Chance

The office visit

Chance shared the suite of offices on Polk Street with three other doctors, Salk, Marks, and Haig. Jacob Salk was a psychiatrist, an authority on mind control, cults, brainwashing, and vulnerability to undue influence. David Marks was a neuropsychologist Chance knew from his days at UCSF. Like Chance, he was married and a father. Unlike Chance, he was still married. And finally there was Leonard Haig. At forty-five, Haig was already the most dramatically prosperous of the group, a neurologist of private means who’d managed a specialty out of defense work for the big insurance companies. He had recently purchased a house in the South of France. He was said to be an exceptionally fine tennis player and successful womanizer. If not crossing paths as dueling expert witnesses in a court of law, as had happened on a number of occasions, Chance and Haig rarely spoke. Yet it was Haig who alerted him to the presence of Jaclyn Blackstone in the building.

“I have just directed a patient to your waiting room,” Haig told him. They were standing in the hallway before a black-and-white photograph of a clearly deranged elderly woman seated in a tiny windowless room. The room was bare as a prison cell save for a string of paper dollies by some means suspended above the woman’s nearly hairless head.

Chance did little more than lift his eyebrows. It seemed to him highly irregular that Haig should find the directing of anyone anywhere as anything other than a task beneath his station.

“She was in mine by mistake,” Haig told him. “I thought of keeping her, but what the hell. She wanted you.”

“Well… I guess I should thank you then,” Chance said.

“Or at least return the favor.” Haig inclined toward the demented woman Chance recognized as the work of the building’s chief parking attendant, Jean-Baptiste Marceau.

Formerly of Paris, France, Jean-Baptiste had once been a student of anthropology and medicine. A head injury at twenty-four with resultant scarring along the motor strip near the back portion of the frontal lobe had made of him an epileptic, subject to partial as well as complex or frontal lobe seizures in the manner of Saint Paul and in the wake of which he had abandoned his formal studies for paths less traveled. One of his interests was photography and he had, in the forty-odd years since the accident, amassed an impressive collection of prideful, demented individuals in various states of physical and mental decline and from which he occasionally sought to decorate the walls of the building.

“He’s at it again,” Haig said in reference to the picture. “I’m thinking this time… maybe you can talk to him.”

Of the artist’s work, Chance was of two minds. On the one hand, the stuff intrigued him for reasons he could not entirely fathom. On the other, it made him want to hang himself. Of Jean-Baptiste he was not at all conflicted but considered him one of the city’s hidden treasures, a kind of peripatetic holy man sworn to the pursuit of subjects not yet identified. He lived alone in the building’s tiny basement apartment, procured along with his job by way of some connection to the landlord, an ancient Chinese woman of immense wealth, that was not altogether clear, though Chance suspected some form of very beneath-the-boards type treatment/therapy as perhaps part of the equation given that Jean-Baptiste, while lacking in appropriate credentials, had been known to see people now and again as patients, especially in such cases as were inclined toward astro travel and talks with the dead. But whatever the arrangement, and clandestine therapy was pure conjecture on Chance’s part, attempts by certain of the building’s tenants to dislodge him had ended badly. The Frenchman was protected from on high.

But that was only part of it. The other thing about Jean-Baptiste was that when it came to parking cars he made no distinction between the late-model Porsches, Beamers, Mercedes, Range Rovers, and Audis that filled the underground lot and Chance’s 1989 Oldsmobile Cutlass. (His wife in possession of the Lexus, he’d found the Olds on craigslist.) Where other attendants were almost uniformly inclined to hide the creaking wreck, Jean-Baptiste was given to placing it among the building’s most desirable spaces, an act of charity that had led some, Haig among them, to believe the two in some special alliance.

“He’s taken this Diane Arbus routine to new heights, or lows,” Haig went on. “We’ll have patients going out the windows.”

Chance studied the demented woman. While it was true that in the months since Jean-Baptiste’s arrival in the building’s basement, and particularly in the wake of his own divorce, Chance had come to rather enjoy the other’s exuberant disinhibition—to the point of imparting certain confidences he would not have shared with his more professional colleagues—it was also true that Jean-Baptiste was a thing unto himself, as subject to influence as the weather, but pleasures had been few of late and Chance would take them where he could. “I don’t know,” he said, his eyes on those of the woman. “I kind of like this one.”

Haig just looked at him.

“Something about those dollies. I mean, think about it.” He had started once more for his office.

“Fuck you then,” Haig called after him. “She comes in here again… I’m keeping her for myself.”

Chance gave him a little wave. “Perhaps you should meet Big D,” he said, too distant to be heard but indulging his latest fantasy. “On a dark night in a dark alley. Oh, and bring your bat.”

He caught sight of her from the back, through one of the rectangular glass panels that flanked his door. She wore boots and jeans and a long gray sweater. She was staring out a window and he was taken, as he had been in the bookstore, by her length and line. Funny how well she’d hidden it on the occasion of her first visit, in the flat shoes and dowdy dress, the lackluster arrangement of her hair.

She turned as he entered, showing him her splint and bruises. As he started toward her, he became aware of Lucy, the young woman he’d hired to manage his office, giving him the evil eye from her place behind the counter. She was the perfect height for it at five feet even. Sometimes all you could see from across the room was the top of her head down to her eyes. She had red hair and the kind of horn-rimmed glasses once favored by Buddy Holly. Her skin was milk white, pure as the driven snow save for the full-sleeve tattoo decorating one arm, extreme perhaps but beautifully done, the work of some latter-day Dalí, all melting clocks and serpents in the garden. He didn’t know what else. The tattoos disappeared into her clothing but presumably went on from there. There was a small silver stud in her face just beneath her lower lip. She favored dresses from retro secondhand stores and Converse sneakers but she knew how to put it all together. Before reinventing herself as a psych major at UC–Berkeley she had studied art at Hunter College in New York City. She was really quite sexy in a druggy, artistic sort of way when you got right down to it. Probably why he hired her. Not that this was anything he would ever have acted upon. But he did like seeing her there, behind the big, curved counter, greeting patients, moving about the office. It was why people kept exotic birds. Her colors filled the room.

“The Jenkinses are waiting,” Lucy said. She affected a somewhat breathless delivery, one eye on the wounded Jaclyn. “I told Mrs. Blackstone she would have to make another appointment…”

“It’s all right,” Chance told her. “I’ll handle it.”

“The Jenkinses have been waiting for half an hour.”

“Please tell them that I will be with them momentarily.”

Lucy looked at him just long enough to punctuate her disapproval then did as she was asked.

Chance crossed to where Jaclyn stood waiting, blue circles beneath her yellow cat’s eyes. “I do have someone,” he said.

“Should I go?”

“It may be awhile, is what I’m saying.”

She looked to the window as if to master her emotions.

The Jenkinses were a married couple with two small children. Ralf Jenkins was thirty-nine years old. He was two years post a second craniotomy and following radiation therapy for a malignant brain tumor. Since the second surgery he’d been experiencing word-finding difficulty and fine-motor problems with his right hand. Chance had recommended both a speech pathologist with regard to his language problems and a psychotherapist for assistance with the psychological effects of his brain cancer. That had been at the first of the year. Last week they had scheduled a return visit for reasons he might anticipate but had yet to be certain of. He imagined the appointment would take anywhere from one to two hours. Since moving into private practice, Chance had always tried to make large allowances of time for the patients who came to see him. Their conditions were often grave. They were often confused, frightened, angry. The universe was already rushing them. They didn’t need it from him. “How much time do you have?” he asked of Jaclyn. He was aware of Lucy, watching from her post in the reception area.

“I have the afternoon. I’m sorry to just show up like this…”

He raised a hand. “It’s okay. It’s dull waiting up here. There’s a little café just downstairs at the end of the block. Why don’t you go down there and wait, have a cup of coffee.” He looked to a table in his waiting room. “Take a magazine. I should be able to join you in an hour or so.” He looked at his watch. It was just after one. “I have to pick up my daughter by four, but we should have some time to talk.”

Her eyes found his. “That would be very kind of you,” she said. Her fingers fiddled with the buttons on her sweater. He could see that her thumbs were raw around the nails where she picked or chewed at them. “I have a cell phone,” she told him. “If I have to leave, I’ll call your office. But I’ll try to wait.”

“That’ll be fine.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know…” She started off on some new train of thought then reigned herself in. “I’m sorry. Really. But thank you.” She moved away, ignoring the magazines and exiting the office.

“Don’t even go there,” he said to Lucy on his way to the Jenkinses. “You don’t know what she’s been through.”

“Maybe not, but she strikes me as someone who knows how to get what she wants. You should’ve seen her little-girl-lost routine with your buddy Dr. Haig.”

“He’s hardly my buddy.”

“And she was hardly lost. I mean, she’s been here before.”

“And sustained a pretty good concussion since that time. How come you’re so tough all of a sudden?”

Lucy ignored the question. “Meeting in the café,” she said. “Is that like a freebie, then?”

“Believe me,” Chance told her. “It’s the least I can do.”

His meeting with the Jenkinses lasted for more than an hour but Jaclyn was waiting in the café, nearly empty at this time of day. To enter was to descend a short flight of tiled steps by which the café’s windows were brought nearly even with the sidewalk, the wheels of passing cars. Jaclyn had chosen a table well back in the room and away from the windows. Chance ordered coffee on his way in and joined her in the shadows.

“How was your patient?” she asked.

He told her about Ralf.

“He’s dying then?”

“He has six months, maybe.”

“Jesus. What do you tell them?”

“The truth. I suggest counseling, support groups, hospice care.” A cable car rattled past in the street. “It’s not always as grim as you might think,” he said. “What you see… sometimes, with some people… is the bullshit falling away. They see what’s important, and what isn’t. You get the feeling… with some, that they actually begin to live for the first time.” It pleased him to believe this was so.

Jaclyn nodded but didn’t say anything.

“A blast occurs outside that window, the white light of some nuclear holocaust. You’ve got five seconds. Now what do you do?”

Jaclyn looked to the street. There was only the muted light of a foggy afternoon. “I don’t know,” she said. She looked to Chance. “Do you?”

He reached across the table and took her hand. “This. Maybe this is all there is. They find people like that, you know, everywhere from Pompeii to the World Trade Center.” He let go her hand. “We all die,” he told her. “It’s what we do with the time we have that matters.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “You’re a good doctor,” she said.

“People want miracles. Sometimes the only miracle is, I take your hand. That’s the miracle.”

A moment elapsed. She regained her composure.

“What do I do?” she asked him.

“I’d think you have to start with the truth.”

“He’d kill me. He’s said he would and I believe him.”

“We’re talking about your husband now, not some intruder. Just to be clear.”

She nodded that this was so.

“It was your husband who beat you.”

She smiled in a way that seemed to suggest the naiveté of his question. “He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t be the one to get his hands dirty.”

“He had it done? Is that what you’re telling me? It’s important for us to be clear about this.”

She shrugged and looked away.

“Have you ever talked to an attorney? Another cop? There are attorneys who specialize in cases where people are threatened…”

“I’m talking to you.”

“But now, that you’ve actually been hurt…”

“You think this is the first time? Look, I know the drill… What you don’t know, what nobody knows… is how smart he is. He knows the law. He’s also crazy. He would get me in the end. It’s what he’s like. He knows people. He could be in jail and still have it done.” Her voice broke for the first time. “He knows how to do things,” she whispered. “He would know how to make Jaclyn disappear.”

“You just referred to yourself in the third person,” Chance said. “Is this Jackie I’m speaking to now?”

“No. I don’t know. I don’t care about Jackie.” She gave it a beat. “I have a daughter,” she said.

Chance was stunned. There had been no mention of a child in any of the paperwork pertaining to her case. Nor had the subject come up at the time of his initial interview. He studied her for some time in the muted light.

Jaclyn Blackstone studied her hands.

“The child is his?”

She shook her head. “I was seventeen. Her father and I were never married.” She hesitated and went on. “I gave her up for adoption. We reconnected two years ago. She’s in school at Chico State. Raymond pays her tuition.”

“Raymond is your husband?” He believed it was the first time he’d heard her say his name. She indicated that such was the case. “Why didn’t you mention any of this when you came to my office?”

“I guess… what I was most afraid of just then… was that these symptoms I’d been experiencing were neurological.”

His first inclination was to mention that he was in fact board certified as both a neurologist and as a psychiatrist, that any proper evaluation of her particular symptoms would require his being privy to any and all pertinent information. Upon reflection this struck him as needlessly argumentative, given the circumstances, and he chose to let it go, at least for the time being. “I take it,” he said finally, “that you believe your daughter to be at risk as well.”

“He’s said as much.”

Chance imagined himself no stranger to the machinations by which people went about establishing the architecture of their own imprisonment, the citadels from whose basement windows one might on occasion hear their cries. Like Houdini, we construct the machinery of our entrapment from which we must finally escape or die. Mired in the legal and financial difficulties following in the wake of his divorce, he did not find in himself any particular exception to this rule, though in comparison to Jaclyn Blackstone, his chances of death were certainly more figurative than literal. “Beyond trying to find legal help,” Chance said. He was at the end of another long pause. “I don’t know what to say. Will you continue with Janice?”

“He’s forbidden it. This was a big deal, me coming here. This is dangerous for me.” Her eyes searched the room. “It could be dangerous for you too. I could be putting you at risk. I had to think about that.”

He was for the second time that afternoon aware of the day’s fresh slant. “There is,” he said, “quite often a difference in what people threaten and what they will actually do.” But noted that his pulse had quickened.

“Right,” she said.

“Look,” he said. “This is not easy. I get that. What do you risk to get your life back? Do you risk losing it? And it’s not just you. There is your daughter to consider. I can’t tell you what to do. I still think some kind of discreet conversation with someone more versed in the law… I’m often called to testify in court as an expert witness. These are rarely criminal cases, but I do know a number of attorneys. I could make inquiries… Beyond that…”

She reached suddenly across the table to take his hand. “Maybe it’s like you said,” she told him. “Maybe there’s just this. Maybe this was why I came.”

The move caught him. He sat with his hand in hers, studying her in the late light. Christ, he thought, you could land a plane on those cheekbones, and wondered how at their first meeting he could have missed so much. She pulled his hand toward her, clasping it between her own, the wedding ring she still wore sharp against his fingers. He imagined himself outside looking in. He imagined the picture they might make at just this moment. He imagined the bad cop looking on. One should really be more mindful of appearances, he thought, in the manner of his father, one should be more cautious, but his hand remained where it was. He was aware of the pulse in her wrist, warm against the heel of his palm. He was aware of his desire, taking him by the throat.