She lifted her arm. That eased my hand off her shoulder. She touched my cheek with her fingers, stroking me. “You have a beautiful face,” she commented. “Tell me. Is that the same speech you made to Gene?” She backed away. There was not a trace of malice in her expression or in her voice. “I really don’t need help, Doctor. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I do terrible things. But they don’t make me feel terrible. I’m happy. And believe it or not, I can make you happy.” She waved the manila envelope gently for a goodbye. “Give me a call if you feel like learning to enjoy life,” she said and left.
I had no guide, no text I could follow after I took that risk and it failed. Twenty minutes later, the big door to Stick’s office whooshed open for me to enter. I had to be prepared for the possibility that Halley had reported my diagnosis to him, although I doubted she actually would. (Especially if I was on the money.) Still, if she did, what were the consequences? My position was untenable — I wanted to treat these people and they didn’t believe they were ill. Therapy depends on the patient desiring a cure. If I took Halley at her word (as you know, an Olympian feat for a shrink) I was sadly mistaken and she was a paragon of adjustment. My training, the accumulated knowledge of dozens of geniuses studying the human condition, had taught me she couldn’t be happy. Yet she functioned. There were no symptoms of distress. Settling into the black leather chair across from Stick’s country French table I had to allow for the possibility that she was right. I pronounced Gene cured and he committed suicide; I said she was mentally ill and she thrived. At what point did I have to admit that if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, then, at the very least, it was going to be able to live its life as a duck?
“Well,” Stick said, palms out, as if he were surrendering, “I have to hand it to you. I just got off the phone with Andy. They’ve licked the I/O slowdown and—” Stick shook his head. “Goddamn, Andy actually gave credit to somebody else. Tim Gallent—”
“Yes,” I said, glad to be on neutral ground. Not that I felt safe. I knew Stick well enough so that I didn’t relax because he appeared relaxed. Halley might have told him, anyway. His self-control was formidable. “They were rechecking it early this morning,” I continued. “Apparently Tim beat it last night.”
“That’s the first time Andy’s sounded like a real manager.” Stick winked at me. “Maybe he’ll come after my job next.”
“No,” I said in a rush. “Not in his personality. As I told you, he’s a prodigy and he’s adjusted by—”
Stick halted me with a raised hand. And with laughter. Deep, self-satisfied laughter. “Okay, okay. I was joking. I know Andy knows his place.” He fixed me with a steady beam from his dark eyes. “And we’ll both have to make sure we keep it that way. We don’t want to repeat our mistakes, right?”
“Right,” I agreed and lowered my eyes. Something was wrong with me. This interview, with a powerful man behind a desk, and me, a supplicant in the chair, insecure, carrying secrets, unable to meet his eyes — I had already lived this chapter in the story of my life and it shouldn’t be happening at my age and with what I had learned. How would you answer your own challenge, Dr. Neruda? I asked myself. Are you happy?
“Rafe?” Stick knocked on the bleached wood of his desk. “Hello? I lost you there.”
“I’m sorry.” Get your head up: hold that gaze. “What were you saying?”
“Did you get a chance to form an opinion of Jack Truman at the barbecue — I saw you talked a little.” Stick smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “You can’t blame me, Rafe. You’ve done such wonders downstairs, I’m tempted to move you to the Glass Tower.”
“His wife is worried about their son,” I said. “She’s getting bad advice from her pediatrician.”
“Really?” Stick lowered his chin, pinched his nose with his fingers, then stroked his eyebrows, finally locking his hands together. He leaned back. “Something you can help with?”
“Um …” I was having trouble concentrating — all the beloved theories were dancing upside down in my head and I found the view of their ungainly thighs and flipped skirts grotesque. “It’s simple really. The boy just needs an adequate reading tutor, mostly to calm the mother down.” I cleared my throat, shifting to the edge of my chair, which was designed to keep the sitter angled slightly back, passive compared to the straight up-and-down look of Stick across the desk. “My guess is Jack’s withdrawing from the family because he’s got a crush on Halley. One possibility is that Amy Truman is blowing this up into a crisis to call her wayward husband back home. Another is that the boy has intuited the marital trouble and this is his distress signal.” I waited for Stick to react. When he failed to, I continued, “But dealing with the child’s reading block directly will suffice. For a family dysfunction, it’s pretty routine. And Jack’s tough. He won’t come apart when Halley dumps him.”
Stick cracked his knuckles. I winced. “She’s close to dumping him?” he asked.
“You tell me,” I said and stood up. I had to gain height on him, and freedom of movement.
“You’re going?” Stick asked.
I moved aimlessly toward his windows. The parking lot was full below. Theodore Copley was in charge of every life down there. Not as a matter of objective fact. But that’s what he must feel as he watched them arrive, docking at his desire, looking up as they entered his house of worship. He was a very little Westchester god to the world, but, all the same, from the perspective of this window he was God. “I feel restless, that’s all.”
“You want to go for a swim?” he asked. “I’m going to the gym after our meeting.”
I watched a Federal Express van pause at the security gate on its way out. “I don’t swim,” I said, a silly lie, a private form of rejection, told because I wanted so badly to disassociate myself from him and everything he did.
“No kidding.” Stick swiveled in my direction. “How did that happen? Didn’t you go to summer camp?”
“I was a poor kid. I grew up in the city.”
“But you were a ward of your uncle, right? He was a friend of Edgar’s father? Wasn’t he—”
I interrupted, “—Not until I was a teenager. Uncle didn’t want me to go to a regular camp. Mostly I took advanced courses offered to bright high school kids during the summer. You know, at colleges.”
“So you never learned?”
“I’m a little frightened of the water,” I said. “Don’t want to go back to the womb, I guess.” I shrugged, smiled at Stick, and returned to my chair.
“You know how my father taught me to swim?” Stick asked. I shook my head. “We vacationed in a cabin in Maine, on a pond. A lake really, at least in size. A large pond. He told me he was going to teach me. He rowed me to the center of Walker Pond, where it was very deep. He took off my little life jacket and threw me in.” Stick watched for my reaction as if he were the shrink and I the patient.
But that makes no sense. I am the doctor, I reminded myself. Perhaps I should look in my wallet, show my identification, call an ambulance, put him in a straitjacket and order electroshock. We could jolt those self-confident brain cells, make them misfire, and cure him of his efficiency.
“Why are you smiling?” Stick asked.
“What happened?” I asked. “When he threw you in, I mean.”
“He rowed away. I don’t know how far. Far enough. He said, ‘You’d better swim, boy, or you’ll drown.’ He didn’t have to say that. It was pretty obvious.”