Silent Partner

“No Shirlee Ransom on any of our files, which means nothing- she wasn’t a criminal. But DMV didn’t have her either.”

“They wouldn’t. She couldn’t have driven a car.”

“Whatever. Searching for heirs isn’t our business, Doc. Whichever lawyer’s probating the will would have to hire someone private. And to answer your next question, no, I don’t know who that is.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks for your time.”

“No problem. Glad to give it. When I have it.”

Which was a polite way of saying Don’t bother me anymore.

13

A porn loop.

Kruse’s “research.”

Exploring the boundaries of human sexuality.

Larry had laughed about it, but self-consciously. Working for Kruse was a phase of his career he clearly wanted to forget. Now he was going to be reminded, again. I called his office in Brentwood, using the private line that bypassed his answering service.

“I’m with a patient,” he said, sotto voce. “Call you back at a quarter to the hour?”

He did, at precisely 2:45, munching on something and talking between bites.

“Missed me already, D.? What’s on your mind?”

“Sharon Ransom.”

“Yeah, I read about it. Oh, God, I forgot- the two of you were an item way back when, weren’t you?”

“She was at the party, Larry. I ran into her when you went to make your call. I talked to her the day before she died.”

“Jesus. Did she look depressed?”

“A little down. She said things weren’t going well. But nothing profound, nothing to set off any alarms. You and I both know how much that’s worth, though.”

“Yeah, ye olde professional intuition. Might as well use a ouija board.”

Silence.

“Sharon Ransom,” he said. “Unreal. She used to be gorgeous.”

“Still was.”

“Unreal,” he repeated. “I haven’t seen her since school, never ran into her at any meetings or conventions.”

“She was living in L.A.”

“Mystery lady. She always projected a bit of that.”

“Did she work on the porn project, Larry?”

“Not when I was there. Why?”

I told him about her being Kruse’s assistant. About the loop.

“Welcome to Hollyweird,” he said. But he didn’t sound surprised and I commented on it.

“That’s ’cause I’m not surprised, D. Someone else, maybe, but not her.”

“Why’s that?”

“Truth be told, I always thought she was strange.”

“In what way?”

“Nothing blatant, but something about her just wasn’t set right- like a beautiful painting hung off kilter.”

“You never said anything to me.”

“If I’d told you I thought your girlfriend was iffy in the personality department, would you have listened to me calmly and said, ‘Gee, thanks, Lar’?”

“Nope.”

“Nope is right. Au contraire, you would have been highly pissed off, probably never spoken to me again. No, no, kiddies, Uncle Larry keeps his mouth shut. First rule of therapy: When you’re not sure, say nothing. And I wasn’t sure. It’s not as if I was formally diagnosing her- this was just an impression. Besides, you seemed to be enjoying yourself with her, and I didn’t see you marrying her.”

“Why not?”

“She just didn’t seem the marrying kind.”

“What kind did she seem?”

“The kind you keep on the side and destroy your life over, D. I figured you were too smart for that. And I was right, wasn’t I?”

Pause. He said, “Let me ask you a question and don’t take offense: Was she any good in bed?”

“Not really,” I said.

“Went through the moves but didn’t really dig it?”

I was startled. “What makes you say that?”

“Talking about the loop made me realize who she reminded me of: the porn actresses Kruse used to have in his movies. I met them when I worked for him. Those girls all oozed sex appeal, came on as if they could suck blood out of a rock. But you got the feeling it was just a veneer, something that came off with their makeup. Sensuality wasn’t integrated in their personalities- they knew how to split their feelings from their behavior.”

“Split,” I said. “As in borderline?”

“Exactly. But don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying Sharon was a borderline, or even that all the actresses were. But she and they all had some of that borderline quality to them. Am I on target at all?”

“Bull’s-eye,” I said. “She had typical borderline qualities. All these years I never put it together.”

“Don’t shit on yourself, D. You were sleeping with her- afflicted with severe pussy-blindness. I especially wouldn’t expect you to be diagnosing her. But I’m not surprised she made a fuck film.”

Borderline personality disorder. If Sharon had deserved that diagnosis, I’d flirted with disaster.

The borderline patient is a therapist’s nightmare. During my training years, before I decided to specialize in children, I treated more than my share of them and learned that the hard way.

Or, rather, I tried to treat them. Because borderlines never really get better. The best you can do is help them coast, without getting sucked into their pathology. At first glance they look normal, sometimes even supernormal, holding down high-pressure jobs and excelling. But they walk a constant tightrope between madness and sanity, unable to form relationships, incapable of achieving insight, never free from a deep, corroding sense of worthlessness and rage that spills over, inevitably, into self-destruction.

They’re the chronically depressed, the determinedly addictive, the compulsively divorced, living from one emotional disaster to the next. Bed hoppers, stomach pumpers, freeway jumpers, and sad-eyed bench sitters with arms stitched up like footballs and psychic wounds that can never be sutured. Their egos are as fragile as spun sugar, their psyches irretrievably fragmented, like a jigsaw puzzle with crucial pieces missing. They play roles with alacrity, excel at being anyone but themselves, crave intimacy but repel it when they find it. Some of them gravitate toward stage or screen; others do their acting in more subtle ways.

No one knows how or why a borderline becomes a borderline. The Freudians claim it’s due to emotional deprivation during the first two years of life; the biochemical engineers blame faulty wiring. Neither school claims to be able to help them much.