by Chloe Cox
Well, he’s going to have to deal with it. I need to know about Cedric. I need to know what I’m getting into, with Gerald’s blessing or without it.
I take a deep breath and tuck a stray strand of hair behind my ear. I smooth the front of my trench coat – a deliberate choice; it’s the same coat I was wearing when Gerald tried to seduce me, when I thought he might be part of the Doctor’s elaborate instruction, and I want to remind Gerald of that infraction – and push open the finely wrought iron of what used to be the service entrance. Now it’s the entrance to his psychiatry practice.
I still cannot get over that.
And I’m going to have even more trouble getting over the interior of Gerald’s office. It takes a second or two for me to place the feeling of déjà vu I get from the sleek, expensive decor, with furniture of vaguely Swedish-looking design, but all in whites and greys this time, as opposed to. . . .
The Doctor’s waiting room. This place reminds me of the Doctor’s waiting room, the very first time I saw him. As though the Doctor modeled himself very consciously on this method of psychiatry, another way of helping people, another...
But it’s Gerald.
So similar, and yet so different. Not least of which is that, in place of a scantily clad woman on her knees with her hands clasped behind her, sweeping the floor with a tiny brush held tight in her mouth, there is a modern, normal looking receptionist, eyeing me quizzically.
“Can I help you?” She is so polite. Not young, not old, not pretty, not ugly. Efficient.
“I hope so,” I say, and smile widely. “I have an appointment.”
“Ms. Donner?” I nod, and she smiles back. “May I take your coat?”
“I think I’ll hold onto it, thanks.”
She eyes me over the rims of her wire-frame glasses, seems to come to some sort of conclusion, and gives me an encouraging smile.
“He’ll do wonders for you, Ms. Donner.”
I can’t think of a response to this. I wonder what I look like to her. I wonder why she thinks I’m here. I’m certainly not the same woman I was even a few weeks ago; I didn’t think I still gave off that sad, hurt, broken sort of vibe. I turn towards the angular sofa, replete with waiting magazines, and catch a glimpse of myself in the reflection of a framed Dali print, and try to see what this receptionist sees. I can’t.
“How do you mean?” I ask, turning back to the front desk. I try to keep my voice disinterested, polite, but I can tell that she hears the urgency behind it. She pauses over her keyboard, lips pursed.
“Well, he helped me, didn’t he?” she finally says, eyes drawn back to her computer screen. For the first time I hear a faded English accent. She’s a long way from home.
“How?” I ask. She flinches a bit.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t mean to be rude, it’s just I’ve never been to a shrink before. I guess I’m a little nervous.”
And more than a little willing to lie to get some dirt on one Dr. Gerald Granger.
The receptionist studies me for what seems like a long time, her thin hands finally still, resting on the desk. Her eyes soften a bit, and her shoulders relax.
“You’re here about a man, aren’t you?”
I startle at her accuracy, try to recover some dignity. It’s harder than it sounds.
“What makes you say that?”
She laughs, a bigger laugh than you’d think could come out of that bird-like body. “That’s why we’re all here, love.”
I smile back, at ease for the first time. I hadn’t even realized how anxious I had become. “Ain’t that the truth.”
“I suppose I shouldn’t be telling you this,” she says, her voice lower now, conspiratorial. “It’s unprofessional, I know. But you do remind me of myself, when I was younger.”
“Really?”
She clucks at herself, shaking her head, as though she’d just caught herself indulging in a bad habit.
“I should learn not to go on like a gossipy school girl, as though the world cares about my problems. All I can tell you is this,” she says, eyeing me over those glasses. “Don’t get involved with a mean man, love. Or you’ll be paying Dr. Granger ‘til you’re as old as I am.”
And she winks.
The sense of foreboding I’ve been carrying with me since that ill-fated meeting with Cedric condenses and crystallizes above me. I feel it falling down around me, covering me like a fine layer of snow and ice. It’s certainly chilling, I’ll say that. How can she know? I’ve been preoccupied with whether or not people can see the changes in me, whether or not they can see more than what is there on the surface. I’ve been mostly thrilled at the idea, like when I was a teenager and lost my virginity, and wondered if anyone could tell the next day. I desperately want to know what this woman, contentedly typing away, can see in me. If she can see through me. If she can see that I’ve just gone from one foolish, sad existence, to another, more advanced form of the same foolish, eventually sad existence, willingly giving myself over to a man who might be a monster.
I shiver at the thought.
“Good thing you kept that coat,” the receptionist says, pulling me out of my thoughts. “Dr. Granger is ready for you now. I’ll see what I can do about the thermostat.”
“Don’t bother,” I say, and walk down the only hall towards a door with a bronze plate on it, announcing the lone occupant: Dr. Gerald Granger.
I take a deep breath, trying not to think of how many of those I’ve had to take lately, cinch my trench coat meaningfully, put on my game face, and open the door.
He’s sitting at his desk, framed in a pool of warm light from an antique desk lamp, pretending to read through a file. He looks up with precise timing, and I see that his usual introductory performance is completely ruined when he sees who is standing in front of him. His mouth is still gaping open as I close the door behind me.
“Hello, Gerald.”
“Claire.” He glances down at the mostly blank file in front of him. “So you’re Ms. Donner?”
“Yup.”
“And I assume it’s you that has my wallet, then?”
“I can neither confirm nor deny that.”
He sighs. “I’d just like to know whether to cancel the cards, Claire.”
I stride across the room and lower myself into one of the expansive leather chairs in front of this desk, avoiding the couch to the side. He watches me, and I see his eyes narrow. “Never mind,” he finally says. “I’ll cancel them anyway.”
Wait, what the hell is that supposed to mean? I’m thrown for a second, which, a second after that, I think might have been his intent – to throw me off from the reason I came, to keep me off balance, to stay in control. Goddamn I hate dealing with shrinks. You have to think like this constantly.
I just decide to ignore him and stay focused. I have a goal, after all.
“There’s something I want from you.”
“Shocking,” he says, and rubs his eyes. This is not exactly what I expected. I expected him to be a little more impressed, I think.
“I want some information.”
“Listen, Claire, I’m not going to help you bleed my best friend dry, all right?” He stands up suddenly, his face now a grim shadow looming above me. “I don’t know what you think you have on me, but you can go dig for gold somewhere else.”
Um.
What?
Honestly, I’m not even sure how to process this. A gold digger? What on earth could possibly make him think that about me?
“Ok, first of all, Gerald, screw you,” I say, crossing my legs, hopefully with authority. “And second of all, I want to know about his wife, not his bank statements.”
“You want to know about Julia?”
“Yes.”
He gets up and walks over to a wet bar tucked away in the corner and begins to mix himself a drink. Why is it that all rich guys have bars in every other room? Like that’s normal? Doesn’t he treat any recovering alcoholics?
“You don�
�t want to know about Julia,” he says, pouring out some gin. He laughs softly to himself. “No one in their right mind wants to know about that.”
The foreboding bears down on me again. It’s become an insistent pressure, a weight that I’m getting tired of carrying around with me. What will it mean if the man who’s responsible for so many positive changes in my life – in me – what will it mean if he’s also capable of great harm? I can’t shake the feeling that it might somehow invalidate all I learned from him, that it could undermine everything I think I’ve learned about myself. I see Gerald watching me, evaluating me, swirling his drink in quiet contemplation, and I realize I’m as afraid of losing this new sense of self as I am of losing Cedric.
And I am terrified of losing the one man I’ve grown to love. Especially if it’s because he’s not the man I thought he was.
Damn it, Claire, what happened to your whole faith thing?
“I need to know.”
Gerald snorts, and takes a healthy swig of his gimlet. He stares into his glass for a beat, then polishes the rest off with one more swallow.
“The problem is,” he says, turning away to add another measure of gin, “that you remind me of her.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“Oh, I have no doubt about that.”
He walks back to his desk, and sits on the corner like he did when we first met. I refuse to be intimidated. But I can’t help but think how much of my leg is visible, peeking out from under my tightly-cinched coat, how my carefully chosen heels lengthen my calf, how it might have been wise to wear stockings today, instead of opting for bare skin. I’m more a bare-skin kind of girl, but I suddenly don’t want Gerald thinking of me that way, ever again. And I don’t want him to think that I want anyone but Cedric. I tug hopelessly at the edge of my coat, willing it to lengthen over my thigh.
“Thank you for saying that, though,” I say, trying to make peace. “That I remind you of her. I’m flattered.”
“It wasn’t a compliment.”
I’m stunned.
For a couple of summers when I was little, my entire family would go stay at a cabin that belonged to my Dad’s boss for a week or so at a time. It was in the middle of the woods, far away from everything, and I was a city girl. What I remember the most from those hellish, bug-filled weeks was what it was like when I turned off the light in my little, unfamiliar room. I’d never experienced darkness like that before. Complete, utter dark. I’d have to put my hands out and stumble around, newly aware of how little I knew about the world, just to find my way to the bathroom.
That’s what it feels like when Gerald tells me it wasn’t a compliment: sudden, complete darkness. I have no idea where I am, or what’s going on around me, or what’s happening. I’ve read everything I could about Julia; I’ve done research. I thought I knew that Julia was nearly perfect, a tragic heroine. Now I’m just disoriented. It gets worse as I look at Gerald’s face and see that’s it’s screwed up with barely-contained anger.
“What did he do to her?” I ask.
Gerald stares at me.
“What did he do to her? Try to save her? Get burned? Do you really not know anything at all?” he asks. He leans towards me, intent. “Listen. I was not her doctor, and this is not a diagnosis, but Julia was fucking crazy.”
“But she –”
“Not cuddly crazy, either. Not occasional mood swings, or eccentric, or all the other things people casually dismiss as crazy. She was a fucking malevolent, cancerous blight on the life of my best friend, and to this day, he still won’t hear me call her that.”
The intensity of Gerald’s gaze is unnerving, and then I remember that he said I reminded him of her. Of a malevolent, cancerous blight.
So. That is. . . not great.
“Please,” I say acidly, “go on.”
“She claimed she was into the BDSM scene, just like you. She brought him into it, actually. Saw that he was a natural Dom.” He laughs bitterly. “Oh please, Claire, don’t look at me like that. Not all psychiatrists are closed-minded about alternative lifestyles. It should have been great for Cedric in every way, but Julia. . . she’d come up with all these elaborate scenes and fantasies, and then she’d use them to manipulate him later. She’d claim he hurt her, or that he abused her, or whatever, just to get what she wanted. And sometimes all she wanted was to grind him down. You know she blamed her professional failures on him?”
“Her...failures?”
I’m still sort of in shock. I thought Julia had been a respected academic.
“Yeah. Somehow he was responsible for her failure to publish after they married. He ‘sabotaged her dreams.’” The vehemence in Gerald’s voice betrays his anger. Or the gin. Either way, it seems like he’s been keeping this bottled up for a while. “She was a goddamn drunk, that’s why she didn’t publish. All he tried to do was help her, and every little thing he did became ammunition. Do you know she tried to kill herself four times before they met?”
“Four times?”
My voice sounds comically small against the enormity of what Gerald’s saying. My brain is having trouble making room for it.
“Four! None of them serious, all of them about getting attention. So was the last time, too, only she misjudged the dosage and the traffic. Cedric got home late.”
She misjudged the traffic.
The nastiness of that last tidbit hangs in the air between Gerald and me, rank and poisonous. It’s almost too horrible for words. Not for the first time since meeting Cedric I feel like my mind is overwhelmed with sensation and knowledge, with a million new, important, complicated things that I can’t begin to make sense of. It’s like trying to drink from a fire hydrant. But amidst all the cacophonous noise warring for my attention, one signal stands out, one bit of knowledge: Cedric, trapped by love for someone who, because of her own wounds or lack of character or both, was best suited to hurting others. Cedric had lived the life I was afraid of leading. And somehow he still felt for his dead wife, enough that he didn’t like Gerald to speak ill of her.
“That’s a terrible thing to say,” I whisper.
“It’s true.”
I guess Gerald finally looks at me again, because his expression softens. I’m still not very good at hiding what I feel, and what I feel right now. . . I don’t know. I think it’s just sadness.
Except then I remember one key thing.
“I remind you of her?” I say, standing up. “What the hell?”
“You want things from him. You have the same effect on him.”
“I don’t want ‘things’ from him, I want him, you ass.”
What I want, more than anything, is to storm out of this office, slamming the door as an exclamation point, but I still need Gerald’s help to get through to Cedric. I settle for stomping my foot instead.
Gerald looks at me for a long time. Long enough for me to feel stupid and childish. Finally, he says, “Why were you at his townhouse the other day?”
“Why were you there?”
“This is important, Claire.”
“Why do you think? I was there to try to convince him to, I don’t know. . . take me back? Date me? Look, are you just asking this stuff to embarrass me, or. . . ?”
“You really have no idea what’s going on, do you?”
“Obviously.”
With that I slump back into that brown leather chair, elbow on the armrest, chin in hand. I’ve gotten somewhat used to having no clue what’s going on during the course of my treatment with the Doctor. Which, in retrospect, is probably a key component of having faith in someone. But right now it’s not enough.
“Care to enlighten me?” I ask, expecting no real answer. Still, I look up at Gerald, and see that he’s returned to his perch on his desk, only this time he’s smiling. And it’s not the lecherous leer that I remember so well; there’s actual kindness there. Sadness, too.
“Just because someone is completely blameless doesn’t mean he doesn’t still blame himself, Claire
. He sees some of the same things in you that I did – you do have some things in common with her, you know. Creative, sensitive, beautiful. So he’s afraid that it will happen again. He’s afraid you’ll end up hurt, that you’ll hurt him, that you’ll blame him, that he’ll blame himself.”
Gerald rotates his hand in the air as if he’s recounting the boring parts of a long story and not this epic litany of all the things that stand between me and the guy I love. I grit my teeth. I don’t respond well to being told something can’t be done.
“That’s ridiculous. I’m not crazy, and I have complete faith in him,” I say.
“You think it matters how much faith you have in him if he doesn’t have it in himself?”
Gerald shrugs, and again I feel very young and very inexperienced. But for the first time, I’m ok with that. Sometimes you have to be young and deluded to get anything done. All of the pieces have just come together, and I now know exactly what I have to do.
“Yes,” I say. “And you’re going to help me prove it.”
It’s unseasonably cold today, of all days, the day of my Art Institute interview and the day I make my bid for Cedric, and I’m not wearing nearly enough clothing. I’ll be wearing even less in a few minutes.
The inspiration to show Cedric how much faith I have in him through a performance piece came in a flash, as I suppose inspiration is supposed to do, while I sat there in Gerald’s office. It was so clear. Cedric had become integral to my dreams, in a way he apparently never was with Julia’s; I might as well show him that, even if it doesn’t end up moving his heart as much as I’d like. I have to at least try to help him as he’s helped me.
Besides, they wanted more personal expression in my art, right? And wow, am I about to give it to them.
I am seriously nervous. I mean, how could I not be nervous? I’ve never done performance art. I’ve never done anything like this at all.
Except with the Doctor.
Thinking about him, and about what I’m about to do, sends a warm wave washing over me. It clashes with the cold chill in the air, and the effect is almost a burn, like when you run cold and warm water at the same time from different taps. My nipples pucker, and my pulse thuds a dull rhythm in pelvis. It’s almost time.