Chance

Jaclyn

Jaclyn Blackstone is an ambidextrous 36-year-old woman living in Berkeley. She has a college education and a teaching credential. She is employed as a substitute teacher for middle school classes in the Oakland School District, where she also works as a private tutor for students in algebra and geometry.

The patient is referred for evaluation from the Stanford Neurology Clinic for complaints of intermittent memory loss and periods of poor concentration. As a child and young adult, Mrs. Blackstone reports that she was a “sleepwalker,” often waking in strange places without any memory or knowledge of how she had arrived. She describes her recent episodes of memory loss as “Like that,” in reference to these earlier sleepwalking episodes. A full set of laboratory studies (including SMA-20, CBC with diff. and thyroid function tests, vitamin B-12 levels, heavy metal screen, and serum ceruloplasmin) were completely normal. An MRI head scan was within normal limits. Her neurologic examination was normal and no evidence was found to suggest an organic basis for her cognitive disturbances.

The patient states that she has recently become aware of a “second personality,” whom she calls “Jackie Black.” She states that Jackie is daring and extroverted, a person who comes out at times of particular distress. In particular, it is Jackie who continues to have a sexual relationship with her estranged husband, even though she, Jaclyn, does not approve of this. Mrs. Blackstone states that she hates being called by the name of Jackie and the only person who uses that name is her husband, a homicide detective in the Oakland Police Department. The patient states that while prior to her discovery of Jackie Black there were no other known alternative personalities, there have been “periods of time” for which she has no specific recall. As to whether or not these “blank spaces” may also be associated with other personalities, the patient is unwilling to speculate. The patient further states that at one point she acquired a gun as a means of killing herself if things became intolerable. She says now that the gun has been sold to a pawnshop dealer in downtown Oakland.

It seemed straightforward enough, really. Mrs. Blackstone’s memory problems were clearly secondary to psychiatric distress, engendered most directly from her continuing to see the abusive husband from whom she is ostensibly seeking a divorce. “The development of secondary or multiple personalities occurs most frequently in the context of physical, sexual, or psychological abuse,” Chance had written. “I think it is important for this warded-off aspect of her personality to be addressed and, ideally, integrated into her basic persona. However, as long as she continues to have a relationship with a person whom she both despises and fears, there is little reason to believe that her underlying anxiety can be successfully treated with pharmacologic approaches.”

By way of treatment, he had recommended that Mrs. Blackstone consider psychotherapy. He had also recommended that she work with a female therapist and had offered a name, Janice Silver, a therapist in the East Bay he believed to be particularly good.

In most cases that would have been the end of it, and there was nothing about this case to suggest that Jaclyn Blackstone was the type of patient he would ever see more than once. Nor was it likely she would have replaced Mariella as the object of his obsession. She would have faded back into that great gray array of the lost and lonely, the neurasthenic and terminally distraught, the walking wounded he saw by the score day in and day out. But then two things happened.

The first was a chance meeting with Jaclyn Blackstone on the streets of Berkeley. It was quite unplanned and took place in a trendy little shopping district at the northwest side of town. He was still trying to figure out what to do about his furniture and Carl’s offer and Big D and all of that and was poking about in the Art and Architecture store on Fourth Street, looking through a book on French Art Nouveau furniture, when he caught sight of Jaclyn Blackstone among the aisles. It was scarcely two months since she’d visited his office yet he was struck by how different she looked. At the time of his evaluation she had worn a shapeless sweater over an old-fashioned blue print dress, her hair pulled loosely back, held by the kind of small white combs a little girl might use. She had looked all of her thirty-six years and then some, matronly, he had thought at the time. In the store she wore jeans and running shoes and a leather jacket over a yellow T-shirt and was anything but matronly. Her hair was different too, shorter, trendier. The fact was, she had caught his eye and it was only upon closer scrutiny that he realized who it was. The recognition was followed rather quickly by the thought that maybe this was not Jaclyn at all, but Jackie, and he wondered if she would see him and if she did, would there be any sign of recognition, though he also understood that even as Jaclyn she might not be so eager to say hello given the circumstances of their original meeting. He was therefore a bit surprised when, as their eyes met and after only a momentary delay, she favored him with a rather shy smile and a little wave of the hand.

Their paths crossed at the end of the aisle. They were both holding books. “Don’t you love this store?” she asked.

“I do. What are you reading?”

She held up a rather small book with a picture of two wooden chairs on the cover. “I like to find old pieces of furniture that I can strip and redo.”

“Antiques?”

“Nooo. Junk.” She produced an iPhone, pulled up her photographs, then scrolled around a bit before finding something for him to look at, half a dozen straight-back wooden chairs that had not only been rather gaily painted with pastel washes but bore as well the likeness of movie stars reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s silk-screened portraits.

“Madonna and Marilyn,” she told him. “I call them my icon chairs.”

“These are quite good,” he said. “I mean it.”

“Yeah?” She found two other chairs that had pictures of dogs on them. “I like dogs too,” she said.

“Me too. Do you have one?”

She looked away. “I did. But I lost him,” she said. Her smile of only moments before had given way to a look of profound distress.

“I’m so sorry. It’s sad to lose a pet.”

She nodded. “I have a cat.” Her eyes clocked to his book. “What do you have?”

He showed her the book on French furniture.

“Well, see…” she said. “Yours is fancier than mine. But then you’re the doctor.” It was the first reference either had made as to why they were even standing here talking.

“Yes, well… I have some furniture kind of like this that I’m thinking of selling.”

“Well don’t think too long,” she told him.

He laughed. “Now why would you say that?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. It seemed like good all-purpose advice. One could say it about so many things.”

It was almost as if she were flirting with him. He was even beginning to wonder if she’d lied. Maybe there were more than two of her. He was also enjoying her company and in a short while discovered that he had moved with her into the checkout line at the register where he felt somehow obliged to buy the book he carried even though it was more money than he’d wanted to spend if for no other reason than to prolong the pleasures of the moment.

Minutes later, on the sidewalk in front of the store, the absurdity of it all descended on him for the first time. In the twenty years of his marriage he’d been faithful to his wife, raising his daughter, building a practice. He’d seen no one since the separation. That he was suddenly standing here, amped like some schoolboy in the presence of an attractive woman he just happened to have seen as a patient, that he just happened to know was possessed of at least one secondary personality willing to engage in rough sex with an estranged spouse, by all accounts a dangerous psychopath, was enough to render him at least momentarily speechless. The really disturbing part was that he was also trying to decide if he should invite her to coffee as there was one of those upscale little East Bay coffee joints almost directly across the street from where they stood. Mercifully, she spoke first and thereby, he would conclude later, saving him from God only knew what horrors. “I just want you to know that I’m seeing the therapist you recommended,” she said. “It’s changed everything.” When next he spoke it was as what he was, a doctor addressing a patient on the occasion of a chance meeting in a public place. “I’m so glad to hear that,” he said. “And you’re feeling better?” He might have added that she looked like a million bucks but decided against it.

“I am,” she said. “I’m feeling better than I have in a long while.”

They stood for a moment with this.

“Well…” Chance said.

“Sometimes I use numbers,” she told him.

Chance just looked at her.

“On the furniture,” she added. “Formulas, sometimes, or geometric shapes. But sometimes just numbers.”

“Ah.” He recalled that she was also a teacher.

“I substitute,” she corrected. “I started doing it again, after the separation…” She allowed her voice to trail away, as if from the subject.

“You’re looking well,” Chance said, acting suddenly on his earlier impulse. If he’d hoped to put the smile back on her face he was successful.

“Am I?” she asked, and in doing so managed somehow to shift the tone of their meeting ever so slightly once more.

Was it him, he wondered, or did she really know how to play it so well? Or perhaps he was not according her the benefit of the doubt. He’d seen therapy turn people around. Why not Jaclyn Blackstone? “You are,” he said finally. “I almost didn’t recognize you there in the store.”

“Well,” she said, and she offered him a hand. “I am glad we ran into each other just now.”

He took her hand. “So am I. And I wish you the best.”

She seemed to take this as his way of saying good-bye, and perhaps it was. It certainly should have been. Still, in letting go of her hand he experienced a pang of remorse.

“Well…” she said once more. And he really did feel that they were both reluctant to break it off. “Enjoy your book. And good luck with your furniture, whatever you decide.”

He smiled and nodded and like that she was gone, or so it seemed. So conflicted had he been at just that moment in trying to decide if he should not have added something more, that in thinking back on it later, he could not quite recall if they’d even said good-bye. He concluded they had not. He had nodded. She had smiled. He had been left to stand there as she moved off down the sidewalk, pausing at the window of some store half a block away before moving on and out of sight, for good as far as he knew, so that what he was left with in the end was that very particular ache he had not felt in many years, the exultation of wanting in combination with a certain knowing, that the object of such desire is forever unavailable, that and the wonderful curvature of her spine as she posed like a dancer before a shop window, the afternoon light on her ash-blond hair.

Any such feelings of romantic ambiguity as may have washed over him in the immediate aftermath of this meeting were, in the days that followed, replaced by a profound relief that he had not succumbed to the absurd temptation to involve himself further in her affairs and he had returned to the contemplation of what to do about his furniture. He felt no great sense of urgency in this regard. It was his nature to view a thing from as many angles as possible, to imagine any and all worst-case scenarios. His wife and daughter had often accused him of being overly cautious in such matters, ganging up on him without mercy as Chance spent days on end lost in the evaluation of some apparently trivial decision or purchase, but then Chance was a believer in caution. He supposed such traits were drummed into him by his father, provost at a small Bible-based college on the outskirts of Springfield, Missouri, who, like the Master for whom the school had been named, was a lover of parables. His father had favored those in which some youthful indiscretion leads inexorably to a life of pain and deprivation. And while Chance declined entrance to his father’s school, he could not say the old man’s words had failed to dog his tracks. Nor had his own work as a doctor served to make him any less wary. He’d spent far too many days with people for whom everything had changed in the time it took to draw a breath… because they’d turned left instead of right, failed to see the light or hear the horn, or those like Jaclyn Blackstone, guilty of little else save the kind of poor judgment that would place the heart above the head, now at Mercy General Hospital in downtown Oakland with an orbital blowout fracture on the right side of her face awaiting surgery to relieve pressure on an entrapped inferior rectus muscle, and that was the second thing that happened.

He’d heard the news from Janice Silver. She’d called because Jaclyn had come to her by way of Chance and she thought he would want to know. She was also angry and wanted someone to vent to and lastly, as Jaclyn was without insurance and in a county hospital, she was wondering if Chance might be willing to look in on her, to evaluate the extent of her injuries himself.

Chance said that he would. He was seated in his office, the very book he had purchased in Jaclyn’s presence open on the desk before him, the buildings outside his window losing definition to a creeping afternoon fog. “This is the work of the ex?” he asked.

“I can’t believe it’s not.”

“But you don’t know for sure?”

“She’s not saying.”

Chance watched the fog. He heard Janice sigh, the anger in her voice. “She had been doing so well,” she told him. “You know this bastard had been coming to see her once a week. She’d begun to say no. It was working. Jackie was staying out of the picture. It had to be him.”

“What does she say?”

“She says she surprised an intruder on the patio of her condominium.”

“I suppose that’s possible.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Janice echoed, “anything is possible. Let’s not rule out alien abductions.”

He went the following day. He did not visit her straightaway but spoke instead to her attending physician. She’d received a concussion but there was no evidence of bleeding into or structural damage of her brain. The surgery required to relieve the entrapped muscle was straightforward enough and he felt satisfied that she was in good hands. As to the nature of the incident, she had yet to claim additional knowledge. There was only the bit about having surprised someone at the rear of her condo and that was all.

He considered leaving it there as the course prudent behavior then caved to the impulse to stop by her room. He found the door open and a man seated in a chair at the side of her bed. The man wore a gray suit. He was broad shouldered with thick dark hair. He had his back to the door and was leaning forward a bit, holding to one of Jaclyn’s hands, speaking to her in a low voice. Chance heard little more than a name… Jackie … before retreating to a nurses’ station to make conversation with one of the nurses, while waiting to see if the man would leave anytime soon, and where, having identified himself as a doctor, he inquired further regarding the patient in room 141.

“She’s been in quite a lot of pain,” the nurse told him. “Complaining of double vision. She’s scheduled for the surgery this afternoon.”

“Has she had many visitors?”

“Just the husband,” the nurse told him, and excused herself to check on a patient.

Chance was still at the station when the man came out of the room. He was, as Chance had noted, a lean, broad-shouldered man of medium height, a handsome enough man, Chance thought, and fit, certainly capable of doing some damage with his fists.

Chance had expected him to walk on by and was surprised when he stopped before him. “You one of her doctors?” the man asked. The man’s eyes were black and direct. Chance of course recalled that he was a homicide detective for the city of Oakland and he had that about him, whatever that was, some air of authority, some hint of the bully. Chance had no difficulty in believing he was a cop. He had no difficulty in believing he was a bad cop. “I’m a neuropsychiatrist,” Chance told him. “I was asked by her therapist to look in on her.”

“You were in her room just now, why didn’t you look in?”

“I saw she had a visitor. There was no rush.”

“No rush? Not like the doctors I know.”

Chance thought that perhaps the man would smile but he didn’t. Chance just looked at him. The man looked back, a moment longer, before moving off toward the elevators at the end of the hall. Chance waited till the man was gone before returning to Jaclyn’s room.

She looked about as he had expected given the nature and severity of her injuries. One side of her face was badly swollen and bruised. She turned her head a bit on the pillow at his approach and he could see that she had been crying.

“Jaclyn…” he began. “I’m so sorry…”

“Please,” she said. “You should go.” She spoke through clenched teeth, turning to the wall, where a small dirty window looked out upon the city of Oakland.

Chance put his hand on the forearm that was on the outside of her blanket. “You’re going to be fine,” he said, feeling both moved and impotent, reduced to cliché. “You will feel better when they free up that muscle and you can stop seeing two of everything.”

He’d hoped to joke a little but she wasn’t having any. Her hand opened and closed, holding to the sky blue blanket that covered her bed. He gave her arm a gentle squeeze before releasing her. He would have held her in his arms if he could have, so delicate and wounded did she seem just then, lying there in that sterile room with its plastic curtains and hospital blankets, its dismal view of the city. He recalled their conversation in the bookstore in Berkeley not two weeks prior, the business about the chairs, her expression in recalling the loss of her dog, her beguiling smile as they had waited in line to buy their books. She was a gentle soul, he thought, a kind spirit. She declined to look at him and she declined to be comforted. And of course the truth was that while surgery might free the trapped muscle, it would not free her from the man Chance had seen in her room just now, bending over her like some B movie vampire, her hand in his, the same that had beaten her. For now that Chance had looked into the man’s face he had no doubt that Janice had been right. There’d been no intruder in the back of the condominium. It was the man he had seen, the bad cop, hunting his whore, angered at her sudden disappearance.

Beyond the walls of the hospital, which were dull and gray and rather more like a prison than a place of healing, a pall had settled. Even those views of the city by way of the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge that had almost never failed to cheer seemed veiled in gloom. He spent the rest of the day in the small, overly warm kitchen of a retired dentist. He’d been retained by a distant relative on suspicion of elder abuse and asked to make an assessment with regard to vulnerability to undue influence. The man, William Fry, though he preferred to be addressed as Doc Billy, was ninety-six years old. He sported dual hearing aids and was attached to an oxygen tank. The requisite cognitive and psychiatric testing had dragged on for hours. By the time Chance reentered the day, as claustrophobic as Doc Billy’s kitchenette, the afternoon had given way to darkness, the sidewalks made wet by a roiling fog he might once have found romantic. Returning to his apartment, he was alerted by way of a letter that the IRS had just put a lien on any profits realized from the sale of his house.

Though well into the dinner hour, he was able to get his attorney on the phone. The situation was explained as follows: The government’s interest had been piqued as a result of an audit of his soon-to-be ex-wife’s business, a small photographic studio. There’d been a couple of years there when he’d pumped some money into the enterprise in an effort to help her get it off the ground. It seemed now that the money had not been properly accounted for. On his end were unsubstantiated expenses, on hers unreported income. Being married, the two had filed jointly, leaving both now tarred with the same brush. The only difference between them was that he had money, albeit in dwindling sums, while she had none. The government was looking for back taxes and penalties in excess of two hundred thousand dollars. There would of course be further bills from the requisite attorneys. He thanked his attorney and hung up.

He sat holding the letter from the IRS, fingers trembling with rage or stress, or fear, unable to shake the feeling that his former spouse and confidante, the mother of his child, had ratted him out. “It never fucking rains…” he said to no one, realizing almost at once and with a lasting chagrin it was exactly the kind of thing his mother might have said. And how he would have hated her for it, she with her platitudes and clichés, her grating homilies. But then he guessed that was how it was… you stuck around long enough… your reward was to become the very person you’d spent the better part of your life holding in contempt.

He took a three-dollar bottle of Trader Joe’s wine from the cabinet above his refrigerator, found something to drink it from, and seated himself in his own kitchenette, only slightly larger and less confining than Dr. Fry’s, and began his report:

That was as far as he got. He hadn’t the heart for it. Not tonight. He turned instead to the wine, sipping from a ridiculously large glass container that had once housed a drink called a Hurricane from a bar in New Orleans and was the only clean bit of glassware he’d been able to find after a thorough search of his apartment. He thought about his wife ratting him out. He thought about Jaclyn Blackstone with her fractured face. He thought about the darkness in the hearts of men. He recalled something Doc Billy had said to him in the course of their long afternoon: “You can’t imagine how it feels… ninety-two fucking years old and feeling loved for the first time. Money just doesn’t matter that much anymore.”

Chance believed he could imagine all too well how it might feel being ninety-two fucking years old. Unhappily, this did not serve to make him any less anxious about his own difficulties and his eye fell upon the slick French furniture crammed into a corner of his tiny living room and he resolved to sell it forthwith, for as much money as he possibly could. The consequences could go fuck themselves. It was, for Chance, an unusually rash call. Later he would blame it on the cheap wine, this in concert with the simple fact that he had been unable to find a suitably clean smaller glass.