Now and Then

bullet damage, and would be back tomorrow to paint. It was early afternoon, and Susan and I were drinking pink champagne in her offi ce. She was at her desk, I sat on the couch.

“Doctor,” I said, “my problem is that I’m in love with a shrink.”

“That’s my problem, too,” she said.

“That you’re in love with a shrink?”

She smiled.

“No,” she said, “that I’m the shrink.”

“I’m rarely in here,” I said.

“I know.”

“Why are we in here now?” I said.

“Some impulse toward reestablishment, I guess.”

I nodded.

“Romance is difference,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“John Updike said that, or something like it, in a short story. We’re drinking pink champagne in your office in the middle of the afternoon. It’s different.”

“Yes,” she said. “I see that.”

“Have you ever made love on this couch?” I said.

“Not yet,” she said.

We sipped our champagne.

“He sat here and flirted with me,” Susan said, “and talked about his father.”

I nodded.

“And of course it almost certainly wasn’t his father. It was himself when he was Bradley Turner.”

“What Epstein’s found out so far,” I said, “would suggest that. Bradley Turner was active in the antiwar counterculture.”

“The child is father of the man,” Susan said.

“Or something,” I said.

“He was so filled with ego and need and self-regard that he had to talk about himself even at the risk of exposure.”

“So he pretended the self was someone else,” I said.

“Someone he admired,” Susan said.

“And the fl irtation?” I said.

“He had been so successful,” Susan said, “with so many women, for so long. I think he couldn’t believe it would fail. Even when it was quite clear that I was not succumbing.”

“That’s why he kept coming?” I said.

“He kept coming, in part, I think, because he so enjoyed talking about himself.”

“To you,” I said.

“Yes.”

“You’re a splendid person to talk with,” I said.

She smiled.

“It is my profession,” she said.

“It is also your nature,” I said.

She inclined her head to thank me, without committing to whether I was right or not.

“And as noted,” Susan said, “in his relationship with me, he had the illusion that it put him one up on you.”

“So that his seduction was, in a sense, successful from his perspective.”

“Mind fucking,” Susan said.

“You Harvard grads,” I said.

She smiled.

“He must have been horrified to find you here when he came for his session.”

“Yes.”

“And you hit him,” Susan said.