this road. But now that she had begun—was indeed close to her goal—her repression and denial was outright … cowardly!
She had toyed with my emotions, I felt. She had presented herself as a complex person of merit, someone who might understand me. I had been fooled. Betrayed! Could this dull person possibly be the young woman I thought I loved as a daughter? My god. She had revealed herself as spineless, shallow, listless—common.
There remained but one more session before the August hiatus. I did not care to attend. Why waste an hour listening to the patient’s vacant chattering? I decided instead that I wanted to see what she looked like, in the flesh, for real. My goal: to erase the ideal image of her I had been carrying within me all this long year.
I wanted to see with my own eyes that she was an ordinary girl. Perhaps she really was the common-looking woman I’d seen in the elevator, she of the matted brown hair, flushed cheek, and sweaty brow. Unlovely. I would be released from caring if she did not conform to the lovely vision I had constructed in my mind: if her movements were not graceful and delicate; if her eyes were not intelligent; if the swell of her lips was not the perfect portal for the creamed-coffee flow of her voice. I thought of the patient’s flaws as I had learned of them through the eyes of her mother and the therapist: the frizzy hair, “dirty” blond; the eyes that go “dark”; the low, “disgusting” gums; thinness to the point of seeming ill. The “weird” triangular head she had ascribed to herself, Yossele Rosensaft’s head: ugly on a woman. I would station myself before the elevators at the end of the patient’s hour and wait to lay eyes upon this flawed, disgusting, unlovely creature.
I stood before the three elevators at the appointed time. The eyes of the cherubs rolled left then right, following the path of the cabs as they rode up and down the shafts. The center car made a slow descent: stops on seven, four, two; on the mezzanine—could they not walk down!—finally at the lobby. At last the doors rolled back: to reveal the plain woman with matted hair! Her hair, still matted and unruly. The flushed face now red with a pimply rash. She duck-walked forward with rounded shoulders.
Immediately the car to the right opened and disgorged its passengers. And a young woman emerged: another woman who might be the patient! Brown hair, skinny, curly hair—who could tell under such a mop of hair if a head is “triangular”? Perhaps she was indeed the patient, fluffing up her hair to hide the shape of her skull. She, too, walked toward me, her step martial, strident, ungainly.
I turned and followed them out of the lobby. Which one was my patient? Oh, God, why did I not think to say good morning, so that each might reply and reveal herself through the sound of her voice? I trailed behind them as they walked toward Market Street, at which point each turned and went a separate way. I stood there dancing from foot to foot, unable to decide in which direction I should go, feeling such disdain for them that it came into my mind to think, Unworthy bitches! When suddenly I realized the elevators were not done for the day; car upon car would yet discharge its passengers.
I raced back to the lobby. I was sweating, still shifting from foot to foot. The guard fixed his gaze upon me.
He came at me in two long strides.
What is the trouble here? he demanded, his powerful body towering over me.
He knows what I am about! I thought desperately. He knows I am a threat! Yet I managed to reply:
I am late. Meeting someone. And I am agitated at my tardiness.
I heard a deep chord of skepticism rumbling in his chest, saw his eyes running over me like those of the cherubs, his beautiful, frightful countenance as unmoving as their bronze faces.
Then, behind him, the left elevator opened its doors.
Over the guard’s shoulder I saw her: the young woman who had lived in my mind all these months. Slim as an iris stem. A nimbus of brown hair suddenly ignited by a band of sunlight. Delicate cheekbones. Chin pointed like the fulcrum of a heart. Movement as elegant as a willow. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?