“Sit,” she said. I didn’t move. “Come on,” she said. “You’re scaring the shit out of me.” I sat. She pulled an armchair, also new, over from near her desk so she would be only a foot away. She sat forward, leaning her elbows on her knees. “If you’re in trouble, I’m sorry, but I really don’t want to see you. I’m not over it, okay? And I don’t want to start up again.” Suddenly, her eyes brimmed with tears. “I’m just not made that way. I can take a lot but once I’m gone, I’m gone. You know what I’m saying? I don’t care if you’re sorry. You know, you were wrong. I’m nailing that motherfucker. His research was shit. Even he’s admitting that the Stanford group’s replication of his crappy study was kosher.” She was babbling as far as I was concerned. “Stanford?” I mumbled. “Yes! Haven’t you seen the Stanford data? They replicated Samuel and showed the kids are influenced at less than thirty percent—”
“Diane, stop—”
“No, I can’t stop. That’s why I don’t want to see you, because I know I can’t stop. These last four months have been like death. I really feel — I mean really feel — like you stepped on my heart. I know, I know. In two years I’ll be laughing about you. But I won’t take the chance of you hurting me again. Fuck love.” She brushed away a flip of hair that wasn’t there. Her new style was straight back. She sighed. “I’m sorry. Okay,” she sighed. “What do you want?”
“What is that color?” I asked. “What color?”
“Your hair? That’s not a real color.”
For a moment she stared. “Get the fuck out of here,” she said and stood up.
I keened, head in my hands, and begged, “Don’t do this to me, please.” I was blubbering again. “Just let me talk. You’re my colleague, you’re my friend, you’re the only one—” I breathed fast to stop the tears and then took one sustained inhalation to make more words, “You’re the only one I can talk this out with. Okay? Susan can’t help me — she’s, she’s …”
“Second-rate?” Diane said. “When did you find that out?” I looked up, wiping my eyes. Diane had sat down again, only sideways, her legs over the armrest. She muttered to the window, “Listen to me. Now I’m pissed off at poor Susan. She did her best with you. You’re just a hard case. A hard-ass motherfucker who has the gall to come in here and cry.” She turned to me. “Where do you get off crying?”
“You won’t help me,” I said.
She swung her legs to the floor and slapped her newly skinny thigh. “Help you with what!”
“I’ve met two people who are sick.” I took a breath, relaxing a little as I began my report. Talking would help. “One of them is at ease only if he’s putting people under stress. He promises rewards for loyalty and sacrifice, finds a weakness, and when the person is no longer useful, even if they’re not a real threat, he hurts them as badly as he can. He tries to break anyone he can unless they’re totally passive—”
Diane, nodding wearily as if she were bored, interrupted, “It’s called sadism. What is this? A quiz?”
“Right. He’s a sadist. A psychological sadist. Nothing overt. Nothing illegal. He’s not a crude torturer — he doesn’t use his fists, or his cock, or a belt. Every family member has been affected. His son was goaded into a thinly disguised suicide. His wife is alcoholic. His daughter is—”
Diane interrupted, “A sexless, passive—”
I stopped her. “No.”
“Okay, she’s a prostitute. She’s a drug addict who flicks abusive men. Do I get the dishwasher and the trip to Hawaii?”
“No. She’s a narcissist. She’s strong. She has great inner strength. So she found a defense against him by murdering her real self before he could. She’s become a heartless mirage. She transforms herself into a dream figure for every man she encounters who seems worth the trouble to have them fall in love with her. She wins them like trophies and presents them to Daddy in a bizarre symbolic act of incest.”
Diane smirked. “Was she foolish enough to go after you?”
I nodded. “She even bothered to pretend to have bought my book on incest and read it years ago—”
“Is that an assumption? Your book was a bestseller.”
“Not an assumption. I fell for it at first. But later, I had a moment alone to check. On the back page I saw the remnant of a new sticker from a second-hand bookstore.”
“Which one?”
“The Strand.”
“Kind of ironic, no?”
“Ironic?” I asked.
“We used to go there. Remember, Rafe? On Sundays we’d have bagels in bed and walk in the Village?” Diane turned her head and frowned at the door. “So how was she? A true narcissist should be a great lover — at least in the beginning. Totally devoted to your pleasure, huh? Must have been the blowjob of your life.”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t admit what I had done, that I had played an unscrupulous trick to confirm my diagnosis. Diane, of all people, would have had reason to be appalled.
“That good, eh?” Diane got up, walked to her desk, and opened a drawer. “Okay, here’s your moment of triumph.” She came out with a pack of Camel Lights, removing one and lighting it. “Yes, you’ve got me smoking again. You not only broke my heart, you’ve got my lungs.” She took a long drag. “The worst thing is, you can’t smoke anywhere in this fucking self-righteous world. Every asshole on earth thinks they have the right to live forever.” She exhaled a foul cloud toward me. “God. I had an interview with Lisa Dorfman’s father — a court-ordered interview to determine if he was rehabilitated enough to have visitation. Remember what he did to her? Fucked her up the ass in front of her baby sister and then put her in a tub of scalding water? So I light up a cigarette and Mr. Dorfman asks me to put it out. Second-hand smoke is dangerous, he says, I’m putting his health at risk. I should have put it out in his eye.” She took another drag, lids shutting halfway with pleasure. “What do you want?” she asked and exhaled another cloud.
“They’re happy.”
“Who’s happy? Oh. You mean the sadist and the narcissist? You know that would make a good name for a heavy metal group.” She picked up a square glass ashtray, returned to the chair, and balanced the ashtray on her knee. She tapped it with her cigarette. “They’re happy? What do you mean — happy?”
“I mean, they have all the symptoms of their diseases, except one. They’re not unhappy. They function well. They don’t mind the emptiness of their emotional lives. They see everyone else as weak. They are content. They are in homeostasis.”
“God bless us, every one,” Diane said, taking another drag. She squinted at the window, chin up, and blew out a long thin stream. “So? Mazel tov, they’re happy. Who are they, anyway? How do you know them?”
“The narcissist is Halley.”
Diane shook her head, bewildered. “Halley?”
“My former patient, Gene Kenny? She’s the woman he left his wife for. And the sadist, her father, was his boss.”
“Was his boss?”
“You don’t know,” I said, realizing my mistake. “It was after we split up.”
“Split up? Is that how you think of it? Jesus Christ. That’s a masterpiece of understatement.” She pressed her cigarette out. “Wait a minute.” She twisted and tried to slide the ashtray onto her desk. “What the hell—” she couldn’t reach, so she stood up to put it there while talking, “—are you doing? Making contact with a patient’s—?”