want to see is a trial, with the pressure mounting, and all of a sudden she’s standing up in the courtroom, saying, ‘Yes, Jesus, what is it?’ I do not wish to have to explain to Judge Pakingham how such a thing happened. Let’s get her into Jackson, look at her for a while, see how she acts. There’s no rush, is there?”
“Oh, hell, Mickey,” says Kasdan brusquely. He checks his watch and rises. “Go for it! And you can include me too. I don’t feel strongly enough about it either way to be the odd man on this. Meanwhile, I’m out of here. Got a lab meeting.” He waves blithely to both of them and is gone.
Lopez too checks his watch. “I must go too, my dear. I’m sorry to have to throw you out into the street.”
“Yes, the freezing cold,” says Lorna, standing and putting away her papers.
Lopez also rises. “It’s good to see you again. I miss you.”
“Really. I didn’t know analysts were supposed to miss their analysands.”
He shrugs. “It is the case that some people are dull and some not, and it is inherently more interesting to talk to the interesting ones. If you don’t tell the board, I won’t either. How have you been getting on?”
“Okay. Living life. Doing my work. You know.”
“Attacks? Dreams?”
“I’m fine, Mickey,” says Lorna in a tone that closes this line of conversation. “But I’d like to ask a favor?”
“Which is…?”
“I want to continue with this patient.”
“With this Dideroff? What do you mean, continue? In what capacity?”
“I want to be on the treatment team. In fact, I want to be the primary. Under you, of course.”
A judicious pause. “You’re not qualified as a therapist. Technically.”
“People a lot less qualified than me see patients every day over there. Student social workers? Interns? It’s called supervised clinical experience.”
She makes herself meet his gaze and relaxes the muscles of her face, to let the persona sag somewhat, trying to show him that this is not some neurotic tic but an honest and reasonable professional proposal, that she is not manipulating or trying to presume on their past relationship.
He says, “This is important to you?”
“Yes. I’ve been in practice for nearly six years and I’ve never seen MMPI test patterns like that. For one thing, she’s showing frank religious mania without any indication on the mania scale. The readings on scale nine are highly unusual in themselves, and combined with the aberrant sexual orientation…I mean it’s practically unique. We could get a paper out of this, the two of us. A new syndrome.”
Lopez listens calmly to this, nodding slightly. When she finishes he says, “And also…?”
She feels a blush starting on her neck. He used to give her that in therapy when she was weaving one of her elaborate gilded verbal curtains to shield the embarrassing lump of true feeling. Nor does she cop now. “Mickey, for crying out loud, it’s professionallyinteresting. Isn’t that enough? You just said it in reference to your practice, and it’s the same for mine. It’s at least a change from deteriorated schizo street people or shitheads trying to fake psychosis, which are the only two flavors I get on a daily basis. C’mon, Mickey.Puh-leeze? “
He grins and lets out a small laugh and throws his arm around her shoulder. “All right, all right! As you know, I’m a sucker for infantile behavior, which is why I’m such a crappy psychiatrist. I’ll call Jackson NP after we get the remand. And I intend to supervise too, so don’t think there’s going to be any funny business! Now, scram! Out of my office!”
“Yes, Doctor.” She bends to kiss him on the cheek and leaves.
In her car, she sits with the door open, the engine roaring, and the air conditioner pumping chilled air at her face, a familiar maneuver of South Florida. She is sweating even more than the heat and humidity require, and she can feel the thump of her heart. She closes the door and lets the car chill down. Her face dries. She slips out of her suit jacket and directs jets of air at her armpits, holding the sleeves of her jersey open for that purpose. She tells herself she should feel great, that she’s just rolled rat bastard Kasdan, faced him down, marshaled her data, won Lopez’s support, successfully lied to him about her psychic state, and rolled him again on the access to Dideroff. A red-letter day then, so why is she sitting here burning gasoline, with her hand on her heart, trying to count the beats, fearing tachycardia, fearing slipping into the kind of anxiety attack that would have her sitting paralyzed in the car for hours. She checks the fuel gauge?good, three-quarters. Once she had run out of gas racing her engine in a Dadeland parking lot, so now she is careful to fill up often. She has a much higher scale seven score than Emmylou Dideroff. A tendency to obsess. Anxiety attacks. No, no, no, she isnot going to have a fucking attack in Mickey Lopez’s parking lot. She shoves the gearshift into reverse, and the car shoots back, jumping the curb that protects a planting island, and performing a neat left-side taillightectomy against the trunk of a maleleuca tree. Cursing wildly, she slams the car into drive and shoots out onto Ponce de Leon.
On Dixie Highway she takes careful deep breaths. Manufacturing calm. When things are spinning out of control the trick is to control what you can, and you can always control your breathing, as her old panic attack coach used to say. Unless you’re crazy, which she is definitely not. Or not very. Ill perhaps. Why does she sweat so much? Incipient Type 2 diabetes? Her grandfather had it. Although she tests her urine sugar almost daily. Some obscure hormonal imbalance? Or sexual deprivation? Oh yes, there was no doubt that Kasdan still turned her on, albeit in a faintly disgusting way.
Still the tension is undeniable, irritating, and she should take care of it herself, like a modern woman, but this she finds difficult to do. Lorna is not depressive (MMPI scale two score = 53), but she can make herself suicidally so by seeking sexual release without another human in attendance, and it has to be a man too. Others of her acquaintance are not so particular, she knows. Betsy Newhouse, her other best friend besides Sheryl Waits, wants often to discuss dildoes and vibrators and is always threatening to buy one for Lorna. She has a shtick in which she enumerates all the ways in which a vibrator is superior to a man. Lorna has heard many variations of this, and she finds it tedious, but she is a good friend, and besides, no one is perfect, and Lorna is no bargain herself.
Lorna arrives at her house, a stuccoed ranch in South Miami, enters it, and cranks up the window air conditioner in the living room, pausing a moment to stand in front of a chill blast. The living room is simply furnished?a Bahama sofa covered in beige Haitian cotton, a glass-topped coffee table, several canvas butterfly chairs in pale lemon, a cotton rug on the hardwood floor. Lorna’s taste in painting runs to witty surrealism, and there are several pictures on the walls, all bought at art fairs in Coconut Grove. She goes into her bedroom and takes off all her clothes. It is cool in the bedroom because she runs the AC continuously from May to November, twenty-four/seven. Into the bathroom then, where she takes a quick, tepid shower and turns her eyes away from the black mildew springing from the tiles and the ceiling. A Guatemalan lady comes once a week, but she does not do mildew and neither does Lorna.
Naked but for a yellow towel, she goes into the kitchen and makes herself a gin and tonic, with a whole Key lime from the tree in the backyard, and drinks half of it down. Gasping a little, she returns to the bedroom and dresses in a light cotton shirt and bermudas. Then she goes into her office.
Lorna is a freelancer who works out of her home. The office is the largest room in the house, assembled by knocking out the wall between the second bedroom and what locals call the Florida room, a kind of enclosed stone- floored patio separated from the back garden by glass jalousies. From her desk she can look out through these to the croton bushes and yellow allamanders of the backyard. She sits in her swivel chair and enjoys this view, and the sound of birdsong, sipping her drink.
It is a strong one and she has not had anything for lunch. In a few minutes the buzz comes on. She relaxes and feels her face start to numb up. Doctors now recommend a drink a day as being good for the heart, she recalls (for she is an assiduous reader of medical advice), and drinks some more, enjoying the slosh and knock of the ice cubes against her teeth. She feels now the pleasant sense of accomplishment that eluded her upon leaving Dr. Lopez’s office. Howie has been put in his place, an alliance with Lopez on a case, a professional opportunity to explore what could be a new species of craziness, maybe even a suggestion for a whole new subscale for the MMPI-2. That would really make her name in the world of psych testing.
Musing thus, she casts her eye around her office and finds it good. She has a large modern birch desk, an almost new computer with all the accessories, an expensive desk chair with lumbar adjustments, and lots of books. Except for a swath of wall devoted to diplomas and professional certifications, all the wall space is taken up by bookshelves. Lorna buys her clothes (nor are there many of them) on sale, takes few vacations (and these to the cheaper nearby islands), drives a six-year-old car. Her only luxuries are medical examinations and books. She has over four thousand volumes, and she has read them all, some of them twice. There is a teetering stack on a side
