an hour the show will start, the fake Roman statues will come to life, or so a sign says. Hughes doesn’t wait. He hurriedly buys a few T-shirts, a coffee mug, a deck of cards, then flees to the adjoining casino where the air feels more breathable. Kills a few hours at a blackjack table. The environment entirely artificial but soothing somehow; it isn’t pretending to be real. A casino is a self-enclosed world, mad in a way but conforming to its own logic. It succeeds, like all delusions, as long as the doors remain shut and reality isn’t allowed to intrude.
Flick of cards, whir of the automatic shuffler. Hughes hits and busts, hits and busts. Stands and is beaten by the dealer’s two face cards. Surely there’s a pattern to it all. Hughes tries to visualize it, the rhythm, the flow that makes up a run of luck. Something mysterious, hidden from the weekend punters. Munin would see it, Hughes is quite sure of that. His colleague has the rare ability to understand the play of physical symptoms, the behaviours, the random thoughts that aren’t so random, after all. A diagnosis is simply an attempt to wrest some sort of meaning from the human chaos. All that messy business of a patient’s life: the false starts, dead ends, and the path that’s left in front of you becoming ever more constricted. You are tired and freighted with baggage. Who wouldn’t want a guide, someone with a map, a way of categorizing and organizing everything? Who wouldn’t welcome someone with a fresh way of looking at things? Who doesn’t desire to have a system? Nothing predetermined. Nothing judgmental. Nothing so procrustean that it couldn’t accept every conceivable complaint, every mad thought, any unsettling act. Munin’s world could even accommodate those absurd “six aspects of love.”
There’s a woman at the slots counting coins in the metal tray. A man at the craps table is rubbing his fingertips on the felt; he touches his heart, he touches his temple, he blows on the dice before rolling them. Hughes would like to believe that these gestures, the small rituals and superstitions, mean something. But he’s a skeptic. He lacks faith. When he’s with his patients, he listens carefully to what is said, and what isn’t. He understands just enough of what they tell him to make a diagnosis, prescribe something, have them come back in a few weeks. But still, after ten years of trying — after what has been said, after what has been done — he knows he’s missing something. He hasn’t grasped the heart of it.
He pretends, of course. He dutifully conducts the examination, completes questionnaires, checks items on a checklist. He fills uncounted files with his painfully acquired observations. He tries to break things down to their essential elements, their six aspects, or nine, or twelve. He records gestures, counts physical symptoms. He shines a light in his patients’ eyes. He sees all that can be seen. But there is a shadow, always.
Munin dials his home number. Out on the Strip, a stream of early-evening traffic, river of people looking up at signs as though they meant something, bright neon bleaching out the heavens. The phone rings. Munin realizes he’s no longer staring at Vegas but at the glass.
He turns away, phone still ringing, and shuts off the television. On the fourth ring the phone clicks over to voice mail and he hears her: “I’m sorry we missed your call.”
Munin didn’t expect to hear Cynthia’s voice live, not really. Imagines her in her workroom in front of the French doors, rapt, late-afternoon sunlight dappled, if that was the word. “You should be outside on a day like today.” She, of course, would remain indoors; moments like this were so rare. “It’s all about the light.” She notices such things, each place with its own signature of sun and dark. The brilliance of beginnings, afternoons swaddled in grey. She has told him about the artists’ studios — sentimentalized notions of workrooms and garrets, filthy, cluttered with paintings, drafty with only the heat from a small wood-burning stove. Chill spaces up the hill in Montmartre that he tries to imagine but cannot. She describes a Paris twilight filtered through Impressionist cloud, the fine soot of centuries over skylight. None of that here, in Montreal. If she’s ever going to succeed as a painter, well, it’s an old argument.
She applies more paint to the canvas as he watches. If she is withdrawn, it’s an inner thing, nothing visible to the naked. He knows enough to stand behind her, not intrude on her line of sight. She’s studying herself in the window. He kisses the nape of her neck. She continues to work. The painting is a self-portrait, another one. It seems narcissistic — a term she would loathe — and he can’t resist recalling the list of cardinal symptoms: grandiosity, the need to be admired, preoccupation with fantasy, a lack of empathy. But he doesn’t want to think about that. He isn’t about to diagnose, he isn’t being asked to analyze. He wants to live this moment, experience it in all its richness, without thinking of what has passed or what will come. Which is hard. Which is impossible; only fools and madmen can manage it.
In the painting her head and shoulders float; there’s no line of breast, curve of belly. The outline of her face holds the colours of a prism — reds, yellows, violets — as if in the wavelengths of light she is depicting a Doppler shift of mood — heat to coolness, near to far — away from here, away from him. But perhaps he’s reading too much into it. He examines the eyes, sky blue, deeply set, clearly hers. But somehow detached from the face as if they were sketched on the windowpane. They are weeping, and the tears seem to bleach the colours of the garden beyond: sun-faded plastic of patio furniture; tired purple flowers; the dusty climbing vines that Cynthia planted along the fence when they first moved here.
“I like it. It’s very good.” And perhaps she hears something in his voice, a tone audible only to her? For she turns away. He takes her hand — her right, not her brush hand — and kisses it, tastes the liquor of paint, turpentine, the hint of dark earth in the cracked terrain of skin.
“What do you like about it?”
“The flowers,” he says, “they’re very nicely done.” He comments only on the background and imagines she doesn’t notice.
“The cheeks are too fat.” She is foreground, Cynthia, always the subject. “Do you think it looks like me?”
How to respond? What is there to say? He’s a trained observer, yes. Surely there is something to be said about the monomania of self-portrait? The body dysmorphia of cheeks fat or thin, eyes sunken as buried desire, pupils like holes burned in canvas. What of the shapes? What of the colours?
If he were to speak now, she would be impatient with him. “I didn’t marry an analyst” — something she has said often. “Don’t tell me what you think, tell me what you feel,” as if they were two separate things, and maybe once they were not. He responds as a husband. “I think it’s wonderful,” caressing her cheek, “it’s a beautiful painting. I wouldn’t change a thing.”
She frowns. He’s patronizing her. Or worse: he’s blind to her inadequacies. She can’t stand that. It’s infuriating. She desires something in him — ruthlessness — that she calls honesty. He can’t manage it.
Cynthia brushes away his comment. Munin retreats to the door. Throughout the exchange she hasn’t turned. Now her profile is one-quarter, one-eighth, nothing, as she remains fixed on her reflection, the brush hesitating over the canvas. She doesn’t say anything more; her eyes don’t follow him as he goes. Something else he notes but doesn’t comment on.
“Cynthia ...?”
He waits for her to respond. The expectation in his voice is audible, but she doesn’t pick up. The phone records the long pause not as hesitation, indecision, analogue thoughts hissing unexpressed, but as something binary — not presence only absence — before he hangs up.
The first aspect of love was narcissism. As in the story of Narcissus, a myth as ancient as love itself. The youth who was condemned to love only himself. When he saw his reflection in a pool of water, he realized his love was unattainable and stabbed himself in the breast.
He
