“Why?” Parrish asked. Jennie, pleased that her problem was the center of a discussion, set her small, thin face in an earnest smile and leaned forward.
“They are karmically involved,” Anna said. “They can’t escape each other, so they might as well not try. I mean, she can go to a halfway house if she wants to, but it won’t work, because he’ll draw her back, the magnetism of his aura will reach out. She can run but she can’t get away.”
Jennie, who insisted that her brother was constantly making sexual advances toward her (an insistence that was entirely delusional) nodded her head.
Anna began speaking more rapidly, breathlessly. “This sort of thing is all arranged, and the test is whether or not you can accept it and go through it in a learning spirit. That’s what life is: learning stuff, and you can learn with grace or without grace. Like, you can go to a halfway house and get dragged out of that situation like a snail being ripped out of its shell, or you can accept your role and go on back to your brother to work it through.”
Jennie, still nodding her head, was beginning to cry.
Anna, who was sitting next to Jennie, touched the older woman’s arm solicitously and said, quietly, “Don’t cry.” Then, destroying the warmth of the moment, Anna added, “Don’t cry. I don’t even like you.” Jennie didn’t appear to hear this. She continued to sob and nod her head.
Parrish leaned back and said, “So Anna, you believe that everything is already decided. That your fate is already determined.”
Anna shot him another hot glance, and again he felt oddly unbalanced. How did she do it? How did she establish an assumption of intimacy between them, a sense of shared knowledge so that, in an instant, he could feel false and unworthy? The bitch. The presumptuous little slut.
“No,” Anna said. She opened her mouth to say more, and stopped, pouting. He knew the look. He wasn’t going to get any more out of her. He had misinterpreted her, offended her somehow. The damnable thing was that she could make him feel so inadequate. How did she manage it? There was nothing special about her. The world contained a sad surfeit of pretty girls going crazy. Anna Shockley was one of many.
“I don’t understand,” Parrish said.
“No,” Anna agreed, still pouting, “you don’t.”
Al Bowling, an overweight man in his mid-forties, admitted to the Institute by his family doctor for depression, said, “You are all too serious, if you ask me. When I was your age, I was having a ball.”
The hour was over. Parrish dismissed the group and walked back to his office where he dictated a desultory account of a new patient, a young boy who had attempted suicide by stabbing himself in the stomach with a scissors. From his office window, he could see that the storm had, if anything, increased in violence. The parking lot was filled with rivulets of black water.
Still feeling harried by obligations, Parrish called Jane’s number. Her voice was tremulous. “Richard. I was hoping you wouldn’t get tied up. I really need you today. This weather has made me feel so blue, so worthless.”
He had intended to beg off, but this obviously wasn’t the day to do it.
Parrish met her at The Retreat, a small, inexpensive restaurant in downtown Newburg. Jane was already seated at a table.
Jane Solomon was an aristocratic beauty, possessed of a nervous angularity, a rueful and general unease that lessened the effect of her fine features and sleek, exercised body. She communicated an unhappiness and desperation that Parrish might have diagnosed as hysteric under clinical conditions. She wore a tan sweater and her dark hair was pulled tightly back.
Jane was the daughter of Dr. Ron Solomon, president of ExcellCare, a vast corporation owning a variety of medical facilities including Romner Psychiatric Institute.
While Jane was undeniably a good-looking woman, her looks weren’t the sort that normally attracted Richard. He pursued her because she was the daughter of the fabulous Dr. Solomon. She was, therefore, the end of the rainbow. She was all ambitions realized.
And she was no fool. She knew about fortune hunters. There had been one or two in her past. Parrish was careful not to seem overly eager. He was always interested, always available, but he wasn’t in a hurry. He talked about dedication, about striving to help others, about his frustration with the red tape of hospital operations. He was rewarded with Jane’s concern. “You work too hard,” she told him. “I know you want to help everyone, but you have to take some time for yourself.”
From the beginning, Parrish had decided that his best bet was the role of slightly abstracted, unworldly doctor. He had, it seemed, made the right decision. Jane now took pride in having brought him into the wider world, taken him to plays, introduced him to good music, fine food. She had taught him to laugh, to take pleasure in life. She was pleased with herself, for in doing this she had helped create a doctor more in tune with humanity, more capable of sympathizing with the world, more effective with his patients.
Dr. Ron Solomon was harder to read, but Parrish felt that the old man approved of him, at least tentatively. The legendary Dr. Solomon was a Midwesterner with a narrow face and skeptical features. He had extended his hand, on first meeting Parrish, and drawled, “Well, you’re the shrink my daughter is so keen on. Pleased to meet you. How do you find Romner?”
Dr. Solomon had then spent the next forty minutes asking questions about Parrish’s personal experiences at the hospital, his opinion on various doctors, administrative problems, modes of treatment. It felt like an interview, and Richard didn’t object to that. He answered carefully, not wanting to step on any toes but wanting to portray himself—obliquely, of course—as a concerned and dedicated doctor who wanted the best for his patients.
The interview had been terminated by Jane. “Daddy, that’s enough! I didn’t bring Richard here to have you grill him. He worries too much already. You can ring him up at work if you want to talk about work.” Solomon had, good-naturedly, thrown up his hands. “I apologize,” he had said. “My daughter is right. In this house, she is generally right.”
Now Richard smiled across the table at Jane. He raised his champagne glass and said, “You look lovely today. Just seeing you dispels my gloom.” Jane smiled crookedly at his flattery. She was often embarrassed by compliments; they flustered her.
“I like your hair that way,” he continued. “You have beautiful bones,” he heard himself saying. He was rolling on, trying to quiet joyless voices that were growing in number, muttering that he wasn’t happy, that his life was a fraud.
“I’m a nuisance,” she said. “I know that. You probably had something else to do. I think I sensed that in your voice when I called, but I wasn’t about to let you out of it. Was I right? Did you have something else planned?”
Parrish reached across the table and held her wrist. He narrowed his eyes and turned up the modulation on his voice. “Jane, I don’t understand how a beautiful woman like you can have so little self-confidence. There isn’t a man in this town who wouldn’t give his right arm to be having lunch with you, and I know it. However, you are right. Lunch was not on my mind when you called.” Parrish winked. “If your afternoon is free, I thought I might take you back to my apartment.”
Jane Solomon blushed and giggled. Then she stopped. “Are you all right?” she asked. Parrish’s ribald smile had drifted into blankness.
“Are you all right?” he heard her say. He coughed sharply, and the black, accusatory eyes of Anna Shockley disappeared, retreating to whatever alcove they had been inhabiting until they chose to leap so suddenly into his consciousness.
Why was he thinking of Anna Shockley? Now there was somebody’s millstone, a girl calculated to drag some poor whimpering male into misery. She did have a blatant sort of sexuality that Jane Solomon would never have. Anna did have a kind of brash, heavy-metal eroticism, the volume cranked up all the way. Jane was more subtle. Flutes, maybe.
“I’m fine,” he said, when Jane asked, and her startled expression warned him to watch his voice. “I’ve bee
n overworked,” he added. “I apologize.”
The steady, relentless rain helped salvage the day. They had rushed from the restaurant to Jane’s car, running clumsily under Richard’s umbrella, the cold, furious rain outwitted.
At the apartment, Richard poured them glasses of wine and they sat on the sofa, feeling closer and more secure in the warmth. “Sometimes I’m so scared,” Jane said. “I don’t even know what I’m scared of, but I’m also scared of just living my life in somebody’s shadow, Daddy’s, even yours. That’s why I always tend to withdraw, Richard. You’ve been so good about it. It’s not being coy or anything …”
Richard reached over and held her. “I know,” he said. He put his arms around her and held her.
He undid the buttons on her blouse. He expected to be rebuffed, for Jane, although she was twenty-four years old and no virgin, had been chaste the last two years in reaction to a romance that had ended badly. She had traced the bad end to the good sex, addictive, wild, dangerously exhilarating. Richard hadn’t followed her reasoning, but he hadn’t minded the forced abstinence, indeed, he felt his gentle acquiescence to her unreasonable demands gave him a high card in the game of courtship and guilt. Her reticence was an opportunity to show his understanding, the depth of his caring.
But this afternoon she didn’t stop him. She allowed him to undress her without protest. Richard had only intended a token overture, and he was momentarily irritated, awkwardly shifting gears. He carried her into the bedroom. Naked, she was more self-possessed, less predictable. She laughed, catching him and pulling him to her. Lightning turned the room white, scattering shadows. He saw her face and body in the exclamations of the storm, dreamlike, fading in and out of focus.
She was surprisingly vocal in her lovemaking, shouting her delight, and this, in turn, filled him with a sense of his own power. He worked carefully, thoughtfully, cementing this commitment. She wouldn’t turn back now. She would marry him. The high value she placed on sex made it the ultimate contract.
In the midst of these thoughts, Jane mewing beneath him, an orgasm overtook and surprised him.
She left at midnight, saying she had to go home and get some sleep and sort things out.
“I’ll call you in the morning,” she said. “I love you.”
“I love you too,” he said. And he did.
In the morning the hospital called to tell him that Anna was signing herself out of the hospital, going home. He told them to hold on to her until he talked to her. He would be right there. He dressed hurriedly and drove to the hospital in the darkness. The rain had stopped, but the temperature had plummeted and the roads were icy. The car slipped and shivered through traffic. The day promised perils, misadventure. He tried to remember last night’s good fortune, but already it was illusory. He went directly to the restroom and swallowed two Valiums, splashed water in his face, and studied his eyes until some of the dread had left them, squeezed out by hard, mirror-staring effort. Then, feeling in control again, he went to talk to Anna.
They had parked Anna in his office, and she was fidgeting with her hair, looking particularly glum and belligerent.
“I don’t want to argue about it,” she said. “I can’t stay here.”
“Why not?” he asked, sitting down at his desk. He picked a pencil out of a drawer and tapped it on the desk top. “Why do you have to leave, Anna?”
Anna shrugged. “I don’t want to stay where I’m not wanted.”
“Who doesn’t want you here?”
Anna narrowed her eyes and leaned forward. “You don’t.”
“Of course I want you to stay,” Parrish said.
“I’m not going to stay,” Anna said. “I’m sorry, but I made a big mistake coming here in the first place, and now I feel awful and I just want to get out.” She sat down.
Parrish noticed that Anna had dressed for this occasion. Her hair was combed back, and she was even wearing some makeup, unusual for Anna. The makeup was inexpertly applied, but appealing for that very reason, emphasizing her waiflike quality, demanding protection under the rights of innocence.
“Anna,” Parrish said, “I want you to stay. I think you need to stay here for awhile because there are some things that you should think about, some decisions that you really have to make. I think that a lot of bad things have happened in your life, and you have adapted to those bad things, developed ways of coping. But some of the ways of getting by have hurt you, and you have to learn new ways. Remember yesterday when you were talking about getting a job? Your friend Diane in vocational rehabilitation was going to help you look for a job, and you were excited about that. What about that?”
Anna pushed her lower lip forward and stared at the desk. She was beginning to look like a child being reprimanded by the principal. Parrish had an urge to lean forward and kiss her—he imagined her eyes growing big with shock, her mouth falling open—but he wrapped his hands together and waited for Anna to say something. When she did speak, he could hardly hear her. She whispered.
Parrish leaned forward. “What’s that?”
She looked up. Her eyes were wet with tears. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice coming out in a loud hiccup. She began to cry, and Parrish went to her and hugged her and—no helping it now—found himself patting her head.
“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” he said. He held her and she cried and hugged him back. He gave her some tissues and she blew her nose, a loud, unfeminine honk, and smiled.
“Okay,” Anna said. “I’ll stay.”
“Good,” Parrish said. He nodded his head. “I’m glad. I would miss you if you left.” Parrish looked at his watch and raised his eyebrows. “It’s almost time for group, and I haven’t eaten any breakfast. I’ve got to run downstairs and beg something from the kitchen. I’ll see you in group.” Parrish walked her to the door.
Anna was excited now, eyes bright and outlined with wet mascara. She smiled, lowered her eyelids and said, “I’ll see you then, Dr. Parrish.” They walked out into the hall and Parrish closed his office door. He waved and began walking away from her. She shouted after him. “Thank you, Dr. Parrish,” she shouted. “Thank you for everything.”
8
Anna got a job as a cashier at Nathan’s Drugs. She left Romner and moved back to the Villa where Kalso let her rent her old room. Parrish wasn’t happy with Anna’s living at the Villa, but he could sense that Anna wasn’t negotiating on that point, and he didn’t want to scare her off by refusing to compromise. He didn’t want to lose her.
Richard Parrish and Jane Solomon were officially engaged in March, and Parrish’s mother had flown up, ostensibly on a whim—“Can’t a mother miss her only child?”—but, in fact, to meet Jane and her legendary father. Richard had sweated through a long dinner at the Solomon mansion. How Grace had wrested this invitation from the semi-reclusive Dr. Solomon was a mystery, but she had done it, and Richard watched his mother charm skeptical father and reticent daughter with her caricature of a dotty Southern belle. She told delightful stories of her girlhood; of an eccentric father who wrote scathing letters to editors on any and all subjects and whose favorite word was “scandalous,” used loosely to describe anything he disapproved of from presidents to toothpaste; of a fearful but loving mother who believed that a parked automobile was like a sleeping bull and might, at any moment, erupt into electric life and rush about maiming and murdering. Richard had never heard these anecdotes, and had rarely seen his mother in this nostalgic and whimsical mood.
At the airport, when she was preparing to leave, she told her son, “Marry that girl. She’s money in the bank.”
“Mother,” he said, frowning at her.
She frowned back. “I’m your mother, Richard. I would just as soon you didn’t dissemble. For one thing, you do it so poorly. You fumble so when it comes to faking an emotion. We both like money, and you can smell the money in those people.” His mother’s face possessed a manic eagerness as she talked, and she clasped her hands in an unintentional parody o
f greed. “She’s lovely the way only the rich can be lovely, Richard, and I will kill you if you don’t marry her.” She kissed him then and marched off for her flight. Watching her small, brittle frame negotiate an escalator, Richard realized that she meant it. He was realizing her deepest dreams.
Anna didn’t come to the after-care session, and Richard fretted and had difficulty sleeping. He had rented a house that was sheltered by maples and evergreens, and the cool leaves allowed him to sleep with the windows open, without the distasteful, clammy breath of the air conditioning. But he awoke sweating from a nightmare in which he had been crumbling apart, rotting away. In the dream, he had been sitting at his desk and had felt a loose tooth with his tongue. He had reached up and pulled the tooth out. It had come out with a squishy pop, and he had discovered that the other teeth were as easily removed. He couldn’t help himself, he slowly pulled them all out. Then, rubbing the flesh of his cheek, he discovered that it was numb, a rubbery stuff that came off in his fingers. He began to fall apart in other ways, portions of his body dropping off, melting, an eyeball thumping on the desk to stare up at him, unwinking and baleful.
He awoke from this horrible, mortal moult and went downstairs, turning on lights as he went. He sat in a chair and began to write in his diary. Writing in the diary always invigorated him. He wrote, “That little bitch.” He put the pen down. She was beginning to infect all things, even this, his refuge. He no longer felt like writing.
When the first faint sunlight illuminated the drawn curtains, he stalked upstairs and sank into grudging sleep.
He couldn’t help it. He was elated when she showed up for the next session. “Where were you?” he asked, adopting a mock stern tone.
She told him she had gone to a meeting of the Dancers of the Divine Logic with Hank and Gretchen. Parrish couldn’t hide his irritation. “I thought we agreed that you weren’t going there for awhile. I thought we agreed that you were going to let that cool off a little, get your life in order and then see how you felt about those folks.”
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