didn’t move.
I pulled the door shut behind me, deliberately leaving the light on. The click of the latch a blow. To my heart. To my ego. A part of me held out hope that the door would open, and I’d be swept back to the couch or upstairs or to the chaise on the porch or the fat rug in the family room or the fancy French-oil-cloth-covered breakfast table. I sat on the stairs, the wood cold and hard under me, contemplating the seemingly endless possibilities.
The slit at the bottom of the door went dark.
Chapter Seventeen
The security system chimes woke me. The clock read 8:47, the sun raged through the open blinds of my east-facing window, my head was pounding, and my mouth tasted vile. I slipped on a robe and peeked over the gallery railing in time to see the back of Richard going from the foyer to the dining room toward the kitchen. I slid down the stairs on my butt, staying out of his view, while expanding mine. He did his kitchen inspection, rearranging the hanging pots by size. At the racket, Mike’s head popped up over the back of the family room sofa, the newspaper in his hands. I watched Mike watching Richard, stifling a childish giggle in my chest.
Richard ran his hands along the granite counter tops. He must have encountered something sticky, as he lifted his hand and rubbed his fingers together. I imagined his face, squinched tight, as if he smelled something dead. He picked up the cork from the first bottle of Prosecco, gave it a brief sniff and put it in his pocket like he was collecting evidence, which occurs to me now he might well have been doing.
He rounded the counter bar into the family room. Mike’s voice hit him out of the blue.
“A person can get hurt walking in to someone else’s house unannounced.”
I held my breath.
“The kids mentioned a private investigator had been hanging around,” Richard said. “Didn’t realize it was a twenty-four hour shift.”
“And you’re Richard?”
“I assume you’re good enough at detection to know this is still my property.” Richard had his courtroom voice. “And I’m here to pick up my children.”
Mike stood. “Seems everyone’s still asleep. You might have called.”
“Keep the shirt,” Richard said. “I never liked it.”
“There’s no need for unwarranted conclusions,” Mike said, without apology in his voice.
“Seems a shame you left the force. All those perks and benefits—medical insurance, disability, pension plan. And the uniforms. You must have saved a fortune on clothes.” Richard was doing his best demeaning act, treating Mike like he’d treated green interns when he was chief resident. “But of course, Homicide doesn’t get uniforms. Excuse me. I need to wake the kids. We’ve got a busy day.”
I made it back up the stairs and ducked into my bedroom to the sound of Richard’s Italian loafers on the marble foyer floor. The coward’s way out, I suppose, but what would’ve been gained by my appearance? I stayed there until I heard the bicker of the kids roused from sleep and the scurrying of the dogs displaced from their burrows in the children’s beds.
I heard Mike saying goodbye in the foyer. “I’m doing a job here.”
“As long as you don’t start doing mine,” Richard said.
“I’d like to talk with you sometime,” Mike added. “Get your thoughts about what’s happened with Nora’s patients.”
“Hmmmm,” Richard said, mocking. “What would be the point?”
“Mr. Ruiz is the detective, Dad,” Tamar said.
“He’s a private dick,” Richard said. “Not a real detective.”
“Dick is a bad word,” she said.
“Depends on how you use it, stupid.” Alex’s last word preceded the door slam.
“Thanks for covering my back,” Mike said, when Richard’s car squealed away.
“I was asleep.”
“Sleepwalking, maybe.”
“You handled him well. Hang around to referee, maybe I’ll stay married to him.”
“I’ve got a bad feeling about your husband. He’s got an ax he wants to grind.”
“He’s just pissed I get to stay in the house.”
“Don’t kid yourself.”
“Richard’s a blowfish. All air and bluster.”
“Blowfish happen to be poison,” he said.
“Now we have poison fish?”
“National Geographic Special,” he said. “Sushi chef slips, you’re dead.”
“I don’t watch television,” I said.
“Okay, I’m an intellectual imbecile.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Only with your every move,” he said. “I do have a question though. Not that it’s my business. But why do you let your kids behave like that?”
“Like what?” I said.
“Hitting. Shoving. Putting each other down. Fighting over everything like street urchins. Do I need to go on?”
“All siblings fight.”
“Not like your kids. Alex needs to show his sister some respect, be protective of her. He needs some outlet for that aggression. Something constructive.”
“That’s why he’s playing baseball,” I said.
“He sucks at baseball. Please don’t tell him I said that.”
“So do something else with him,” I said.
“Me? Last time I checked he had a father.”
“Take him shooting,” I said. “He keeps asking you to.”
“I’m serious about this, Nora. It’s not good. He’s cruel to Tamar. And she keeps asking for it until he has to let her have it.” He pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes like his head hurt too. “I just need something to eat.” He headed for the kitchen, shoving a chair under the breakfast table in passing, jerked open the refrigerator, then slammed the door without taking anything out. “Forget it. I shouldn’t say anything. You’re the expert.”
I could tell he didn’t really mean that, and it made me mad.
“No one is an expert when it comes to their own kids,” I said.
“It just didn’t go on in my house.”
“Your father was probably physically abusive.” His look told me to shut up, but I kept going. “And you don’t have kids.”
“You don’t know shit about who I am or what I have,” he said.
Chapter Eighteen
I hadn’t thought as far as breakfast when I’d been grocery shopping the day before. My stomach was a mess, thanks to my hangover and the combined stress of Richard’s site visit and Mike’s unsolicited critique. I’d have been better off without a morning meal, but Mike insisted he couldn’t think on empty. I suggested the Metropolitan Café. Café au lait. Brioche. Some fresh-squeezed orange juice. But on our way up McCullough, Mike spotted The Olmos Pharmacy.
“I’ve heard about this place,” he said. The
shocks on the LeBaron complained as he took the slight grade of the parking lot a little too fast.
The Olmos Pharmacy sits at McCullough and Hildebrand, the intersection where Richard’s parents Stu and Esther met their maker. The place is frozen in time, 1938 to be exact. Attlee Ayres, San Antonio’s local claim to architectural fame, designed the Arte Moderne façade. A long linoleum lunch counter stretches from the front door toward the back of the building. Five green vinyl-seated booths, perpetually occupied, parallel the counter.
An elderly man moved himself and his cane over a stool to open a spot for Mike and me to sit together.
“How you?” Mike said.
“Too damned old,” he said. “That’s how.” He lifted his coffee cup, signaling Angie.
Angie plays The Olmos Pharmacy counter like a professional organist on her keyboard. She could be thirty-five or sixty-five. She could be straight or gay or unwilling to put up with any sexual nonsense at all. She wore her usual tee shirt and grubby butcher’s apron folded over and tied around her ample waist. Her hair, the only thing about her that ever changed, was buzzed except for the thin braid that ran down her neck. I remembered her, of course, from the time when I’d bring the kids in for milkshakes after nursery school. Olmos means elm tree in Spanish, but Tamar, capturing some essential truth about the place in her childish mishearing, called it The Almost Pharmacy.
Angie remembered me too. “Been a while,” she said, standing with the green-paged order pad in her hand. “Kids too old for chocolate malts?”
Mike ordered the $5.99 Breakfast Special: two eggs over easy, three silver dollar pancakes, bacon, black coffee and orange juice.