home.
“Big tooth,” he said to himself as he came toward me.
“Big tooth,” I repeated.
The bag in my hand was hot and the biscotti must have been getting moist.
He pointed across the street toward the bay. There was a giant white tooth which was slowing the passing traffic.
He scratched his inner left thigh and said, “Dentist should buy it. Definitely.”
One of the charms of the man was that he never asked for money or anything else. He minded his own business and relied on luck, the discards of the upscale restaurants in the neighborhood and the kindness and guilt of others.
I reached into the bag and came up with a coffee and a biscotti. He took them with a nod of thanks.
“You, too?” he asked, tilting his head toward the nearby bench-not his former residence, but the one right outside Ann’s office.
“Can’t,” I said. “Appointment.”
“Old lady who talks to ghosts and crazy people?”
“Not ghosts,” I said.
“I’m not a crazy person,” he said.
“No,” I agreed.
“You a crazy person?”
“I don’t know.”
“You should maybe find out,” he said, moving toward the bench, his back to me now.
“I’m working on it,” I said and stepped through the door.
Ann’s very small reception area was empty except for three chairs, a neat pile of copies of psychology magazines, and a small Bose non-boom box playing generic classical music. The music was there to cover the voices of any clients who might be moved to occasional rage or panic, usually directed at a spouse, child, sibling, boss or themselves. The music wasn’t necessary for me. My parents never raised their voices. I have never raised mine in anger, remorse, or despair. All the passion in our family came from my sister, and she more than compensated for it with Italian neighborhood showmanship.
Ann was, as always, seated in her armchair under the high narrow horizontal windows. I handed her the bag. She smelled it and carefully removed coffee and biscotti and placed them on the desk near her right hand.
“No coffee for you?” she asked, handing me a biscotti.
“No,” I said. “Caffeine turns me into a raging maniac.”
I took off my Cubs cap and placed it on my lap.
“Levity,” she said, removing the lid of her coffee and engaging in the biscotti-dipping ritual.
“I guess.”
“Small steps. Always small steps. Progress,” she said. “Biscotti are one of the tiny treasures of life. When one of my clients tells me he or she is contemplating suicide I remind them that, once dead, they will never again enjoy coffee and biscotti.”
“Does it work?”
“Only one has ever committed suicide, but I can’t claim that the biscotti approach has ever been the reason for this high level of success. Did your mother make biscotti?”
“No, she ate it. My father made pignoli. My uncle made biscotti.”
“ Pignoli?”
“A kind of cookie with pine nuts.”
“My mother made mandel bread,” Ann said. “That’s like Jewish biscotti, made with cement, at least the way my mother made it.”
I looked at the clock on the wall over her head. Five minutes had passed.
“You want to know when we are going to start,” she said. “Well, we already started.”
“I asked Ames to be my partner.”
“Putting down roots,” she said, finishing her biscotti. She had eaten it in record time.
I handed her mine.
“You sure?” she asked. “I didn’t have time for lunch.”
“I’m sure about you having my biscotti. I’m not sure about asking Ames to be my partner.”
“Why?”
“He’ll expect me to stay around.”
“Yes.”
“Besides, I make just enough to live on.”
“Yes, but you asked him and he said yes.
“He said yes.”
“Sally’s leaving, moving North. Better job.”
Ann said nothing, just worked on her biscotti, brushing away stray crumbs from her white dress with dancing green leaves.
“Did you ask her to stay?” she said finally.
“No.”
“Do you want her to stay?”
“Yes.”
“Is there anything you could say or do that would make her stay?”
“I think so. Maybe.”
“But you won’t say it.”
“I can’t. You want to hear the first lines I’ve collected?”
“Not this session,” she said.
The phone rang. She never turned off the phone during our sessions and I guess she didn’t turn it off during anyone else’s sessions either. She had too much curiosity to turn off her connection to anyone who wanted to confess or try to sell her something.
“Yes, I’ll take it,” she told the caller after listening for a few seconds.
She hung up.
“I’m going to give you a conundrum, an ethical dilemma, a moral puzzle,” she said. “With that call, I just paid to become beneficiary of a life insurance policy for a ninety-one-year-old man. He gets paid with my cash offer immediately. I double or triple my investment when he dies, providing he dies before I do and, given my age, while the odds are in my favor, I stand some chance of losing. I have six such policies. What do you think?”
“Do you meet these people?” I asked.
“Absolutely not,” she said, sitting back and folding her hands.
“Life insurance is gambling on beating or forestalling death,” I said.
“Precisely, Lewis. Still?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right.”
“No, it doesn’t, but why not? Does it challenge God or the gods who might decide to strike you down instead of the person from whose death you would profit?”
Her eyes were dancing. We were getting somewhere or going somewhere. She leaned forward.
“I lied, Lewis,” she said. “I didn’t buy life insurance for a dying man. I told my stockbroker to go ahead and buy pork belly futures. I’m betting on people who might profit from the slaughter of pigs.”
“That’s comforting.”
“Your opinion of me faltered for a moment,” she said.
“Yes.”
“But it’s all right if I profit from the death of pigs.”
“Yes,” I said.
“We bet against death every day,” she said. “But it is taboo to bet for death. We don’t want to make those gods angry even if they exist only in our minds.”
“Someone may be trying to kill me,” I said.
“This has happened before.”
