remaining crumbs of biscotti.
“White worm, right ear. My wife is in the dream. I feel something funny, a tickle in my ear. She says there’s a worm crawling into my ear. I panic, tell her to get it out. She tries. I feel her fingernails gently going for the worm. She says she is having trouble getting a grip on it. It’s crawling deeper. I tell her to get a tweezer, fast. She runs into the bathroom, comes back with a tweezer, probes for the worm. I feel the metal, cold, touching the inside of my ear, jabbing. She is having trouble. Finally, she lets out a sound. I know she has it. She does, but she has to struggle. It comes apart. She digs it out of my ear in pieces while I keep asking ‘Is it out? Is it out?’ When she says it is, I run into the bathroom, turn on the shower, brush away real and imagined worms.”
“You are nude? You don’t have to take off your clothes?”
“Nude.”
“Your wife. She is also nude?”
“Yes, no, I’m not sure. Now she’s wearing something flimsy, white.”
“And you were in bed with her when you discovered this worm?”
“I… yes.”
“You see where this is going?”
She finished her coffee, shook the cup to be sure she hadn’t missed a drop or two and placed the cup on her desk next to the photographs of her grandchildren.
“Yeah, at least part of the way.”
“Tell me.”
“Sex,” I said.
“When is the last time you had sex? I mean with a woman or a man other than yourself?”
The phone rang. She was like an answering machine. She couldn’t bring herself to turn it off or let it ring. I had asked her once to put on her answering machine when we talked. She had gone into a brief explanation about how she could do it, but in doing so she would wonder who was calling and not give sufficient attention to our session. In addition, she worried about her husband. Melvin had a bad heart. So I sat quietly, welcoming the opportunity to think not about my next answer but the possible ones after that.
“I’m sorry. I can’t talk now. I’ll call you tomorrow morning… You have my diagnosis. I am not changing it… I am being reasonable. Good-bye.”
She hung up and said to herself and me, “HMOs.” Then to me, “So, last sex?”
“The night before my wife died.”
“With your wife?”
“Certainly, with my wife. We’ve been through this.”
“Why aren’t you angry with me? You should be at least a little angry,” she said. “I was angrier at the HMO clerk than you are at me for suggesting you might have had sex with someone other than your wife the night before she died.”
The chair I was sitting in was a recliner. I reclined and clasped my fingers together on my stomach.
“I don’t get angry anymore,” I said.
“Nothing makes you angry?”
“I don’t know. I think I’m looking for something to make me angry and I don’t want to find it. Does that make sense?”
“Perfect sense. Next question: Why do you always say ‘my wife’ instead of using her name? You have never spoken her name to me. You want to answer or you want to spend a week thinking about it?”
“It hurts.”
“To say her name?”
“Yes.”
“Pain sometimes just sits there waiting. If you confront it, perhaps it will get smaller. Do you want that pain to grow smaller?”
“I don’t know. No, I don’t want it to get smaller. I want it right there where I can find it.”
“And feel sorry for yourself?”
“Yes, there’s a great comfort in feeling sorry for myself.”
“When you’re ready, you’ll be able to say her name. It will hurt, but it will feel right.”
“I don’t want it to feel right.”
“We’ll see.”
“Her mother was overweight. Nice face, but overweight. I…”
“Yes?”
“Nothing.”
“Your wife was a lawyer.”
“Yes. I don’t want to talk about my wife today.”
She leaned forward, pursed her lips, raised her eyebrows and said, “Then we’ll put that aside for now. You are working? You plan to pay me so I assume you are working. What are you working on? Besides your dreams.”
“A runaway wife. A runaway girl.”
“This is one person or two? A runaway girl who is also a wife?”
I leaned farther back in the recliner and looked up at the ceiling.
“Two people.”
“And you are engaged, interested in finding them. It’s more than a job, a way to make money?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your wife ran away,” she said.
I remained calm and said,
“She died.”
“And you never had children.”
“You know that.”
“Are you angry yet?”
“Not even close.”
I didn’t look, but I was aware of her rising.
“Enough for today. Go look for your missing females. We’ll talk about them next week. A missing wife. A missing daughter. And that dream. One thing I think it might be telling you is to stop punishing yourself. You know the Italian ice shop on Seventeenth Street?”
It was my turn to sit up. The recliner slid back and I felt slightly dizzy as I opened my eyes.
“I know it.”
“Stop there. I recommend the banana chocolate. Melvin likes watermelon. Be good to yourself, Lewis.”
Ann Horowitz is a good six inches shorter than I am, and I’m touching the lower edge of average. I took out my wallet and handed her two twenty-dollar bills. I had first met her when I served papers on her to appear in court to testify in a case involving one of her patients. She had taken the papers at her door, dropped them on the table inside her apartment and invited me in. No one had ever invited me into their home after I served them papers.
She was fascinated by process serving, wanted to know all about it, told me that serving papers for appearances before tribunals went back to biblical times. I was a member of a historically important profession. That wasn’t the way I saw it. For me it was anywhere from twenty-five to fifty dollars for a few hours of work.
Ann Horowitz had said she saw pain in my eyes and asked if I wanted to talk about it. I said I didn’t and she asked, “How long can a person enjoy their pain?”
“Till they die, if they’re lucky.”
She gave me her card and said that she wanted to talk to me even if I didn’t want to talk to her. She planned to do more research on my honorable profession and fill me with history if not pride. She also said that she would charge me only ten dollars for each session. After our first session, I gave her twenty dollars and that became the fixed rate for our meetings. There had been a few times when I was behind on my payments, but I always caught up. I learned from a lawyer whose daughter was seeing Ann Horowitz that he was paying her an even one hundred per session, most of which was covered by his expensive health-care plan.
She handed me a copy of an article from Smithsonian magazine about John Marshall, the first chief justice of
