“Men are shy,” he said.
“I was just stirring things up.”
“No, forget it,” he said. He knew he was fine. He was better than fine. He had observed enough to know that. The men in his family happened to be well endowed. He had seen his father’s penis. And when his brother reached puberty, it became clear he was going to be in the money too. She could write Rex and ask him, if she wanted to, they were so close. Or he could get a medical book and let her look him up, measure him and look him up. There was a sexy idea.
Now they were going to talk about Morel. Somehow the die was cast. He felt it. She felt it.
But she got up, yet again, and said, “I have to do something about the light if I’m going to stay here. I’ll get a couple of candles, if that’s all right.”
He nodded vigorously. She left the room and he added a little more hot water to the bath. The geyser rumbled the way it did when a new demand was placed on it. Crush me, he commanded it.
She was sensitive to lighting. She hated the overhead light in this room. He was sorry for her. He wanted to help. She had a way of making things worse. Now the idea that he was going to hear something much worse than he’d expected was growing. She was in love with Morel. Or she was falling in love with Morel. Or they’d done it and now she was sorry. Never, he thought. He was being extreme. Or they’d done it and she wasn’t sorry. It had been wonderful and now she didn’t know what to do. He would have to help her. That was going to be his role. All her preambling was making things worse.
She brought in two tall candles in a candelabrum, a wobbly craft object from Uganda. She tried different floor placements for the candelabrum, finally settling on a spot to his right, near the wall. She turned out the ceiling light.
They sighed together. “This is mysterious,” he said. The new lighting tended to make the scene more extreme. She was mainly a shape to him. Half her face was in shadow. Her hair looked wild, as though it were swelling outward as he looked at her. She had taken her bandeau off. The Medusa effect he was seeing had to be an optical illusion or a consequence of the steamy atmosphere.
He asked, “What are those paper flowers that expand from nothing into complex blooms when you put them in water called?”
She was blank. “Paper flowers was what we called them. I don’t think I ever knew any other name for them, like expando flowers or something like that. Paper flowers.”
He said, “But of course there are all kinds of paper flowers.”
“I know.”
The wavering light the candles produced was fundamentally unhelpful.
Go first, he thought, but too late because she was saying in a constricted voice that they had to talk about Davis now, it was the right time.
Resentment drove him to say, hotly just under his breath, “Son of a bitch.” She didn’t hear it. She was continuing. This was not something she was enjoying, at least.
“Ray… I want to go two or three times a week to Davis, go on a regular basis instead of off and on the way I do now. I have really decided. That’s one thing. So it’s going to cost something we need to budget for.”
He made an ill-considered dismissive gesture, to show that the money was nothing, ill-considered since his arms were underwater and the gesture splashed water out of the tub, alarming her instead of the reverse.
He apologized.
She said, “The more I go the sooner it’s over. I don’t plan to be going to him forever. So that’s one thing. I love you. And now the other thing is that I need it to be agreed that I don’t tell you anything about what we discuss, our sessions. This is standard in therapy, but it’s going to be hard for you, for us, because it’s so unlike the way our life together has always been. And I know you’ll be curious, but I want you to promise you’ll just leave these sessions as terra incognita. I know you. I know the way you try to get things out of me. You do it almost automatically, you can’t help it. So I need you to promise that you won’t. I want a pledge. That you’ll try.”
“Is this pledge something your doctor proposed?”
She didn’t want to answer.
“Why?” she asked him.
“I’d just be curious to know who it emanated from, him or you?”
“Both.”
“Okay, that’s fine, but you give me pause in a certain way. And we should discuss this now, I guess. Because what I see is, okay, you’re going into therapy, psychotherapy, and the money is not an issue, you understand, that’s all fine. But here’s a consideration. I’d like to understand how this… process… this process can be useful to you if you have to observe certain limits in what you can tell him about your life. That is, our life, your life with me.” He thought of Boyle’s chamber.
He continued. “He would consider me a spy.”
“You
“Well,” he said. Despite the heat of the bath, he felt a sensation of cold in his chest, like a lozenge the size of a bar of soap.
“I apologize for raising this, but I can’t help it. Is this correct?… that a whole constituent of your life and the problems it causes will be left out. We’re agreed on that? I mean, I know we are, but I seem to be asking for reassurance…”
She was silent. He needed to be able to see her face better. The abominable lighting was against him.
Finally she said, “I don’t see that as a problem.”
“Okay, you mean you accept these limitations… And you don’t think that leaving all that out will, well, moot the process you’re… paying for?”
She was slow to answer. He thought, In the States the agency has its own roster of cued-in shrinks for this kind of thing. Talk about sinecures.
“I accept,” she said.
“Then it’s fine.”
Maybe I shouldn’t do this, he thought, saying, “Maybe I shouldn’t ask you what I’m about to ask you. But it will just be this once. I would just like to know in a general way
“How can you stand this?” she murmured, meaning the ambience, the heat, and not that she was relenting or showing sympathy toward him.
She was trembling slightly. “You know why. At least you know why I went to him initially.”
They went through it. She had thought her urine looked too dark. Ray had been dismissive. She had gone to Davis Morel and Ray had turned out to be right, but Davis had discovered something else. He had looked at her and seen something and had questioned her.
Ray sat up straight in the tub. This was new.
He held his breath while she talked, so he could hear everything. Because Davis had listened to her and gone beyond the original complaint that had brought her to him he had discovered that she was suffering from hypoadrenia, which was not something Ray should worry about and which was essentially being taken care of. Davis had questioned her about her energy level, about which she had complained listlessly and endlessly at home. Because Davis had listened to her he had found something that Ray with his congenital optimism had never acknowledged. She was telling him more about hypoadrenia than he needed to hear. What it was was obvious. Her energy had been low. She’d been having adrenal insufficiency due, most probably, to the universal cause, stress… although stress included not just emotional but physical, chemical, and thermal varieties. He had tested her for the Ragland effect and it had been positive. Now she was taking glandular supplements and heavy B complex and malic acid and magnesium and she was enormously improved. The whole thing had been fixed so rapidly that she hadn’t bothered to mention it to him. The extra supplements she was taking fitted in with the regular vitamin pills they took. So that had been the physical side of why she began with Morel.
He could read between the lines. His attempts to buck her up and tell her to rest had been a mistake, a form of letting her down. She didn’t have to say so directly. It had been a mistake to judge her by his own condition, which was that his energy level went up and down too. His policy was to ignore his fatigue. He thought, I could be Bartleby in ten minutes, little does she know… I could stop, freeze… I could permanently relax… terminal relaxation, retire physically, stop exerting. But he couldn’t retire. They hadn’t figured that out yet, but it was coming up.
