A Tightly Raveled Mind

by Diane Lawson

  “I just want to know who you are, Miguel.”

  “I go by Mike.”

  “I like Miguel better,” I said, reaching over to run my finger up and down the vein on the back of his resting hand. “It feels nicer in my mouth.”

  He flipped that hand over, trapping my finger in his fist. “In your mouth, huh?”

  The way he gripped my finger made me nervous. I wanted to take the gesture as a show of affection.

  “I can think of better ways to accomplish that.” He leaned back without releasing my hand, resting his head against the wall, lids heavy, not blinking, massaging my finger with the callused tip of his thumb, waiting to see what I would say, giving me room to incriminate myself.

  I blushed. It occurred to me he might be a little drunk.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

  That wasn’t exactly a lie. I was pretty sure I knew what he meant, but I didn’t want to make assumptions. What if he didn’t mean that, and I’d humiliate myself? I know my thinking was warped. Come on, Nora. Show me a man who turns down oral sex from any willing provider. Let’s just say that I was suffering from a little self-esteem crisis after I’d been kicked out of this man’s bed the night before.

  And then if he did mean that, I didn’t want to encourage him.

  Or did I?

  “You don’t need to know who I am.” He let my finger drop. “You need to know who your patients are. Who they really are. Not the lying shit they pay you a hundred and fifty dollars an hour to listen to.”

  “You’re right,” I said, nodding to the busboy with his eye on my plate. “So tell me what you found today.”

  Mike blocked the busboy’s approach with a stop-traffic palm. “I might want some of that.” I stared at him, watching him chew. “Okay. I don’t know why I’m making a deal of this. My mother was Greek. Ariantha Kostas. May have been a Spaniard or two somewhere in the Ruiz family woodpile. My parents just rolled two recessive genes. Happy?”

  “Thrilled.”

  “You don’t like the food?” He stopped his loaded fork midway to his mouth and reached the bite over to me.

  I turned my head. “I told you. I don’t eat meat.”

  “Now, Nora.” I felt an unsandaled foot caressing my leg. “How are we supposed to have a relationship if you won’t eat Demos’ moussaka? It will never work out between us.”

  “What would never work out?” The lights dimmed and music shook the air. “What would never work out?” I said again.

  Mike put one index finger to his lips and pointed to the doorway with the other. A belly dancer, finger-cymbals snapping, writhed into the room. The crowd, chanting Helena, Helena, grew rowdier with every dollar bill stuck in the low-riding band of her skirt. The closer she came to our table the louder the music seemed, as if speakers were embedded in her huge swinging breasts.

  Without acknowledging my presence, Helena gave Mike a familiar smile and pulled him to his feet. He shot me a look, both helpless and defiant, as she shimmied up and down him like an automated car wash.

  Just before her head threatened to settle in at the level of his belt, he threw up his arms. “Opaa,” he said, and started a slow pirouette.

  He stuck a five-dollar bill in her skirt and pushed her playfully in another direction. She gave me a dirty look over her shoulder, making it clear that some routine had been violated on my account.

  “Old friend?” I said when he sat down.

  “I’ve seen her around.” Mike laid three twenties on the table and gestured with his head to the door.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Let’s go.”

  “What about some coffee?”

  “Greek coffee keeps you awake.”

  He stood up.

  I settled deeper into my seat.

  “You said you’d tell me what you found today,” I said.

  He shoved a chair up against mine and sat back down, putting his arm across my shoulders. “You want to know what I found?” he said, voice loud in my ear to compete with the music. “A bunch of nothing.”

  “What do you call nothing?”

  “After I dropped you off, I located Travis Forsyth at a charity golf tournament and talked him into letting me buy him a beer. He’s got no questions about his wife’s death—other than why daily visits to a psychiatrist weren’t enough to protect her from suicide.”

  “Don’t worry about my feelings here,” I said.

  “I’m just telling you what he said. And then Camille gave me a tour of her recently deceased husband’s lab. She must have asked me two questions for my every one. Now that the dust has settled, so to speak, she wonders if maybe the professor was a little preoccupied by his intensive therapy.”

  “So everyone assumes this is all my fault.”

  “I think the odds are ninety-five plus percent that this is just a run of bad luck. Just like Slaughter said.”

  “Then why are you doing this?”

  “Trying to please women is an old problem of mine.”

  “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  It was all there. Like it always is in a new relationship, whether we’re talking analysis, friendship or romance. Those prescient few words that say all you need to know to ward off fate. If only you could know exactly which words to attend to. Back then I couldn’t picture Mike as a pathological pleaser, any more than I could visualize myself as an insensitive ingrate. But what we don’t understand, we have to live out. That’s the damned sad truth. And, for that very reason, I should have said, What do you mean? Tell me more.

  Instead I said, “Then why don’t you quit? Must be the money.”

  “The money. Yeah. The stellar companionship. And that five percent chance. And for that chance, there are three viable suspects—Sniperman, Richard and you.”

  “Be serious,” I said.

  “I’m dead serious. Sniperman has just what it takes to pull off this kind of weird stuff—explosives training, the ability to slip up behind a woman, put his arm around her neck, march her up to the roof, push her off.” His arm settled in around my throat a little too tight as he was saying all this. “He’d even know how to disappear an unsuspecting pervert. Come on,” he said, his controlling hug morphing into a no-nonsense grip just above my elbow. “We’re going.”

  I got on my feet and started a grudging walk, tugging at my arm just enough to make sure he held on.

  “The problem with Sniperman is motive,” he said, weaving us through the obstacle course of tables. “He’s crazy, okay. PTSD or whatever. Can’t rule him out. But then there’s your should-be ex with motive, motive, motive. And he’s clever enough. He knows your patients. Maybe I should have a look in that penthouse of his.”

  “Stay away from Richard. He doesn’t have the balls to do something like this.”

  “Es posible, Doctora,” he said, exaggerating his enunciation and supplying telling gestures like a remedial Spanish teacher, “que sus huevos han crecido mas grandes sin tu ayuda tan amorosa. Perhaps he’d be more of a man were it not for your loving help.”

  “I understood the Spanish. Screw you.”

  “Chin-ga-te. Chingate. En Espanol, por favor,” he said, urging me out the door, way too amused at himself. “And I can’t get close to Sniperman Lance either. Stay-at-home wife. Kids. Nosy neighbors.”

  “You need to get off him too,” I said.

  “And then there’s you.”

  “You think I’m making this up?”

  “Maybe you just screwed everybody up,” he said. “Shrunk their heads too small.”

  “This isn’t a joke. Don’t you understand I worry over that?”

  “Who’s joking?” he said, jerking my car door open. “Just get in.” He stood there, fuming. I slipped by him, avoiding any touch. “But tell me, please,” he said, leaning in to put himself in my face. “If you’ve been having those concerns, why not share them with me? Why do I have to track down reluctant strangers to
tell me what should come from you?”

  “Because these ideas are just my neurotic worries. Things in my head. Not real causes. You don’t understand how the mind works.”

  “What I know, Nora,” he said, “is that sometimes what’s in a person’s head gets out of hand. That’s what I know.”

  The white envelope hid in the pile of junk mail I’d put aside to go through on Sunday, right between the postcard coupon for Bed, Bath and Beyond and a zero-per-cent interest credit card solicitation for Dr. Nora Kleinberg. A haphazard folding job partially obscured the return address in the cellophane window. For the briefest moment, my mind considered it might be a love letter. Just like the ephemeral Mr. Ruiz to hide his feelings on business stationery.

  The invoice left no room for romance:

  Twenty hours at the hourly rate of sixty dollars: $1,200.

  Lunch with attorney’s receptionist at The Sand Bar: $75.

  Charge for mileage: 150 miles at thirty cents per mile: $45

  I tried calculating if he’d charged me for time over dinner, watching Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, nuzzling my neck over the sink, feeling me up through my nightgown. But memory blurred.

  I put the bill on my stack.

  No such thing as forgetting. Freud allowed no wiggle room on that topic.

  “I need a check from you,” Mike said, in a failed attempt to sound casual.

  “Sure,” I said. “The invoice is on my desk in the office.”

  We were sitting on the couch in the family room. The kids were still with Richard. Mike had made himself scarce after dropping me off after our dinner the night before with the barest peck on the cheek, not answering his cell when I called on the pretense of thanking him for the meal, not returning any of my seven increasingly urgent messages—two just before midnight, five more starting at dawn Sunday—then, finally showing up at my door at noon, as if I had nothing better to do than wait around for him, which was exactly what I’d been doing.

  “I’ve got time for you to get it off your desk,” he said.

  I had the money and actually had expected it to be more. And it was a business expense for godsake. Tax deductible. No big deal. “Don’t you trust me?” I said.

  “I work for a living,” he said.

  “Like I don’t work for a living?”

  “Yeah. All right, Nora.” He walked over to the counter, leaning on his elbows there, back to me.

  I got up right behind him. “You’ll get your fucking check.”

  He whipped around, knocking over the barstool.

  “That’s the issue, isn’t it? You expect to get laid in this deal.”

  Blood rushed to my face, and I felt my eyes bulge.

  But he wasn’t done. “I’m starting to think you don’t even care about what might have happened with your patients. What do you want from me, Nora?”

  The truth in his words stunned me to silence. I made a quick pivot, set to storm off I wasn’t sure where. His hand clamped my wrist mid-arc of the melodramatic swing of my arm. The rebound had my fist against his crotch where it stayed. By accident? On purpose? My doing? His doing? Our doing? Yes. Everything in unconscious league. Call and response.

  “Let me go,” I said, and he did.

  Two free hands undid his zipper, my eyes pinned to his like a dare. He braced himself, this time facing me. He was still then except for his rising, as I kneeled and took him in my mouth.

  Fellatio. Oral sex. Blow job. Sucking cock. All words to me until that moment. Knowing even then that this was not for him, but for my yearning to be merged, urgent nipple in hungry mouth. Feeding and being fed. The taking into the empty self. I felt my camisole straps being slid over my shoulders, my breasts held by his hands, squeezed in rhythm with my mouth, nipples urged by fingers to resist. The slightest moan then and he took himself from me, guiding pulsing fluid, first to my left breast and then to the right.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Gizmo’s playful yelping interrupted my solitary Monday breakfast. Richard, setting a personal record, had decided to keep the kids two nights in a row. Checking outside, I found a stray dog cavorting with my two. He was a brown mangy mutt, ribs sticking out, no collar, limping on his front right paw. He wasn’t particularly mean-looking, but then again not a creature I was about to touch or wanted rubbing around on my pets.

  “Get out!” I yelled from the back porch. “Get out of my yard.”

  At the sound of my voice, all three dogs froze stiff-legged in mid-feint. The stray gave a brief tail wag, a question to me. I ran down the stairs, answering him with a rock plucked from the border of the flowerbed. The smooth stone bounced off the paver in front of him, well off the mark. The dog dodged the ricochet, scurried to the fence and slipped between the iron bars like a ghost through a wall.

  But that wasn’t the end of it. When I went out to go to the office, he was back in the yard, curled up snoozing in a bed of violet verbena. He stood as I approached, head lowered, tail between his legs.

  I went at him, waving my arms like a maniac windmill. “You get out. You don’t belong here.”

  He dissolved through the fence again, but reappeared by the time I’d climbed the stairs and was unlocking the office door to start my day.

  Given his parting threats, I didn’t really expect John Heydeman, in theory the first patient of my day, to show up, but I cracked the door to the waiting area at precisely ten o’clock anyway. The room was empty. I left the door ajar and sat for a few minutes at my desk, going through the motions of waiting for the patient who is running a few minutes late—passing time in honor of the patient who might well be dead somewhere, body not yet discovered, flesh slowly starting to stiffen. When the door to the outside opened at seven after, the muscles of my chest wall spasmed.

  “UPS,” a voice said as a box hit the floor.

  I waited three more minutes, closed the wavy glass door and then dialed Mike’s cell.

  “He didn’t show.”

  “I’ll check it out. You say anything about this to Sniperman and I’m off the job.”

  “He deserves to be warned.”

  “My ass. He deserves to be taken out.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “You’re right. Dr. Perv might just be on an extended slum. Catch you tonight.”

  The package contained a book I’d ordered with John in mind—Arnold Goldberg’s The Problem of Perversion. One of the universe’s little jokes, I thought, to schedule delivery during the session he was, for whatever reason, missing. I cracked the stiff binding and scrolled down the chapter headings with the point of the scissors I’d used to open the box. A couple of chapter titles jumped out accusingly: “A Certain Sort of Blindness,” “Sexualization, the Depleted Self, and Lovesickness.” I imagined Mike spotting the noisy red and black dust jacket on my desk, flipping through the pages, making fun of my profession, maybe even thinking the stuff applied to me.

  To avoid that experience, I made a place for the book on my shelf to the left of Freud, who’d been watching me that morning with a more-than-usual amount of disgust. I knew his demeanor had to do with my encounter with Mike the day before. Two versions of that particular moment in time had been running continuously in my head. The first, shot from afar, Freud’s viewpoint: Dr. Nora Goodman taking the penis of a near-stranger in her mouth, providing him the particular brand of affection she’d steadfastly refused her husband. A wave of shame accompanied this perspective, passing over me, through me. Love-sickness. Depleted self. This then shifting to the close-up view: the warm sour-sweet smell of groin, the hard of him against palate. Then the felt-image starting another kind of wave, this one of arousal, from tip of tongue down through chest to aching meeting of thighs. And I’d remember how after he’d cum on me, he’d picked up the fine cotton towel that Richard insisted be reserved for our good crystal, used that exclusive piece of fabric to dab at my breasts, before finishing the job with his tongue. And how he’d then reached into my jeans and I’d said No and he’d s
aid Turn about’s fair and I’d said I can’t and he’d said But you’re so wet and I’d said The kids might…

  And right then and there in the office, my hand headed under my skirt toward some self-generated relief, I noticed the clock roll from 10:59 to 11:00 and knew Lance Powers would be waiting at attention for his session. I made myself stand, letting my concern for Lance’s safety extinguish my inopportune desire. And then, rather than dropping my scissors back into their place in the desk drawer, I gave in to an impulse to slip them under my appointment book, inches away from where I’d be resting my right hand.

  Lance had his sunglasses on when I let him in that day. The set jaw. The knowing smile. The torturing silence.

  How do you tell a person who is paranoid that indeed someone is after him? With the vibes Lance was sending out that day, there was no way I could have introduced the subject. I knew too well his fear that someone’s false move would set him off. I didn’t want to be the one to make that move.

  “Is your dream back?” I finally said when I could take it no more.

  “No need to dream when you can live the nightmare,” he said, turning his head right and then left.

  “Are you feeling threatened?”

  “Could say that.” He bobbed his head slightly as if to some music only he heard.

  “Can you tell me about it?”

  I leaned slightly forward in my chair, trying to show concern without being intrusive. A person suffering with paranoia yearns for contact, but is easily spooked.

  “Relax, Doc. Your job’s about done.”

  “You’re talking in riddles.”

  “Knock, knock,” he said, sticking two pieces of gum in his mouth. “You’re supposed to say, Who’s there?”

  The disconnect between Lance’s hostile aura, his flattened affect and the childish puns told me he had come apart. I’d learned about this fragmented mental state—the place he had to go internally to manage the insanity of being an assassin—when he confided what he’d actually done in Vietnam. I’d seen him retreat to that psychic space in therapy when he re-lived those times: times he’d cram himself between boulders to lie in wait for his target, night-day-night, hardly breathing, no water, certainly no food, oblivious enemies shuffling by inches from his nose. Times he’d submerge himself in muddy rivers hours at a stretch to avoid detection, eyes clamped shut, air through a straw, discounting whatever slithered across his face or up his pant legs. Heads and more heads blown off, chests hollowed out and no end of blood. Always the blood. And all the while in one tiny fortressed part of his mind, his mental safe-room, he’d be constructing and remembering and refining and practicing these little jokes: knock-knock and why does the chicken and how many whatevers does it take. Exactly like he’d done when hiding from, when trying to escape, when enduring the belt, the fist, the two-by-four wielded by his drunken father.