out of the past, made me go back into all that … muck, that nasty business, when it all could have been packed away in a clean little box and put away for good.
She wheeled around to face the ocean, then the door again. You were always like this, she said. Can’t you ever leave well enough alone?
Then she wobbled off the patio in her blue satin slippers.
After several seconds, during which the patient swore to her therapist she felt nothing, she, too, left the patio. She found her mother in the bedroom.
So it’s all my fault, the patient said, walking into the room.
Her mother ignored her. She was arranging and rearranging the skirt of the midnight-blue, silk-and-organdy dress.
Now what in the world will I tell Father when he sees I’m so upset? What will I tell him? He’ll take one look at me and see I’m all upset. Oh! she sighed, stroking the sleeve of the gown. How can I possibly enjoy myself tonight?
113.
My dear patient drove home through the foggy lanes, again going around and around her lost circuit, this time returning perpetually to the Lodge at Pebble Beach rather than the Inn at Spanish Bay. The repeating sight of the stone driveway, valets leaping at the head of it, made her neck sweat. For each circuit gave her another opportunity to decide whether or not to see her father; and each time she had to remind herself that he would be in the bar by the last hole, whatever they called it here, the Nineteenth Hole or the Hole in One or the Caddy Shack or the Driver or the Mulligan or the Cheap Shot Inn—she had visited him in all of them. Her father’s hale-thee-well greeting. The back-slapping men. The introductions to Jims and Joes she would never see again. Once more she would tell herself, Why bother? And then she would try to leave the place, only to keep finding it again and again.
Dr. Schussler tried to soften the effect of the visit. She told the patient that she was right to wonder if her mother did indeed love her. Because her mother did love her, as best she could; which was to say not very deeply or very well.
Do you think your sister basks in the glow of adoring love? she asked the patient. Could your mother truly see a daughter, any daughter, without also seeing someone to serve her, adorn her life, reassure her that she was beautiful and lovely and loved?
You’re right, replied the patient. But it makes me feel monstrous.
Monstrous? But how?
Not being able to feel love. What sort of monster doesn’t love her mother?
You could never, ever fulfill her, replied the therapist. You know that.
There was a long pause.
You know that, repeated the doctor.
Yes, the patient said in a whisper. Yes. I do.
And at that the session closed.
114.
The therapist was taking an extended holiday. And so fourteen days of the Thanksgiving break stood before me, each a stake in a high fence (for so I envisioned it) over which I had to leap if I were to survive without my dear patient. Despite believing myself bettered by my association with her, I knew I could not rest. Long experience had taught me the wiliness of my demons, the strength of my crepuscular self, and how swiftly it might return to claim me.
For the holidays fell upon me as they had a long year ago: the smiling cardboard Indians and Pilgrims taped to store windows everywhere; the disgustingly cheerful music; the twinkling lights on streetlamps; the empty lobby wherein vacant elevators continued to ride up and down, up and down, ogled by the cherubs; the building’s long, silent corridors where dusk gathered at the far ends. And Thanksgiving Day itself dawned as unpleasantly as it had the year before: cold with intermittent rain. Once more the streets were filled with haunted men who smelled of terrible things.
I feared I might not sustain myself through the day. Yet I did not fall. I was not fine, but I did not fall. And during the immediately following days—the panic of post-Thanksgiving shopping, the frothed atmosphere as Christmas approached—I seemed to hover just at the margin. Some current, some sort of magnetic field, hummed below me, like a net stretched above the dark zones, into which I did not tumble.
Yet, come the Friday before the patient’s Wednesday return, my supports threatened to desert me. It might have been the rain, which fell with deluvian