Linda slapped at the steeple, only to find the Doctor's hands in his lap. "Don't push so hard," she said.
"Be specific," Havilland said. "Think exactly what you want to say."
Linda breathed the words out slowly. "We're barely into the session and you start taking command. I had some things I wanted to discuss, things that I've had on my mind lately, and you barge right in with questions. I don't like aggressive behavior."
The Doctor collapsed the steeple and clasped his hands. "Yet you're attracted to aggressive men."
"Yes, but what does that have to do with it?"
Havilland slumped forward in his chair. "Touche, Linda. But let me state my case before I apologize. You're paying me a hundred and fifteen dollars an hour, which you can afford because you earn a great deal of money doing something you despise. I see this therapy as an exercise in pure pragmatism: Find out why you're a hooker, then terminate the therapy. Once you stop hooking you won't need me or be able to afford me, and we'll go our separate ways. I feel for your dilemma, Linda, so please forgive my haste."
Linda felt a little piece of her heart melt at the brilliant man's apology. "I'm sorry I barked," she said. "I know you're on my side and I know your methods work. So…in answer to your question, yes, I do have an active fantasy life."
"Will you elaborate?" Havilland asked.
"About six years ago I posed for a series of clothed and semi-nude photographs that ultimately became this arty-farty coffee table book. There was this awful team of gay photographers and technicians, and they posed me in front of air conditioners to blow my hair and give me goose bumps and beside a heater to make me sweat buckets, and they turned me and threw me around like a rag doll, and it was worse than fucking a three hundred pound drunk."
"And?" Havilland whispered.
"And I used to fantasize murdering those fags and having someone film it, then renting a big movie theater and filling it with girls in the Life. They'd applaud the movie and applaud me like I was Fellini."
The Doctor laughed. "That wasn't so hard, was it?"
"No."
"Is that a recurring fantasy?"
"Well…no…"
"But variations of it recur?"
Linda smiled and said, "You should have been a cop, Doctor. People would tell you whatever you wanted to know. Okay, there's this sort of upbeat version of the movie fantasy. You don't have to be a genius to see that it derives from my parents' deaths. I'm behind a camera. A man beats a woman to death, then shoots himself. I film it, and it's real and it isn't real. What I mean is, of course what happens is real, only the people aren't permanently dead. That's how I justify the fantasy. What I think I-"
The Doctor cut in: "Interpret the fantasy."
"Let me finish!" Linda blurted out. Lowering her voice, she said, "I was going to say that somehow it all leads to love. These real or imaginary or whatever people die so that I can figure out what my fucked-up childhood meant. Then I meet this big, rough-hewn man. A lonely, no-bullshit type of man. He's had the same kind of life as me and I show him the film and we fall in love. End of fantasy. Isn't it syrupy and awful?"
Looking straight at the Doctor, Linda saw that his features had softened and that his eyes were an almost translucent light brown. When he didn't answer, she got up and walked over to the framed diplomas on the wall. On impulse, she asked, "Where's your family, Doctor?"
"I don't really have a family," Havilland said. "My father disappeared when I was an adolescent and my mother is in a sanitarium in New York."
Turning to face him, Linda said, "I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry, just tell me what you're feeling right now."
Linda laughed. "I feel like I want a cigarette. I quit eight months ago, one of my little control trips, and now I'm dying for one."
Havilland laughed in return. "Tell me more about the man you fall in love with."
Linda walked around the office, running her fingertips along the oak walls. "Basically, all I know is that he wears a size forty-four sweater. I know that because I had a john once who had the perfect body and he wore that size-for some reason I looked at the label while he was getting dressed. When I first started having these fantasies I used to picture the john's face-then I made myself forget his face, because it interfered with my fantasy. Once I even drove downtown to Brooks Brothers and spent two hundred dollars on a size forty-four navy blue cashmere sweater."
Linda sat down and drummed the arms of her chair. "Do you think that's a sad story, Doctor?"
Havilland's voice was very soft. "I think I'm going to enjoy taking you beyond your beyond."
"What's that?"
"Just a catch phrase of mine dealing with patients' potentialities. We'll talk more about that later. Before we conclude, please give me a quick response to a hypothetical situation. Among my patients is a young man who wants to kill. Wouldn't it be terrible if he met a young woman who wanted to die and if someone were there with a camera to record it?"
Linda slammed the arms of her chair. The floor reverberated with her words: "Yes! But why does that idea titillate me so?"
Havilland got up and pointed to the clock. "No souls saved after fifty minutes. Monday at the same time?"
Linda took his hand on the way to the door. "I'll be here," she said, her voice receding to a whisper.
Havilland drove home to his condominium/sanctuary in Beverly Hills and went straight to his inner sanctum, the only one of the six rooms not walled from floor to ceiling with metal shelves spilling psychology texts.
The Night Tripper thought of his three dwellings as a wheel of knowledge exploration, with himself as the hub. His Century City office was the induction spoke; his condo the fount of study and contemplation; the Malibu beach house the spoke of dispatch, where he sent his lonelies beyond their beyonds.
But the central point of his work was here behind a door he had personally stripped of varnish and painted an incongruous bright green. It was the control room of the Time Machine.
A swivel chair and a desk holding a telephone were centered in the room, affording a swivel view of four information-covered walls.
One wall held a huge map of Los Angeles County. Red pins signified the addresses of his lonelies, blue pins denoted the pay phones where he contacted them-a safety buffer he had devised. Green pins indicated homes where the lonelies had been placed on assignment, and plastic stick figures marked Thomas Goff, ever mobile in his quest to find more red pins.
Two walls comprised a depth gauge, to probe the Night Tripper's childhood void. Serving as markings on the gauge were WCBS top-forty surveys from Spring 1959, attached to the walls with red and blue pins, and a shelf containing roller-skate wheels that were once the feet of dead animals, lockets of soft brown hair stolen from inside a family Bible, and a swatch of carpet stained with blood.
Clues.
The remaining wall was covered with typed quotations from inhabitants of the void, taped on in approximate chronological order:
December 1957: Mother-"Your father was a monster, and I'm glad he's gone. The administrators of the trust fund have been instructed to tell us nothing, and I'm glad. I don't want to know." (Current disposition: Residing in a Yonkers, N.Y., sanitarium with severe alcoholic senility.)
March 1958: Frank Baxter (father's lawyer)-"Just think the best, Johnny. Think that your dad loves you very much, which is why he's sending you and your mother all that nice money." (Disposition: Committed suicide, August 1960)
Spring 1958: (Imagined? Recalled from previous summer?) Police detectives questioning mother as to father's whereabouts-obsequious; deferential to wealth. (Disposition: Complete disregard of all my inquiries to Scarsdale P.D. and Westchester County P.D. 1961-1968) Dreamt?
June 1958: Nurse amp; doctor at Scarsdale Jr. High (overheard)-"I think the boy has a touch of motor aphasia"; "Bah! Doctor, that boy has got a tremendous mind! He just wants to learn what he wants to learn"; "I'll believe the X ray before I believe your analysis, Miss Watkins." (Disposition: doctor dead, nurse moved away, address unknown. Note: X rays and other tests taken at Harvard indicate no aphasiac lesions.)