The Last Lie

by Stephen White

  The boot she exposed was of scuffed black leather, had two-inch heels, and extended up to near her knee. It was closed with a long zipper on her inner calf. I had seen the boot before. It did not appear to be a special boot.

  I was waiting for Hella to complete the description of her outfit.

  Although my wife would argue to the contrary, I’m not as naïve as I appear sometimes. I knew Hella well enough to predict that the costume she was wearing at Burning Man was unlikely to be an ensemble out of an Ann Taylor catalog. And she knew me well enough to know that the peculiarities of her outfit, whatever they might be, would not become an issue for the supervision unless they were an issue for the therapy.

  Hella added, “And I had this gorgeous—fabulous—eighteen-foot lace wedding veil that I found on eBay. Never used. The woman had called off her own wedding. There was some special meaning there.”

  I allowed myself a moment to digest the image that Hella was painting. Of the boots and the veil and . . .

  “I’d woven a pattern into the length of the veil with some grosgrain ribbon. It evoked shadows in the desert near a roaring fire. Fire climbing from below to the earth’s crust, and from the earth to above.”

  I nodded then, not because I understood the evocation of ideas of shadows in the desert and climbing and descending fires. I nodded because I realized that Hella had completed the description of her outfit.

  2

  I started doing my best to try to stop digesting images, though I wasn’t completely successful.

  Hella smiled an unself-conscious smile. “It’s a great week, Alan. Burning Man is. Every year. Although in many ways I preferred it when the festival was more obscure and smaller and more intimate, each time I go, I find it’s medicine for my heart and my soul. I’ve grown up there in some intrinsic way.”

  I didn’t want Hella to feel she needed to rationalize her attendance at Burning Man or apologize for the costume she’d chosen for her performance. I said, “And for your patient? How were her heart and soul doing?”

  Hella recognized that I was redirecting her. “Thank you. I see what you’re doing. It’s kind, but what I was wearing is significant, Alan. I’m not embarrassed. The thing is, it’s not a gratuitous detail.”

  I waited. To myself, I said, Prurient detail, certainly. Gratuitous detail, not.

  Hella pressed on. “Like I said, I saw her there near the end of our big performance, which took place near the end of the festival. I didn’t run into her at all earlier in the week, and I didn’t see her during the beginning of the performance. She says she didn’t see me earlier, either. When I did finally see my patient, really when I recognized her through the smoke—I’m pretty sure I saw her before she spotted me—she was one person out of a large group . . . dozens, scores, even hundreds . . . who were observing or participating as part of the . . . event.” She narrowed her blue eyes and asked me, “You’ve never been?”

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s hard to describe what it’s like.”

  “Yes,” I said, agreeing. “It’s hard for me to imagine.”

  “What she was wearing is important, too. It’s why I felt I should describe my own . . . attire.” For the record, those ellipses were Hella’s. “My patient was wearing a tiny, very tiny, jean skirt with intricate, embroidered black suns—one rising, one setting—on each of her butt cheeks, and she was wearing a pair of fluorescent green Crocs.

  “She also had a three-wood that was fashioned in a way that made it appear to impale her skull above one ear and exit below the ear on the other side.”

  I waited a suitable length of time for more clothing details before I said, “A lot of symbolism in that outfit.”

  Psychotherapy supervision is not a time when it pays to ignore the obvious.

  “A little overt for my taste,” said Hella. “But gosh yes. The suns? The three-wood? Definite symbolism there.”

  “Her outfit?” I tried to restrain a smile. “What you’ve described? I assume that’s all?”

  “Maybe some jewelry,” Hella replied.

  “Okay then,” I said.

  Hella said, “You know, until that moment, I had not even known she embroidered.”

  I laughed. Hella laughed, too. She was not unaware of the absurdity of the events that had taken place that night in the Nevada desert.

  “My countertransference? This is probably important: If fate determined that I was to run into one of my patients that night, in those circumstances, I would never have guessed that it would be her, that she would be the one who would be at Burning Man. But I might have chosen . . . that she be the one who would be there. Of all the patients in my caseload—if it had to happen—I’m glad it turned out to be her.”

  “That helps,” I said. A therapist’s feelings about a particular patient tend to become more of an issue, and an influence, when they are unacknowledged.

  Hella pulled the disparate pieces all together for me, just in case I had missed anything crucial. She said, “So, basically, she and I run into each other completely by chance in this crazy, ephemeral, transient city of fifty thousand strangers and seekers and gawkers in a dry lake bed on the Nevada desert. It’s the middle of the night, I’m naked for all intents and purposes, my patient is topless, and in the interest of full disclosure, should it turn out to be relevant, I should probably add pantyless, and we’re both completely, totally, absolutely involved in the performance of this wonderfully elaborate interpretative piece about the collision of primitive life forms in the earliest moments of the survival of carbon-based life on earth.”

  “I’m with you,” I said. Though I’m not sure why I said that. The circumstances she was describing were as foreign to me as string theory.

  “Two minutes after I spotted her for the first time, the dance we were doing brought us side to side. She completed a spin, and her eyes showed just a flicker of surprise as she recognized that it was me dancing beside her. I watched her glance flit from my face to my boots to my veil, and down my train, not really ever pausing too long anywhere in between. Finally, she took my hand. Softly. She said, ‘Hello, Doctor Zoet.’ Just like she might be greeting me in the waiting room.”

  Hella narrowed her eyes at me. “You told me once during supervision back when I was still in graduate school that when a therapist runs into a patient in public, out of the office, the safest thing to do is to follow the patient’s social lead. Allow the patient to say hello, or not, to make introductions, or not, that sort of thing. So that’s what I did right then. I said, ‘Hello,’ back to her. I didn’t even use her name, you know, just in case she wasn’t using it while she was at Burning Man.”

  “Good call,” I said. “Considering the circumstances.” And the event. And the wardrobe.

  Hella said, “There’s an underlying expectation of anonymity out there. At Burning Man. Certainly at our theme camp. Absolutely during a performance like that one. No cameras, no recording. It’s made clear to everyone who attends.”

  “I can imagine,” I said. Actually, I was taking Hella’s word for it.

  Hella continued. “She and I were tugged in opposite directions. Literally. By the dance. We parted, danced away. The performance brought us back together a few minutes later. Maybe five, ten.

  “Her presence was a distraction for me, I have to admit. I would have preferred she not be there. I think it’s important that I say that. Burning Man is a place I go to get away from . . . my work. My life.”

  “Understood,” I said.

  “When she saw me again, almost immediately she said to me, ‘In case you’re wondering, they were Dan’s idea.’ ”

  My expression made it clear that the name Dan wasn’t ringing a bell.

  Hella reminded me, “Daniel was her dead husband, the golf pro. The man without the three-wood?”

  “Got it,” I said, grateful for the information. In my professional life, the names of patients, my own and those of my supervisees, not to mention all of their numerous sig
nificant others and friends and family members and adversaries, and colleagues, and neighbors, tended to run together for me. Contextual nicknames helped me keep important people distinct. Hella’s patient had always been “Three-Wood Widow.” Her dead husband, Daniel, had been “the golf pro” or “the dead golf pro.”

  Hella had a new name for him, apparently. “The Man Without the Three-Wood.”

  “Go on,” I said. Few stories in therapy, or supervision, interest me from a narrative point of view. I have, literally, heard them before. However, I definitely wanted to know how the Burning Man vignette turned out.

  Hella said, “I didn’t know what she meant with her reference to her husband; I didn’t know what exactly had been Dan’s idea. Was she talking about being at Burning Man? Was she a return visitor? Or had she made the trip to the festival as some kind of tribute to her dead husband? And why did she say ‘they’ and not ‘this’?

  “Frankly, Alan, I wasn’t even sure whether to respond to her at all. I didn’t want to be her therapist right then. You know what I mean? I didn’t. I had other things in my head. Her presence was . . . distracting. By introducing Dan she seemed to be inserting the psychotherapy into the moment, which did not make me happy. But, on the other hand, I didn’t want to ignore her. That would be rude. Right? Even unprofessional.”

  “Tough situation,” I said. I meant it.

  Hella said, “You’ve always told me that I have to be prepared to take control at moments when reality and therapy collide outside the office.”

  It was one of my standard supervisory prompts, though I would have admitted that I had never imagined a moment precisely like the one that Hella was describing.

  “What should I have done, Alan?”

  “Finish the story, then we’ll talk about that.” I hoped by the time she finished the story I might come up with an answer to her question.

  Hella said, “Well, I turned to face her, and I said, ‘They?’ You know, to clarify?

  “She turned her body to face me. She lifted both her hands so they were floating in front of her abdomen, palms up. She said, ‘These. The C-cups. The girls.’

  “I’m not surprised by much that goes on at Burning Man, Alan. I’ve been going for a long time. I’ve seen a lot. Most of what happens there now is evolution, not pure inspiration. But she must have noticed the bemusement on my face right then because she began to dance in front of me, pulled her shoulders back, bent over a little at the waist, and she shook her chest at me in a shimmy that was so well executed that I’m pretty sure she’d been practicing . . . the move.”

  I shook my head slowly, in amazement. It’s not something I would have done in psychotherapy, but in supervision, it seemed okay to express my wonder.

  “I’m little, Alan. She’s not—she’s like five-eight. A lot of curves. Very pretty, in a dolce vita way. You know what I mean? Anyway, with the dance, and the lean, at that instant her shimmying breasts were right in my face.” Hella held her open hands inches from her eyes. “And I swear those boobs of hers were so well packed they didn’t move a millimeter on their own during the shimmy. It was like the damn plastic surgeon had bound those puppies in shrink wrap.”

  I’m rarely speechless in psychotherapy, except by choice. In supervision? Before that moment? Never that I could remember.

  Hella continued. “She says, ‘See, Dr. Zoet?’ And she shimmied again. ‘This is just the way Dan wanted them.’ ”

  Despite more numerous potential side roads than I could count, I managed to stay in the supervisory moment.

  “She hadn’t mentioned the augmentation previously?”

  Hella said, “No.”

  I said, “Well, it has always been your impression of this woman that she’s a man pleaser.”

  “Exactly,” said Hella. “Exactly what I was thinking.”

  “And the golf club through her head?” I said. “Thoughts?”

  “I kept thinking it would come up. But she didn’t mention it until this week’s session.”

  3

  As things developed, I discovered that I knew more about almost everything and everybody involved with the allegations that emanated from the damn housewarming than I should have known.

  At no point would it turn out that I was pleased about that.

  I wasn’t aware, for instance, that the precise time the caterers left the gathering would become important.

  It was one of many things that the authorities could have just asked me, had they ever gotten around to treating the events of the evening as an actual criminal investigation. Which, from my perspective, they never did.

  It’s also one of the few things I knew, or had learned, that I would have been comfortable telling the authorities.

  What I came to know about the damn housewarming and at least some of the people who attended it and how I learned all of it became crucial as the days passed; it also made it difficult to keep the various categories of facts straight in my head.

  There were some things I didn’t want to talk with anyone about.

  Other things that I couldn’t talk with anyone about.

  But right from the start I did know the time the caterers left the event because the damn catering van had almost run me over on the way out the lane.

  Had I looked at my watch? No, when I’m not at work I don’t wear one. Had I checked the time on my phone? I didn’t, but it would have been convenient. At the moment when the big van came barreling out of the blackness I was staring at the phone rereading one of the day’s e-mails. I dropped the phone—actually what I did was more akin to launching it—as I leapt out of the way of the blunt front fender.

  The time of the caterers’ exit didn’t seem important to me right then. Not even remotely. What seemed paramount to me was the safety of my dogs.

  Emily, a getting-on-in-years Bouvier des Flandres as black as a new-moon night and a protector as relentless as white water, was nearby, somewhere within a four- or five-acre perimeter, methodically conducting her last patrol of the day on the hillsides that rise gently on the southeastern rim of the Boulder Valley. Emily was the unofficial sheriff of Spanish Hills. Leashing her while she was running her beat was no longer even a consideration for me. A lifetime of responsible service and unwavering friendship had earned her the privilege of making the nightly rounds of her protectorate not only solo, but also untethered.

  The alternative would have been an insult to her.

  Only minutes earlier, Emily had been first out the door of our home. She always was. Her initial stop had been directly across the lane at the house that I’d probably always think of as Adrienne and Peter’s. They had been my longtime friends. Each had died a violent death, their passings separated by many years. In the months since Adrienne’s more recent death in a bombing at a Mediterranean resort in Israel, the house and its nearby barn had been vacant.

  Even though I had told myself I would never adjust to her absence, the dogs and I had slowly grown accustomed to the quiet that had begun to shroud our life at the end of the lane.

  But the house had recently been sold, and the new owners had begun what promised to be an extended process of moving in. That night they were throwing some kind of celebration to introduce their old friends to their new digs in Spanish Hills.

  Given the extended inactivity at the property prior to the sale, I wasn’t at all surprised that the sudden presence of a couple dozen vehicles near the long-deserted farmhouse would warrant some of Emily’s attention. From the moment the new owners’ moving truck had arrived to begin the moving-in process a couple of weeks before, it was apparent to me that Emily wasn’t entirely pleased at the increase in commotion in our quiet corner of Colorado paradise. I was thinking that the fact that our new neighbors were so clearly not dog people had something to do with Emily’s disappointment, too.

  Mattin Snow, the male half of the new couple, had introduced himself to me only a week or so before, the evening after a big truck had arrived to deliver an initial fract
ion of their stuff. Before Mattin found me outside with the dogs that day, I had already knocked on the door a couple of times to formally introduce myself, but neither of those attempts to meet the neighbors had been successful.

  The introduction, when it finally occurred, seemed solely intended to provide an opportunity for Mr. Snow to inquire if it was my habit to allow my dog to run free. He meant Emily, the big Bouvier.

  He’d said, “Hello, Matt Snow.” At that juncture he did not, I should note, allow a pause for me to insert my name. I offered my hand. He didn’t offer his. A quick glance revealed his right hand was absent the ring finger. Burn scars raked the top of his hand, disappearing under the french cuff of his shirt. “You allow that big dog to run . . . wherever it wants?”

  I thought my new neighbor had said Matt. But he may have said Mattin and swallowed the final syllable. I also thought I heard a British Empire accent playing in his speech in a minor chord. I couldn’t quite place it, but when faced with empire accents, I inevitably embarrass myself guessing the country of origin.

  I’d forced a smile and said, “I’m Alan Gregory. We live across the lane. My wife, Lauren. Our kids, Jonas and Grace. I think you’ll love it out here. Welcome.” At that point, my neighbor took my hand reluctantly, the way I agree to smell a piece of halibut after Lauren has asked if I think it’s still good.

  We lived on the upper slope of a hill. On a different hillside, one not low-single-digit miles from Colorado’s Front Range, I probably would have said “up here,” not “out here,” to indicate the location of our house. The hill we live on is modest. Seventy blocks or so to the west loom the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Ten miles or so beyond that is a line of fourteen-thousand-foot peaks. So, up is relative.