Mystery

started talking and became a real person and it was just the two of us, I stopped thinking about my silent partner.”

She scanned a couple of drawings. “What do you think of Chad’s artwork? I’ll put money you don’t find anything neurotic or psychotic in them.”

The drawings were age-appropriate for a six-year-old boy. Many bore Mommy I love yous.

“Brilliant, huh?” said Gretchen.

“Excellent.”

“We started with crayons, then he was too good for crayons so I got him these incredible pencils from Japan. That’s what he used on that peacock—over in the corner. Go look.”

Searching for that drawing put her kitchenette in view. Cans of spaghetti, boxes of cookies, bags of chips. The refrigerator was veneered with photos of her and a round-faced, dark-haired boy. In the early ones, Gretchen still looked like Gretchen.

The peacock battled with a dinosaur. From the blood and the feathers, score one for the reptile team.

“Vivid,” I said.

“You messed up your line. You were supposed to say, What an excellent mom you are, Gretchen, to produce the next Michelangelo.”

“You’re doing great as a mom, Gretch—”

“Because it’s all about me me me,” she said. “I’m a me-ist, that’s always been my diagnosis. ‘Narcissistic personality disorder with histrionic elements.’ Oh, yeah, ‘exacerbated by substance abuse.’ You agree?”

“I’m not here to diagnose you.”

“That’s what the shrink my defense team hired said I was. Narcissistic and a junkie. The key was to make me look intensely screwed up so I could avoid responsibility. I wasn’t supposed to read the report but I insisted they show it to me because I was paying for it. It makes sense to you?”

“Legally, it was yours—”

“Not that,” she said. “What the turkey wrote about me. ‘Narcissism, histrionic, dope.’ That fit your diagnosis?”

“Let’s talk about Chad.”

Her eyes fluttered. She fiddled with the air hose. “Just tell me this: How narcissistic am I if I devote the last six years of my life to my child? How histrionic am I if I never show him anything but a calm, happy face? How big of a dope fiend am I if I’ve been clean and sober for seven fucking years?”

“Good point.”

“But I’m stuck with that damn diagnosis. In my head—like that bastard passed a sentence on me. Like it’s my eye color and I’m stuck with it.”

She cleared her throat, coughed, swooned, adjusted a valve on the air tank. “I wanted to kill that shrink. Judging me. Now I’d be happy if what he put down was my only diagnosis.”

I nodded.

“Yeah, yeah, up and down goes the head,” she said. “Been to a lot of you guys, my parents didn’t give up on me till I was fourteen. I have to tell you, most of your colleagues were losers. So how could I respect their opinions? Know why I picked you? It wasn’t because I remembered you from when your gay buddy hassled me. I mean I did remember, but that wasn’t the point. Know what it was?”

“Not a clue.”

“A woman I used to do yoga with, one of the few people who still has the balls to keep visiting me, referred you. Marie Blunt.”

Marie, now an A-level interior designer, had once been a showgirl. The court had asked me to evaluate her kids for custody. The showgirl years had come out, but nothing more. Now I wondered if she’d dabbled in Gretchen’s world.

“Silent treatment, Doc. Yeah, yeah, you can’t admit you know her, I get it. But I’m sure we can both agree Marie’s a saint. Even her idiot ex recognizes that now, but she’s too smart to take him back. She said when the court hired you to do her child custody, she freaked out because he had all the money, she was scared you’d be corrupt like everyone else and take his side. Instead, you were fair and managed to get both of them not to victimize the kids. No mean feat, considering the ex is a total rat-bastard.”

I crossed my legs.

She said, “Nonverbal signal to annoying patient: Quit avoiding what we’re here for. Fine—oh, yeah, let me get you your money up front. I’m sure you don’t mind cash, do you? I’m a cash gal from way back.” Winking. “Old habits and all that.”

“Let’s deal with that later,” I said.

“No, let’s deal with it now.” Hard voice. So was her smile. “I want to make sure I don’t forget.” She touched the side of her head. “I forget a lot, could be tumors migrating into the old noggin, huh? Or maybe there’s just not much worth remembering in the first place? What’s your take on my encroaching senility, Doc?”

“It’s—”

“Yeah, yeah, you don’t know me well enough. Okay, payment with a smile coming up.”

Rising with effort, she hobbled through a doorway, was gone for several minutes, came back with a thick, bright red envelope that she thrust at me.

Unless it was packed with singles, way too thick to comprise a session’s worth. I put it on an end table. “In terms of Chad—”

“I told you, this is all about little old narcissistic addictive me. Count the moolah, make sure I’m not shorting you.”

I opened the envelope, flipped through a collection of fifties. Enough for twenty sessions. “This is way too much, Gretchen. Let’s go session by session.”

“What, you think I’m going to kick tomorrow?”

“No,” I said. “It’s the way I do business.”

“Well, let’s do it differently—be flexible, you know? If we go session by session, you can leave whenever you want. My situation, I need a commitment.”

“I’m committed to helping you. How you pay me won’t make a difference.”

“Yeah, sure.”

I didn’t respond.

She said, “You’re different from anyone else? Then why the cashmere blazer and the English slacks and those cute loafers, what are they, Ferragamo?”

“I like stuff as much as the next guy, Gretchen. And that’s irrelevant. I’m here for Chad and you don’t need to buy me in advance.” Taking a session’s worth of cash out of the envelope, I resealed it, placed it beside her.

“I don’t believe you. You want to feel free to leave.”

“If that was the issue, I could refund unused dough and book on you at any time. Now, how about we stop wasting time and talk about Chad?”

She stared at me. Gasped. Let out a strangled laugh.

“Jesus, I got myself a serious one.”

The urge to prattle never left her but I kept steering her back to a structured history. Starting with Chad’s birth and continuing into the toddler years, preschool, and the boy’s current placement in one of the most expensive grade schools in the city, an intimate place originally based on psychoanalytic theory but now eclectic. I’d lectured there a few times, thought it was overpriced, no better than any school, but not harmful. If need be, the director could be counted on.

No need for that now, but it might be interesting to see how Dr. Lisette Auerbach’s impressions gibed with Gretchen’s description of Chad as a meld of Louis Pasteur, Leonardo da Vinci, and Saint George.

Despite her troubled past and her foreshortened future, Gretchen could’ve been any proud, nervous, overprotective, overindulgent Westside mom.

“Oh, yeah,” she said, “he’s a killer athlete, too. Soccer and basketball. Mr. Cup in Hand must’ve been some kind of stud. Brad and Albert and Pele.”