But she does show Dennis. She shows Dennis everything. He grins and cocks his head. Dependable Dennis. Seventy-two, and as capable of amazement as a little kid. “Would you look at that! Oh, man!”
“It was even eerier in person.”
“In person. I bet.” He can’t stop looking. Laughing. “You know, babe? You could use this.”
“What do you mean?”
“Make a poster out of this photo. Put a big caption underneath it: They’re Trying to Get Our Attention.”
She wakes up that night, in darkness, with his big, gentle hands slack around her waist. “Dennis?” She tugs at his wrist. “Den?” In a flash, she twists out from under the limp arm and is on her feet. The room floods with light. Arms outward, fingers spread, her face so frozen in horror that even the corpse has to look away.
THE VIOLIN MAKER with wood dust in his hair, the man who calms Dorothy and makes her laugh whenever she wants to buy an assault rifle, the man who wrote her a poem telling her where to look if she ever loses him, is begging her to marry. But the law has this thing about one husband at a time.
“Dory. I can’t do this anymore. My halo’s falling off. Sainthood’s overrated.”
“Yes. So is sinnerhood.”
“You can’t go on vacations with me. You can’t even spend the night. It’s the best forty-five minutes of my day, whenever you show up. But I’m sorry. I can’t be number two anymore.”
“You aren’t number two, Alan. It’s just a double-stops passage. Remember?”
“No more double-stops. I need a nice long solo melody before the piece is over.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, what?”
“Okay. Eventually.”
“Dory. Christ. Why are you martyring yourself? Nobody expects you to. Even he doesn’t.”
No one can speak for what he expects. “I signed the papers. I made a promise.”
“What promise? You were on the verge of a divorce, two years ago. You two had practically divvied up the estate already.”
“Yeah. That was back when he could walk. And talk. And sign agreements.”
“He has insurance. Disability. Two caregivers. He can afford someone full-time. You can even keep helping. I just want you to live here. To come home to me every night. My wife.”
Love, as all the good novels know, is a question of title, deed, and possession. She and her lover have hit this wall many times before. Now, in the new millennium, the man who has kept her sane, the man who might even have been her soul mate if only her soul were a slightly different shape, hits the wall one last time and collapses at its base.
“Dory? It’s time. I’m tired of sharing.”
“Alan, it’s share or nothing.”
He chooses nothing. And for a long time, she dreams of choosing the same.
One crystal blue fall morning, a bellow comes from the other room. Her nickname, stretched out to the length of stillness, without the final consonant: Daaa . . . Her skin creeps. It’s worse than the bellow he makes when he fouls the bed and needs her to come clean him. Once more she runs, as if there never has been a false alarm. In the room, someone is talking to her husband, and he’s groaning. She flings the door open. “I’m here, Ray.”
At first glance, there’s only the man in the frozen terror mask, the one she has gotten used to, at last. Then she turns and sees. She lowers herself to the bed, next to him. The television is saying, “Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness.” Saying, “That is the second tower. That just happened. Live. On our screen.”
Some hard, skittering animal in the bed grazes at her wrist. She startles and shouts. Her husband’s movable hand, knocking against hers.
“It’s deliberate,” the screen says. “This must be deliberate.”
She takes his stiff, curled fingers and grips them. They stare together, understanding nothing. Orange, white, gray, and black billow against a cloudless blue. The towers vent, like cracks in the crust of the Earth. They waver. Then drop. The screen staggers. People in the streets scatter and scream. One of the towers folds up flat, like collapsible hanging shelves. The animal shrieking will not stop. Refusal trickles from Ray’s mouth. “Nh, nh, nh . . .”
She has seen this before: monstrous columns, too big to be felled, falling. She thinks: Finally, the whole strange dream of safety, of separation, will die. But when it comes to prediction, she has always been worse than wrong.
HYDE STREET, in Nob Hill, on a block lined with camouflaged California sycamores and one crooked Asian plum that bursts out in cream craziness for three weeks each spring. Mimi Ma sits in her shade-drawn first-floor office, preparing for her second and final client of the day. The first lasted three hours. It was his contractual right to stay however long he needed. But the session polished her down to a blunted nib. The second one will suck the day’s remaining life from her. She’ll retreat to her apartment in the Castro tonight to watch nature documentaries and listen to trance music. Then sleep and rise to face two more clients tomorrow.
Unconventional therapists flood this city—counselors, analysts, spirit guides, self-actualizing assistants, personal consultants, and borderline charlatans, many as surprised as Mimi to find themselves in the trade. But her reputation has spread so well by word of mouth that she can afford the office’s absurd rent while seeing only two clients a day. The real question, session by session, is whether she can stay sane herself as her clients eat her soul.
Many of her prospective patrons suffer from nothing worse than too much money. She tells them so, at the screening interviews every other Friday. She won’t see anyone who isn’t in pain, and she can tell how much pain a person is in within twenty seconds of their sitting in the wing chair that faces hers in her bare session room. She talks to each applicant for a few minutes, not about their psyches, but about the weather, sports, or childhood pets. Then she’ll either schedule a session or send the seeker home, saying, “You don’t need me. You just need to see that you’re already happy.” For that advice, she charges nothing. But for a real session, there must be some sacrifice. Two such sacrifices a day suffice to keep her afloat.
She sits to the right of the bricked-up fireplace, recovering. In the anteroom of fifty, she’s still slim, from the distance running she has taken up, although the cowl of black hair has chestnut highlights now. Still marked by the scar across one cheek that has never vanished. Her hand strokes her steel-gray jeans and travels the pleats of her cyan blouse, the one that makes her feel a little like a troubadour. Her office manager has called the next client to say that the therapist is free. There’s just enough time to climb up out of the morning’s four-hour cauldron of fear, grief, hope, and transfiguration shared with a total stranger before plunging back into it with another.
She bathes her mind in Zen aimlessness. She picks up one of the framed photos from the mantelpiece—the one of an elderly Chinese couple holding up a photo of three little girls. It’s a studio shot, in front of a backdrop. The man wears an expensive linen suit and the woman a silk dress tailored in Shanghai before the war. The couple gaze sadly at the photo of their American granddaughters with the inscrutable names. They’ll never meet these foreign girls or their mother, that fallen Virginia scion, who will die in a facility after forgetting what species she is. And their wandering son: it’s like the couple already know, as the lens opens, at this precise moment years before the violent crime. How does a man rise or fall in this life? The fisherman’s song flows deep under the river.
Once there was a little girl, bristly, a bully, even, trying to preserve herself across a great divide. Not yellow, not white, not anything Wheaton had ever seen. Only that fisherman ever knew her, motionless by her side on long slow days in untamed places, when they both stared and cast into the same running stream. She feels it again, worse for the unthinkable time and distance—rage at his leaving. Then rage at the world for cutting down the harmless grove where his ghost liked to walk, where she liked to sit and ask him why, where she once almost even
got an answer.
A chime shatters Mimi’s reverie. Stephanie N., her afternoon guest, arrives in the front office. Mimi returns the photo and presses a button on the underside of the mantel, telling Katherine that she’s ready. A soft knock on the door, and Mimi rises to greet an ample, wiry-haired redhead with tortoiseshell glasses. The hunter-green tunic and its half cape fail to hide her paunch. It doesn’t take a rabid empath to feel the visitor’s broken mainspring.
Mimi smiles and touches Stephanie’s shoulder. “Relax. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Stephanie’s eyes widen. There isn’t?
“Hold still. Let me have a look while you’re standing. You’ve gone to the bathroom? You’ve eaten? You left your cell phone, watch, and all other devices with Katherine? Not carrying anything? No makeup or jewelry?” Stephanie is clean on all counts. “Good. Please, sit.”
The visitor takes the proffered chair, unsure how this can lead to the magic that her brother-in-law called the most bruising, profound experience of his adult life. “Wouldn’t it help to know a little about me?”
Mimi cocks her head and smiles. There are so many names for the thing that everyone is scared to death of, and everyone wants to tell you theirs. “Stephanie? By the time we’re done, we’re going to know more about each other than there are words for.”
Stephanie daubs at her eyes, nods, laughs two syllables, then flicks her fingers. Ready.
Four minutes in, Mimi stops the session. She leans in and touches Stephanie’s knee. “Listen. Just look at me. That’s all you need to do.”
Stephanie palms an apology and reels her hand back in to her lips. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“If you’re self-conscious . . . if you’re afraid, don’t worry. It doesn’t matter. Just keep your eyes on mine.”
Stephanie bows her head. She sits up, and they try again. It happens often, this false start. No one suspects how hard it is to hold another’s gaze for more than three seconds. A quarter minute and they’re in agony—introverts and extroverts, dominants and submissives alike. Scopophobia hits them all—fear of seeing and being seen. A dog will bite if you stare at it too hard. People will shoot you. And though she has looked for hours into the eyes of hundreds of people, though she has perfected the art of endurance staring, Mimi feels a tinge of fear herself, even now, gazing into the skittering eyes of Stephanie, who, blushing a little, powers through the shame and settles down.
The women lock in, awkward and naked. A tic at the corner of Stephanie’s lips makes Mimi smile back.
Sheesh, the client’s eyes say.
Yes, the therapist agrees. Humiliating.
The awkwardness turns pleasant enough. Stephanie the likable, Stephanie the good-natured, the mostly self-assured. I’m a decent person. See?
It doesn’t matter.
Stephanie’s lower lid tightens and her orbicularis oculi twitches. Do I make sense to you? Am I much like everyone else? Why do I feel like I’m falling through the cracks of social goodwill?
Mimi squints less than the width of two lashes. Microscopic reprimand: Just look. Just. Look.
Five minutes in, Stephanie’s breathing shifts and narrows. Okay. I see. I’m getting this.
You haven’t even started.
Mimi watches the woman come into focus. A mother, and of more than one. Cannot stop taking care of the therapist. Wife of a man who, after a dozen years, has become civil and distant, a bear in his lair. Sex is perfunctory maintenance at best. But you’re mistaken, the speculating therapist tells herself. You know nothing. And the thought registers across the minute muscles of her face. Just look. Looking must correct and heal all thoughts.
At ten minutes, Stephanie fidgets. When does the magic start to happen? Mimi’s eyes bear down. Even in this tedium, Stephanie’s pulse rises. She sits forward. Her nostrils flare. Then everything relaxes, from scalp to ankles. Well, here goes. What you see is what you get.
What I get is beyond your control.
The weird shit in this room had better not leave it.
Safer than Vegas.
I’m not sure what I’m doing here.
Me neither.
I’m not sure I’d like you if I met you at a party.
I don’t always like myself. At parties, almost never.
This can’t possibly be worth what I’m paying. Even if I stay all afternoon.
What is it worth to be looked at, without judgment, for as long as you need?
Who am I kidding? It’s my husband’s money.
I’m living off my father’s inheritance. Which might have been stolen.
I’ve let men define me.
I’m really an engineer. I’m only pretending to be a therapist.
Help me. I wake up at three in the morning with a black thing clawing my chest.
My name isn’t really Judith Hanson. I changed it from Mimi Ma.
On Sundays when the sun goes down I don’t want to live.
Sunday evenings save me. Just knowing that, in a few hours, I’ll be working again.
Is it the towers? I think it might be the towers. I’ve been so brittle, like frozen glass—
Towers are always falling.
A quarter hour passes. Unrelenting human scrutiny: the weirdest trip Stephanie has ever been on. Fifteen endless minutes of staring at a woman she doesn’t know from Eve triggers things, things she hasn’t thought about in decades. She looks at Mimi and sees a crow’s-footed, scar-faced, Asian version of her high school girlfriend, a girl she broke with at nineteen over some imagined slight. There’s no one to apologize to now except this stranger who won’t stop staring at her.
Time passes, a lifetime, a few more seconds, in a room with nothing to look at but a stranger’s damaged face. The trap closes around Stephanie. Her eyes cloud with resentment bordering on hate. A tremor of Mimi’s lips sends Stephanie back to that day three years ago when she at last faced down her mother and called her a bitch. And her mother’s mouth, in that instant . . . Stephanie squeezes her eyes shut—rules of this game be damned—and when she opens again, she sees her mother, eight more months down the line of panic, on a respirator in the hospital, dying of COPD, fighting to keep all thought of that day’s accusation out of her face as her daughter leans in to kiss her stony forehead.
The watch that Stephanie left in the reception room ticks on, out of sight and hearing. Away from it, far from all claims on her, the visitor remembers herself, soft, sad, out of nowhere, at the age of six, wanting to be a nurse. Toy props—syringe, blood pressure cuff, white hat. Picture books and dolls. Three years of obsession, followed by thirty-five of amnesia, retrieved only by going down the rabbit hole of another woman’s eyes. Nothing else exists outside this pact. Pupils lock and can’t look away. The years parade through Stephanie’s mind—childhood, youth, adolescence, the immunity of young adulthood followed by endless scared maturity. She’s naked now, in front of someone she has agreed never to try to see again after today.
Through the two-way mirror, Mimi sees. Such pain you’re in. Here, too. How can it be? In a patch of sun that falls between them, a green feeling opens to the light. Mimi lets it play across her face, there for the seeing. Therapy. You remind me of my sisters. She lets this woman in, up into the breakfast tree, backyard, Wheaton, Illinois, where she, Carmen, and Amelia have already taken their cereal bowls up onto the summer limbs and are busy reading each other’s futures in the floating oat rings. That Virginia missionary’s daughter stands at the kitchen window, the one who’ll die of dementia in a nursing home without ever having looked her daughters in the eye for more than half a second. That Hui man, coming from the house to call to his daughters, My silk farm! What you do? The mulberry, sweet, crooked, and open, rounded with shade, dripping peace, lying about everything the future would hold.
A great sororal surge comes over Stephanie. She reaches her hand to this slight, half-Asian shaman four feet from her. One quick tightening of Mimi’s corrugator muscles warns her off. There’s more. So muc
h more.
At half an hour, Stephanie melts down. She’s hungry, stiff, itchy, and so sick of herself she wants to sleep forever. The truth seeps out of her, a bodily discharge. You shouldn’t trust me. I don’t deserve this. You see? I’m fucked up in ways even my children don’t suspect. I stole from my brother. I left the scene of an accident. I’ve had sex with men whose names I don’t even know. Several times. Recently.
Yes. Hush. I’m wanted in three states.
Their faces feed pitiless into one another. Muscles move, the world’s slowest flip-book. Terror, shame, desperation, hope: each lasts its own three-second lifetime. After an hour, the islands of emotion wash into an open sea. The two faces swell; their mouths and noses and brows expand to fill a Rushmore. Truth hovers between them, great and nebulous, a thing their bodies keep them from reaching.
Another hour. Deserts of infinite boredom punctuated by peaks of freakish intensity. More annihilated memories percolate up from below, so many moments, recovered and lost again in this loop of looking. Hydra-like, multiplying memories longer than the lives that made them. Stephanie sees. So clear now: She’s an animal, a mere avatar. The other woman, too—stuff-imprisoned spirit, deluded into thinking it’s autonomous. And yet conjoined, linked to each other, a pair of local gods who have lived and felt all things. One of them has a thought, which at once becomes the other’s. Enlightenment is a shared enterprise. It needs some other voice saying, You are not wrong. . . .
If only I could remember this in real time, under fire! I’d be cured.
There are no cures.
Is this it? Is there more? Maybe I should go.
No.
In hour three, truths flow loose and terrible. Things come out of hiding that would lose them membership in any club but this one that they can’t quit.
The Overstory Page 43