Chance

Chance and the perfect sign

There was, he found, no end to the considering of it. It was bottomless, like the axiom of choice or the book of Job. He rose late from a fitful sleep. What had passed in the night seemed at first light the stuff of dreams. There were no hanged cats at his door or unmarked cars waiting at the end of the block. He inspected the building’s entry for signs of the night’s struggle but there were none to be had. He had righted his trash can before retiring. The wooden and stucco houses with their muted colors, the treeless street and parked cars… it was all quite void of mystery, flat as a two-by-four in the morning’s tepid light.

As a general rule he avoided the city’s mass transit systems, but on the morning in question he hadn’t the energy for much else. Still, the bus was a mistake. He saw it at once. The thing was filled to capacity. The air was close. But this was only the half of it. Save for a handful of unruly teenagers carving graffiti into one of the plastic seats with a box cutter, or this at least was what they appeared to be doing—he was reluctant to look too closely lest he be beaten before breakfast—the morning’s other riders might well have been on their way to his office for evaluation.

Chance took it as a great irony, and not a happy one, that if he’d spent the first half of his life trying to remember, stuffing his head with all manner of data and detail, he would surely spend the second and final half consumed by a desire to forget. With certain notable exceptions, Mariella Franko, Jaclyn Blackstone, Doc Billy… his patients and their afflictions were not the baggage he wished to carry. There were over nine hundred entries in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In the time it took to traverse a city block, he was able to diagnose any number of neurological and psychiatric disorders, including tardive dyskinesia, Parkinsonian gait, one cervical dystonia together with an impressive display of what were no doubt substance-induced and quite possibly hallucinatory states of both agitation and elation, and that was just inside the bus. The list might have gone on but he fled several blocks before his intended stop, only to be greeted by a man hardly older than himself. The man was both legless and homeless, rather clearly in the final stages of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, positioned in a ratty wheelchair reinforced with plywood before the Wells Fargo bank at Van Ness and California, holding in his lap a battered piece of cardboard upon which he had printed in black ink the words YOU ARE PERFECT! The sign was framed in painted wood roughly assembled and rested on what Chance took to be a well-worn copy of Gideon’s Bible.

The man held his message aloft as the bus lurched from the curb, as though to spare it the roiling exhaust, or perhaps that it might be more clearly read by the very people with whom Chance had just shared the morning’s ride and who were certainly in need of some reassurance. He put a dollar bill in the can at the man’s side and hurried away. Walking east on California Street, he became aware that the man in the wheelchair had begun to read aloud from the Bible in his lap. At least he imagined it to be the man, without actually turning to look. The man was reading from the Revelation according to John in a loud and surprisingly mellifluous voice.

Lucy was at her post, eyes running to the clock on the wall as Chance entered. “Am I fired?” he asked. He was mildly perplexed by her powers of intimidation.

She watched as he fumbled for the key that would allow for the relative safety of his office. “Why should I care if you’re late?” she asked. “It’s that.” She was pointing at the wall where it appeared that Jean-Baptiste had taken the liberty of hanging yet one more of his disturbing photographs—one more elderly woman, this time stark naked save for what might be taken as the elaborate headgear of an American Indian. “Did you say he could do that?” Lucy asked.

Chance moved for a better viewing. “Not exactly. He asked. I didn’t exactly say that he couldn’t, either.”

“Think maybe you could say so now? Since I’m the one who has to look at it.”

Chance’s nod was noncommittal, Lucy’s stare not so much. “The Footes will be here in half an hour,” she told him. “You want their file?”

Chance was still looking at the picture. “This one is a bit extreme, I’ll give you that.”

“Thanks. Does that mean you’ll ask him to take it down?”

“He’s dying,” Chance said.

“Thaddeus Foote?”

“Jean-Baptiste. I’m not really supposed to tell anyone, but I’m telling you.”

“Are you sure?”

Upon reflection Chance supposed it true that Jean-Baptiste, a self-acknowledged confabulator, had been dying for quite some time now, but it was also true that he had been a patient in the bone clinic at the Stanford teaching hospital. “I spoke once to one of his doctors,” Chance told her. “It’s something rare, that no one’s been quite able to figure out.” The doctor had not said that Jean-Baptiste was dying exactly, but Chance had been willing to take it as implied.

“That puts a new slant on things, I guess. How do you suppose knowing what he knows relates to the photographs he takes?”

“Have you ever talked to him, about the photographs?”

“No.”

“Maybe you should sometime. He’s a smart guy, eccentric but smart. You can’t let on that I told you he was dying but you could ask why he takes the pictures. I’d be interested in what he tells you.”

“Have you ever asked him?”

“I haven’t. But I think it might be better… coming from you.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. I just do.”

“Well,” she said. “I knew he was smart… just seemed a little pushy… hanging those things everywhere…”

“They are an acquired taste.”

“I guess I should be nicer to him.”

“Be nicer,” Chance said. He turned once more toward his office.

“Thaddeus Foote. You want the file?”

“What I’d like you to do is cancel their appointment.”

She gave it a beat. “You’re kidding me, right?”

“I don’t think I am.”

They regarded one another from across the room.

“They’re probably on their way.”

“Then maybe you can catch them.”

“You’re serious.”

Thaddeus Foote was a tall, morbidly obese, schizophrenic young man of twenty-nine almost certain to be brought in by his mother. Taken together they formed about as dull and depressing a duo as one was likely to find. “Do you remember,” Chance asked, “how Mrs. Foote described her son’s condition on our questionnaire? One word, psychological.”

Lucy actually smiled at him. “They’re a little slow.”

“And life is a little short.”

She gave him a look. “Rough night?”

“I wouldn’t know where to start.”

Lucy nodded, in the manner of someone who’d had a few rough nights of her own. “What should I tell the Footes?” she asked. “About his meds? There’s no way she’s not going to ask.”

“Amitriptyline. Twenty-five milligrams twice a day.”

As Lucy reached for the phone, Chance made good his escape.

Psychological indeed. The youth so described had sustained a concussion, a basilar skull fracture, and an intracerebral bleed as the results of an automobile accident on the Shoreline Highway. The accident, his third in as many years, had resulted in the death of a twenty-three-year-old blind woman riding in the car Thaddeus had hit. Formerly the valedictorian of her senior class, she was a college student at the time of her death, home for the winter break, in the company of friends and headed for oysters on the Tomales Bay when struck by Thaddeus who, acting on instructions from his car’s radio, had driven the 1953 Buick Roadmaster belonging to his mother, an ungainly beast scarcely fit for the street, across the double yellow line on the Shoreline Highway and into oncoming traffic. The blind girl’s father, a landscape architect by trade who’d raised her as a single parent after her mother’s death, had since turned to drink and lost his business. Insurance companies had begun protracted wrangling over fault in light of the boy’s colorful past and questionable capacities. Assorted insurers, Mrs. Foote, and even the Department of Motor Vehicles had all been implicated. Chance could not, without consulting his records, remember exactly who among them was paying for Thaddeus’s visits, nor could he imagine that any amount of wrangling, however it all came out, would make much difference to the girl’s father.

It was the primary concern of the chubby duo that Thaddeus not lose his license to operate a motor vehicle as his mother was counting on him, primarily for rides to and from the store where she liked to purchase her movie star magazines, newspapers, and cigarettes with food stamps provided by the state. As to any concerns the couple might have shared over future instructions from the car’s radio and their effect upon young Thaddeus, both were at pains to state, in a manner that might only have been taken for upbeat, that, in general, Thaddeus was quite able to say no to such suggestions.

Chance’s great and single contribution to this tale of woe had been, by way of a series of letters and phone calls, to keep the dim-witted fatass from regaining his place behind the wheel under threat of house arrest. Mind-boggling that no one had done this previously but there it was, your tax dollars at work. Needless to say this had not sat well with mother and son who now used every opportunity to lobby hard for the immediate reinstatement of Thaddeus’s privileges and would no doubt have continued to do so on the day in question had Chance consented to give them a hearing.

Lucy put her head in a short while later to say that she had pushed the appointment to the following week. “Excellent,” Chance told her. “And thank you. The day’s visit was not to be borne.”

She stood a moment longer in the doorway to his office. “Are you sure you’re all right?” She actually looked worried. Chance assured her that he was. She took a last long look around, as if expecting to find something he’d hidden there, Jaclyn Blackstone perhaps, and left him alone. Sometime after lunch, which he also skipped, he put in a call to Carl Allan of Allan’s Antiques but the old man was out. He left a long, possibly incoherent, message on the business’s answering machine and hung up.

There were a number of incoming calls throughout the remainder of the day but Chance declined to take them. Lucy came on two separate occasions to check in on him. He continued to assure her that everything was A-OK, finally sending her home early at just before three o’clock.

When she was gone he continued to sit at his desk, which, like the pieces so recently sold, was an antique of similar vintage but worth considerably less, housing at one of its corners the small bust of Nietzsche he had acquired as a student abroad, a trip undertaken as a break from the study of medicine, the latter being not so much the dictate of the heart as a thing that had been required of him by his father. Well, he thought now, watching the golden light and late wind play havoc with the clouds above the rooftops, he had been the good son, at least to a point. Twenty-odd years in the practice of medicine and it had gotten him here, to something very much resembling the oft-cited life of quiet desperation, unfulfilled in his work, divorced and indebted, half in love with an impossible woman, a potentially malignant blip on another man’s radar. If that wasn’t the shits he didn’t know what was.

While doing nothing to advance the workings of his office, he did feel inclined to call Janice Silver. He was still operating on the assumption that, whatever else happened or didn’t, they would find a way for her to continue with Jaclyn, and he wanted her to know about the perfume.

“Do you mind my asking what she was doing in your apartment?”

He told her about the meeting in the restaurant and Jackie Black. This was followed by a moment of silence. A trolley rattled past on the street below.

“I don’t know, Eldon,” Janice said at length. “I don’t think this sounds so good.”

“I saw a soul in distress. I made a decision to help.”

“I guess we both did. And now we may be finding out firsthand why they warn against it. My God, what are you going to do when this man… the husband, comes looking for you?”

“It’s not my intention to start see ing her,” Chance said. “Socially or professionally. I was hoping to arrange something, find a way for her to continue therapy while I look for this guy’s Achilles’ heel.”

“And how are we coming with all of that?”

“To be honest with you, I’m not sure.”

There was another lengthy pause. “It’s a dangerous game you’re playing here,” Janice said at length. “On two counts. There’s her and now there’s him. I say this as your friend. As far as therapy is concerned, I’ll go along with this to a point. I’ve a friend whose daughter is having trouble with her algebra. So we can try that. But as you know, any progress she may make is pretty much dependent upon her getting out from under the relationship that has given rise to her problems.”

“This is true. But what I’m also thinking… this guy may not be the alpha and omega of her problems. Has she ever said anything that would have suggested abuse from an earlier time?”

“She thinks her childhood was wonderful.”

“Her thinking it might not make it so.”

“And one needs, as you well know, in the current climate, to be cautious in suggesting that.”

“Both parents are dead, as I recall, limiting their ability to bring suit. There was something in her reaction to that scent that is simply hard for me to ignore. It suggests something buried, something she has yet to speak of, maybe even to become aware of herself… She fled immediately. There was already a cab waiting in the street. It was hardly something I could pursue but I think you might. I’d be happy to provide the perfume.”

“That’s your domain, Eldon, but let me think about it.”

“It’s interesting that the scent in question was a woman’s scent. You would think, given what we know of her history, that if anything was going to elicit that kind of flight response, it would be a man’s scent.”

To which Janice only sighed before going on. “She and I met exactly six times. Most of the work we did was along behavioral lines… strategies by which she might say no to her husband. My point being… there is very little that we actually know about her history.”

“Maybe that’s something we could work on.”

Janice sighed once more. “Yes, Eldon, maybe it is. But right now… I have a patient waiting.”

When they’d hung up, Chance went back to his initial report on Jaclyn Blackstone and read it one more time. The thing ran for a mere six pages. She had been referred by the Stanford Neurology Clinic for complaints of intermittent memory loss and difficulties in concentration. Biographical information was scant. Born in Virginia Beach, Virginia, graduated from high school in San Jose, California, with high marks, college in San Diego, where she had majored in applied mathematics, both parents deceased, married three years to Raymond Blackstone. There were no children, at least none she had admitted to in the report, although she did claim to have been pregnant once at the age of thirty-two. The pregnancy had ended in miscarriage. Chance had of course seen all this before, but that was back in the day. Jackie Black had upped the stakes.

In the wake of the miscarriage, she had seen a therapist, a Myra Cohen, for a period of one year, at which time Dr. Cohen had died suddenly. There was no more to it, at least not here, meaning she had volunteered nothing more at the time of their initial meeting and he had not asked. Still, it was in reading about Dr. Cohen that he saw something he had until now overlooked.

He had always assumed her seeing the therapist was in response to depression following the loss of her child. What he saw now was that this was not exactly the case. Depression had been a factor but there was more to it. Buried in her talk of depression and the loss of her child were also “vague paranoid feelings” as might, he concluded, be expected in someone beset by repressed memories.

Jaclyn had claimed Jackie Black as a response to Raymond Blackstone. This was, as Janice had pointed out, atypical. Dissociative disorders of the type thus far in evidence were generally thought to arise out of childhood abuse and were often associated with repressed memories. Coupled with this were a number of interesting if not disturbing questions. How had Detective Blackstone known to come to the restaurant? Had he intercepted a message, overheard a conversation, or was it a game Jaclyn played, an unconscious game but a game nonetheless, the pitting of one man against another, the new knight against the old?

The control mastery theory of psychotherapy is predicated on the idea that all people do through life is try, in unconscious ways, to master early trauma, that all relationships take on meaning in reference to feelings of shame and helplessness versus control and domination. Life itself becomes an expression of the will to power, to do to others what was done to you. Locked into such a pattern, the victim may become a predator out to ensnare predators from whom to be rescued, preferably by yet one more predator. Could that be the dance and Jaclyn the caller? If Jackie Black had found him once she would find him again. Distancing himself might not be so easy as he’d once imagined. The lives of certain very fucked-up types were like that after all. It was a blood in and blood out kind of thing. One exit strategy might be to go at it head-on, to seek out the earlier trauma in the hopes of effecting a cure, to bring the hidden patterns of behavior out into the light and so end the dance once and for all. It was to this end, he concluded, that it might be of interest to look into the death of Dr. Cohen, surely a matter of public record. Perhaps, if they were lucky, there would be medical records as well, maybe even the doctor’s notes. Might any of these have survived? Might one track them down? Would he entrust this to Janice Silver or engage in the hunt himself ?

There were, of course, any number of things with which one might engage. Effort would be required, a “heave of the will” worthy of William James. Jaclyn Blackstone was after all only one of his troubles. There was also the matter of Carl Allan. One really ought to go see the old bird face-to-face. One ought to do something about a certain check in a certain safe-deposit box not a block from where he sat. Awash in the day’s complexities, Chance remained at his desk, the six pages of Jaclyn Blackstone scattered across its surface, his beloved Mahler on the sound system, staring across city rooftops made faintly luminous in the afternoon light.

At exactly five thirty-five, the late light growing ever longer and Chance still at his desk, there was a call on his personal line. He saw that it was from his soon-to-be ex-wife. He did not like seeing this and, not liking it, took the call.

“Is Nicky with you?” Carla asked.

He heard the fear in her voice, as in answering to the negative he could feel it in his own.