The Hypnotist’s Love Story

by Liane Moriarty

  A waiter took away their plates, balancing them on his forearm. "Was the pork belly all right, sir?"

  "It was fine." Patrick smiled up at him. "Just wasn't as hungry as I thought."

  "Can I tempt you with the dessert menu? Or coffees?"

  Patrick raised his eyebrows at Ellen.

  "No thank you," she said.

  "Just the bill then, thanks, mate," said Patrick.

  Ellen looked at her watch. It was only ten o'clock. "I've got some nice chocolates at home," she said. "If you want to have coffee at my place. If you've got time."

  "I've got time," said Patrick, and his eyes met hers.

  Of course, they never bothered with the coffee and chocolates. As they made love for the first time on the clean sheets, there was a sudden flurry of hard rain on the roof, and Ellen thought briefly of Patrick's stalker, and wondered where she was right now, imagining her standing under a streetlight in the rain with no umbrella, raindrops sliding heedlessly down her pale, tortured (beautiful?) face, but then all the interesting sensations of a new lover filled every corner of her mind and she forgot all about her.

  Chapter 2

  At my age most of my friends are in long-term relationships, and in my line of work I don't have the opportunity to meet many new potential partners. I guess this just seemed like a fun way to make some new friends. I'm a romantic, but I'm also a realist.

  --From Internet dating site profile of

  username: Ellen68

  Ellen walked barefoot along the beach early the next morning, her trousers rolled up to her knees so she could let the waves break around her ankles, thinking about Patrick (she loved the name Patrick, nothing namby-pamby about it at all!) and everything that had happened the previous night.

  His son. (So cute!)

  His crazy ex-girlfriend. (Intriguing! Although also possibly somewhat frightening. She wasn't sure.)

  His body. Goodness, she had thought, as if she were a swooning heroine in a Regency romance, when he unbuttoned his unassuming striped business shirt. Just thinking about his chest gave her a shot of pure lust and she pressed two fingers to her tender lips, grazed from all that kissing.

  He had left right at midnight. Like Cinderella. He said that although his mother was staying at his place to look after his son, and would have gone to bed in the spare room, he always felt as if he was somehow taking advantage of her if he stayed out too late.

  "I hate doing this. Of course, if we--you know--I'll be able to let her know I'm staying overnight," he'd said as he buttoned his shirt back up over his caveman chest.

  "It's fine," Ellen had said, her voice thick with sleep. She was happy he was going. She preferred to lie in bed and think about him, rather than have him actually there and worry about what her hair looked like in the morning.

  "I'll call you," he'd said when he kissed her good-bye.

  Her phone had beeped with a text message at six a.m.

  When can I see you again, please? I think you've got me hypnotized!

  Which was cheesy. But extremely lovely.

  So it looked like it was happening. She was at the beginning of something new. Here we are again. She took a deep breath of salty air and it caught in her throat. For a moment she felt the weight of all those previous disappointments.

  Please let this one work, she thought pathetically.

  And then, with more spirit, Come on now, I deserve this!

  Ellen had been in three long-term relationships: Andy, Edward and Jon. Sometimes she felt like she was always dragging the memories of these relationships along with her, like three old tin cans on a string.

  Andy was a freakishly tall young banker. Their three-year relationship always seemed vaguely fraudulent to Ellen, like they were just pretending to be in love and doing a really excellent job of it. When Andy got an overseas posting, neither of them even mentioned the possibility of Ellen going with him. The whole affair left her with the same sense of grimy regret she felt after eating McDonald's.

  Edward was a sweet, sensitive high school teacher. They fell deeply, profoundly in love and became one of those couples with a clear path ahead of them incorporating children and pets. And then, for complex reasons that were still not clear to her now, and to everyone's shock, the relationship suddenly imploded. It was quite exquisitely painful.

  She met Jon on her thirtieth birthday. So OK, she thought, this is the one. The real grown-up relationship. He was a smart, articulate engineer. She adored him. It wasn't until after he'd pulverized her heart that she finally noticed he'd never actually adored her back.

  She'd always thought of these failed relationships as, well, failures. But it occurred to her now that perhaps they were actually essential steps in a predestined journey leading to this very moment on this very beach. To a green-eyed surveyor called Patrick Scott.

  She thought of Patrick's ex-girlfriend, his stalker. Saskia. An unusual name with its hard, spiky little syllables. Ellen rolled the name around in her mouth, like a strange new fruit. Saskia would not appreciate knowing that Ellen's heart was filling with tremulous hope right now.

  Ellen kicked out at the water in front her, sending up a spray of icy droplets. Well, really, what sort of person was this girl? Had she no pride at all? Ellen cringed at the idea of her ex-partners knowing she ever spared them a thought.

  When, in fact, the three of them were always lolling about in the back of her mind. Every time she got out of the car she automatically slid the driver's seat back for Andy's long legs, a habit left over from the years they'd shared a car. Every time she cut a tomato she thought of Jon, because he'd once told her cutting crossways made it juicier. Every Boxing Day she remembered it was Edward's birthday.

  Of course, it was to be expected that she thought of them. For a while each had been the person who knew her best, who spoke to her every single day, who knew where she was at any particular time, who would have sat in the front row at her funeral should she have tragically died.

  It sometimes seemed so peculiar and wrong to her that you could be that intimate with someone, to go to sleep with him and wake up with him, to do really quite extraordinarily personal things together on a regular basis, and then, suddenly, you don't even know his telephone number, or where he's living or working, or what he did today or last week or last year.

  Ellen watched a giant wave on the horizon curl and crash with a distant boom.

  That's why breakups felt like your skin was being torn from your body. It was actually strange that more people weren't like Saskia, instead of being so well behaved and dignified about it.

  "Good morning!" An elderly couple walked by from the opposite end of the beach at a brisk pace, elbows pumping. Ellen picked up her own pace so as not to be outdone by octogenarians.

  When her grandparents were alive, they would walk along this beach every night just before the six o'clock news.

  They spent sixty-three years together. Sixty-three years of waking up next to the same person, in the very same bedroom, in fact, where she and Patrick had made love last night. (Which, now that she thought about it, was terrible. She liked to think that the spirits of her grandparents still inhabited the house. She hoped her poor grandfather hadn't been trapped in the bedroom, standing behind the curtains, shielding his eyes.)

  Ellen had always assumed she would marry young and have a relationship like theirs. She thought she was that sort of person. Traditional. Nice. As if nice girls always found nice boys. As if "niceness" was all that was necessary to maintain a relationship.

  In all honesty (and the achievement of genuine self-awareness was her ongoing goal), it wasn't her niceness so much as the fact that she believed herself to be nothing like her own mother: her mother who had brought up Ellen alone, with barely a man in sight.

  And yet, here she was, thirty-five and looking for men on the Internet. Each time she clicked on to the website she felt like she was doing something vaguely unseemly.

  Unseemly for her. That was the crux of it.
She didn't think there was anything unseemly about anyone else doing Internet dating. Oh, no, it was fine for the unwashed masses! But Ellen helped people with their personal lives for a living.

  That was it. She thought she should be the sort of person who was great at relationships, and it seemed she actually wasn't. Really, she kept telling herself briskly, why shouldn't she have suffered and had her heart broken like anyone else? Why shouldn't she have found it hard to meet the right man, like so many other women? Why shouldn't she be worried about the ticking of her biological clock, even if it was a cliche? Why shouldn't she be a cliche?

  She was ashamed of her shame. As penance she was extremely open about her single status. She told all and sundry that she was Internet dating. She went on each awkward new date with her head held high, her outlook positive and her heart and mind open to all possibilities.

  But it was hard work at times.

  She reached the rock pool where she always turned back and put her hands on her hips, breathing heavily. She'd been walking faster than she realized.

  She looked back along the beach toward her grandparents' house, now her house, the glass room at the back winking in the morning sun, like a diamond stuck haphazardly to the side of the house. "Fabulous. He's made it even more of an eyesore," her mother had said when she saw the new room Ellen's grandfather had added on, thanks once again to Great-aunt Mary's lotto win.

  Ellen's grandfather's childless, unmarried younger sister, Mary, had won half a million dollars in lotto and then died just six weeks later, while she was still pondering what to do with her windfall. (A new TV, perhaps? One of those "flat screens"? But really, Deal or No Deal would still look exactly the same, wouldn't it? Just bigger.) All her money had gone to Ellen's grandparents, who had used it to put on the extra glass room, install gas heating and go on a ten-day cruise each year until they died. Great-aunt Mary's lotto win had also resulted in their decision to leave their house to Ellen when they died, while her mother and Amnesty International had inherited the capital. This suited everyone because Ellen's mother had no desire to live in her childhood home. "No amount of money could save it," she liked to say, with sad authority, as if she'd been asked to give her expert opinion.

  It was a strange-looking house, built in the seventies and incorporating all the most fashionable design features that decade had to offer: exposed beams and bricks, a stainless-steel spiral staircase, mirrored arches, lime green shag carpet and a bright orange kitchen. But Ellen had always loved it. She thought it had groovy retro charm and she refused to change a thing about it, except for adding an off-street parking spot for her clients. While her career as a hypnotherapist had supported her "quite remarkably" well (as her mother was always telling people, equally disappointed and proud), she had still been renting an apartment and an office when her grandmother died. Inheriting the house and using her grandmother's sewing room to treat her clients meant that Ellen was now enjoying the most financially secure position of her life.

  A white stone on the sand caught her eye and she bent down to pick it up. It had a pleasing shape and feel to it; it might come in useful for one of her clients.

  As she straightened back up, she looked out at the ocean and felt a loosening sensation in her chest, as if she'd been released from a corset. You weren't meant to admit, even to yourself, how badly you wanted love. The man was meant to be the icing, not the cake. She was a bit embarrassed by the depth of her happiness. Thank goodness no one could see the champagne corks popping in her head.

  When she got home she would answer Patrick's text and suggest they see a movie that night. Not very original, but still one of the loveliest things to do with a new boyfriend. She would try not to sound overly eager.

  She walked closer to the water and dug her toes deep into the sand. She remembered the feel of Patrick's back beneath her fingers, his collarbone against her lips.

  Sorry, Saskia. I think I'm keeping him.

  So, he's slept with the hypnotist.

  I can tell. I knew as soon as I saw his hand pressed to her lower back as they came out of the movie. It was low, you see, and confident, indicating ownership.

  He thinks he's pretty good in bed. It was his wife's fault. She once told him that he was an "extraordinary lover." And then she died. So every word she ever said became like the Word of God. The Word of Colleen.

  Colleen once told Patrick that the laundry powder should be fully dissolved in the washing machine before you put in the clothes, even though most people just chuck it in on top of the clothes. But Colleen said the clothes wash better if the powder is fully dissolved. And so it was. I still do it, for Christ's sake. Even though it's annoying, because you have to wait until the machine fills up with water and sometimes I walk away and forget about it, and then I suddenly realize I've done half a load without any clothes in the machine.

  He was actually pretty good in bed. He probably still is. Probably still says the same things, makes all the same moves.

  I think of him lying in bed with her, breathing in her sandalwood smells, running his hands over her smooth, toxin-free skin.

  I would like to see. I would like to be there, sitting at the end of the bed, watching him bend his head toward her nipple. Her breasts are larger than mine. I guess that's nice for him.

  I wonder if she hypnotizes him for free.

  Her voice sounds like warm honey dripping off a spoon.

  They saw that Russell Crowe movie last night. It was pretty good. He should have known what was going to happen, because the movie was based on the series we used to watch on a Monday night. I wondered if he remembered and I thought, I bet he doesn't, so I sent him a text reminding him.

  Afterward, they went for dinner at that Thai restaurant on the corner where he told me he loved me for the first time.

  I wonder if they sat at the same table.

  I wonder if he remembered, just for a second. Surely I am worth a fleeting thought.

  I couldn't get a table. They must have had a reservation--she must have done it, he would never bother. So I went to a cafe and I wrote him a letter, just trying to explain, to make him see, and I left it on the windscreen of his car.

  I am looking forward to my next appointment with the hypnotist.

  Chapter 3

  "As man imagines himself to be, so shall he be, and he is that which he imagines." So said Paracelsus in the fifteenth century. The idea of the power of the mind is not new, ladies and gentlemen. Good morning.

  --Introduction to a speech given by Ellen O'Farrell to

  the Northern Beaches Rotary Club August Breakfast,

  sadly unheard by the majority of the audience due

  to a malfunctioning microphone

  We should go," yawned Ellen.

  "We really should," yawned Patrick.

  Neither of them moved.

  It was nearly eleven o'clock on a Thursday night and they were lying flat on their backs on a picnic rug on a grassy slope directly under the Harbour Bridge. Earlier, they'd been to the theater in Kirribilli and seen a silly play. They'd eaten dinner at a tiny, crowded noodle bar, and then they'd walked along the boardwalk by the harbor, watching the traffic zoom over the bridge while the lit-up ferries slid beneath. They'd agreed tonight would be an early night, and that Patrick wouldn't come back to her place, because a teenage neighbor was looking after Patrick's son, and she had a uni lecture early the next day, so he didn't want to keep her up too late--but still, neither of them wanted the night to end.

  They'd been dating now for three weeks and everything still had that shiny new-car smell. Even the yawny voices they were using right now still had that self-conscious sheen: Look, this is how I sound when I'm tired!

  "Have you got a busy day tomorrow?" asked Patrick.

  "Just an average day," said Ellen. "Five appointments. That's enough for me. I find if I do any more, I get really, well, exhausted."

  She was aware of a feeling of defensiveness left over from her most recent relationship.
Jon's contempt for her profession had always been subtle: a faint fragrance she couldn't quite identify, and therefore couldn't ever tackle head-on. He was an even more passionately committed atheist than her mother. (The God Delusion was his favorite book.) "Show me the empirical evidence" was one of his favorite phrases. Whenever Ellen talked about her work, Jon would put his head to one side and give her a patient, avuncular smile, as if she were a charming little girl burbling on about fairy princesses. Then he'd make some humorous, teasing remark that didn't go quite as far as denying the existence of fairy princesses but was there for the entertainment of any nearby adults. "Ellen has a Bachelor of Hypnotherapy," he would tell people, which was his sarcastic way of pointing out that Ellen didn't have a degree, because of course, there was no such thing. (She'd enrolled to do psychology and then dropped out halfway through her second semester to study hypnotherapy. Her mother was still in mourning.)

  It wasn't until after she and Jon had broken up that Ellen saw how she'd struggled to hold on to herself throughout their time together. It was like every time she spoke, she was simultaneously trying not to take herself too seriously--Hey, I can handle a little gentle ribbing!--while at the same time justifying her whole existence: Yes, it is OK to be me. Yes, I do believe in myself and what I'm saying. I am not a frivolous lightweight, except maybe I am.

  "Is it draining because..." Patrick scratched the side of his jaw and frowned up at the stars. "Ah, why, that is, how exactly is it draining?"

  He was respectfully baffled.

  "I guess it's because I can't ever just coast," said Ellen. "I have to be totally focused on the client. I never use prepared scripts. I tailor every induction--"

  "Induction?"

  "That's whatever technique I use to induce hypnosis--like, imagining you're walking down a flight of stairs, or progressively relaxing your body. I tailor it to the client's interest or background--whether they're more visual or analytical, or whatever."