These two aspects had been separated as I watched her coming towards me through the snow. I pictured her again, trying to catch the carefree, sensual elegance she had projected before I realised who she was. A distinct pang of arousal went through me. And at once a preposterous surmise came into my head: she changed into the leather skirt between sessions to pick up men and have sex with them for money in the park. I could go there now and find her with one knee provocatively cocked as she leaned pale and delicately shivering against a cedar post of the trellised walkway that led down to the lake…
I finished my coffee, read a newspaper, then walked the two blocks to her building. As I entered her consulting room, I saw that she had changed her clothes again: in place of the leather skirt was a demure pleated tweed affair, with thick brown wool tights underneath, and house slippers on her feet. She looked rather aloof and forbidding.
I lay down on the couch, facing away from her. For a moment I almost baulked at telling her the things that had just been going through my mind, but at a hundred dollars an hour, I couldn’t afford to suppress anything that might prove illuminating.
‘After I passed you on the street just now’, I began, ‘I went to a diner where I started thinking about why seeing you like that disturbed me, which it did, and I found myself drifting into this fantasy…’
I described all the things I had thought and felt and imagined as I sat in the diner. As I spoke, I was aware of the sound of her pen scratching across the pages of the notebook she always jotted in furiously while I talked. It occurred to me that this notebook contained a great deal of intimate material about me, and I wondered if there were any circumstances under which she would show it to someone else. Was she bound by any code of privacy or therapists’ version of the Hippocratic oath? What, in fact, bound her to me other than the fees I paid her; the fees I realised now I had been faintly annoyed to see glistening in that expensive-looking leather skirt?
I must have been speaking for longer than I realised: it seemed we had barely begun to discuss my fantasy of her picking up men in the park when a soft buzzing filled the room, marking the arrival of Dr Schrever’s next patient.
As I got up to go, Dr Schrever looked at me in a way that seemed for a moment uneasy.
‘By the way,’ she said, ‘I wasn’t sure whether to tell you this, but I think on balance I should. You mentioned passing me in the street, but I haven’t been out of this room all afternoon.’
I looked at her, dumbstruck.
‘In any case,’ she went on, ‘I was with another patient when you arrived. You must have seen him leave while you were in the waiting room.’
Now that I thought of it, I had seen him leave: a lugubrious-looking man who always preceded me that day of the week. But so certain had I been of encountering Dr Schrever half an hour earlier that it hadn’t even crossed my mind to infer from his presence anything that might have brought this into question. I had seen him, but apparently not taken account of him.
‘Perhaps it disturbs you to think I have other customers?’ she asked, looking at me levelly.
‘You mean… patients?’
‘Well, yes,’ she said with the trace of a smile, and I realised she had been referring light-heartedly to my fantasy, presumably to defuse any embarrassment I might have felt about it, with a note of humor, and I appreciated this.
Even so, as I left, I felt rather worried that I could have made such a blatant error of recognition, and as I walked back toward the park, where the snow was now lying in raised veins along every shiny black branch and twig, forming an exact white replica of each tree, I wondered who the woman was who had smiled at me in the street and said hello.
I walked idly over to the opening where I had seen her disappear into the park, and even went so far as to go down the winding path that led to the lake.
There was a small, rustic shelter where the path turned. I looked in; half-hoping, I suppose, to see the woman there. It was empty, of course. I stood there for a moment, watching the snowflakes dissolving in the black water, parts of which still had great plates of ice floating on or just under the surface.
Then I went home.
The next time I was in my office, I made a deliberate effort to settle the question of whether there really were grounds for thinking I had an intruder. The moving bookmark no longer seemed very mysterious, and given my misidentification of Dr Schrever I now began to wonder whether I might not have been paying proper attention when I went through the phone bill. Perhaps I had called that number after all, forgotten whose it was, and misread the time of night recorded on the printout. I looked for the bill now, but I couldn’t find it. I assumed I must have thrown it away after paying it, and the cleaner had emptied the wastepaper basket.
In the act of searching for it, however, I found myself for the first time really noticing the contents of this room. It hadn’t occurred to me to take stock of them before; after all, why would anyone waste a moment on such things – objects so remote from any active use or ownership they’d staled away into little more than dust-shrouded memories of themselves? But my curiosity was aroused, and I embarked on a conscious inventory of the place.
Black-stained wooden chairs and bookcases; off-white walls; grey carpet and doors; a four-drawer metal filing cabinet with a Hewlett Packard printer curled up on top of it; the two oversized desks by the latticed window, a Dell desktop computer on one of them, on the other a giant stapler; a five-to-seven-cup Hot Pot Coffee Maker in its opened box; my own wooden desk with cables running around its legs, and a cache of styrofoam peanuts under its base – out of reach of the cleaner’s vacuum.
There was a door I hadn’t opened: behind it a closet with an air-conditioner hibernating on the floor, pleated wings folded neatly into its body. Some clothes in a dry cleaner’s wrap hung on a metal hanger from a peg, under a woman’s maroon beret. The late Barbara Hellermann’s, perhaps? I closed that door. A few curled and fading cards stood on the window ledge. I opened them; saw they were all to Barbara from her students: ‘Thank you for being you’; ‘Your generosity and understanding will live with me forever.’ A clock in the shape of a sunflower stood on a metal shelf next to several amateurish, brightly glazed pottery mugs. Although these things were of little interest in themselves, I did find it interesting that I hadn’t even registered them until now. On another shelf was a bronze bowl with pebbles, a piece of quartz, a fir-cone, a tarnished coin – Bulgarian, on closer inspection – a key-ring and a jay feather. There was a framed Matisse still-life on the wall, a small cork bulletin board with an old teaching schedule pinned to it, and next to that a rough-edged square of what looked like handmade paper with the following quotation printed on it in gold letters:
I want to do something splendid. Something heroic or wonderful, that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead.
I think I shall write books.
Louisa May Alcott
The ceiling was made of perforated white drop-tiles, and was stained yellow from a leak in one corner. The light came from three plastic-paneled fluorescent strips.
Completing my examination of the room without any great sense of satisfied curiosity, I found myself thinking of Barbara Hellermann. I pictured her coming in here, hanging up her beret and her dry cleaning, glancing cheerfully at her cards, her uplifting quotation, taking her five-to-seven-cup Hot Pot from its box to brew coffee in for her class, setting out the pottery mugs… The sense of a sweet-natured, diligent soul came into me. I imagined her as an elderly lady, and hoped that her death had been peaceful.
CHAPTER 2