sorry for myself and stroking the grass until a round object found my fingers. I held it up and recognized my patient’s lucky cat’s eye marble.
Making my way back down the driveway, I nearly collided with Camille and her eighteen-year- old twins. She lifted her sunglasses, squinting her eyes, as she searched for me in her mental rolodex.
“I’m Nora Goodman,” I said, giving her a break. “Howard’s analyst.”
“Of course you are, dear,” she said. “Howie pointed you out to me at…” She tilted her head back and stuck her index finger in my direction. “I’m guessing the Library Foundation gala. Right after your Richard joined our board. One of my better nominations if I do say so myself.”
So that’s how Richard got on the fancy board-of-the-moment. He’d been vague about the particulars of that bit of good fortune. Puzzle pieces appeared in my mind’s eye. Camille had been unhappy with Howard. Richard and Camille were cozy. Howard was dead. Richard sent an over-the-top floral arrangement.
What was up here?
Was something up here?
My mind refused to focus.
The twins in their matching navy blazers stood on either side of their mother, swaying in impatient synchrony from one foot to the other, scuffing their penny loafers on the asphalt, looking more like their late father than I was prepared to bear.
“Boys,” she said, “say hello to Dr. Goodman. You have her to thank for your daddy having shown signs of being human in his last few months.” She threw the words out between us like small change.
The polite move would have been to extend my hand, but I was holding tight to that marble, to all I had left of Howard. To make the moment even more awkward, I couldn’t come up with anything appropriate to say. In my mind, the urge to confess culpability for Howard’s death played tug-of-war with the impulse to accuse Camille of responsibility.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said finally. “It doesn’t seem real to me yet.”
“That reaction is quite normal, I’m told,” Howard’s widow said. “But look at me, telling you of all people that.” She gave a short laugh. “It’s ironic. Howie was always so very careful in his little laboratory.”
She held eye contact a bit too long, I thought.
Then—though admittedly she might have been reacting to the sun’s glare or the dusty west wind—I could have sworn she winked.
Chapter Three
I went right back to work the day after Howard’s death, just like nothing had happened. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t the wisest thing to have done, given my clinical performance in some sessions that week. Then again, what would have been the other option? To call my living patients and say I was canceling their time? Either lying about the reason or running the risk of violating Howard’s confidentiality in the process and—god forbid—revealing my own limitations? Inserting my personal loss and self-doubt into their treatment? No way. An analyst knows how to deal with her emotions. A real psychoanalyst picks herself up and gets right back behind the couch.
Without Howard in my schedule, however, my world felt out of balance, like a mobile missing a hanging part. I plowed numbly through the abbreviated workdays that followed, trying to proceed as if Howard were just on vacation, though the puritanical Howard didn’t believe in vacations.
Unlike Howard, Allison Forsyth was always late to session. She was late for everything, a habit she knew most people perceived as wealthy arrogance. And Allison did have a staggering mound of money. The exact number of millions her oilman grandfather had stashed away for her in various trusts and limited partnerships was a matter of perpetual debate in the tight social circles of Alamo Heights. But it wasn’t just her net worth that made others resent her. It was her bearing, a distracted aloofness that people read as a refusal to be bothered with life’s ordinary concerns.
Of course, it wasn’t that simple. I understood that her depression made her move as if under water. Some days I’d watch her from my window as she sat slumped in her Range Rover, summoning the energy to pull her ninety-eight pounds up my stairs. Once moving, she’d hug close to her dusty vehicle, to the fence, to my building, her feet scraping along the flagstones. Hers wasn’t a runway walk, but that of someone who feared losing contact with earth.
Like Howard though, Allison had come for analysis because of marital problems. Her husband Travis Forsyth, a pit bull of a litigation attorney, had one day—out of the blue, from Allison’s perspective—declared himself fed up with her complaining, packed up his ten-piece set of monogrammed leather luggage and moved to a rejuvenated downtown apartment in the historic Majestic Theater building. Allison was undone. She’d assumed Travis had married her for money and had banked on his greed for her security.
Allison had made a meek eleven-minutes-late entrance the day after Howard’s memorial service and proceeded to lie on my couch as if in a coffin, eyes closed, shrouded in her trademark shapeless dress—this one a print of tiny blue roses. As usual, she seemed to have gone out of her way to be unattractive. She was thirty-five, passed for fifty, never wore makeup or styled her limp blonde hair. I spent sessions making her over in my mind, imagining how pretty she could be if she took care of herself.
For most of the three-plus years we’d worked together, Allison had complained that my “stingy forty-five-minute appointments” were too short for an adequate detailing of the pain wrought by Travis’ betrayal. In the beginning, I’d felt sympathetic. I had no reason to doubt that Travis was a cad. I’d seen him once or twice and found him good-looking in that hair-combed-straight-back, luxury-used-car-salesman kind of way. Certainly he seemed to possess all of the calculating confidence that his wife lacked. But as time went on, it became clear that Allison was a whiner of magnificent proportion. Our sessions became the repository of all shades of that darkness, from gray mopiness to black despair—especially after Travis began making the rounds with a bounteous supply of women (every one of them beautiful, of course, or at least well done-up), women that my patient tearfully referred to as “Travy’s professional bimbos.”
In the weeks preceding Howard’s death, however, Allison’s pattern had shifted from this non-stop complaining to a clock-stopping silence that gave me an overwhelming impulse to fidget.
“You’re quiet again today,” I said, after what seemed like an eternity.
“I don’t know why,” Allison said. “Maybe I’ve already told you everything.” Her eyes and mouth resumed the closed position.
I was restless, itching to make a grocery list, just to have something to do. No paper at hand, I settled for penciling the coming week’s schedule into my date book, only to give that up when Allison, perhaps having heard the soft scratch of lead, shifted position. At that point, I’d been with her for all of five minutes.
“You won’t believe this,” she said then, probably sensing my impatience.
Ideally, I’d have explored this comment in a deeper way, wondered with her why she chose those particular words when she might as well have employed Wait until I tell you or Fasten your seatbelt or any number of other
