In A Country Of Mothers

1

Jody was already dialing when Harry came up from behind and put his fat thumb down on the hook, disconnecting her.

“No spy reports,” he said.

“I was making a shrink appointment. You’re driving me crazy.”

“I’m flattered,” Harry said, plucking the quarter from the coin return, dropping it into her open palm. “Try again.”

Once more Jody put the quarter in and dialed. She turned to face Harry. The short metal phone cord pulled close against her throat. Later, she would notice it had left a thick red mark like a scar across her neck, as though someone had tried to strangle her. But then, waiting for the call to go through, she ignored the pressure at her throat and fixed on Harry. Fat, swollen up like a dead whale, Harry’s stomach started at his collar and went down to his knees, jutting out in front of him in one solid lump. His thick, pink lips were pulled down by age and too many years of pretending to pout. She imagined his skin was cold and clammy to the touch.

When Claire Roth’s answering machine finally beeped, Jody smiled at Harry and left the following message:

“Hi, this is Jody Goodman, you don’t know me. I’m having some trouble making career decisions.”

Harry’s face curled into a scowl.

“Barbara Schwartz gave me your number. I think I should make an appointment. I can’t be reached at work, but my number at home is 555-2102. Thanks.”

“Taking to the couch over me?” Harry asked when Jody hung up. “How wonderful.”

“You’re an asshole,” Jody answered, loud enough for the crew hovering around her to hear.

“And you, good girl,” Harry said, blushing, “are an angel.” He kissed her forehead and drifted back onto the set.

Jody dropped another quarter into the phone and called the office.

“Michael Miller Productions, can you hold?”

“It’s me,” Jody said. “Is he there?”

“Hold, please.”

There was a buzz, then the clattering of Michael Miller picking up his prized Lego phone.

“What?” Michael said.

“‘What?’? No ‘Hi, hello?’” Jody asked.

There was silence. After spending two years as Michael’s assistant, Jody was often spoken to in a kind of small talk that was sometimes no talk.

“Fine,” Jody said. “I guess when you’re losing millions of dollars, the little niceties are the first thing to go. Well, he knows I’m checking in. He just kissed the top of my forehead. A saliva ball remains in my hair. I think I can feel it.”

“Aside from your personal injury?”

“He’s taking his time. Going over everything again and again. There’s no way he’ll finish on schedule.”

“Let me know more as soon as you can. I may have to try and bring in some new money. Speaking of which, where did you put that European check?”

“In the production account. By the way, I think I’m on to something. I just called Harry an asshole and he blushed.” She hung up quickly before Michael could respond.

“Lock it up,” the production assistants screamed down the street. Within minutes traffic was stopped, pedestrians held behind barricades, and a rented police car, sirens wailing, raced up a side street past the first camera position, turned wide onto Broadway, spinning a little in front of a bank of lights and a second camera, then came to a screeching halt in front of Zabar’s, third position. An actor dressed as a cop jumped out of the front seat, opened the back door, and a woman in a thick wool coat, played by the legendary Carol Heberton, stepped out.

“Do you want anything?” Jody said, mouthing Heberton’s lines in synch with the action. “I won’t be more than a minute.”

“Cut,” someone shouted into a megaphone. “Once more, positions.”

Jody pushed her way through the crowd, mentally calculating the cost of another take. Film was money; cost was associated with everything.

As she started to duck under one of the barricades, a real cop stopped her. “You’ll have to cross on the other side.”

“I don’t think so,” Jody said, and went forward.

The cop caught her by the shoulder and held her until a production assistant came to the rescue. “She’s okay,” he said. “She’s okay, she’s one of us.”

Jody dusted herself off.

“Harry’s been asking for you,” the PA said, “barking ‘Good girl, good girl,’ into someone’s walkie-talkie.”

“Great,” Jody said, turning to look at the crowd of hangers-on, thinking the whole thing was ridiculous. Michael Miller Productions — a.k.a. Forgettable Films. She’d taken the job with the idea that if she wanted to be a filmmaker she ought to learn something about the business. For the entire two years she’d been there, Michael had been scraping money together so that old Harry Birenbaum, creator of hybrid, sweeping, pseudo-European romantic epics, could try his hand at a new kind of movie, one that had commercial potential, and ideally would earn back all the money Michael had begged, borrowed, and worse. If the film failed, Michael Miller Productions would probably become Michael Miller Lawn Service: WE CLEAN GUTTERS.

A homeless man appeared out of nowhere and scurried up to the food table. Jody watched him pile bananas, oranges, and apples into the crook of his free arm. He was almost at a dozen when a technician startled him—“And don’t come back!” The last orange fell, bounced on the sidewalk, and rolled into the street.

Michael had talked Jody into loaning herself out to Harry during the New York location work by describing it as a unique opportunity to see one of the masters in action. So far, all she’d learned from watching the great one was that maybe she should have applied to UCLA’s law school instead of the film department.

Jody knocked on Harry’s trailer door, marked COSTUME to deter celebrity maniacs.

“Please,” Harry called.

The door opened and Karl, Harry’s assistant, came flying out as if he’d been fired from a cannon.

Harry himself was sitting sideways at the table, too fat to fit in facing front. “Come and have lunch with me,” he said.

Jody didn’t answer.

“Well, come on. Can’t leave the door open like that. Someone might see.”

Jody climbed in and sat across from Harry at the dinette.

“What do you think — A or B?” He aimed a remote control at a television set built into the wall and played two video versions of a scene they’d shot the day before. The A sequence was neither here nor there, acceptable but boring, definitely not the stuff of Academy Award nominations. The B shot was classic Harry, so tight that the images overflowed the frame. Instead of Carol Heberton from fifteen feet, it was Heberton’s left eye, a subtle shift in the pupil, a dilation that registered her having seen something, consciously or unconsciously. Playing the known against the unknown, that was Harry’s strength.

“A or B?” Harry asked again.

She didn’t want to answer. Harry really was one of the great filmmakers, but he was slumming. His last three films had lost fortunes, his shooting style of rehearsal, take, and retake was so expensive that producers wouldn’t go near him. Regardless, he wasn’t someone you pictured behind the wheel of a cop-and-robber flick.

“Sweetheart,” he said. “You want to be a director? Directors make decisions.”

“B,” Jody said.

“And why?”

“It builds tension, reveals more without giving anything away. The other one is too diffuse, there’s too much in the background, it’s distracting.”

“A-plus, little one, A-plus. Do you know what that boy who was in here said?”

Jody shook her head. Karl had to be at least forty years old.

“He said A, because Carol looks old in the B shot. But she is old. For weeks I’ve been trying to make her look exactly like this, and suddenly he’s complaining. Old is nice, isn’t it?”

“Lovely,” Jody said, standing to leave.

“This isn’t a beauty contest,” Harry said.

There was a knock on the trailer door. Karl slipped in and deposited a huge tray of food in the middle of the table.

“That’s all for now,” Harry said.

After Karl turned and left, Jody also started for the door.

“You don’t expect me to eat alone?” Harry asked.

Jody shrugged and lied. “I’m not a food person.”

“But I am.”

And so Jody sat and watched Harry suck up his lunch like a vacuum cleaner, thinking about her own life, past, present, and future. She envisioned a high crane shot beginning inside the trailer: Harry chewing on the small bones of a roasted baby something — chicken, lamb, child; the crane pulling up through the skylight to reveal the set outside — technicians scurrying for lights, gaffer’s tape, the cinematographer riding his camera back and forth on dolly tracks, Heberton repetitiously rehearsing her lines, the pedestrians tripping over one another to get a closer look; and then the camera pulling away even more, sweeping past Michael in his office crunching numbers, and moving still farther away to an aerial view of Manhattan — New York from a distance, earth as seen from space.

By the time Harry was finished, Jody was nauseated as hell, partly from the sight of the great man with carroty flecks of cole slaw at the corners of his corpulent mouth, a wide yellow slap of mustard across his cheek, and partly from the anxiety of her own thoughts. Who did she think she was that she could make it in this business, where the recipe for success seemed to be equal amounts of arrogance, assholism, and unbridled brilliance? All she had for sure was curiosity and a peculiar little vision. When Karl returned with a huge pot of coffee and a tray of cookies, Jody immediately drank four cups, ate a dozen cookies, and spent the rest of the afternoon wishing there was a convenient building tall enough to jump off of.

2

Between patients, Claire napped on the sofa in her office. Something — perhaps a dream, the sound of the phone ringing, or the young woman’s voice on the answering machine — woke her. Whatever it was came like a flash, a fleeting electrocution that left her with the sensation of having been ripped back and forth through time.

She sat up, convinced something horrible had happened. If she hadn’t been expecting a patient, Claire would’ve gone home and examined her children for signs of damage. She would’ve told them to open their mouths and say aah while she shined a flashlight in. She’d press her ear to their chests, her hand to their backs, and ask them to breathe deeply. Instead she went to her desk, and called the apartment.

“Everything all right?” Claire asked Frecia.

“Adam and I are making cookies, Jake’s watching TV,” the housekeeper answered, her voice a comforting singsong.

“Don’t let him get too close to the oven. He likes to look in.”

“His head won’t catch fire,” Frecia said firmly. She’d been with Claire for years. She was used to this.

The buzzer in Claire’s office went off.

“Sam called and said he won’t be home until after eleven,” Frecia said.

The buzzer sounded again. It reminded Claire of the air-raid test sirens in elementary school: the first Wednesday of every month, from 11:00 a.m. until 11:03—every month of every year, and always it came as a surprise. She looked out the window. A woman was crossing the street with a stroller. The light was changing, and a bus was about to force its way through the intersection. Claire held her breath until the woman and the stroller were safely on the other side.

“My four o’clock’s waiting,” Claire told Frecia. “See you later.” She buzzed the patient in and turned the volume on her answering machine all the way down.

It wasn’t until she was saying hello to her six o’clock that she remembered the phone ringing during her nap. She tried to focus on what the client was saying, but her mind kept circling back to the phone call. Somehow she thought it was from someone she knew.

“It’s really wonderful that you just sit and listen to me blabber,” the patient was saying. “You never judge me. I like that. Thank you.”

Patients were always thanking Claire, telling her how wonderful she was, how much she’d helped them. And while she appreciated these thoughts, they didn’t really count. They weren’t thanking her; they were thanking a little piece of her that, in terms of the whole, wasn’t much. They thanked their fantasy of Claire. If her patients really knew her, Claire figured, they’d never come back.

She smiled, nodded. “See you Thursday,” she said fifty minutes later, leading the patient to the door.

Alone at her desk, she pressed “play” on the answering machine and listened.

“Hi, how are you?” It was her friend Naomi. “Do we have theater tickets for Saturday? If you’ve got a sitter maybe we should leave our kids at your place — two for the price of one.”

Claire fast-forwarded.

“This is Jody Goodman, you don’t know me. I’m having some trouble making career decisions. Barbara Schwartz gave me your number. I think I should make an appointment. I can’t be reached at work, but my number at home is 555-2102. Thanks.”

Claire rewound the message and played it again, writing down word for word what the girl said. Years ago, when she got her first answering machine, Claire had started transcribing phone messages from patients or would-be patients. The way she saw it, the calls were filled with clues: what the callers did or didn’t say, their tone of voice, the way they dealt with the machine. She’d never told anyone. The transcriptions would have seemed like a peculiar habit, the kind of tic only a shrink would have.

In session, listening as intently as she could, Claire often felt as though she heard nothing. Writing it down gave her the sensation of studying something, making it tangible. If she’d thought her patients would stand for it, she would have taped their sessions. But then the tapes would just be there, piled up in a closet she would have to keep locked. When the therapy was terminated, what would she do — give the tapes back to the patient? Or would she be expected to erase them, as if the person had never existed?

She dialed Jody Goodman’s number. A machine answered, and as Claire started to leave a message, someone picked up. “Hello? Hello?”

“I’m trying to reach Jody Goodman,” Claire said.

“It’s me.”

“This is Claire Roth, returning your call.”

“Oh, hi,” Jody said. “Sorry if my message sounded a little strange, my boss was standing over my shoulder. Literally.”

Claire didn’t say anything.

“I think I should make an appointment with you,” Jody said.

“Could you tell me why?”

“Graduate school,” Jody said.

A simple answer. She didn’t say she’d been seeing spotted elephants walking down Broadway. She didn’t say her boyfriend had threatened to kill her and had just gone out for pizza but would be back any minute. In other words, it wasn’t an emergency. Claire relaxed. She hated talking to strangers.

“How do you know Barbara Schwartz?” Claire asked.

“She used to be my shrink.”

“How long ago?”

“Two years. I stopped when I moved to New York.”

“Would you like to come in tomorrow? I could see you at twelve-thirty.”

“Yeah, sure. I think that’ll work.”

“See you then,” Claire said, and hung up.

She flipped through her Rolodex, found Barbara Schwartz’s number, and started to dial, but then stopped herself. She didn’t want anyone’s impressions to interfere with her own. If she needed to talk to Barbara, she’d do it later.

Barbara Schwartz. Whenever the past crossed into the present, Claire got nervous. All day she saw what memory was for people: a stomping ground for bad feelings, frozen worst moments, gone over again and again until they were smooth and hard like calluses or beach glass. When things got bad for Claire, Sam tried to make her feel better by saying, “What happened, happened. Look at it this way: if you had to do it over again, you’d do it differently — who wouldn’t?” Claire accepted it. She accepted what had happened with the kind of resignation that was in some way expected of her. There was no reason to discuss it. What happened, happened. Past is past.

Barbara Schwartz, an immigrant from Tucson, Arizona. “The onliest Jew in the West” was what she’d called herself. Nineteen sixty-seven. Little Barbie in Baltimore, with her frizzy brown hair dyed blond. A row house subdivided into apartments; Barbara, the young social worker with her first grown-up job, downstairs, and Claire, depressed, upstairs. Barbarella Schwartz, who borrowed Claire’s cashmere sweaters for dates. Claire lent them, not caring that they came back with stains or cigarette burns. Somehow, if her sweaters went out on dates, it counted for Claire too. She’d sit up watching television, waiting for her sweater to come home. And when it got back, Claire would carry the contents of her refrigerator into her bed, and she and Barbara would lie there watching the late movie and saying nasty things about men. It was on one of those nights that Claire almost told Barbara her secret — the truly worst thing about a man, the reason she was in Baltimore. But she chickened out, afraid the story would ruin their friendship.

Baltimore was more than twenty years ago. Claire had arrived almost a year before Barbara, and stayed two years after she left. The whole time, the whole four years, she’d waited there in that same apartment, secretly hoping that what had been done would somehow, of its own volition, become undone. If only she waited long enough.

It was 1966 when Claire’s father had stormed out of their suburban Virginia split-level house shouting, “Something has to be done! This has to be put to rest!” while Claire lay on her twin bed, staring at the white lacquered furniture set, a child for the last time. She imagined her father going off to the local veterinarian and arranging to have her put to sleep. She imagined she wouldn’t live to get old. Her mother came in and silently started packing Claire’s things, putting in a few odd pieces of her own clothing as gifts. When her father returned, Claire followed her suitcase out to the car, and in silence they drove away. It was dark when he pulled up in front of the house in Baltimore, a place that might as well have been on the moon considering that Claire had never been there either. He carried the bag up the steps, unlocked the apartment, and dropped the suitcase inside. “Here,” he said, handing her the keys and an envelope from the bank. “Make it last. We can’t afford this kind of thing.”

Her father drove off, and Claire stood in the front window, dumbfounded.

As far as she knew, neither of her parents had ever told anyone. Her mother once said that if anyone asked, she’d say, “She’s gone off to Goucher College to study English literature”—something Claire would have gladly done, if only Goucher had accepted pregnant students.

The phone rang just as Claire was putting on her jacket, getting ready to leave the office.

“I know we’re getting together on Saturday, but how about meeting me for dinner tonight?” her friend Naomi asked. “I called your house and Sam isn’t coming home until late.”

“I haven’t been home all day,” Claire said.

“What’s another hour?”

The golden hour, the difference between life and death for trauma patients. “Sure,” Claire said. “Ten minutes.”

They didn’t have to discuss where to go. They always met at the same Italian cafe on Thompson Street.

“My family,” Naomi said, “is driving me nuts.”

Although Claire had never told her so, Naomi was her alter ego. She did and said all the things Claire only imagined.

“I feel like running away,” Naomi said. “I just want to say goodbye, close the door, and be gone. Sometimes I look at Roger and I want to know why. Why did I do this? Why did I get married? It’s like having a fourth child. If I’d stayed by myself and adopted a baby, at least I’d be alone when I got into bed at night. There’s no escaping. It’s either his children or him.”

Claire nodded. She twirled pasta on her fork and slipped it into her mouth. She smiled.

“There’s nowhere I can go for a minute of silence. I’ve started hiding in the kitchen. I stay in there all night purposely burning things that smell terrible so they’ll leave me alone.”

“Not a good sign,” Claire said, blotting marinara sauce from her lips. “Why don’t you go away for a weekend?”

“By myself?”

“Why not?”

“What would I do? Who would I talk to? I’d end up staying in the hotel room the whole time.”

“Go to a bed and breakfast upstate, or out to the beach. There’s a spa in Montauk, get a massage, an herbal mud wrap.”

The couple at the table behind them were arguing about something unbelievably stupid, destroying their relationship because both of them were determined to win. Eating her pasta, Claire realized that if she were really doing her job, if she turned around and explained it to them, her work would never end.

“Not to change the subject, but can I ask you a completely unrelated question?”

Claire nodded.

“How do you get your hair to do that?” Naomi asked. “Is it like a goy thing?”

Claire put her hand to her hair, which was up in a bun. “Hidden pins,” she said. “I’ll show you sometime.”

“Anybody home?” Claire called as she opened the front door. The television was blaring. “Hello … hello?” She made a mental note to talk to Frecia again about the television. She hung up her coat, flipped through the mail, and went into the living room. Adam was curled up on the sofa with his stuffed rabbit. His hair was still damp from his bath. He looked tired, as though recovering from something. Jake sat next to him, eyes fixed on the TV. Frecia was at the far end of the sofa, folding laundry, stacking clean clothing on the coffee table. Claire went to Adam and kissed him on the forehead, leaving her lips against his skin a little longer than necessary, trying to decide whether or not to take his temperature.

“How was your day?” she asked.

No one answered.

“Anyone call?”

Frecia shook her head. Claire picked up the remote and turned the TV off.

“Mom, it’s the middle,” Jake said, still staring at the screen.

“Sorry,” she said. “Did you finish your homework?”

As much as she wanted to leave her children alone, to let them run their own lives, she couldn’t. They sprawled like inert objects, deflated balloons. Neither of them could focus on anything for more than a minute without becoming distracted. She was sure it was a birth defect that would become increasingly pronounced, so that by the time they were eighteen, when all the other kids were going off to college, hers would have to be institutionalized. She and Sam would begin new lives, adopting children from some far-off, war-torn country, raising them fully, lovingly. On Sundays she and Sam and the new children would go on long car rides to the distant institution where her old children lounged on plastic-covered, drool-protected sofas.

“Did you do your homework?”

Jake shrugged. He was in the sixth grade, at the beginning of real homework. He absolutely failed to understand that the amount and difficulty of the assignments would increase for the next fifteen years, until finally he would be expected to write a thesis. Without that he would be abandoned by his school, parents, and friends, and left to fend for himself in a world where people actually worked for a living.

“Get your book and bring it here, right now.”

Jake just looked at her, eyes thick as if covered by a strange film. She imagined that the news would arrive in tomorrow’s paper: TELEVISION FOUND TO CAUSE BLINDNESS AND RETARDATION. LONG-TERM EFFECTS SIMILAR TO PROGRESSIVE LEAD POISONING.

“You,” she said to Adam, “are going to sleep.”

“No I’m not.”

“Yes you are.”

Jake pulled his textbook out of the sofa cushions. “Here,” he said, handing it to Claire.

“It’s not for me, sweetie. Open it and get to work.”

Claire lifted Adam off the sofa and carried him to the boys’ room. Just inside their door, toys crunched under her feet. She flipped the light switch. Every goddamned piece of molded plastic her sons owned was spread out across the floor.

“What happened in here?” Claire demanded.

“Playing,” Adam said innocently. His sweetness saved him.

She kicked a clear path to the bed, laid Adam down, read him a quick story, and turned out the light. Tomorrow she would remind Frecia to remind the children to put their toys away.

“I feel sick,” Adam said, as she reached the door.

“Go to sleep,” Claire whispered.

“But I feel sick.”

“Close your eyes and think about what a wonderful day tomorrow will be.”

She gently pulled the door closed. Adam began to cry. What would happen if she opened the door? Adam would be forty years old and still living at home. If she left it shut, he’d become a mass murderer.

She stood at the door listening. The crying stopped and there was a horrible sound, the rumble and roar of a child throwing up. She opened the door and flicked on the light. Adam was sitting up in bed — his blanket, pajamas, and stuffed rabbit covered in vomit.

“Oh, sweetie,” she said, running to get a cold washcloth from the bathroom. She lifted his pajama top off and carefully took it and the blanket into the bathroom and put them in a plastic trash bag. She put the stuffed rabbit into the sink and turned on the water. “Frecia?” Claire called.

Frecia came into the room, already in her coat.

“Can you do me a favor on your way out? Put these clothes in the machine downstairs — there’re some quarters on my dresser.”

“We used them today for the bus.”

“Then check my purse.”

Frecia took the bag from Claire. “See you tomorrow,” she said.

“What happened?” Jake asked, rushing to the scene five minutes after the fact, reinforcing Claire’s idea that he was growing slower and stupider as he got older. “Oh, stinko,” he said. “I’m not sleeping in here.” Adam started crying.

“Is your homework finished?” Claire asked.

Jake nodded.

“Then go take a bath.”

“Shit,” Jake said.

“What?”

It wasn’t like Jake to swear. The beginning of the end: in the morning he’d come to breakfast with an unfiltered Camel hanging out the corner of his eleven-year-old mouth.

“I’m pretending I didn’t hear that,” she said. “Why did you throw up?” she asked Adam, as if he’d be able to explain.

“Cookie dough,” Jake said. “He ate cookie dough before Frecia baked it. I had some too. Oh my God,” he said, clutching his stomach, scaring Claire for a second, “I’m going to be sick too.” Jake imitated throwing up all over Adam, who loved it.

“I want my rabbit,” Adam said.

“I have to clean him first,” Claire said, and Adam started crying again.

She changed Adam’s sheets, then went into the bathroom to wash Woozy Rabbit. She heard Sam’s key in the lock and then him in the hall taking off his shoes so his step would be light and the children wouldn’t be awakened.

“We’re in here,” Claire yelled.

Sam stomped flat-footed down the hall and into the room. “What’s going on?”

“I threw up,” Adam said.

“You did? What a wonderful boy. God, I wish I could throw up,” Sam said. He sat down on Adam’s bed and took off his shirt and tie, which Adam immediately put on.

“God, I’m happy,” Sam said, running his fingers through the thick hair on his chest. He unbuckled his belt, pulled it out through the loops, and dropped it on the floor. Adam stood up on the bed, posing in his father’s shirt. Sam reached up for him.

“Don’t start or he’ll throw up again,” Claire said. She hated it when Sam came home excessively cheerful after a long day. The worse things got, the more Sam glowed. Originally, it was something she’d liked about him, and she still did on occasion, but on a regular basis all the smiling, the jokes, could bring a person down.

“You mean, if I play with you, you’ll throw up again?” Sam asked Adam. “If I touch you even just for a second, to give you a hug, you’ll throw up?”

Adam nodded, grinned, laughed.

Claire was sure that if she hadn’t been standing there, Sam would have started tickling him. She gave Sam the evil eye and went back into the bathroom, washed the rabbit, and hung it from its ears, where Adam could see it from his bed. “Tomorrow he’ll be ready for you. Now, let’s put on some fresh p.j.’s.”

Adam shook his head and pulled at his father’s shirt, which came down to his ankles. “This is my nightgown,” he said.

“Not the tie,” Sam said, slipping it. over Adam’s head.

Claire kissed Adam goodnight. “I’m sorry I didn’t pay attention when you said you felt sick.”

“I told you,” he said, looking at his father for confirmation.

“Yeah, he told you,” Sam said, crossing his arms in front of his chest.

She knew Sam was kidding, but it made her feel like they were ganging up on her. After all, there were three of them and just one of her. Besides, she was their mother, Sam’s wife, she took care of them. They should be nicer to her.

“I know you did, sweetie,” Claire said. “And I’m sorry. Sleep well.” She went out of the room and left Sam to tuck them in.

In the master bedroom, even though she wanted to collapse onto the bed, she first flipped through the closet and thought about her schedule for the next day. A new patient. The former patient of an old friend, a colleague. She’d better look good in case the girl reported back.

Claire used to believe that looking good inspired trust, gave the impression that the shrink could actually do something for her patients — if not rid them of their angst, at least upgrade their sense of style. All the same, she’d given up on it, deciding that a flawless costume caused patients to feel competitive with the therapist. Her current theory was that a well-dressed shrink seemed superior and therefore served as a depressant. These days, Claire dressed as though she were going to lunch with a girlfriend: nice, but relaxed — approachable, was how she liked to think of it. She picked out a very short black skirt and a silk blouse, hung them on the doorknob, and went looking for pantyhose. She knew the outfit might be considered unacceptable, sexually provocative; but her legs were long — why not show off? — and besides, it was late, she was exhausted, and, more importantly, nothing else was clean.

3

At noon the next day, while Harry was immersed in a debate with the special-effects guy about the fine art of splattering fake blood, Jody sneaked off the set.

“I have an, uh, appointment,” she whispered to Karl. “Be back in ninety minutes.” She figured fifty for the shrinking, forty there and back.

“Gotcha,” Karl said, winking.

She walked straight down Broadway, passing the bookstore where they were shooting, the production trailers and trucks, smiling, nodding hello and good morning. Once she was in the clear, with everything and everyone behind her, she flagged a cab. Within seconds she was stuck in traffic.

It was as if all of Manhattan had poured out onto the streets, the city itself doing a snakish shuffle-and-stop, shuffle-and-stop, like the “Soul Train” dance line. She checked her watch. She could’ve taken the subway, but the last time she was on it, something horrible had happened: the train ran over a man and they’d kept the subway doors closed until the police came. Jody was forced to sit there while the man moaned somewhere beneath her on the tracks.

The shrink’s office was on Sixth Avenue near Houston, seventy-some blocks from the location and about fifteen from Jody’s apartment. She was late. Timing the two-minute-forty-second wait for the elevator, she figured how much standing in the lobby was costing her. On the way up she entertained herself with questions like: Do all the offices in the building belong to shrinks? Is everyone in this elevator crazy?

On the third floor, she found Claire’s office and pushed the buzzer marked “Roth.”

“Hello,” a muffled voice called through a small speaker in the wall.

Jody considered not going in, not meeting Claire Roth face-to-face but having the session out there in the hall, chatting it up with a hidden voice, as if talking to the Wizard of Oz. “It’s Jody Goodman.”

The door unlocked with a thick sound like a joy buzzer. Jody grabbed the knob and pushed.

The waiting room was long and thin, three doors with chairs in the spaces between the doors. Jody sat on the chair closest to the door going out, unsure whether you were supposed to sit in an assigned chair — the chair next to the door that belonged to your shrink? The whole thing felt like a puzzle, a test designed to reveal something significant about Jody’s psyche. She had the urge to get up, take the subway back uptown, and call later to say she’d realized that she’d left the toaster oven on and had to hurry home. Reschedule? Well, right now I’m kind of busy. Oh, there’s my other line. Gotta go.

There were two noise machines on the floor, filling the room with the rushing sound of mechanically driven air. She was proud of herself for knowing what they were: shrink technology, white noise. They sounded like a constantly droning vacuum cleaner. Jody closed her eyes and imagined holding one to her ear like a shell. More than once, when she and Barbara reached sensitive points in what Jody called their “negotiations,” she’d wanted to lean forward and say, “Your sound machines don’t do shit.”

The door at the end of the hall opened. “See you Thursday,” a soft voice said. Because she couldn’t decide who to look at, the patient or the shrink, Jody saw nothing.

“Hi, I’m Claire,” the shrink said, extending her hand.

“Hi,” Jody said, shaking hands, worried that the shrink could feel her trembling, her sweat.

“Would you like to come in?”

I must be crazy, Jody thought as she walked over the threshold into the office. There were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, an old wooden desk, a leather sofa, a small table for the requisite box of Kleenex, and one chair. Claire sat in the chair, Jody on the sofa. It was easy, obvious.

“So,” Claire said, picking up a big yellow legal pad and resting it on her lap. “What’s going on?”

“I really shouldn’t be doing this,” Jody said, laughing a little. “I just escaped from the set of a movie, and coming here, sitting here, I feel like I’m in a movie.” Jody paused.

Two seconds had passed. Jody couldn’t imagine lasting an hour. There was silence. Jody looked at Claire and noticed she was wearing a short skirt. She’d never seen a shrink in a short skirt before. She hoped it was a good sign.

“You made the appointment,” Claire said. “There must be something on your mind.”

Jody had the sensation of auditioning to be Claire’s patient. At the end of the hour, just like a casting director or a theatrical agent, Claire would stand up and say, Look, this is all very interesting, but I really don’t work with people like you.

“On the phone you said you were having some difficulty making career decisions. Would you like to talk about that?”

Again Jody laughed, but it came out more like a snort. “For as long as I can remember I wanted to go to UCLA film school, so this year I applied, got in. And now, all of a sudden, I’m not sure.”

Jody wanted Claire to like her, to choose her. She didn’t want to say anything about herself that would seem too terrible, too complicated. She wanted Claire to think she was easy.

“So you’re afraid? Is that the problem?”

Of course that was the problem, or at least part of it. But she wasn’t ready to talk about it, so she started telling jokes. “I’m not so sure it’s the school I’m afraid of. I think it’s getting there, flying. I used to love it. Up in the air, Junior Birdman. Up in the air, Victory.” It was the first session and Jody was singing at the top of her lungs, making her fingers into goggles and pressing them up to her eyes, making faces.

Claire was smiling at Jody. “You’re very funny. That’s great.”

Not only did Claire understand; she appreciated, she approved. Jody felt incredible. She felt as though she could relax, could confess all the things she’d never been able to tell Barbara, all the things she’d never told anyone; anything and everything.

She closed her eyes and saw herself as a World War I flying ace. She was flying to Los Angeles in a leather jacket and goggles, a white silk scarf flapping back into her mother’s face. Her mother wore a leather hood and big glasses and kept shouting directions into Jody’s ear. The directions were based on a trip she’d made to California by bus thirty years before.

“Is there any other reason you might not want to go away?” Claire asked. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No,” Jody said.

“Do you want one?”

It seemed like a strange question. “Are you giving them away?” Jody asked.

Claire laughed. At the rate this was going, by the end of the session Jody could have the “HBO Comedy Hour” all to herself.

“What about your family?” Claire asked.

Jody raised her eyebrows.

“Who’s in your family?”

Oddly phrased, as though Claire wanted names, famous names, like Clark Gable and Rock Hudson. “I have a mother, a father, and a grandfather,” she said uncertainly.

“What are they like?”

“Well,” she said, teasing, “my aunt was Lucille Ball — you know, ‘I Love Lucy.’ It was really hard on my mom, not being the funny one.” Jody noticed Claire writing something down on her legal pad and got nervous. “Don’t write that down.”

“I didn’t,” Claire said, looking up.

“Why not?” Jody asked.

“You don’t look anything like Lucy.”

“I’m adopted,” Jody said, and Claire’s expression changed. “My aunt and I were very close.”

“What I’d like to do,” Claire said, “is see you three times — then I’ll have a better sense of things and we can talk about where to go from there. Does that sound okay to you?”

Jody nodded. She hated this part. Business before pleasure.

“What kind of a job do you have?”

“I work for a film production company.”

“Are your parents helping you?”

“A little.”

“Can you afford ninety-five dollars an hour?”

Jody nodded.

“Are you sure?”

Jody nodded again. There was something about Claire that made Jody think that even if she couldn’t afford it, she wouldn’t say no. She’d find a way.

Claire picked up her appointment book. “Could you come the day after tomorrow at one?”

“Do you have anything later?”

“Three?”

Jody nodded.

“I’ll see you then,” Claire said, standing.

Jody couldn’t believe the session was over. Okay, so she’d been a few minutes late, but this had to be the fastest fifty minutes in history.

“Have you got the time?” Jody asked, getting up, noticing that Claire was quite tall, at least five nine or ten — model material.

“It’s one-thirty-five, we ran a few minutes over.”

“Wow.”

“See you Thursday,” Claire said, closing the door behind her.

Instead of waiting for the elevator, Jody ran down the stairs, hailed a cab, and raced back uptown.

Some strange and primal magic had been exchanged. Jody went back to work with more energy than she could ever remember having, so much energy that it was a little frightening.

“Ahh,” Harry said, turning from a quick conference with one of the lighting guys. “I missed you at lunch.”

Jody was at the food table, slapping cream cheese onto a bagel. She blushed, took a bite, and looked up.

Harry reached out, wiped a blob of cream cheese off her face, and popped his finger into his mouth. “We should have dinner sometime,” he said.

Jody didn’t answer. She chewed. One of the other lighting guys called Harry over to check something, and Jody ducked around the corner into a phone booth.

“What’s the word?” Michael said.

“Not much. They’re on the bookstore scene,” Jody said, staring at the Shakespeare & Co. marquee.

“Is everything going right?”

“Well, they’re splattering fake blood all over stacks of books and then trying to clean them off and do it again.”

“I hope they’re not real books,” Michael muttered. “Check and make sure we’re not buying the whole inventory — and if we are, at least get them to use paperbacks.”

Jody took another bite of her bagel. “Am I getting overtime? I should definitely be getting more money.”

“Are you eating something?”

“No,” she said, spitting the bread into her hand and dropping it, as nonchalantly as possible, into the gutter.

“It’s disgusting. You’re eating while I’m talking.”

“I’m not eating. Look, Michael, I’m not exactly clear about what you expect me to do here.”

“Kiss Harry’s ass and then tell me how hairy it is. That’s your job.”

“I never knew you were such a romantic,” Jody said. Michael hung up and Jody felt cheated out of one of her favorite moments, slamming the phone down. She dialed Ellen’s number at work.

“Third National,” Ellen said in a smooth voice.

“Hi,” Jody said.

“Are you eating something?” Ellen asked.

“A bagel,” Jody said with her mouth full.

“Can I have a bite?”

“Yeah, sure,” Jody said, swallowing. “So listen, I went to this shrink, you know, and it was kind of weird.”

“Is she good?”

“She’s either very good or very dangerous. I go back in two days.”

“Can we not talk about your problems?” Ellen said. “Can we just talk about me? I’m so depressed.”

“Sorry.”

“Well, you don’t really have any problems. You got into UCLA, you like your shrink. On the other hand, what am I doing with my life? I can’t keep going out with Robert. He’s an insurance salesman. I don’t care about insurance. I don’t even have any. He wants me to marry him. Meanwhile, in this restaurant this afternoon, I met this actor-waiter type and went in the back and kind of … I really like him.”

“Kind of what? Isn’t this the fourth person in three weeks that you kind-of ed? Are you being careful?”

“The other ones don’t count. They’re from before. And this was really fun. We went out of the restaurant, opened those metal cellar doors you see on the sidewalk, went down there, and did it with the door open. If someone was walking by and had looked in, they would have seen us. It was—”

“You’re nuts,” Jody said. “And when you’re dying of AIDS, you’ll expect me to visit you and bring you popcorn, play with your respirator and everything.”

“Don’t be mean.”

“Don’t be stupid‚” Jody said. “You can’t keep doing this.”

“It’s just because I’m bored.”

“Go bowling,” Jody said. The pay phone beeped and a nasty woman’s recorded voice cut in, demanding money for more time. “I’m out of change,” Jody said, as she patted a huge lump of coins in her front pocket. “Gotta go, talk to you later.”

“How come you didn’t call me back last night?” Jody’s mother asked when she called at eleven, when Jody was three-quarters asleep. “I called twice. Didn’t you get the message?”

“I was busy,” Jody said.

“Well, you could have called back and told me that you were too busy to talk. I would’ve understood.”

“No you wouldn’t.”

“Anyway,” her mother said, “I got tickets for us to fly out to UCLA and look around. Week after next. You’ll have to come home the day before.”

“I’m not sure I can take the time off work. We’re in the middle of shooting.”

“Of course you can. If I can take the time, you can take the time. Besides, you’re quitting soon anyway.”

“Mom, don’t push me.”

“Push you? You’re the one who applied to school in California. The tickets are in my hand. They aren’t returnable.”

Jody felt confused. Everyone she knew said her mother was amazing. Supportive. That was the word, for all the people who were, or had ever been, in therapy. Supportive.

“I know these things are hard for you,” her mother said. “I just want to help.”

“I started therapy today,” Jody said, as if it were something you signed up for, like a dance class.

“I thought you were through with that.”

“It’s kind of a refresher course. Look, I’m really tired, can we talk about this later? Like when I’m thirty or something?”

“Fine,” her mother said. “You’re tired. Go to sleep. I’ll call back tomorrow.”

As soon as Jody hung up, she was wide awake. She lay in bed for half an hour, thinking about how everyone thought her relationship with her mother was great. “You talk,” Ellen said. “Do you know how many daughters don’t speak to their mothers? It’s special. Don’t knock it.” Special, yes, Jody thought, but not entirely marvelous.

At midnight, she got up, took out the ingredients for brownies, and started baking. At one-thirty, when the brownies were cool, she sprinkled them with powdered sugar, poured herself a huge glass of milk, and sat eating while she flipped through the phone book. There was only one listing for Claire Roth, the same number Jody had called before. The real question was, Where did she live? Knowing things about her shrinks that were supposed to be secrets made Jody feel more comfortable. It gave her something to think about — which, she realized, was theoretically the reason she wasn’t supposed to know anything.

There was a listing for Samuel B. Roth at 2 Fifth Avenue. Too close, Jody thought. After all, who’d want to live up the street and around the corner from her office — especially a shrink? Plus, “Samuel” was an old man’s name. Jody decided that Claire worked downtown but lived on the Upper West Side, and probably didn’t even know that old Samuel B. was practically a neighbor.

Jody stayed on the floor eating brownies, getting smashed on the chocolate and sugar, questioning why she’d bothered calling a shrink in the first place. She was definitely going to graduate school. How could she even think about not going? Sure, California was hovering on the edge of the ocean, about to fall in. Sure, it was farther from home than she’d ever been for more than two weeks. But the fact that California was on the other side of everything didn’t mean she had to go into therapy. The problem was geographical, not psychological.

After all, she’d graduated. Jody was the only person she knew who had actually graduated from therapy. She envisioned a little box surrounded by wedding announcements in the back of the Style section of the Sunday Times:

Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Goodman of Bethesda, Maryland, are pleased to announce that after seven years of grueling biweekly sessions their daughter, Jody Beth,has finished therapy, graduating with honors from the practice of BarbaraSchwartz in Georgetown. Jody’sdegree is in human relations and self-actualization. She is in the process of finally leaving home and will be working for a film production company in New York City. The graduate will keep both her name and her sanity.

It wasn’t as if Jody had been an inpatient, locked up behind doors that said FIRE EXIT ONLY. She was a perfectly normal twenty-four-year-old who’d been in therapy for more than half her life and therefore would never again be normal, not in the truest sense of the word.

She imagined her mother hovering over her crib, watching for the first signs of maladaptation.

“I’m not going,” Jody had said. She was three years old and starting nursery school.

“Please go,” her mother said.

They were sitting in the parking lot arguing while all the other mothers were unloading little children from their station wagons.

“Get out of the car,” her mother said.

Jody shook her head.

“I’ll pick you up at noon, sweetie, I promise — just go on.”

There was something in her mother’s voice that made it impossible for Jody to leave the car, even though secretly she liked the idea of nursery school.

The first time Jody went to “see someone,” she was in the fourth grade. Her mother made the appointment with one of their pediatricians.

“This doctor does a special thing,” her mother said. “Besides taking care of colds, he talks to children.”

“About what?” Jody asked.

“Anything you like.”

The doctor was running late, so Jody and her mother sat for an hour in the waiting room with all the sick children. Jody didn’t want to play with anything. The toys, even the lava lamp, had lost their charm. She watched children and mothers come out of the bathroom with urine samples in clear plastic cups and thought about what this man was going to ask her. All that came to mind was sex. He would ask if she’d gotten her period yet, and Jody would have to tell him that she was only nine and wouldn’t be expecting it for a good while yet. He’d ask all kinds of questions like that and then he might make her take her clothes off. After all, he was a doctor. Jody didn’t want to go. When the nurse called her name, Jody stood up slowly and her mother pushed her forward. She started walking down the hall toward the doctor at the end, but then turned and saw the open door behind her and the sky and the parking lot outside. Jody ran. She ran outside and around and around in the parking lot until she found the car, then opened the door and locked herself in.

The doctor and her mother came out, pressed their faces to the window, and begged her to open the door. Her mother tapped the window with her car keys, as if to rub in the fact that if she wanted to, she could unlock the door herself. Jody held the door button down with such pressure that her fingers turned white, bloodless. The doctor shook his head at her mother and she put away the keys. “You don’t want to force her,” he said in a voice that sounded soft through the glass. He smiled at her. She’d never seen a doctor out of context before. The strangeness of his white coat against the sea of cars confused her. She bent her fingers around the button as if to pull it up, but then came to her senses. No matter how much she might have wanted to give in, to have the doctor ever so gently take her hand and lead her down to the hall to his office, there was something so incredibly strange about the idea of just sitting there talking to him that she couldn’t go through with it.

“Maybe another time,” the doctor said, and he and Jody’s mother turned around and went back into the building.

A few minutes later Jody’s mother came out again, alone. Watching her mother walk empty-faced toward the car, Jody hated her more than anything. Jody unlocked the door, crawled over the front seat and into the back. They didn’t say anything the whole way home.

The next time, her mother took her to someone whose office was in an apartment building. The waiting room was just off the kitchen; the doctor’s office was the bedroom. Jody thought the whole thing was a bad trick, a disgusting disguise. The psychiatrist tried to get her to play cards and checkers with him, hoping she’d slip and say something incredibly important if he let her jump his king.

“Why do you think you get so many sore throats?” he once asked when they were playing gin.

Jody put down her cards and opened her mouth. “Well,” she said, pointing down her throat so far she nearly gagged, “the part back here gets a kind of a cold in it and turns red. I think it’s red now.” She opened her mouth again, but he didn’t look. “And then it really starts to hurt and it goes up into my ear and I have to put my whole head on a heating pad.”

“But why do you get so many sore throats?” he asked again.

In retrospect, Jody wondered what he had expected her to say: Well, I was never breast-fed, and considering the throat and mouth as an important area of contact between mother and child, I guess you could say that a soreness or pain in this area later in life might result from not having fulfilled the original bonding between mother and child.

Why do I get so many sore throats? I’m a hypochondriac, of course. Or maybe I’m a lazy fucking asshole. I’m in sixth grade and I’d rather stay home and eat ice cream all day, watch soap operas, and read the porno magazines I found down in the basement. That’s my idea of the good life.

“Why don’t you talk to my mother?” Jody said, then opened the door and pulled her mother into the room. There were only two chairs in the doctor’s office, so Jody sat on the floor at her mother’s feet and refused to talk. She was onto something, even if she couldn’t tell anyone what it was: by bringing her mother in, and making her do the talking, Jody was telling the shrink that it was her mother who was the problem. But no one seemed to get it.

When she was in high school and her report card featured more absences than presences, her mother took her to see Barbara Schwartz. She dropped Jody off in front of the building in Georgetown, gave her the office number, and said she’d be waiting right there by the curb. For seven years — through high school and on college vacations, once a week, twice a week, sometimes three times a week — she’d gone to Barbara Schwartz. For seven years Jody sat in the same chair and looked out the big windows onto the parking lot while stories of her life escaped her like various gases, sometimes toxic, sometimes not. A lifetime in a chair.

In the end Barbara said, “We’ve been talking about your leaving for a while now — do you have any last thoughts about it?”

Jody was still sitting in the same exact chair. The chrome arms were losing their shine, they were starting to get wobbly, and sometimes she could feel little sharp things poking her ass through the cushion. She wanted to say, I was thinking that maybe if I could buy this chair from you, if I could take it with me wherever I go and sit on it for an hour or so a couple of times a week, everything will be all right. But instead she said, “I’m just a little nervous.”

Jody had said “I’m just a little nervous” in the same way Dustin Hoffman said “I’m just a little worried about my future” in The Graduate.

“Do you know that when they made The Graduate,” Jody said, “Dustin Hoffman was thirty and Anne Bancroft was only thirty-seven. Isn’t that amazing?”

“You’ll do very well,” Barbara said. “You really don’t need me anymore. You know who you are, what you need. You’re grown up.” She paused. “I have a friend in New York who’s very nice. She’s a therapist. I can give you her number if you feel you might need it. She’s in the Village. Isn’t that where you’ll be living?”

“I thought I was graduating,” Jody said.

“You’ll be fine, but if you want a name?”

Jody shook her head. “I’d have to start all over again, and I’d never be able to convince a stranger that I’m not really crazy.”

Barbara smiled. “I can just give you the number. You don’t have to use it.” She went to her desk, which was covered with things her children had made — they hadn’t even been born when Jody started seeing Barbara, and now one was almost six years old.

Sometimes Jody thought she was special, not in the usual sense, but like the young women in television movies — girls whose tormented pasts keep them from living normal lives until they meet the good doctor who knows just how to fix them, schizophrenics who end up being only slightly learning-disabled, cripples who become concert pianists.

Barbara wrote the name and phone number on a piece of scratch paper and handed it to Jody, who immediately jammed it deep into her pocket. For more than a year she’d kept it in her wallet like a condom, in case of emergency.

“Thanks,” Jody had said to Barbara, putting her coat on without even thinking if the hour was up or not. It didn’t matter.

“Stay in touch,” Barbara said.

“Thanks a lot,” Jody said. “Really, thanks a lot.”

Barbara smiled again and moved towards her, and for a second Jody thought Barbara might hug her. If Barbara hugged her, she’d die. Barbara put her hand out and quickly Jody did the same. They shook.

“Goodbye,” Barbara said.

“Yeah, see you later,” Jody said, thinking about what she’d do after this last session. McDonald’s, she figured — for lunch, not a career.

And now, what seemed like a hundred years later, at two in the morning, Jody was sitting on the floor of her apartment — in Greenwich Village, in New York City, two hundred and fifty miles from Barbara, from her mother, from everyone — eating brownies. Why had she gone to see Claire — was she an idiot? Jody had graduated. She’d done it. She was proud of herself. Until she’d picked up the phone and called Claire Roth, she’d thought of herself as the strongest person alive.

4

During her afternoon break, Claire sat on Bob Rosenblatt’s extra chair. She didn’t lie on the couch because, as she saw it, she wasn’t a patient. She’d paid her therapy dues long ago. No, she was coming to a respected colleague for advice. Rosenblatt was older, wiser, a professor at Columbia who had Oriental rugs and good art in his office, all qualities Claire admired in a psychiatrist.

The problem was her relationship with Jake. She was angry. She resented his sluggishness, which she was afraid might be the core of his personality. It had occurred to Claire that it might be best to ignore him and just assume that one day he’d become a highly motivated genius. At the same time she thought of sending him away to school — something regimented, perhaps agricultural in nature, where he’d be forced to work. Even if it didn’t help, at least she wouldn’t have to see him languishing on the sofa. The third possibility was that this period of absolute inertia was merely a resting place, the last quiet moment before his body was filled with the hormonal rush of adolescence.

“Describe yourself as a child,” Rosenblatt said.

Claire closed her eyes and tried to give Bob what she thought he wanted. “My mother was very fussy, everything had its place. In the living room there was a bookcase filled with china figurines. Our house was a sanctuary, a place where my father came to relax after work. Maintaining calm was the focus. My younger sister was the good one. They used to say I was filled with the devil. I left home when I was eighteen and a half.”

“So,” Rosenblatt said, quickly, definitely, “you were a difficult child, a hell-raiser?”

Claire was shocked. Hadn’t he heard what she said? God, what a lousy shrink. Why was he supposed to be so great? “Hardly,” she said, trying not to overreact. “Just because they thought I was wild doesn’t mean that I was.”

Rosenblatt nodded. “You described how your parents saw you, but not what you were like.”

“What was I like?” Claire said. “I tried hard.” She was so annoyed it was hard to think. She thought she’d made it clear on the phone that she wanted to talk about Jake. Five more minutes, that’s all he was getting.

“So, what were you like?”

“Frustrated, just like I am now,” she said, figuring there wasn’t much to lose. If she got into a huge fight with Rosenblatt, she’d go to fewer shrink parties, spend more time at home with Jake. Maybe that’s what he needed, anyway: his mother to bust his ass and drive him nuts.

Rosenblatt laughed. “Just like you are now, exactly! Why?”

“Because you don’t understand what I just told you five minutes ago.”

“Good,” he said.

Claire didn’t get it. She felt like a child, a dog being patted on the head. She didn’t have a clue where he was leading her. She looked around Rosenblatt’s office, bigger than hers, with more windows and a better view. It marked the difference between psychiatrists and psychologists. Money.

“Do you think your son is frustrated?”

“No,” Claire said. “I think he’s brain dead.”

“Let’s get back to your family.”

“I’ve made myself a life they can’t imagine.”

“What do you mean, ‘they can’t imagine’?”

“I live in New York City. I married a man who makes a living defending criminals and likes it. I have a career and two children and my parents still act as though I’m a failure, as though I’ll come running home any minute now. They live in a split-level house in northern Virginia with a two-car garage, and every Sunday morning my sister, her husband, and their three daughters pick them up, take them to church, and then out to lunch.”

“Church?” Rosenblatt asked.

Claire nodded. She knew what he was getting at but wasn’t about to give it to him. It came up everywhere — Adam’s preschool, whether to send Jake to Hebrew school — and affected the way people perceived her, how they acted. There was never a way around it.

“Are you Jewish?” Rosenblatt asked. He meant, aren’t you? But this way, he thought he was being tactful.

“By marriage,” Claire said.

“Aha,” Rosenblatt said softly.

You bet. Claire wondered exactly what it meant to him. Was she a whole new person, the blond shiksa, simultaneously despised and worshiped? Did Rosenblatt look at her and think everything came easily, that she was as simple, clean, and easily digested as white bread and mayonnaise?

Rosenblatt flashed her a condescending smile: I’m the shrink, you’re the shrinkee. I’m the Jew, you’re the goy. I’m a medical doctor, you’re a Ph.D. You’re the girl, I’m the boy. I win. He shifted his weight around in the chair and crossed his legs.

“My sister, Laura, the good one, got married when she was nineteen. She works with ‘special children’ because it’s the right thing to do. It doesn’t threaten her family or her husband. She manages her life as if it was a retarded child. We speak twice a year.”

“Is that a loss? Do you wish you were closer?”

“No,” Claire said. “But I feel like I have no family; no one who knew me as a child. I have Sam and the kids, but Sam doesn’t belong to me.” She paused. “And my children are spoiled slugs.”

Claire almost started crying, but stopped herself. There were huge holes in what she said, but she knew Rosenblatt didn’t see them. She’d done a good job. All the same, as she sat in Rosenblatt’s big leather chair, talking, she felt as though she was starting to fall through. She wouldn’t tell him the whole story; she’d promised herself that.

The silence made her uncomfortable. She looked at Rosenblatt. He was someone she knew. She knew a million people who knew him. On the phone, she’d made it clear she was coming in for a bit of advice, not a whole big thing, just some clues from a seasoned expert who had one kid at Yale and another at Harvard. Rosenblatt was staring at her knees — bony and poking out from the edge of her skirt — hiding his discomfort behind his glasses and the pose of the elder, a professional, a man. He could do it to her and get away with it.

Claire told herself to keep it all a little more tightly wrapped. Talk to Sam, she told herself. Sam never seemed to think anything was all that strange.

More silence. Claire pulled herself back to the surface and got angry. Her anger would save her. She tried to get really mad, but was exhausted from the effort of sorting her life into two piles, secrets and things that were all right to discuss. She’d done well. None of the really messy stuff had come out — not Baltimore, not anything about her life after she left home. The one saving grace was that it sounded normal enough to say you left home at eighteen. She never added that in her parents’ home, the expectation was that she wouldn’t leave until her wedding day.

“We’re running out of time,” he said. “Where should we go from here?”

Bob Rosenblatt had done her a disservice, opening everything up. One could argue that like certain types of surgery, it needed to be done; that it was necessary to release the pressure before it built into an explosion. All the same, the side effects included the loss of her good sense.

“Would you like to come in again — say, next Monday at nine?”

Claire took out her appointment book. That she also did this for a living seemed strange. She felt like a fraud.

“Fine,” Claire said, getting up to leave, annoyed that she’d gone ahead and made another appointment instead of saying what she really thought.

She walked down Fifth Avenue toward Sixteenth Street, trying to shake off the Rosenblatt effect, stopping to look in windows along the way. She was meeting Sam for lunch, something they did once every couple of weeks, often enough that it didn’t feel like a doomed occasion where one of them would confess to something horrible: I’m leaving, the test came back, I’ve done something you won’t forgive me for. Claire got to the restaurant a little early and had a glass of wine at the bar.

“Whose fault is it?” Sam whispered in her ear, taking her arm and following the maitre d’ to their table. “If it’s genetic, it’s your side. Jews are never like that.”

The restaurant was filled with good-looking, well-dressed men and women gorging themselves on expense accounts. When the waiter handed them menus, Claire hid behind hers. Over four-tomato soup with floating goat cheese she began to cry. Sam’s face wrinkled. He always cried when she cried. The people at the next table stared. Claire forced herself to stop, blotted her eyes, and then looked up.

“A joke?” Sam asked, pouring her a glass of wine.

Claire nodded.

“Two guys, Abe and Louie. A promise: first one dies calls the other, tells him what heaven’s like. Twenty years later, Abe dies. Couple months go by, Louie’s phone rings. ‘Abe?’ ‘Louie?’ ‘Abe, is that you?’ ‘Louie?’ ‘So tell me, Abe, what’s it like?’ ‘You wouldn’t believe. Wake up in the morning, have sex, a little breakfast, a nap. Lunch, some sex, rest till dinner, a little nosh, more sex, then sleep all night like a baby.’ ‘Heaven sounds incredible, Abe.’ ‘Heaven, Schmeven — I’m a bear in Colorado.’”

Claire only smiled, having sunk too far into herself to laugh. She ate her soup looking at Sam. It was normal to go back, to reconsider, to move backwards before going forward. She remembered that when she first met Sam, his hair had been thick, cut like a thatched roof — a Jewish Robert Redford. In her mind, the closest she’d get to marrying him would be sleeping with him two, maybe three times, and then he’d move on to someone more challenging, more sophisticated. Sam was too good for her. Everything was too good.

They met at a demonstration at Columbia; she was getting her Ph.D. in psych and he had just finished law school. They were both watching friends get arrested. He grabbed her hand and pulled her away from the crowd. Together they went to the police station and waited for their friends to be released. Afterwards they all went out for Chinese food, and one of Sam’s friends explained in minute detail how carefully a male cop had searched her. “I had some dope on me and he was getting close, so I stated telling him how much he was turning me on and gave him a blow job to keep him distracted. It worked,” she said, pulling a baggie of pot out of her pocket and handing it to Sam. “I owe you this, for coming to get me.”

Later, in Claire’s apartment on 106th Street, Claire and Sam smoked the dope. Claire wasn’t used to getting stoned, and freaked out, confessing everything. “I had a baby,” she told him.

“You mean you had an abortion,” Sam said.

“No, I had a baby. No one knows. Years ago, a little girl. My parents made me give her away. I never should have given her up.” The words repeated themselves in her head, and then, as if something in her had broken, Claire started crying and repeating “I had a baby, I had a baby” again and again, wailing, bellowing like an animal. She was crying so hard and so strangely that she scared herself. She started thinking that the dope had been laced with something, that this feeling would last forever and she would never be herself again.

Sam got a cool washcloth and rubbed it over her face and arms. He found a Valium in the medicine cabinet and slipped it into her mouth. Sitting next to her on the bed, he held her hands until she fell asleep; and while she slept he cleaned the apartment, rearranged things so that the place seemed larger, took down the dark red curtains she’d made herself, and washed the windows. She woke up in a different world.

Claire picked at the swordfish she’d ordered and watched Sam spin the tricolored pasta onto his fork. The older Sam got, the better he looked, the more relaxed he seemed. If she weren’t so miserable, she’d be happy.

“Are you okay?” he asked, cutting a piece of her fish for himself.

“I’ll be fine.” She reached under the table, pretending she’d dropped her napkin, and rubbed his crotch. “Do you want to come back to my office after lunch?”

“Can’t,” he said, chewing.

“I love you,” Claire said, her hand still under the table. Sam leaned across the wineglasses and kissed her. Out of the corner of her eye, Claire saw the two women at the next table watching.

Back in the office, Claire told herself she had to focus on something. Work more. Being a shrink was lonely business; most of the people Claire knew were also shrinks who, between their practices and their real lives, were too busy for anything other than a quick breezy chat between sessions. And then there were her patients, but they weren’t exactly available for afternoon cappuccino. A little high from the three glasses of wine, Claire sat looking out the window, waiting for her next victim, thinking she should put a sign up: TODAY ONLY, HALF-PRICE SPECIAL, SPACED-OUT SHRINK.

The buzzer went off. “Yes,” Claire said in a distant voice.

“It’s Jody Goodman.”

Claire had completely forgotten that she’d switched Polly and her would-be husband — if only he’d make a commitment — to another time. Good, she thought, pressing the button that unlocked the front door. Jody will make me feel better.

5

“My mother wants me to fly to L.A. next week,” Jody said.

“And?”

“I don’t want to go.”

“Because of the flying?”

“Flight 206. It sounds like a number you hear on the news when they talk about the worst aviation disaster in history. ‘Flight 206, originating in Washington, D.C., bound for Los Angeles, crashed today, killing all aboard.’ I can’t do it.”

“The plane isn’t going to crash. You’re rerouting your anxiety.”

“That’s really brilliant,” Jody said, and when she saw Claire looked hurt, she apologized. She’d never worried about hurting a shrink’s feelings before. She hadn’t figured they were exactly human.

“What could you do to make this work?” Claire asked. “Could you take some Valium?”

Jody shook her head.

“Why not?”

“Don’t you know that’s why so many people die in these things? They’re too stoned or drunk to get up and walk out.”

Claire laughed. “If you’re serious about going to school out there, you should definitely take a look. That way, if you decide to go, you’ll be more comfortable in the fall. It’ll seem familiar.”

“I am going,” Jody said. “I have to go. Nine million people apply to film school and only about two get in.”

“You must be very talented.”

Jody shrugged. She usually hated it when people complimented her, but Claire had a way of doing it that actually made her feel good. When Claire said something, Jody believed it.

“It’s nice of your mother to go with you. Is she always like that? Is she especially nice?”

“Ellen says so,” Jody said.

“Who’s Ellen?”

“My friend. She lives in my building, grew up where I grew up. Like I was saying,” Jody said, pausing for effect, “Ellen says I should be happy that my mother and I get along.”

“And?”

“That’s it. Mostly Ellen talks about herself.”

“Oh. I was hoping you’d tell me a little bit about your mother, your family.”

“The family’s a push-and-pull thing,” Jody said. “They want me to grow up and be independent, but they also want me to stay with them — not at home, just on their level. Then there’s the idea that I should go off and do everything, fulfill all of everyone’s undone dreams. But they’re also afraid I’ll go too far and I won’t need them anymore.”

“Is that possible?”

“I dunno, I haven’t gone anywhere yet.”

“You’re here.”

Jody laughed. “I have this vision that I’ll be called home like a kid out late on a summer night. My mother will open the front door to New York City and yell, ‘Jody, come home.’ I’ll be outside playing. I won’t turn around. I won’t answer. She’ll call me at the office. ‘Jody, come home.’ I’ll be waiting in a movie line. ‘Jody, come home, it’s eight-thirty, I’m running your bath.’ At a restaurant. ‘Jody, get in this house right now.’ After a while, I won’t have any friends left, they’ll be repulsed by me and my family. No one will want to play with me. And I’ll be torn between staying with my ex-friends, even though I’m unwanted, and going home to be plunked into a vat of Mr. Bubble and left there till I’m all shrivelly.”

“What an imagination,” Claire said, clearly enjoying herself. “Now, tell me something else about your family.”

There was a shift between Claire’s listening for pleasure and her determination to gather information for purposes that weren’t entirely clear.

“I don’t know what to say,” Jody said, instinctively withdrawing, shrugging in apology. “Sometimes, with people I like or people who I want to like me, I get very quiet. With people I don’t care about, I’m a regular Chatty Cathy.” Jody was quiet.

“Does that mean you care about me?” Claire asked.

Jody glared at her. She didn’t care about her, didn’t know her well enough to have any particular feelings about her. Shrinks always did that — insisted that you care about them, that you secretly loved them — but Jody never had. Maybe that’s why she was still the way she was.

“You don’t have to worry about saying something that will scare me away.”

“Yeah, right,” Jody said.

Claire smiled. “It’s true. I can take it.”

Jody allowed herself to make eye contact for a fraction of a second. Claire’s eyes were green and encouraging. She looked, and like an idiot let herself be seduced. Claire actually could take it, she thought. She felt like she’d never been in a room with a woman so strong. Jody had the urge to say “Here’s my life” and dump it on her lap like a knotted necklace. Here, fix it for me, make it good again.

“When you tell someone something,” she said, “what you tell them doesn’t just belong to you, it also belongs to the person listening. People say certain things because they want something back from the listener, something in exchange.” Jody stopped herself.

“If you’re right, then you must want something from me,” Claire said. “The question is what.”

Jody shrugged and ignored her. “Most people give what comes easiest.”

“You didn’t answer my question. What do you want from me?”

“Nothing,” Jody said. “I wasn’t talking about you. It has nothing to do with you. You’re the shrink, not a person. You can’t want something from a shrink.”

“Hostile,” Claire said. “Very hostile.”

“Maybe.”

“People want things from their therapists all the time,” Claire said. “Approval, love, attention.”

They were silent. Jody stared at the tan wall. Like everything else in the office, it was the color of a desert — a person could get lost.

“We were talking about your family,” Claire said.

“Yeah, I was about to tell you a secret. It’s not really a secret,” Jody said. “It’s something everyone knows, everyone except you.”

“I’m listening.”

“I had a brother,” Jody said. “He died six months before I was born. There was something wrong with his heart, a defect. He’d been sick since he was a baby.”

“That’s very sad.”

“I was adopted,” Jody said. “After my mother had him, she couldn’t have any more children, so they brought me in to replace him.”

Claire lifted her eyebrows as if to ask whether this was fact or fiction.

“It’s true,” Jody said, surprised that Claire was looking at her like she didn’t already know. She’d imagined that as soon as she’d called for an appointment, Claire had called Barbara, who’d told her everything. What did shrinks say to each other? It sounded like a joke, but what was the punch line? Time’s up for today.

“Tell me again,” Claire said, picking up her legal pad. “How old was the child?”

“Nine,” Jody said.

“And how old were you when you were adopted?”

“Brand-new.”

“Months, weeks?”

“Days.” Jody glanced at Claire, whose eyes were red, as if she’d been crying. Jody made the shrink cry. She’d hardly said anything. “It’s nothing, I swear,” she added, laughing nervously.

“I’d like to see you again tomorrow,” Claire said.

Jody couldn’t believe it. She’d thought she’d been torturing Claire, and now Claire wanted to do it again tomorrow. Why not? There was something about throwing all this emotional information around without having any idea where it would land that was invigorating and kind of scary. Cheap thrills, only it wasn’t so cheap.

“Three o’clock?” Claire asked.

“Sure,” Jody said, worried about sneaking off the set again. Most people who had jobs went to work and stayed there. That was the basic premise, or didn’t Claire know that? Should she remind her?

Claire took a card off her desk, wrote something on it, and handed it to Jody. “It’s my home number. I want you to call me if you need to.”

“I can’t,” Jody said, handing the card back to Claire, who refused to take it.

“What do you mean you can’t?”

“I just can’t, okay? I can’t call anyone, my friends always call me. Even my mother calls me every night at eleven,” Jody said. “I have a special phone that doesn’t even have a dial on it.”

“If you don’t want to call me at home, you can always leave a message on the machine here. I check in quite often.”

Barbara hadn’t given Jody her home phone number until she’d been seeing her for a year and a half. In the whole seven years Jody had used it once, and regretted it. She’d had a huge fight with her mother, and when she called, Barbara had spoken in little clipped sentences. Then one of her kids walked into the room, and Barbara put her hand over the receiver. Jody felt like a leper. She could hear the sound of a kid crying in the background, a reminder that the shrink had her own private life. No, Jody thought. No way, no thanks.

“You can call me,” Claire said. “I want you to.”

“Nope.”

“Why not? You did it before. You called me to make an appointment.”

“I was crazy then,” Jody said. “I’m better now.”

Claire laughed, and Jody headed for the door.

“By the way,” Claire called after her, “you’re going to California.”

Jody had the cab drop her at Seventy-second Street and then walked along the park toward the Seventy-ninth Street location.

“You,” Harry said, shaking a fat finger at Jody from halfway down the block.

Jody went white.

“You,” Harry said, wagging the finger again as she got closer.

“I’m sorry,” Jody blurted. She’d have to call Claire and cancel.

“You are a fool.” Harry took Jody’s hand and guided her down the street, along the lines of cable leading toward the Museum of Natural History. “This morning Michael told me I’m losing you to UCLA. Do not go to school, good girl. You’ve done that already. That’s finished. I know about these things.”

“Why do you even care?” Jody asked, still thinking about the appointment with Claire.

“I like you, good girl. You’re tough — you’ve got a little extra heart where most people keep their credit cards.”

“On my ass?”

“No, here,” Harry said, patting his breast pocket. “I’ve been to film school on many occasions.” He then did an elaborate impression of an overzealous grad student. “‘Excuse me, Mr. Birenbaum, but in your work, like that of da Vinci or van Gogh, the shades of the palette seem to carry such significance — especially for me in Shadows from Fall, which was albeit a little heavy-handed; the house was white, her dress was red, and the car they drove away in was blue. But could you tell us something about that, about your relation to color as political statement?’ Actually, I’m color-blind,” Harry mocked, shrugging off the question.

He slid his arm under Jody’s so it rubbed against her breast, the better to guide her. “You,” he said, “should know better. If you want to make movies, make movies. Don’t get a degree in it.”

“But—”

“Dear one, nothing can convince me it’s not injurious to the process. Film students are retards.”

Jody didn’t say anything.

“Now that I’ve depressed you, let me make you happy again. I’m invited to something tomorrow night, I don’t remember what, but I have to go. I’m hoping you’ll be my date?”

Jody still didn’t say anything.

“You’d have to wear a dress,” Harry said. “You do have at least one dress, don’t you?”

Jody nodded.

“I’ll pick you up at eight.” Harry took a large book out of his pocket and had Jody write her address and phone number on a page already thick with names and numbers.

6

After Jody left, Claire had an attack of paranoia. She decided that Jody was afraid of nothing — a laser beam, a nuclear warhead. Her fear of flying, her anxieties were affectations to make her seem less powerful, less overwhelming, more normal. Claire conjured Jody’s image: the smooth, open face needed no makeup, no correction; wavy brown hair, stylishly cut; cerulean blue eyes, quick to look and then to look away; shoulders back, neck extended, the posture of confidence — someone you’d notice. Despite what Jody said, how she hemmed and hawed, pretended to suffer crushing self-doubt, her appearance was that of someone who knew where she was going and exactly how she’d be getting there; the sort of young woman who caused people to ask “Who is that?” in sweaty, eager tones.

Jody was toying with Claire. She never had a brother. She wasn’t adopted. She’d come to undo Claire, to dismantle her. She could see right through Claire and was playing with all the weak links, reducing her to nothingness.

Claire flipped through her Rolodex, found Barbara Schwartz’s number, and left a message on her machine. The second she hung up, Claire regretted having called. She had nothing to say to Barbara. Past was past. Certainly Claire couldn’t call out of the blue and discuss the idea of her patient as a demon, the devil incarnate.

She had two back-to-back cancellations and a free hour. Instead of lingering in the office, filling out insurance forms and writing up bills, she went shopping.

In Macy’s, the salesclerk asked, “For your grandchild?” as Claire picked up a new stuffed animal for Adam.

“My son,” Claire said.

When Adam was twenty-eight, Claire would be nearly seventy. She would wear her white hair in a bun, her pull-on pants too short, adult diapers bunched up underneath. Adam wouldn’t allow himself to be seen with her, and Claire wouldn’t blame him.

“Can I ring that for you, ma’am?” the clerk asked. In her daze Claire thought she’d called her “Mom.” She glared at the girl, handed her the stuffed animal and her Macy’s card, and dropped back into her dream. Claire had worked hard to make herself this life, this marriage, these children, and now she suspected that she’d done all this as a cover-up, so no one would notice she was a fraud. She lived in fear of being discovered.

In the children’s department, surrounded by infant clothing, Claire thought about her missing baby. The baby that was old enough to have a baby of its own by now. There was something undeniably different about having sons rather than daughters. Living in a house that was strictly male felt like a never-ending frat party. Only Claire seemed to care if they left their underwear in the living room or wore any in the first place. If she weren’t there, she was convinced, they’d pee in the sinks, out the windows, in dirty coffee cups, wherever it was convenient. There were times when all Claire did was play the maid, the referee, the police officer who kept them from having fun. If she left, if she ran away, they’d be pleased as long as they still had their take-out menus.

The boys were Sam’s, his duplicates in every way. The day after Jake was born, she and Sam had a horrible fight. The nurse had come in and innocently asked “Are you circumcising?” and all hell broke loose. Somehow they’d never discussed it. Sam assumed they would; Claire assumed they wouldn’t. “What’s the point?” Claire said. “You’re not religious.”

“It’s not about religion, it’s tradition. I’m a Jew!” Sam bellowed. “This is what Jews do. Besides, it’s healthier.”

“It seems so unnecessary. He’s a little baby. Why do you want to start cutting him up?”

“Because it’s what you do!” Sam screamed. “They don’t really feel it. It’s not something you remember when you’re older—‘Oy, the day they cut my dick!’”

It went on and on, so loudly that at one point a nurse’s aide stuck her head in and asked them to keep it down.

Sam ended it by saying, “This is my son. I want to be able to stand next to him in a locker room and not feel like we’re at a conference of Christians and Jews. I want him to be like me.”

Claire couldn’t argue with that. She couldn’t say, “And I want him to be like my father, like the first boy I ever slept with.” And so it was done, without ceremony, before Jake went home from the hospital. The next time they were ready. When Adam was born, they did it the traditional way, a bris, with the baby’s godfather holding the baby, Sam and Claire standing off to the side, hoping not to faint when the mohel did his thing.

Claire imagined having a daughter. She imagined taking the little girl to the hairdresser’s with her. She thought it was a shame that women didn’t have their hair done anymore. Every two months they just went and had it cut. She remembered when she was little, sitting on a stack of phone books under the dryer, imitating the ladies. She remembered her mother indulging her and letting the manicurist put clear polish on her nails.

Claire had held her baby girl only once. The nurse lowered the baby into Claire’s arms as she sat in a wheelchair on her way out of the hospital. She’d never held a baby before. She wasn’t one of those girls who was a mother’s helper during summer vacations or baby-sat the neighbor’s kids. Claire was afraid of children; she watched them from a distance and worried about what she’d do when she had her own. The closest she’d gotten to her sister, Laura, was sitting on the other side of the room while her mother changed diapers.

“Don’t look,” she remembered her mother saying.

In 1966, in Washington, D.C., when a nurse deposited Claire’s daughter into her lap, Claire felt a rush as though she were going instantly insane. The blue-eyed thing that lay in her arms had come from her own body and yet was a stranger, a complete and total stranger. She gave it up before she ever knew who it was.

The lawyer, posing as Claire’s father, followed the maternity nurse who wheeled Claire and the baby to the lobby. Claire accepted the hospital’s baby-girl gift bag, signed out, and then the nurse said goodbye and left Claire in the lawyer’s command. There was no reason for Claire to be sitting there in the wheelchair like a cripple except that it was hospital policy. She could have walked. She could have gotten up and run if only the baby hadn’t been sleeping in her lap. The lawyer, in a black cashmere overcoat, went up to a woman in a tweed car coat who was standing alone.

“Is that the baby?” the woman asked, nodding in Claire’s direction.

“Yes,” the lawyer said.

As the two of them approached, Claire felt weak for the first time since the birth. The lawyer lifted the baby from her lap, and it was as if some vital organ had been ripped out. On the baby’s wrist was a name bracelet made out of tiny square pink and white beads — all blank. Claire wanted to take the bracelet off so she’d have something to keep, but she was afraid the child would cry and attract attention.

The lawyer handed the baby to the woman. “If you ever see her again,” he said, pointing at Claire, “do not acknowledge her.”

The woman nodded and looked down at the baby in her arms. “Pretty baby,” she said. “Your new mommy and daddy are going to be so glad to have you.”

The lawyer rolled Claire out the door behind the woman and the baby. Claire stared at her back and tried to read her mind, wondering who she was under that big, thick coat. Outside, the lawyer slipped the gift bag over the woman’s shoulder and she walked off, trailing the twin vapors of her breath and the baby’s.

Claire closed her eyes, not wanting to see the child leave. If Claire had been a stronger person, she would have stopped them. She would have screamed, “My baby, my baby, they’ve stolen my baby!” and the hospital security guard would have chased after the woman. The lawyer, seeing the commotion, thinking it best not to be involved, would have simply gotten into his car and driven off. Instead, he pulled his Buick up to the hospital entrance and drove Claire to a nearby park, where her father was waiting. An envelope was exchanged and the lawyer took off, tires spinning in the gravel.

The whole way back to Baltimore, all her father said was “I had to take off work to do this.”

As Claire climbed out of the car, her father added, “I hope things will be easier now,” and tried to pat her on the back, but she was already most of the way out, and his hand landed on her rear end. He blushed and brusquely told her to close the door quickly—“Cold air’s coming in.”

Claire went back to Baltimore with nothing except the memory of a three-day-old monkey face, pink cheeks, thick brown hair that stood in a point, and blue eyes she was sure already saw through her and hated her. She went back to the apartment and found that nothing had changed except the milk in the refrigerator had turned.

“It’s better this way,” her mother said on the phone while her father was at work. “Believe me.”

• • •

In Macy’s, Claire bought Jake and Adam clothes and toys and tapes and books. She charged over four hundred dollars’ worth and then had a hard time stuffing everything into a cab.

The phone was ringing when she stepped into her office. She grabbed it just before the machine picked up.

“Hi, it’s Barbara Schwartz. Were you in session?”

“No, just coming in the door,” Claire said. “Hang on.” She pulled all of her packages in, closed the door, and brought the phone over to the sofa.

“So, how are you?” Claire asked.

“Good,” Barbara said. “Tired, but good. I only have a minute between patients, but I wanted to call you back.”

“I’m seeing Jody Goodman. She’s been accepted into graduate school and can’t decide whether or not to go.”

“UCLA?”

“Yes.”

“Great,” Barbara said. “That’s what she’s always wanted. Jody’s special — a great imagination, smart. A thinker. Sometimes she feels obligated to kid around, to compensate for the dark stuff. But basically she’s all there. The main thing was getting her away from her family. They’re pretty dependent, and she’s always been too involved. She needs a lot of support, reassurance.”

“Any secrets?” Claire asked. There was noise in the background. Barbara didn’t seem to hear the question. Claire looked around her office; compared with Rosenblatt’s, it was quiet, humble, a relief.

“Oh God, here’s my patient. Anything else?” Barbara said.

“Is she a game player?”

“Game player?”

“You know,” Claire said. “Tall tales. Manipulative?”

“Not at all,” Barbara said, surprised. “Why?”

“Just curious. How’re the kids?”

“Great. Yours?”

“Fine. Everything’s fine.”

“Stay in touch. I’m glad you’re seeing her.”

Claire hung up, thinking she liked Barbara even more than she remembered, if only because Barbara was too busy to talk about Jody or, more importantly, anything else.

7

“Your plane didn’t crash,” Claire said. She stood in the door to her office, smiling.

“Beginner’s luck,” Jody said.

“So, how’d it go?”

“I got into a fight with my mother on the way to the airport.” Jody turned in her chair and prepared to pantomime. “Me: ‘I don’t want to go to Los Angeles. I never said I wanted to go. I don’t even want to go to film school. I lied. I want to be a receptionist in a dentist’s office.’ My mother: ‘The dentist? You hate the dentist. Why would you want to work there?’” Jody said it slowly and deadpan. “Had a nervous breakdown on the runway. The engines started and it was like my guilt weighed enough to bring the plane down. My mother doesn’t want me to go away. It’s true. She secretly wants me to live with her forever. As we’re going down the runway, I start apologizing all over the place. The plane lifts up off the ground — we’re at the angle where you feel like an astronaut — and my mother squeezes my hand and says, ‘It would be good if you could learn to be nicer to me. After all, I won’t last forever.’ Up in the air, I’m chanting to myself: ‘I will never be mean to my mother again. I will never be mean …’ They served dinner. My mother kept trying to lower my tray table and I kept putting it back up. I didn’t want anything. She says, ‘You paid for it, at least let them give it to you.’ And I’m like, ‘Who’s gonna eat it — the guy snoring across the aisle?’ My mother ate her dinner and then all of mine.”

Claire laughed.

“It’s true,” Jody said.

“Did anything good happen?”

“I guess you could call the plane not crashing good, depending on how you look at it.”

“What happened once you were there?”

“We looked around, flew home, and I took the train back to New York.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Jody looked at Claire. How could she not believe her. “Okay, we didn’t look around and then we flew home.” She paused. “I made my mother go to Forest Lawn and spend two hours looking around for graves of famous people. All she said was, ‘Well, it’s nice to be outside on such a beautiful day.’”

“I think you had a good time and don’t want to admit it,” Claire said.

“Don’t start thinking you’re brilliant or anything,” Jody said. “It’s pretty basic.”

“Some people’s mothers wouldn’t have gone at all.”

“It’s not a comparison study,” Jody said. “It’s just my life, okay?”

“Sorry,” Claire said. “You’re right. So what about UCLA — are you going?”

“Harry says I’m a fool if I go to graduate school. ‘Film students are retards.’” She did a perfect imitation.

“Who’s Harry?”

“Harry Birenbaum, the film director. He made Trial of Love and a bunch of other stuff.”

“Really?” Claire said, excited. “That’s my favorite movie.”

“It’s everyone’s favorite movie.”

“That’s who you work for?”

“No. Technically I work for a film producer, who sent me to spy on Harry. Last week, before I left, Harry gave me a long lecture and then took me to some benefit dinner dance at the Plaza where everyone kept saying they didn’t know he had a daughter so grown-up.”

“What’s he like?”

“He wanted to have a sleepover. I should probably introduce him to my friend Ellen. All they both talk about is fucking. Who they fuck, why they fuck, how much more they want to fuck. Every week or so Harry picks a female project and works on them until they either give in or quit.”

“Are you one of his projects?”

“I’m not talking about myself. Every word out of my mouth is not about me,” Jody said, and immediately wished she hadn’t. She had the urge to apologize, to start the session over, walk in the door and go on about how sunny and warm California was. She was quiet.

“Is there something you’d like to talk about?”

“The weather,” Jody said.

Claire smiled. They sat silently. The longer they were quiet, the more nervous Jody got. She played with the ends of her shoelaces, with a quarter from her pocket, with a piece of hangnail on her thumb. She crossed and recrossed her legs, trying not to look at Claire. She looked at Claire’s shoes, brown suede slip-ons. Nice. Probably from Saks. She looked at the air conditioner. She wiggled around, trying to look like she wasn’t wiggling. She fought the overwhelming desire to fall asleep. There was no air in the room. There was air in the room but it was treated with special tranquilizer dust. Claire had pushed a secret button on her chair and released an invisible cloud of the stuff and Jody was falling asleep. Her head was weaving around. Her neck felt too thin and weak to support her skull. Not only was it exhausting not to talk, but it made the hour seem incredibly long.

“Are you all right?” Claire asked.

“Fine,” Jody said.

“Well, we’re out of time for today,” Claire said.

Jody had a hard time getting out of the chair. Her body was like lead.

“Would you like to come in on Wednesday, same time?” Claire asked.

I have to work, Jody thought. I have a job. I like having a job even if I don’t fully understand what I’m supposed to be doing. But Claire was nice to her. She’d gone all the way to Los Angeles for Claire. She couldn’t say no.

“So Wednesday’s all right?” Claire asked. Jody nodded. “We’ll talk more about things then.”

Jody walked out. She might not want to talk about things Wednesday. She might not want to talk about them later in the week, later in the year, or ever.

She called Ellen from the phone in Harry’s trailer while Harry went out to lunch with a reporter from Premiere.

“Third National,” Ellen said.

“I screwed up at shrink,” Jody said, glancing out the window at the Hell’s Kitchen location — special security guards had been hired for the afternoon to keep panhandlers away.

“And how may I help you this afternoon, Ms. Goodman?”

“I didn’t talk. I must be having a nervous breakdown.”

“No, we don’t give oral sex for opening new accounts anymore. It’s toasters. One moment, please, I have to put you on hold.” There was a long pause, and Jody started opening the cabinets in the trailer; one was filled with boxes of Jiffy Pop microwave popcorn, the other with packs of unused Polaroid film. Jody slipped some film into her knapsack.

“Sweetie,” Ellen said, “you don’t just walk into a shrink’s office a few times and all of a sudden have a nervous breakdown. All day long people go to shrinks and don’t say anything, it’s no big deal.”

“I kept looking at her shoes, her feet and stuff, and the more I didn’t talk, the worse it got. Then she made an appointment for Wednesday. She used to want me to come in every day. I don’t think she likes me anymore.”

“You’ve only been going for two weeks? Why do you care what she thinks? Maybe she’s busy tomorrow. Maybe there’s a sale at Bergdorf’s or something. Don’t take it personally.”

“I am taking it personally.”

“Majorly. She sounds like a lousy shrink. How come she didn’t do anything to make you start talking? You haven’t known her long enough to be completely silent together. Look, I met this guy — maybe you want to come out with us tonight.”

“Penis four thousand fifty-four.”

“I like sex, okay?” Ellen said loudly. Jody could picture all the other people behind their desks at the bank whirling around and staring. “I like it a lot. Everyone always tries to make me feel bad about it, like I’m some kind of pervert. I like to fuck‚ to get fucked — what’s wrong with that? If we weren’t supposed to, we’d be built differently!”

“You’re yelling,” Jody said.

“No, I’m not!” Ellen yelled. “I’m just talking to you and you don’t like it.”

“I worry about you,” Jody said. “It’s selfish, but if something happened to you I wouldn’t have anyone to talk to. Sex is dangerous. It’s not like when we were growing up.”

“I have to go,” Ellen said. “Someone’s waving at me. Talk to you later.”

Later that afternoon, the assistant director barked “It’s over” down the street, and Carol Heberton was led from her trailer to a waiting car. Two guys in suits climbed into another trailer behind Harry, and someone dumped the rest of the coffee from the huge insulated vat into the gutter. The PAs were checking their walkie-talkies in for a recharge, and one of them turned to Jody. “We’re going for beers, wanna come?”

It was the first time they’d invited her anywhere. Every night she’d seen packs of production assistants walking off the set together, relaxed, laughing, never looking back.

“So, are you related to someone?” one of them asked as they walked down Eighth Avenue.

“No,” Jody said, “Not related.”

“Well, so, what’s your job exactly? Me,” he said, “every morning I buy flowers for Heberton’s trailer, I buy her a fried-egg sandwich at a quality diner. I spend my days fetching whatever needs to be fetched. Before I check out, I turn in receipts and get paid back. But what do you do and who do you do it for?”

“I work for Michael Miller. I help raise money, but for now I’m on loan to Harry.”

As they walked, weaving their way through the west side of Midtown, breathing in the thick fumes of tunnel traffic, they passed places Jody had always wanted to go, places she’d been and meant to come back to: the Film Center Cafe, the Cupcake Cafe, Restaurant Bellevues. She assumed they had something better in mind. She figured they knew where they were going. When they turned into the doorway of a place marked BAR/PIZZA in neon, Jody’s stomach sank. She wished she’d eaten that last bagel on the food table. Production assistants seemed to revel in their lack of taste, their psychotic roommates and below-poverty-level standard of living. Jody made it a point to sit as far way from the florist/fetcher as possible. They ordered pitchers of beer and a pitcher of Coke for the alcoholics, of which there seemed to be quite a few.

“When this one wraps, I’m getting a regular, boring job,” one of the women said.

“If you want to stay in film,” Jody said, “you should write Michael a letter. My job will be open soon.”

“And where will you be going?” the florist/fetcher asked. “Off to direct your first feature, or to spend the summer in Paris?”

Jody didn’t answer right away. There was no way she could tell them about film school, about Claire, about Ellen, Harry, or anything. “I’m going back to Montana,” she finally said. “My father has a ranch there and they always need an extra hand.”

They ordered five pizzas for seven people, bad pizza with cardboard crust, sauce like watered-down blood, and cheese like shoe rubber. In the end Jody was walking down Seventh Avenue with a huge pizza box in her hands.

“Really, you take it,” one of the PAs had said. “After all, you put in the most money.”

Out of guilt, Jody thought.

She passed a homeless man camped out in a small park. “Would you like a pizza?” Jody asked, holding out the box.

“Is it poison?”

“No, I ate some. It’s just not very good, too chewy.” Jody lifted the top so the man could see.

“Has it got tomato sauce on it? That looks like tomato.”

“Yeah, well, it’s a pizza.”

“I can’t take the tomato,” the man said. “Doesn’t agree with my stomach. I like that other kind, though. What do they call it — white pizza. You got any of that?”

Jody shrugged. “Sorry.”

“Well, I guess you could go on and leave it on the bench. I’m expecting company later, maybe they’ll want some.”

Jody put down the pizza and walked away.

“Next time,” he called after her, “get the other kind. It’s healthier.”

8

Sam sat on the edge of the bed in the glow of the television, an old set of heavily padded earphones circling his head. Ever since the playoffs, when night after night they’d found Jake asleep with his head pressed against the wall, the house rule was that Sam couldn’t watch sports at night without the headset. He was also forbidden to carry on discussions with the commentators, although occasionally his feet pounded the floor and Jake would yell “What happened, what happened?” from the kids’ bedroom.

Claire climbed over the bed and sat at the small desk jammed into the corner against the windows. When Adam was born, they’d converted the master bedroom into the boys’ room and taken the little one for themselves. It was ridiculous — a queen-sized bed, a double dresser, a desk, a chair, and two adults crammed into an eleven-by-fourteen box. She looked out the window into the apartment across the street. It was bigger than theirs, nine windows across; there were flowers in some of the windows, and the walls were painted interesting colors, probably by a decorator.

“Remember Karen Armstrong?” Claire said to Sam. He didn’t answer. “They just bought an apartment in the San Remo — they were asking eight-five, but Karen got it for seven-eighty. Her sister Susan’s curating an exhibit at the Whitney that’s traveling to four cities.” Sam didn’t respond. Claire stood in front of the TV, raised her shirt, and flashed her breasts at him. His feet stamped the floor in a brief tantrum, and Claire left the room.

She called her friend Naomi.

“Can’t talk now,” Naomi said. “I’m trying to get the kids to bed.”

“It’s ten o’clock,” Claire said. “Maybe you should get one of those tranquilizer dart guns.”

“Yeah, and send them to the zoo. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Claire hung up. Her life was fine, according to some people perfect. There was a reassuring rhythm and routine to it. But now she wanted something else — something to hook her in, to take her to the next level, to keep her interested.

She made a microwave pizza, put it on a tray along with a bottle of seltzer and two glasses, and carried it into the bedroom. Sam took his half of the pizza, rolled it into a tube, and ate it in less than seven bites, letting crumbs fall all over the floor. Great, Claire thought; all we need is a mouse again — maybe a sewer rat this time.

She lay back on the bed and hooked the elastic band of Sam’s underwear with her toes. She pulled it away from his body and then let it snap back against his skin, again and again, until Sam reached back and grabbed her foot. After five minutes, when nothing else happened, Claire folded her foot underneath her and picked up a book.

Their apartment was definitely too small. At night it shrank, as though someone upstairs held marionette strings attached to the walls and gave a firm yank at eight p.m., drawing the walls closer together. Until now, Claire had thought living in close quarters was good for a family. It taught them how to get along, how to find private space when there was none, and how not to need so much. It was impossible for Jake or any of them to have a secret life, no way to sneak anything in or out. And yet there was a major drawback in knowing everything your kid did. For example, when Jake did nothing, when he lay in his room staring at the ceiling, waiting for his life to begin, it annoyed her no end. And as much as setting them free scared her, she really didn’t want to know so much about them anymore. They were beyond the stage where it was cute. She looked at Sam watching TV and wished the game would end so they could have a serious discussion.

Claire crawled under the covers and thought of how her parents would see things. Her father: Big deal he’s a lawyer, they’re all lawyers. That’s how they get all the money. You should see how they live — not that I’ve ever been there, my other daughter told me. Children running around the house in their underwear. Slobs. Hippies, that’s what they are. Never grew up. They live in that Greenwich Village, like animals. Bohemians. It’s disgusting.

Her sister actually came to visit: “I love Fifth Avenue — are you sure this is really Fifth Avenue? Well, it must be the poor part. And what’s going on in that park, Washington Square? All day today I watched them. People with radios the size of suitcases doing gymnastics, waiting for people to throw money at them. What is that? How can so many people be out there all day long, on a weekday no less? Doesn’t anyone have a job?”

Her mother: “You shouldn’t let the maid call you by your first name. I never did that. You have to keep people in their place. How can you take a month off work every summer? I would think you’d lose your job. Well, I realize you work for yourself, but no one takes August off unless they retire. I don’t know why you always have to do things exactly the opposite of how everyone else does them.”

She thought of her new patient Jody Goodman, who’d just flown out to Los Angeles with her mother, a woman who sounded perfectly wonderful, like a friend. Claire had never talked to anyone about the idea of adoption as replacement. She’d had adopted clients before, but somehow the concept of replacing a lost child had never come up. Maybe that was the best way to do it, mother a stranger. It worked for Claire — a hundred dollars an hour, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. It was a living.

At two in the morning, Claire stood at the kitchen counter, waiting for water to boil, going over notes for a lecture she was supposed to give next week on anxiety attacks and their attachment to loss.

It was Claire’s opinion that anxiety attacks were like allergic reactions. They symbolized the body’s insistence on preserving life and occurred in response to direct-conscious or indirect-unconscious experiences. Situations exposing the patient to death and/or loss — the primal-infantile equivalent of separation — resulted in the patient facing extinction, the feared death of the self, and caused an overwhelming flood of response, a chemical pinball racing through the body, bouncing off nerve receptors, the repetitious, ricocheting ding-dinging driving the score higher and higher. Pulse rises, palms sweat, pupils become hypersensitive to light, breathing becomes shallow and rapid. These signals attract the victim’s attention, alerting him or, more likely, her to the state of the body and mind.

The primal fear of being abandoned was the trigger. Claire imagined apes in the jungle separated from their group having anxiety attacks and becoming ferocious. Unarticulated anxiety existed in everything, Claire wrote; and unfortunately, because it is not in keeping with our conception of what is normal, we are not trained to express our anxious urges. She figured that people were supposed to live in groups and were not programmed for extreme independent behavior. She thought back to an internship she had at Hopkins, when she was finally getting her B.S. She worked in a clinic, interviewing potential candidates for surgical sex reassignment. Often the men who had sex-change surgery became depressed and suicidal. Years after Claire left for New York, Hopkins stopped performing the surgery. All along, Claire had suspected that the depression was the result of severe anxiety stemming from a decision to reject the tribe of birth. And although many of the men saw their surgery as a welcoming of the true self, their core self could not be separated from its historical past, ultimately resulting in a rejection of the self. And so on … Claire stood at the kitchen counter writing for two and a half hours in the middle of the night, drinking cup after cup of instant coffee, thinking each one was the last.

At six Adam climbed into their bed and wedged himself between Claire and Sam. Claire refused to let on that she was awake. It was Sam’s turn; that’s what marriage and family life were supposed to be about, alternating, taking turns. Finally Sam got up, turned on the television, and went back to sleep, leaving Adam at the foot of their bed in a cartoon trance.

At seven Claire woke Jake and made the kids breakfast. By the time she got to her office she was exhausted. Her ten o’clock buzzed at nine-fifty-three. Claire heard her patient crying in the waiting room, but waited the full seven minutes before opening the door, hoping the girl would stop.

“Come in,” Claire said, smiling.

Polly gathered up her purse, her own personal box of Kleenex, and her jacket. “I’m pregnant,” she said before she even sat down. “I can’t believe he did this to me.”

“Are you sure?” Claire asked. It was her job to always remain calm. It was what was expected of her. The girl could get angry and scream right into Claire’s face, but that was part of the job as well, acting like a giant sponge. The trick was not to let it really soak in.

“Positive,” Polly said. “He came over Monday night and got the rest of his stuff and yesterday I realized I’ve been feeling kind of strange, so I bought one of those kits and it was positive, so I went back and bought a different kind and it was positive, and then I went to the doctor and he said definitely.”

“What are you thinking of doing?”

Polly glared at her. “Obviously, I can’t rely on Phil.”

Claire was listening more to the subtext of what Polly was saying rather than focusing on the actual words.

“I can’t rely on Phil,” she said. (Or you, she meant.) ‘I’ll have to deal with it on my own.” (I don’t need your help anyway.)

“I’ll just go and take care of it. I’ll get rid of it.” (And myself too.)

“It’s like poison in my body. I just want to scream.” (Fear and truth.)

“I want to scream.” (What would you do if I started screaming? If I sat here and howled? You’d do something, wouldn’t you? You’d kick me out, I know it.)

“The doctor gave me the number of a place to call.”

“How will you feel if you don’t have this baby?” Claire asked.

“It’s not a baby. It’s nothing.” Polly paused. (I can’t deal with it, therefore I deny it.) “Are you telling me I shouldn’t have an abortion?”

Claire imagined telling Polly the truth according to Claire. It never ends. It’s a recurring nightmare where the baby you killed comes back and does all kinds of things to you. There’s the constant remembering; the possibility of not being able to get pregnant later. Guilt. You didn’t know that when you gave it up once, you gave it up forever. What if she had a baby later and there was something horribly wrong with it? What if it died? It might not be a baby now, but what about later?

“Sometimes,” Claire finally said, “it’s not as simple as getting it over with. People have feelings they may not recognize until later. There can be aftereffects, emotional and otherwise.”

“You’re scaring me,” the girl said.

Claire looked at Polly and remembered when she’d first come in. There were patients Claire looked forward to seeing and others that seemed less important; Polly fell into the second group — the unloved. It wasn’t that Claire hated her; but there were others she enjoyed far more. Claire thought she worked hardest with the ones she liked least and was probably less effective with clients she liked because she was too much like a friend, too easy.

“It’s not my intention to frighten you.”

“I cannot have this baby. I don’t want a baby!” Polly screamed. “Change the subject.”

“You’re very angry.” Part of Claire’s job was to point out the obvious.

“That’s right. I’m pissed off. You’re making me feel like I’m doing something wrong, like I’m screwing up my whole life.”

“How am I making you feel like you’re doing something wrong?”

“You’re asking a million questions. I don’t know what to say to make you happy.”

“You don’t have to make me happy. You have to decide what you want.”

“Do I look like I’m in a position to become someone’s mother?”

“Is there someone who could go to the clinic with you?”

“You know I don’t have any friends anymore. Phil made me get rid of them. We already talked about that.”

“What about a relative? Don’t you have a cousin in town?”

“I just told you, I don’t want anyone to know.” Polly started crying again. “I can’t believe this is happening to me. A month ago I was talking about getting married — now I’m sitting here, I don’t even have a boyfriend, and I’m pregnant.”

Watching someone cry was one of Claire’s least favorite moments. She often had the urge to comfort her patients — to squeeze their shoulders, pat them on the back, whatever was necessary — but she knew they had to cry alone. Giving the patient an opportunity to let go was more important than immediate pain relief, so she taught herself to sit like stone when the tears came. Sometimes she handed the patient a tissue, and it came across as a gesture of concern. With certain patients — like Polly — who cried all the time, Claire got frustrated, although she tried not to let on. They came into the office and the first thing they did was burst into tears, every session, for months on end, years. What did they get out of it — release? An excuse not to talk about something? As far as Claire was concerned, the prognosis for a constant crier was not good.

“Would it be helpful if I went with you?” Claire asked, once Polly stopped sniffling. She’d said it before she realized what she was saying. This was the part of Claire that her patients thought made her a great therapist: she was a real person. This was also the part of Claire that was dangerous. As much as she tried to act like Mount Rushmore, they could always see the living flesh in the background.

Polly looked surprised.

“If you need me to go with you, I will.” Claire had done something like this only once before. She’d taken a completely petrified woman to the dentist and sat in the waiting room while the woman had her teeth cleaned and two fillings done.

How can I do this? Claire asked herself while Polly was talking. How can I not? Together they called the clinic, made a time, a date, and a plan.

Claire’s next patient, Bea, was a fifty-five-year-old woman without a life. Unhappily married to someone who was perfectly nice, she’d raised two children, one married, the other at Brown. And now, with no orthodontist appointments, piano lessons, or family dinners to prepare, Bea had nothing to do. She felt as if she were dying. She’d been referred to Claire after spending three weeks in Payne Whitney being treated for depression. The psychiatrists had recommended antidepressants and reeducation via Claire, with the idea being that if Bea developed some interests of her own, her boring marriage would no longer be the focus of her life.

“My classes at Marymount started last night. Herbert was annoyed that I got home late, but I think I enjoyed myself. I’m not really sure. I haven’t been to school in more than thirty years.”

“Did you talk to anyone?” Claire asked.

Bea shook her head.

“Next time, you should try. Ask one of the other women to have coffee with you afterwards and you can talk about the class.”

“Herbert wouldn’t be happy.”

“It’s all right,” Claire said. “Tell him ahead of time that you’ll be out late. A new show opened at the Guggenheim; maybe you could take a walk over there.”

“I still don’t like going places by myself.”

“It takes practice, but it’s near your apartment and should be something you can manage. Have you made any arrangements about doing volunteer work?”

“I decided I don’t want to be around sick people.”

“Plenty of places use volunteers — Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney.”

“I don’t want to make a commitment. What if Herbert wants to go away for a few days?”

“Then you tell them you’ll be away. You’re doing them a favor. It’s not a problem if you have to leave.”

Bea’s life was not in crisis, it never was. Twenty years of absolute passivity had claimed this woman, and Claire was trying to wake her, gently. There were times when Claire felt she was expected to be the leader of all women. She was the one who had to nourish them with hidden supplies, goods brought in from the other side, behind enemy lines. She had to give them what they never got. She had to make them strong and teach them to kill.

It was almost noon when Bea left. They’d gone a few minutes over, planning Bea’s activities for the next few days. Claire checked her book and realized that she had a parent/teacher conference at Jake’s school that was supposed to start at eleven-forty-five. She threw her book into her bag and, not waiting for the elevator, ran down the steps and race-walked east across Houston to Lafayette.

The Lang School was the hippest school downtown. Its students were the sons and daughters of gallery owners, actors, name-brand heirs, and rock stars. The twin daughters of Jake’s heavy-metal hero were in his class; every afternoon a cocaine-white limo carried them the seven blocks home to their soundproofed triplex apartment around the corner from Tower Records. Jake swore he was in love.

Claire gave the guard at the front door her name, flashed her Parents of Lang photo ID card, and hurried toward the sixth-grade classroom. The hallways were lined with floor-to-ceiling bulletin boards, plastered with thumbtacks and art that looked exactly like the stuff Claire used to see when she worked with inpatients at Bellevue.

“It really is very nice. You should go sometime,” Sam was saying when Claire burst into the room, panting.

She squeezed herself into a kid-sized desk and tried to catch her breath. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I was with someone. It couldn’t be helped.”

“Il Cantinori,” Sam said. “Tenth, between University and Broadway.” He picked up Claire’s hand and squeezed it. “It’s our favorite.”

“I’ll go this weekend.”

Get a grant first, Claire thought, wondering why Sam had talked the teacher into trying a restaurant she obviously couldn’t afford.

“Sally’s getting married,” he explained.

Sally was the teacher. According to Lang educational philosophy, students called everyone from the principal to the janitor by his or her first name. This was to inspire self-confidence. Claire could never remember Sally’s last name, and it drove her crazy.

“Congratulations,” Claire said.

It was recess. Claire could hear two hundred and fifty kids screaming as they ran up and down the barricaded street outside.

“About Jake …” Sally said.

Claire could feel the other shoe about to fall. Her stomach sank. She leaned forward, subtly tilting her head down, trying to keep from fainting.

“I get the feeling he needs more structure at home,” Sally said. “He needs a clearer idea of what’s expected of him and how he can achieve those goals.”

Sam and Claire nodded vigorously. If Jake were bumped out of this school, they’d have big problems. It would be hard, if not impossible, to get him into another good school; even if they did, one of them would have to drag him uptown every morning and someone would have to pick him up every afternoon. And if he didn’t get in, he’d end up in public school — something to be avoided at all costs.

“What do you suggest?” Sam asked.

“Are his afternoons planned? Does he have any specific activities?”

There was no way to present Frecia as a strong, stimulating role model, or to explain that her job was simply to keep the children alive until Claire or Sam got home. Structure and planned activities were out of the question.

“What I’m thinking of,” Sally said, “is an after-school program. Sports and music — nothing specifically academic.” She paused. “Jake could stand to run around a little. He’s at that age. And he’s not doing nearly as well as he should be or as we’d hoped.”

She didn’t continue. Claire knew “that age” was one where boys were either frenzied or like bumps on a log. Jake was a bump. Perhaps the damage was reversible.

“We do have a program here. I’ve checked and there is space. He could start right away.”

Of course they had a program. And of course the program cost an extra thirty-five hundred dollars a year — on top of the nine thousand they were already paying — and of course Sam and Claire signed him up. Claire imagined that if they said no, the next time Sally would skip the friendly little chat and call the Department of Social Services. She’s a shrink, he’s a lawyer, and their kid’s a little shit. The father’s kind of cute, so obviously it’s all her fault. Arrest her.

Claire and Sam went out the door arm in arm, smiling, whispering. As soon as they were on the sidewalk, Claire pulled away. “What a little bitch,” she said. “It’s hush money. Give us thirty-five hundred and we’ll keep him.”

“It might be good for him.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

Sam shrugged. “You want an ice cream?”

Claire didn’t answer. They walked five blocks and couldn’t find a place that made sundaes. Ice cream was too uncool, unhealthy, drippy. They ended up at Mondadori Cafe with the high-cheekboned crowd, cappuccinos and three-berry tart.

9

Wednesday at six-thirty in the morning Jody’s phone rang.

“I had a horrible nightmare,” Ellen said. “Can you have breakfast with me?”

Jody grunted.

“Come on, get up, I’ll take you out. I have to take a fast shower and get rid of someone. It’ll be about twenty minutes. Meet me in the lobby.”

Jody stood up and pulled her nightgown off over her head. “There isn’t a federal law that requires you to notify me every time you sleep with a stranger.”

“He’s not a stranger anymore.”

“You’re right. Bring him to breakfast.”

“I’m not sure he speaks English,” Ellen said.

“So,” Jody said, when they were safely awake, around the corner in the coffee shop. “What did you dream?”

“The bank went under and I had to turn sex into a profession. All my customers were men I’d known all my life — friends of the family, old teachers, the president of the bank. All day I had to fuck and fuck.” Ellen spoke loudly, but no one in the coffee shop seemed to notice. “I had to do all these strange things exactly the way they wanted or I wouldn’t get paid. In the end, I stole a gun from this cop I’m blowing and shot myself in the crotch.”

“It’s been done before,” Jody said, breaking an egg yolk with a corner of toast, mopping up the yellow.

“What do you mean, ‘done before’?”

“Shot in the crotch. I can’t remember the name — a French film with Gérard Depardieu, and that old Frenchwoman, maybe Jeanne Moreau. In the end she puts the gun inside her and pulls the trigger, makes a huge mess, and takes a long time for her to die. Very symbolic. Almost heavy-handed.”

“You’re telling me my life’s been done before? My nightmare?”

“Everything.” Jody flagged the waiter for more coffee. “Can I ask you an intensely personal question?”

Ellen nodded.

“Do you always wear sunglasses indoors at seven a.m., or is it something you want to talk about?”

“I have a boo-boo.”

“What, like the stranger’s fist met your face?”

“Unfortunately, more embarrassing.” Ellen took off the glasses for a second, flashing a semicircular black-and-blue mark at Jody.

“I’m listening.”

“We were, shall I say, engaged, and I kind of reared up and came down hard on the edge of the headboard.”

“That metal thing?”

Ellen nodded. “Completely knocked me out, only I don’t think he noticed. When I came to we were still doing it.”

“Well, you must not have been out very long.”

“If I go to work like this, they’ll think someone did it.”

“Someone did. So say you were in a cab accident, they smashed into a truck, your face was slammed against the Plexiglas. Happens all the time.”

Ellen laid her hand out on the table. On her right hand, fourth finger, was a shiny diamond ring. “Rob gave me this yesterday. What do you think?”

“He gave you an engagement ring and you brought a stranger home?”

“He didn’t exactly say it was an engagement ring. He should know better than to try and marry me.”

“You’re nuts.”

“You’re just jealous. Here, try it on.” Ellen took off the ring and tried to slip it onto Jody’s finger. “With this ring, I thee wed.”

Jody pulled her hand away. “You need professional help.”

Ellen shook her head. “Every time I go to a shrink all they want to do is fuck me.”

“Go to a woman.”

“What makes you think she wouldn’t want to fuck me?”

“Ellen, I know this will be hard for you to accept, but not everyone wants to sleep with you, and that’s all right. It’s supposed to be like that,”

“I couldn’t. I hate women. Disgusting. I can’t imagine what I’d tell a woman.”

The waiter brought the check and Ellen grabbed it. “Whoever does the most talking pays.”

“Thanks,” Jody said.

“You never said anything about L.A. — how was it?”

“Nice. Very nice. Sunny, warm.”

“Is everyone really good-looking?”

“I didn’t notice.”

Ellen tapped her face. “Do you think I can cover this with makeup?”

“Take a piece of gauze, tape it over your face, and tell people how long you had to sit in the emergency room waiting to get your skull x-rayed.”

“Do you think about your brother a lot?” Claire asked. Five minutes into the session, Jody was starting to space out. It was pouring rain outside. She looked past Claire and out the window. Somehow it was easier to look over Claire’s shoulder than to deal with things inside.

“Would it be better if I closed the blind?” Claire asked.

“No. Sorry,” Jody said.

“How would you describe your relationship to your brother?”

“My relationship? He died before I was born.”

“Do you think of him as your friend? Your enemy?”

“My ghost,” Jody said. “I am him, he is me.”

“What does that mean?” Claire asked, eyebrows raised.

Jody shrugged. This was getting a little too close for comfort.

“Did your parents want a boy, or did they purposely adopt you because you were a girl?”

“They adopted me before I was born,” Jody said, annoyed. “The deal was, whatever the baby was, it was theirs. The guy who was in on it called my parents when I was born and said, ‘Your package is here and it’s wrapped up in pink ribbons.’ Isn’t that incredibly queer? ‘Your package.’ What did they do, mail-order me?”

“People didn’t talk about adoption very openly twenty-five years ago.”

“Tell me about it,” Jody said.

“Why don’t you tell me,” Claire said.

They were silent. Rain splattered down onto the air conditioner outside, and Jody forgot where she was for a minute, slipping back and forth in time and geography.

“The whole year I was nine,” she said, “I thought I was going to die. Every day I waited. I didn’t know how it would happen — if it would be a sudden, quick snapping thing or something that would creep across me for days or weeks. After that, regardless of what happened, I always felt like one of those miracle cancer patients who lives despite the odds.”

“What made you think you were going to die?”

“He was nine when he died and somehow in my head I figured all children died. That was just the way it went.”

“Depressing,” Claire said.

“Very,” Jody said.

“Did you ever have fun?”

“Yeah,” Jody said, laughing. “I played funeral home with the kid who lived next door. I made her lie down flat and then I covered her face with baby powder.” Jody paused. “You’re looking at me funny.”

“You say the most upsetting things and somehow they sound funny. I’m not sure whether you’re kidding.”

“The funnier it gets, the less I’m kidding,” Jody said dryly. “Can we change the subject?”

“Do you find it difficult to talk about your family?”

“No, it’s like eating a York Peppermint Patty, uplifting, refreshing, get the sensation.”

“You’re very angry.”

“Annoyed, not angry. When I get angry, little flames start coming out of my ears, it’s a whole different thing.”

What do you want from me? Jody was tempted to ask.

“I’m curious why you’re having such a hard time today,” Claire said. “The trip to L.A. went well, so there should be some acknowledgment of success, but you don’t seem willing to discuss that, either. Maybe you want me to know that despite your ability to succeed, there’s still something you need me for.”

Jody shrugged. She was nailed. She tried to play it cool.

“I’m here,” Claire said. “You can tell me the most horrible thing in the world or the most wonderful thing. Either way I’m still here.”

“My life, my brother, my family has made me into a very different person from the one I was born as,” Jody said. “When I think about it, I have the sensation of being separated from myself. I’m not into this adoption thing, okay? I love my parents, I really do. But there’s something, some strange something. Maybe it’s from being adopted, maybe it’s just me, but I don’t get too attached to anyone. To anything. I don’t want to. I’m convinced that if do, I’ll get fucked over. Call it fear of rejection, whatever.

“When you’re a baby you look at your mother’s face and it’s your face. She smiles at you and at that moment she is you. When you’re a little older, you smile back at her and somehow the smile on your face is her smile, it’s you becoming her.”

Jody paused and looked at Claire, who was nodding intensely. Though she didn’t usually wear makeup, Claire had lipstick on, and one side of it went up above the lip line, making her look a little demented. Jody forgot what she was thinking for a second.

“But when you’re adopted, you look up at your mother and she’s trying to look at you, to understand you, and in my case there was also this ghost of a child between us. What I saw was not a mirror; it was neither myself nor my mother, but something confusing and much less clear. The root it plants is a strange kind of detachment, an insecurity.” Jody stopped and fixed on Claire.

“Do you still feel the insecurity?” Claire asked.

Jody sighed. She wondered if shrinks made their families stay up late at night and talk about everything in microscopic detail. So fucking obsessed, no surprise that they worked in offices by themselves. No one could stand to be around them.

“There is something, some lack of something.”

“What?”

Jody flashed Claire a hard look. Even if she knew, she wouldn’t tell anyone, ever.

Claire didn’t react except to glance at the clock and then pick up her appointment book and start flipping through the pages. Were they out of time? Jody wondered. It was as if they’d been under water and suddenly had raced back to the surface for air.

“There’s a lot to talk about,” Claire said.

Jody nodded.

“Would you like to keep going?”

Jody didn’t know exactly what Claire meant.

“We could have a double session,” Claire said. “I’m not seeing anyone until five. What do you think?”

Jody shrugged. She still wasn’t clear about what was going on. She’d never heard of anyone going overtime. Didn’t Claire have better things to do? Didn’t Jody have a job? A life?

“Do you want to stay?” Claire asked.

Of course Jody wanted to stay, didn’t everyone? But at the same time, she’d had enough. She’d said the things she’d said knowing that within the hour Claire would throw her out. There were no major consequences. You didn’t have to live with your words for more than fifty minutes. That was the beauty of therapy, you always ran out of time. You could always say something incredibly important in the last five minutes and there was nothing the shrink could do except say, We’ll have to talk about that next week, or, It’s so interesting how you save the very best things for last. No matter what, you left when the hour was up. That was one of the rules.

“Well?” Claire asked.

Jody shrugged.

“Are you leaving it up to me?”

She nodded.

“Then let’s keep going — but first I have to go to the bathroom. I’ll be right back.”

Claire walked out, leaving the door open. Jody never had a shrink who went to the bathroom before. She’d always thought they were like teachers: they just didn’t go.

Claire’s purse was on her desk along with a huge stack of notes, a pile of yellow legal pads. Jody could have gone through everything. She could have stolen Claire’s wallet and then played dumb. She could have flipped through her appointment book, making a list of the names and numbers of all her other patients. Later that night she’d be able to sit down with a bowl of popcorn and make crank calls.

Hi, I’m calling for Claire Roth. She asked me to let you know that you’re so incredibly neurotic that it’s driven her crazy and she had to be admitted to the hospital. Hi, this is Claire Roth’s secretary. She asked me to leave you a message: get a new shrink.

The phone rang just as Claire was coming out of the bathroom. “Don’t answer it,” she yelled, running back into her office, picking up just as the tape clicked on. “Hello,” she said, breathless.

From her side of the room, Jody could hear a woman’s voice squeaking through the receiver.

“I’m with someone now,” Claire said curtly. “Can I call you later?”

“So,” Claire said, hanging up and sitting back down in her chair. “Tell me how your parents adopted you.”

The mood had completely changed. They’d come back to the surface and now, with barely a breath of air, Claire wanted to go under again. Jody wasn’t sure she could do it. If she’d been the person she wished she was, the great pillar of strength and wisdom, she would have explained that while she was grateful for the offer, she’d had enough for one day and really had to get back to work.

“Do you know the details about where you came from?” Claire asked.

“Yeah,” Jody said. “The sperm bashed its head against the egg and here I am.”

“How romantic,” Claire said. “But did you come from an agency or an orphanage?”

“You really want to hear all this?”

Claire nodded.

“My parents told me I came from an agency.”

“How old were you when they told you?”

“Just born,” Jody said. “I came home from the hospital and they said, ‘Hi, how are you? This is the house, this is the kitchen, this is the front hall, we’ll take you to your room. Oh, and by the way, you’re adopted, but don’t think twice about it.’”

“Do you remember them telling you?”

“They always told me. They had this book, not something in general circulation, but like something an adoption company would sell you. A two-volume boxed set, The Adopted Family. One book was a picture book for the kid, and the other was the more serious stuff for the adoptive parents, things like what problems you might have, how to love the stranger’s child, blah, blah, blah.”

“Was finding out you were adopted traumatic? Do you wish they hadn’t told you?”

“It’s like learning your name. You don’t remember learning it, it’s just there, it belongs to you. I’m adopted. A-D-O-P-T-E-D. It’s the first word I learned to spell.”

Claire grimaced.

“Kidding,” Jody said. Every time she said something, Claire’s face flashed a reaction. At first Jody had really liked that — it was proof that a human being was sitting across from her — but sometimes she wished everything wasn’t so damn interesting, didn’t mean so much to Claire.

“Everything is not a natural disaster,” Jody said. “‘Adopted’ … I know the word, but what does it mean? I have no idea.”

“Do you feel adopted? Earlier you were talking about your mother and not mirroring her.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know if that comes from being adopted or having a dead brother.”

“How long before you were born did he die?”

“Six months.”

“It is kind of close,” Claire said.

“I know.” Jody was tempted to tell Claire to take a tranquilizer or to point out that therapeutically speaking, all Claire’s expressions might not be a good thing. If Jody were not Jody, if she were a seriously disturbed maniac, someone who couldn’t take a little criticism, all Claire’s heaving and hoing might throw her right over the edge. Fortunately, what Jody was saying was old hat. There were no shocking new revelations about her past. She was telling the story of her life, and the facts came easily.

“Barbara used to hound me about didn’t I think it was strange that an agency would give an infant to a family whose child had just died. She kept pestering me, like maybe she knew something I didn’t, but she never came out and said it. Anyway, I used to bug my mom for information, I always had the feeling that there were things nobody was telling me. I’d hit her up for a recount whenever I knew she’d be weak, like the kid’s birthday or the anniversary of his death.”

“How did you know when his birthday was, or when he died?”

Fucking detective, Jody thought. “My mother would say, Today’s Blank’s birthday. Today it’s ten years since Blank died.’ I never heard her tell anyone else, but she’d always tell me in a kind of conspiratorial whisper.”

“That wasn’t very fair, was it?” Claire said, then quickly added in a soft voice, “I wish you’d tell me his name.”

Jody shrugged, her stomach turning in on itself; it was as if Claire was asking Jody to share her brother. Jody was aware of the betrayal, the obviousness of leaving her brother’s name out, but she had to keep something for herself. Claire couldn’t have everything.

“Anyway, I’d hit her for info, and then when I was about twenty, it came out that they didn’t get me from some agency, but on the black market, and the lady who lived next door went to the hospital to pick me up because my mom was too chicken to meet my real mom. They traded me in the back of a cab for an envelope of money.”

Jody glanced at Claire, who looked as if she were having an allergic reaction. Her nose and eyes were all red. “The thing that kills me — well, among the things that kill me — is no one will tell me how much they paid for me. I mean, I’d like to know. I asked and my mom said, ‘Whatever it was, it wasn’t worth it.’”

Claire looked surprised.

“She was kidding,” Jody said. “The other thing that kills me is that it’s still not clear to me if Barbara knew something or not, and if she did, how come she played along and didn’t tell me?”

“I don’t know,” Claire said. “You’d have to ask Barbara.”

“No one ever tells me shit.”

“Do you feel like people are purposely deceiving you?”

A fucking obvious test question. Did Jody also think people were out to get her? That everyone was working together in a plot to ruin her life? She looked at Claire as if to say, Don’t you think I see what you’re getting at? Don’t fucking condescend to me. Fuckwad.

“Is there some reason why people would keep the truth from you?” Claire asked.

Jody shrugged.

“What else do you know?”

“Why are we talking about this?” Jody asked.

“Why?” Claire said.

“Yeah, what does being adopted have to do with going to UCLA?”

“You tell me.”

“No, you tell me.”

Claire looked at the clock. “Well, neither of us can say much more today. Let’s talk for a minute about your schedule. Do you work every day?”

Jody nodded.

“Are you going to keep working until you leave for California?”

“That’s a big subject if we’re out of time,” Jody said.

“So let’s talk about it more later,” Claire said. “What’s tomorrow like for you?”

“Fine,” Jody said, wondering how the hell she’d pay for all this. All of a sudden she needed to see Claire all the time. Not once a week but every day. She had the urge to tell Claire everything, even the things she really didn’t want her to know. It was as if Jody needed to unload herself, her whole self, to empty everything onto Claire and then, scrubbed clean, leave for California. And Jody also had the strangest gut feeling that Claire somehow needed her as well; she reprimanded herself for it. That was truly sick, a sure sign of major neurosis. Of course Claire didn’t need her, she had a life of her own: a husband, probably kids, and a million other patients, including the one who’d just buzzed into the waiting room.

“We really have to stop,” Claire said. “Is nine-thirty all right?”

“In the morning?”

Claire laughed. “Too early?”

“It’s all right,” Jody said. Didn’t Claire know that America worked from nine to five, that structure was good for people? Nine-thirty in the goddamn morning was way too soon. Nothing was going to happen between now and then. Jody would eat dinner, watch TV, sleep, then be back here with Claire. Why was Jody throwing herself at Claire? Moreover, why was Claire letting her do it? Shouldn’t Claire set some limits, say something like, I know you’d really like to see me again soon, but it’s not healthy, not productive. You must learn to solve your own problems, be independent, otherwise how are you going to get to California and make a name for yourself?

The rain had stopped, and a veil of late-afternoon sun was poking through dark clouds. Somewhere — maybe in Vermont, where Claire probably had a weekend house — there was a beautiful rainbow. The air was warm from the rain. Jody crossed Houston and walked up to Washington Square, which was empty, the junkies temporarily chased out by the weather. A couple of street people pushing grocery carts were circling each other, staking out the best bench. She walked east toward Broadway, not at all sure where she was going. It was twenty past five. She’d been in the shrink’s office for the whole fucking afternoon.

The phone rang at ten-thirty and Jody knew a stranger was calling. She’d already said goodnight to her mother, Michael was out of town and wouldn’t have bothered to take her number, Ellen was on a date, and Harry was at an opening at the Museum of Modern Art.

“Hello,” Jody said, prepared to hang up without saying another word. She held the phone in one hand and, with the other, pulled back the window shade enough so she could peek outside, as though the caller would be standing at the pay phone on the corner.

“I don’t think you know me,” a man’s voice said.

Jody was tempted to slam the phone down, but there was something kind of nervous and pathetic about the voice. Jody let go of the shade.

“This is Peter Sears. Ann gave me your number.”

Ann who? Jody wondered.

“She told me you were living in the city and suggested I call you.”

Peter Sears had gone to Wesleyan along with Jody and about fifty people named Ann. His father was a famous record producer, and she’d considered trying to be friends with him, but she realized this impulse was based more on his father’s success than on any qualities Peter himself might have had, so she ignored him. Plus, he was good-looking, really good-looking, so good-looking, in fact, that Jody couldn’t figure why he was calling her in the first place.

“So, how is Ana?” she asked, still not sure who they were talking about.

“Fine,” Peter said. “She said that since graduation you’ve been doing some film work.”

“A little. I’m helping Harry Birenbaum on a project,” Jody said, figuring that Peter would recognize Harry’s name. Harry and Mr. Sears probably played whatever it was that men played together. “But in the fall I’ll be going to UCLA.”

“Wow, great.”

Yeah, wow, great, Jody thought. Every time she said “UCLA” a wave of anxiety washed over her. At least it sounded good to other people.

“What have you been doing?” Jody asked.

“Some writing,” Peter said.

He probably didn’t have to work. Jody imagined Peter living a life of extreme luxury in the brownstone his father owned but never lived in for more than three days in a row. Peter probably woke up at ten a.m., watched cartoons until eleven, drank fresh-squeezed juice in bed, and finally got up around noon, giving the maid a chance to straighten up before doing the shopping.

“I have tickets to a screening of Tin Beard tomorrow night and was wondering if you might want to go.”

“I saw it already, last week‚” Jody said. “It’s not great.”

“There’s a party at the Ark afterwards — would you want to go to that?”

“All right,” Jody said, as if she’d been talked into something.

“Pick you up at ten-thirty.”

Jody hung up, curious how come Peter Sears had to dig up strangers from college in order to get a date. She tried to remember which Anns he’d been friends with. There were four of them — interchangeable as far as Jody was concerned — Ann Weinstein, Ann Salzman and Anns Bankowsky and Willers.

The phone rang again. It was either Peter Sears calling to say he’d come to his senses and there was no way he was going anywhere with Jody, or the guy at the phone booth on the corner had finally found her number. She peeled back the shade and looked outside again. The phone booth was empty.

“Hello,” Jody snapped, turning on the answering machine even though it was after the fact.

“Is everything all right?”

Jody was silent, terrified.

“Jody, are you there? It’s Claire Roth.”

“Yeah, I’m here,” Jody said.

“Sorry to call you at home. I was looking at my book and realized I made a mistake. I have to change our appointment time for tomorrow. Would four-forty-five be all right?”

“Yeah, sure, fine.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Positive,” Jody said, banging her knee against the filing cabinet nervously, again and again. Tomorrow it would be black and blue and she’d look at it and wonder if it meant something, leukemia or hemophilia.

“Good. Then I’ll see you tomorrow,” Claire said. “’Night.”

Her voice was as soft as they pretended Kleenex was on television. It floated down over Jody and she breathed it in like a kiss.

10

Claire sat in her office, hoping Polly would cancel. When the buzzer went off, she let Polly into the waiting room and, feeling obligated to offer Polly a chance to talk herself out of it, opened the office door and asked, “Do you want to come in?”

“Could we just go?”

Claire locked the door and they stood silently in the hall, waiting for the elevator. Without the structure of the office, the two chairs, the fifty minutes, Polly didn’t know what to do. Claire wasn’t supposed to step out of context, much less out of the office. She was supposed to live within the walls, waiting for her patients, sitting near the phone twenty-four hours a day in case of emergency.

“Is it still raining?” Claire asked, casually, but making it clear that while this wasn’t a session, it wasn’t a social event, either.

“I don’t know,” Polly said.

Outside, Claire flagged a cab, and Polly gave the driver the address. Sitting in the backseat with Polly, Claire started thinking about what people she met at parties did when they found out she was a shrink. Men told every therapy joke they’d ever heard and eventually ran off to the bar for a refill and never returned. Women pretended to understand. They looked at Claire, smiled, and eventually they’d whisper something about their children and a problem. Claire inevitably said, “It’s perfectly normal. It’ll pass,” and the women would seem relieved.

The reactions were always based on the person’s feelings about therapy. The worst were those who had been “in” for a long time. Analysands refused to speak to her — as if Claire were responsible for all the shrinks throughout history. If Freud was wrong, it was her fault. Therefore it was mostly true that shrinks hung out with other shrinks or, more likely, didn’t hang out at all.

Polly was mute, acting as if she’d regressed to a preverbal stage and was expecting Claire to take care of her. When Polly smiled at her, Claire felt she was waiting for her to do something, say something, that would indicate her willingness to be the mother.

“Do you feel all right?” Claire asked.

“Yeah. I took two Valiums this morning.”

“Were you supposed to do that?” Claire asked, surprised.

Polly didn’t answer.

“Make sure you tell them when we get there.”

Claire could picture Polly not saying anything, and during the procedure the doctor would give her another drug that would cause a horrible reaction. They’d call an ambulance and take the comatose, brain-dead, half-aborted girl to the hospital. It would all be Claire’s fault.

“I don’t really need you to do this,” the girl said after a while. “I can take care myself.”

Claire simply nodded. They got out at the corner. Polly paid the driver and, without waiting, started off down the street towards the clinic.

“Let’s stop for a second,” Claire said, and Polly stopped. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“Well, I want you to know that if at any point you change your mind, it’s okay. I won’t feel as though you’ve wasted this time. It wouldn’t bother me at all.”

“Great,” Polly said, and started walking toward the clinic again.

Inside, all of a sudden Polly got shy. She sat in the chair closest to the door and looked up at Claire, pleadingly, indicating her wish for Claire to handle everything.

“I think you’re supposed to check in at the desk,” Claire said calmly, and then tried not to watch as Polly fumbled with the forms, the questions, pretending not to be nervous. When she watched her, she started hating her. It wasn’t productive. She focused on the nature posters taped on the walls. Someone had tried to make the clinic look like a pleasant place. Claire could picture the decorations being ripped down during an anti-abortion protest. She could see the receptionist ordering not one duck-pond poster but two or three, maybe half-dozen at a time. It was all very clean and neat. It could have been a podiatrist’s office. Claire found it hard to believe anything happened there. The room offered no clues, no sounds, no signs, nothing.

She glanced at Polly. Claire hadn’t heard her say anything about the two Valium.

“Did you tell them about the Valium?” Claire called across the office.

Polly turned around and flashed her an annoyed look.

“How many milligrams?” the nurse asked.

“Two blue ones,” Polly said.

“Ten milligrams?”

“Yeah.”

If Claire had taken two blue Valiums that morning, she’d be on the floor by now. The difference between what a body could take at twenty and at forty-three was amazing.

“Have a seat and well call you.”

“Why did you tell them?” Polly asked.

“Because you didn’t,” Claire said.

Five minutes later, when the nurse stepped out from behind her desk, Claire wondered if she should talk to her, explain who she was. She felt like an undercover agent. “Polly?” the nurse said. “You can come in now.”

Polly stood up.

“Your friend can come with you, if you like.”

“She’s not my friend,” Polly said, “she’s my shrink.”

And she’s a blabbermouth, Claire expected her to add.

“She can come with you, if you like,” the nurse repeated as if she hadn’t heard. Claire was the girl’s shrink. Didn’t that mean anything? Was it every day that a shrink brought someone in?

Polly turned around and looked at Claire, “It’s okay. Just wish me luck.”

“I do,” Claire said.

For a second, she’d seen herself in the operating room — if that’s what they called it — holding Polly’s hand and seeing more of her, literally and figuratively, than she ever wanted to. She saw herself forced to watch the whole thing, the unborn sucked in bits and pieces into a glass jar.

The nurse took Polly away, and Claire was glad to be alone. Her thoughts had agitated her to the point where if she hadn’t been with a patient, she would’ve tried to get a little Valium of her own somewhere. She took a couple of deep breaths and closed her eyes. She’d been there before. She could feel it in her shoulders, in the back of her neck. Déjà vu, sort of. It was much different then. In 1966 there were no pregnancy tests on sale at the drugstore. There were no abortion clinics listed in the yellow pages.

• • •

Eighteen and a half years old, finishing her first year at George Washington University, she was involved with Mark Ein, an English professor just out of Yale with a novel already published. Intense, with curly brown hair, sexy pursed lips, and blue eyes. He was like no one Claire had ever known. He said he avoided eye contact because he was afraid of burning holes into people, and described himself as a nonteacher. “We’re in this together,” he told the class. “This is an exploration, the beginning of what should become an unending process.”

As part of the exploration, he took Claire out. He took her for meals she’d never eaten, to movies she’d never heard of, to hot spots where they danced to strange new music. And then she was pregnant. In 1966 that’s how an eighteen-year-old knew; she figured it out. It didn’t take a genius. No red tag sale, the curse that didn’t come.

“I’m pregnant,” Claire finally told him as they walked into an ice cream store.

Standing in line, Mark leaned over and whispered in her ear. “I should tell you something. I’m married. My wife’s in graduate school at Berkeley.” He ordered a mint chocolate chip cone for himself and turned to Claire, who was about to throw up. “Want anything?”

She shook her head and bit down hard, grinding her teeth together.

“You don’t have to have it,” he said. “I can find a place.”

Claire wasn’t sure what he was talking about. What kind of a place? A place where she and the baby could hide? Where he’d keep her as his extra wife?

On the warmest day of spring, Mark picked Claire up in his green MG and drove her into a part of Washington she’d never seen before: street after street of row houses, not brick townhouses like they had in Georgetown, elegant and expensive, but rundown wood and brick. Some had little front porches; some had faded striped awnings and half-rusted aluminum porch furniture. There were a few children, a few older men shuffling around, the occasional dog loping toward home. Claire felt exposed, in danger. She wondered if Mark was taking her to the nanny who’d raised him and was going to leave her there. She would live in the nanny’s house, and sometimes Mark would sneak away and come visit her. By the time the nanny got old and died, the neighbors would be so used to Claire that she’d just go on living there for the rest of her life.

“Come in,” a tall black woman said, holding open the screen door. They stepped up onto her porch. “I’m Luanne,” she said, leading them through the house, into the kitchen in the back. “Lie down.” She pointed to the kitchen table covered with a neatly pressed white sheet. Claire lay back on the table — the same table, she supposed, they ate their dinner on every night. She didn’t know what she was doing there. Mark hadn’t said a word. Would he make her do something she might not want to do? Would this woman operate on her, just like that, without warning?

“Relax,” Luanne said, smiling. Her smile was filled with dark tooth gaps and bright pink gums. Claire looked at her uneven grin and decided they’d come for some sort of special treatment that would make the baby dissolve and disappear. Luanne closed her kitchen door and came to Claire. She lifted Claire’s shirt and put her hands on Claire’s belly.

“How long?” she asked.

“Two months, maybe a little more,” Claire said.

With dry, bony fingers Luanne kneaded Claire’s stomach.

Mark stood in the corner gnawing his cuticles. Claire could see him out of the corner of her eye. He no longer seemed so wonderful, larger than life. He looked small, nervous, unpleasant.

“I can do it,” the woman said. “You come back and I’ll do it. You stay overnight. Think about it. I make no guarantee. There could always be a problem, and there’d be nothing I could do except try and get you to the hospital. I don’t have a car, and it’s hard to get a taxi. I’m telling you that.”

Claire nodded. She finally understood what they’d been talking about all along, although she had no idea of how it would be done. Would the woman cut her belly open? Punch a hole with a knitting needle and stir things around?

“I’ll think about it,” Claire said, trying to be polite. There was no way she was coming back. The whole time she’d been lying on the table, all she could think about was the family eating dinner. She could see this woman taking her child, making stew out of it, and serving it up to a table full of people. Fresh, deep red, and tender.

“We’ll be back,” Mark said easily to the woman.

The woman nodded and smiled at him. Claire wondered if he’d been there before. She didn’t ask. She didn’t really want to know. For the next month she avoided Mark. The semester ended. For the first time in her life, Claire had straight A’s.

“Guess you’re having it,” Mark said to her. They were in his office after the last class.

Until he said it, Claire had never really believed that if she did nothing, in six months she would be forced — if only by gravity and the infant’s self-determination — to have a baby. She wondered how much it would hurt. Just having sex, having a man inside her, was enough. She couldn’t imagine a baby coming out without killing her. She pictured herself trying to hold it in, for months, years, the rest of her life.

“Maybe you’ll have a miscarriage or something,” Mark said hopefully.

Claire shrugged and pretended not to be offended. She could already feel it rooted inside her, not about to give up.

“Sorry,” he said simply, as if he’d accidentally stepped on her toe. “I’ll walk you to the bus.” They walked out into the clear May afternoon. Claire saw the bus coming down Pennsylvania Avenue and, without a word, took off running toward it and never saw Mark Ein again.

She waited until it was no longer possible not to tell her parents. She pulled her mother into her room and sat her down on the bed; but when Claire started to speak, no words came out.

“Is something wrong?” her mother asked, starting to get up. “Maybe you should suck on a lozenge.” Claire pushed her back down on the bed, lifted her blouse, pushed down the elastic waistband of her skirt, and turned to the side, so her mother would see the bulge. In profile, it looked like what it was.

“Oh my lord,” her mother said, covering her mouth with her hand, as if to push back a longer stream of words, the stream that turned into an overflowing river when her father found out.

Her mother ran out of the room and into the kitchen, where she made hushed phone call after hushed phone call. Then she ordered Claire into the car. She drove her to the doctor — not the family physician but a different one in downtown Washington — to make sure the protrusion wasn’t something else. Claire imagined her mother wishing it was some complicated disease, something there would be no shame in dying from. Cancer would have been good.

“It’s true,” the doctor said, as though he too had first believed Claire was concealing a tumor under her skirt.

Her mother leaned far over the doctor’s desk and whispered, so softly that later it would seem as though she’d never said it, “Is there anything that can be done about it?”

The doctor shook his head, leaned forward, and whispered back. “Too late for that.”

Claire’s father rented a truck and made a point of going up and down the street telling the neighbors he was taking a load of old furniture down to the “poor folks” and that if they had anything to add, he’d be glad to take it. Claire ended up alone in an apartment in Baltimore with all of Hillside Street’s discarded furniture. It was depressing as hell. It was also the only time she’d been away from her family since spending two weeks at Christian Fellowship camp when she was thirteen. In 1966, maternity wear was basically huge cotton underpants and tent dresses in frightening prints, not the kind of thing that looked good on a nineteen-year-old, so Claire stayed indoors unless it was absolutely necessary to go out.

For no reason other than her determination to embrace everything and anything she was not, Claire decided that if the baby was going to be given up for adoption, it should go to a Jewish family. They’d make a better home for it. They understood sorrow, suffering, loss, what it meant to be an outsider. She thought of the holiday Mark had told her about, the one where they welcomed strangers; they would leave the door open and set a place for a mysterious prophet who’d come in and sit at their table, drink their wine.

“You’re crazy,” her father said. “Always have been. If the boy had been a decent Christian, you’d be married now.”

Claire didn’t bother telling him that Mark was already married. There was no point.

“They’re like that,” her father said. “Slimy sons of … Go ahead, give it to one of them. The further from us, the better.”

It almost went wrong. A family was found, but three weeks later they backed out. The lawyer said it was because they knew, in a roundabout way, who the father was.

“Of course they knew,” her father said. “What do you expect? They all know each other.”

“The family wanted a child with no background at all,” the lawyer said.

Claire tried to conjure a child arriving with no past, only a future.

A second family was found. Through the lawyers sanitized descriptions were exchanged. No one wanted to take chances; it was getting late. Only the most minimal information was passed along. “A lovely family. A mother, a father, a little boy. Because of complications they can’t have more of their own, and yet,” the lawyer said, winking, “they have a lot of love to give.”

He meant money, Claire understood. She wondered how much it was costing them.

“Upper-middle-class. College-educated. Jews.”

Claire was glad they weren’t first-time parents. A baby wouldn’t be a surprise. And it would have a big brother; Claire had always wanted a brother. When she thought of her baby, she imagined a girl named Rachel splashing in a wading pool with all her cousins and the neighbors’ children. She saw her daughter going off to school in a brand-new dress, new shoes, carrying her brother’s old lunch box. She pictured her sitting on a braided rug during story hour, playing with the curls of the girl in front of her, giggling. She figured there would be an extended family; grandparents coming up from Florida with sacks of oranges and grapefruit, and stubby old fingers just right for pinching cheeks. She saw love and comfort. The child would never know she’d started off belonging to someone else.

Claire knew her daughter only as she grew inside her. She loved her by rubbing the child’s kicking foot through the walls of her body.

A woman came charging into the clinic and stopped in front of Claire. “First time?” she bellowed.

“I’m waiting for someone,” Claire said, startled.

“Oh,” the woman said, as if she didn’t believe her. “This is my third. It’s nothing, really. I’m sure your daughter will be fine.”

“Oh no,” Claire said, shaking her head. “It’s not my daughter.” It came out sounding drastically different from how she meant it. The woman shrugged and didn’t say anything else. Claire went up to the desk and asked the nurse how much longer it would be. The answer was hours, not minutes.

“I have to leave,” Claire said. “I’ll be back.” She hurried out of the office, sure that if she didn’t get out in less than thirty seconds, she’d lose consciousness, and masked men would haul her into the back room. They’d give her an abortion even though she didn’t need one. They’d get her anyway, suck whatever they could out of her, just because.

• • •

That night, when Sam reached across the bed and pulled her toward him, Claire screamed.

“I know it’s been a while,” he said. “But has it really been that long?”

They started again. When it seemed certain that neither Jake nor Adam was going to stumble in, Claire reached into her night-table drawer, pulled out her old diaphragm, and filled it with jelly, thinking she probably should turn on the light and check it for holes.

“Are you off the pill?” Sam asked.

“No,” Claire said, handing him the gooped-up disc.

He disappeared under the covers. She could feel him playing, pretending he didn’t know what to do. He ran his mouth over her thighs, blew a stream of air inside her, teased her with his teeth, and finally the diaphragm popped into place.

“What’s up?” he asked, reappearing, tickling and kissing her.

“I feel like I need to be very careful,” Claire said.

It was a major regression. When Claire met Sam she was taking the pill, had an IUD, and a diaphragm in the drawer, and was also trying out this new kind of foam that was like shaving cream and gave some guys a rash. The joke among Claire’s friends was that men needed special protection to keep from turning impotent around her.

“I just don’t want to get pregnant. Is that asking too much?” Claire would demand. She’d stand naked at the foot of the bed ranting and raving about responsibility, starving, unwanted children in third-world countries, the war in Vietnam, anything and everything, until finally, exhausted, she’d collapse onto the water bed and allow herself to be taken.

“Do you not want to do this?” Sam asked twenty minutes later, when nothing was happening, when it still seemed like Claire was somewhere else, not even phoning it in. “I could just put on a videotape and do it myself,” he said.

Claire didn’t respond.

“Maybe I should take a shower.” Sam moved to get out of the bed.

Claire reached down under the blanket and grabbed him by the balls. “I’ll kill you,” she said.

“Now we’re talking.”

“I’ve had a very long day,” Claire said, squeezing Sam until he was on the verge of real pain. “Don’t give me a bad time.”

He pulled away and hurried out of the room, his half-hard dick leading the way. He came back with an old bottle of Jack Daniel’s and something hidden behind his back. “I can do this to you or you can do it to me,” he said, opening his hand, flashing the heavy-duty handcuffs Jake had brought home from school the day before with no explanation.

“Do you have the keys?”

Sam swung the little skeleton keys back and forth hypnotically. He opened the bottle and took a slug. “Who’s it gonna be?”

Claire reached for the Jack Daniel’s, took a long pull, another, and another, then lay back and let Sam handcuff her to the bed frame.

“Let me ask you something,” Rosenblatt said, leaning forward in his chair, pressing his palms together. “Do you ever have fun?”

Claire looked confused. “I’m not sure what you mean,” she said.

“It sounds like you don’t have fun.”

“I wasn’t aware I said that.”

“You didn’t say it,” Rosenblatt said. “But you never talk about enjoying yourself. Enjoying your family.” He leaned back in his chair, his hands crossed behind his head. “What gives you pleasure?”

“My work,” Claire said. “I work very hard, and it makes me feel good.”

“Besides work. Tell me what you enjoy — the theater, eating out, sailing on weekends? There must be something.”

Claire shrugged. He was pissing her off again. Every time he did this, she swore she wouldn’t come back, and every time she made another appointment. It was humiliating to be constantly asked if she wanted another appointment; it was like being forced to get down on your knees and beg for more help. A normal therapist would suggest the next week at three, keeping the process going without constantly addressing the issue of needing help. Rosenblatt, she knew, did it to feed his ego.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

“You know why I’m here.”

“Tell me again.”

Claire was glad she didn’t have to sleep with him. Fucking this guy would be hell. He’d do his thing, come, and then fall off snoring before his dick was even dry.

“I’m having a hard time with my children,” Claire said.

“Could it be because you don’t have any fun? You don’t play?”

Now Claire was getting really angry.

“Do you ever laugh?” Rosenblatt asked.

“Of course,” she said.

“When?”

“Whenever I see a new Woody Allen movie,” Claire said.

“You’re very defensive,” Rosenblatt said. “I could tell you to relax more, to try and enjoy yourself. But the real issue is why you don’t have fun. I suspect that you simply won’t allow yourself. That’s why you like your work so much. I know what you do for a living. It’s constant torture.”

“Then why don’t you stop?” Claire said, shifting in her chair.

“Why don’t you stop?” Rosenblatt asked. “Because you have to punish yourself. Because everything has to be taken so seriously. Because it would be wrong for you to enjoy anything.”

Claire shrugged. So Rosenblatt was right, big deal. So what? Most people didn’t have fun. She didn’t need to have fun. She liked being miserable. That was her fun.

“I’m right,” Rosenblatt said.

“Perhaps.”

“The question is, What horrible thing did you do? What made you so guilty that you’re not allowed to have any pleasure? What crime did you commit?”

Claire didn’t answer.

“We’re out of time. Would you like to come back again next week?”

“I’m afraid I’m pretty much tied up for the next few weeks,” Claire said.

“You’re afraid, that’s right. How about on the twentieth?” Rosenblatt asked. And then, before Claire had a chance to answer, he added, “I was thinking it might be useful for you to bring your son in with you. I’d like to meet him. No big deal. One session.”

Claire didn’t say anything. As much as the problem was Jake, she didn’t want to involve him in all this stuff, not yet.

“It would be helpful,” Rosenblatt said.

“I’ll think about it.”

“I have some Saturday hours. Why don’t we make an appointment for then. That way, he won’t miss school and you won’t be working.”

Claire scribbled the time and date into her little black book and stood to leave.

“A homework assignment,” Rosenblatt said. “Before you come in again, do something fun.”

11

The session wasn’t going well. That happened sometimes. Jody wondered if there was a way to mathematically compute how often it went sour and why. Did men or women have more bad sessions? What were the demographics?

She was definitely coming down with something. When she swallowed, it felt like razor blades were shredding her throat — not a sensation that inspired her to be particularly chatty.

“You look tired,” Claire said.

Jody nodded. She’d been up half the night deciding to tell Michael that she’d only work part-time from now until she left for California. That way it would be easier to spend time with Claire. But there was something dangerous in her thinking, something that worried her. She remembered in eighth-grade gym class, during sex education, the teacher stood in front of them and talked about masturbation. “It’s not dangerous,” she said. “It’s not a bad thing, unless you start avoiding social activities in order to do it.” In other words, playing with yourself was a mini-perversion, a bad habit that, like having a drink before dinner, was basically all right as long as you kept it in check.

“Do you want to talk a little bit about your plans?”

“Not today,” Jody said. “I have a sore throat.”

She couldn’t believe she’d said that. Claire would think she was a hypochondriac. Oh, so you’re worried about going to L.A.? Well, have a sore throat, and if that’s not enough to stop you, what about chest pains or shortness of breath? Hey, I even have a little dizziness left from the last nut case, you want it?

“Do you have a fever?” Claire got up out of her chair and pressed her palm to Jody’s forehead. Jody tensed. Shrinks were not supposed to walk across the room and take their patients’ temperatures; they weren’t even supposed to believe in physical illness. According to almost any self-respecting shrinky-dink, even cancer was something you willed upon yourself.

“You look flushed‚” Claire said, moving her hand from Jody’s forehead to her cheek.

Jody hated it when people touched her. She hated it when near-strangers kissed her goodbye or hello, when her friends insisted she hug them. Everyone read her discomfort as a marker of immaturity, but in fact it was something more — a refusal to partake in false intimacy. She wished Claire would just keep her hands off her.

But Claire stood there for a minute or more with her hand on Jody’s face, looking worried.

“It’s fine,” Jody finally said.

“I think you’re coming down with something. Do you have a headache?” Claire went to her desk, rummaged around, and found some aspirin. “Here, I want you to take these,” she said, going out of the office into the bathroom and returning with a tiny cup of water. “Go on,” she said, and Jody was obligated to swallow the pills even though she really wanted to say “no thanks” and hand them back.

“Finish the water,” Claire said.

Jody swallowed the rest. “Do you believe in illness?” she asked.

“Do I believe in illness?” Claire asked. It was a standard shrink technique to repeat a question. Penny for your thoughts. Question for a question.

“Do you think people actually get sick as opposed to wanting to get sick or getting sick to avoid something?”

“Of course people get sick,” Claire said. “In fact, most people don’t admit they’re sick. Everyone used to say things were psychological in origin; but now, especially here in the city, between TB, AIDS, cancer, and who knows what, it’s pretty clear that we’re not all that crazy and repressed. There’s a lot of denial.”

“I was sick when I was a little kid,” Jody said. This was something she’d never discussed with anyone.

“What was wrong with you?” Claire asked.

Jody tapped the side of her head, “My ears,” she said. “I had surgery, even x-ray treatments. Any moment now I could get a brain tumor from all the radiation.” Jody smiled. “My earliest memories are medical.”

“What was the problem?”

“Don’t exactly know,” Jody said. “According to my mother, I was losing my hearing and they decided to shrink the tissues by x-raying them. See my teeth?” Jody rolled back her lip and flashed a row of gray teeth. “They didn’t know that if they give you tetracycline before your permanent teeth come in, they show up gray like this.” She flashed her teeth again. “It probably wouldn’t have been so bad if there hadn’t been another kid before me. According to Barbara, my parents got me to make them feel better after the kid died, and then I got sick and they freaked. It was too much. Nine years with one sick kid and then the new one turns out defective too.”

“Do you remember them being upset?”

“Not exactly. I remember other things; being taken to the hospital, lying on a metal table, a huge x-ray machine hanging over me. Through a little window in the door, I could see my parents’ faces on the other side. And all anyone said to me was, ‘Whatever you do, don’t move.’”

“What else?” Claire said.

“My grandparents visited, brought me a tiny stuffed dog I still have. Then my mom drove me home in our new car, and right when we pulled into the driveway, I threw up. My mother took me inside, gave me some apple juice, and then went back out to clean the car. I felt really guilty.”

“How old were you?”

“Three.”

“And you remember all that?”

“More,” Jody said.

“Go on.”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“It sounds incredibly frightening.”

“I wasn’t scared. When I think about it, I have the sensation of being frustrated, of people not listening. One time I had surgery on my ears, and my mother came into the operating room with me and held my feet while they gave me the gas. I was crying and saying I didn’t want it, because I remembered how bad it smelled and tasted from the last time, and all these guys were standing around with green masks on, and the ear doctor said, ‘It’s a new flavor, you’ll like it.’ And so I breathed the stuff and it was the same as always, and I was really, really mad, but there was nothing I could do. I passed out hating everybody.”

“Who were these people?” Claire asked, incredulous.

“My mother, the doctors. That’s how they did it then. They figured you could lie to a kid because kids don’t remember. Later I told my mother and she said no, that wasn’t true, it wasn’t like that. But it was. I’m not an idiot.”

“Are you angry now?”

Jody shrugged. “My teeth are puke gray; I could have a brain tumor at any moment. I’m not exactly pleased. I’d rather die than go to a doctor, but no, I’m not angry.”

“Why didn’t your parents protect you?”

Jody made a face at Claire. “They were right there, believing whatever the idiot doctors said because they didn’t know who else to believe. All they wanted was a healthy baby. They would’ve done anything if they thought it would make me better, bring back the other kid, or both.”

“If I were you I’d be furious.”

You’re not me, Jody thought, and how come you’re saying that? You’re never supposed to say how you’d react. This isn’t about you, this is about me. “What’s the point of being angry?” Jody said.

They sat in silence for a few minutes.

“It’s sad,” Claire said.

“Do I seem incredibly affected?” Then Jody quickly said, “Don’t answer. I don’t want to know.”

“I wonder about your parents.”

“Don’t,” Jody said.

“Don’t you think not only about the parents who adopted you but also the ones that gave you up?”

“The ones that gave me up weren’t parents. They were two people who probably didn’t know each other very well.”

Jody spent the last quarter of the session in silence. She’d always questioned whether getting sick as a child was a kind of failure to thrive. Was it from the stress of being without her natural mother, the anxiety of having the ghost of a dead kid hanging over her? Or was it completely unrelated, a genetic glitch, an unaffiliated infection? Still, even now, there was a weakness in her, and she could feel it lying dormant, waiting.

• • •

Night shooting. It sounded romantic — falling stars, midnight riverboat cruises. The idea of staying awake while the rest of the world slept was filled with possibilities. The crew started arriving between four and five in the afternoon at the edge of Central Park. They set up lights, dolly tracks, miles of electric cable, and the ever-present food table. According to union rules every location was required to have one ton of food, half hot, half cold, delivered at specifically timed intervals for the sustenance of cast and crew. The day before, the table had been heaped high with Twinkies, Hostess cupcakes, and fruit pies. “Someone’s birthday?” the cinematographer asked.

“Mine,” Harry said, popping a whole Twinkie into his mouth. With white filling squirting out of the corners of his thick lips, he turned to Jody. “Do you taste better than this?”

She stood there, dumbfounded.

Harry offered her the second Twinkie. “Want some?”

She shook her head, locking her jaw shut.

“It’s plump enough,” Harry had said, “but don’t you think it should be a little bigger?” He took a bite and threw the rest into the trash.

As the sky dropped down into darkness, Jody felt the rhythm of the city playing itself out around her; she also felt her throat hurting more and more. Early on, the passersby were people coming home from work. They stopped at the barricades for a few minutes but quickly grew tired of shifting from one aching foot to another. Kids on their way to nowhere hung out forever, always asking which movie this was. Guys who’d once done something on some other film stopped and wanted to know who was directing, who was on crew, and whether the production was hiring extra help. Later on, the after-dinner crowd, the theater crowd, the club crowd, ten thousand maniacs, prostitutes, two-bit muggers, and looney-toons paraded back and forth past the blue barricades marked POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS.

The shot they were going for was a chase that ended at the fountain with the Plaza looming in the background. Carol Heberton was going to fire five shots into a bad guy, who’d spring a thousand leaks, fall backwards into the fountain, and turn the clear water pink. The fountain was so well lit that it was positively glowing. Carriages passed in front of it, and special assistants hired for the evening followed behind the horses with brooms and large dustpans. On film this would all look incredibly romantic. The best of New York suddenly intruded upon by the worst — compare and contrast, seduce and shock.

Even though it was summer, the night got chilly. Jody sipped endless cups of tea, and when Harry pulled her toward him some time after midnight, she let him hold her under his armpit. His body was warm, almost hot. Under the lights Harry looked sort of cute. His thin, silvery hair was slicked back, his bifocals resting on top of his head, his linen suit wrinkled, his custom-made shirt unbuttoned, his gray chest hair poking out. The rumpled look wore well after dark. Jody watched Harry deftly leading the actors and technicians through the scene, making changes on the spot. Strange things could happen in the middle of the night. But as soon as the sun crossed the horizon and the sour smell of the warming city wafted up from the sidewalks, everything good disappeared as quickly as a dream.

At six-thirty in the morning, when they couldn’t hold the location anymore, when the cinematographer was so bleary-eyed he could barely guarantee focus, they called it quits.

“Share a cab with me,” Carol Heberton said, not willing to wait for her car and driver. Jody was trying to flag down anything that moved.

“Two stops,” she told the driver, sliding into the cab after the actress.

“The Carlyle,” Heberton said. She was the old-fashioned kind of movie star — elegant, graceful, otherworldly — the Carlyle made perfect sense. Jody couldn’t picture her with Harry at the Royalton — so hip that inside, instead of a front desk, there was just a telephone you had to pick up in order to find out anything, including your own room number.

Carol Heberton turned to her. “Who are you and what do you do?”

“I work for Michael Miller.”

“Aah, you’re the one.”

The one what? Jody wanted to ask.

“Don’t mind Harry. He’s impressed by women who say no — it fascinates him.” Heberton looked at Jody carefully. “You remind me of myself when I was young, but at my age I guess everyone does.” Heberton took a long, sad movie-star breath. Jody noticed the driver staring into the rearview mirror.

“This movie gives me nightmares,” Heberton said. “It’s so frightening. I’ve never played a working-class person before. Maybe I should have my face done again. What do you think?” Again she looked at Jody. She put her bony-beyond-belief hand on Jody’s knee and squeezed it hard. “I’ve been approached to do a commercial. Laundry detergent. I haven’t done my own laundry since I was nineteen.”

The cab pulled up in front of the Carlyle and a uniformed doorman hurried over. Heberton fumbled through her jacket pocket for money.

“I’ve got it,” Jody said.

“You’re a pal. Would you like to come in for breakfast?” And before Jody could answer, Heberton climbed out. “No, I guess not. You’re young, you have a life.” The doorman took her by the elbow and led her toward the hotel.

“Where to?” the driver asked.

Jody checked her pockets. All she had was a ten and some tokens. Two paychecks were waiting at the office, but she’d been too busy to put in a personal appearance. “Broadway and Forty-fourth,” she said.

When she arrived, she flicked on the fluorescents, stuffed the checks into her back pocket, and sat at Michael’s desk, looking out over New York. Then she picked up Michael’s Lego phone and dialed home.

“Hi, Ma, it’s me.”

“Is something wrong?” her mother asked. “It’s seven-forty-five in the morning.”

“I know. I just had a minute and thought I’d say hi.”

“I called you last night, you weren’t home.”

“We worked all night. I’m at the office now.”

“You were out on the streets all night? I don’t like that. That’s not a good idea.”

“It’s fine. There were plenty of people around. I rode home with Carol Heberton.”

“Oh, I like her. She used to make such nice films.”

Jody heard the office door opening. “Hello?” a man’s voice called. “Who’s in here?”

“Got to go,” Jody said. “Talk to you later.”

“Call me tonight,” her mother said.

Jody hung up and stepped out into the hall. Raymond — one of Michael’s protégés — was standing there, brandishing a thick wooden coat hanger.

“It’s all I could find,” he said sheepishly, throwing the hanger into a closet. “Why are you here so early? You look terrible. Did something happen?”

Jody realized she hadn’t seen herself in twenty-four hours, hadn’t brushed her hair or washed her face or changed her clothing. She probably smelled. And now her ear was hurting too.

“Night shoot,” Jody said, her voice cracking, the sore throat finally breaking into something real.

Raymond nodded.

“I rode back with Carol Heberton.”

He nodded again. “Be careful,” he said.

“Why?”

“She competes with Harry for all the sweet young things.”

“Really?” Jody asked.

“‘Really?’” Raymond said, mocking her. “Please. Let’s try and live in the real world, shall we?”

12

The first time Claire thought Jody might be her daughter, she threw up. She had the thought and instantly her stomach rose to her throat and she ran for the bathroom.

“Are you all right?” Sam asked. “Do you need help?”

“No,” Claire said, grateful to be alone. She sat on the edge of the tub, afraid to move.

Jody reminded her of herself, but that didn’t necessarily mean they were related. They’d both grown up in and around Washington, which could explain certain sensibilities and ways of speaking. The resemblance was cultural, Claire told herself, not familial. Clearly, her own upbringing had been radically different from Jody’s. The similarity was their shared determination to overcome a family, an accident, to somehow make a life even though the essential ingredients seemed to be missing. The problem Jody posed was a countertransference complicated by the mutual adoption experience and Claire’s temptation to mother. It was not to be taken literally.

A couple of weeks later, after Jody had mentioned her curiosity about her biological father, Claire dreamt about Mark Ein. They were back in college, at the English department, Mark sitting at his desk and Claire, too frightened to sit, standing at the door. She was very pregnant.

“I want you to give me the child,” Mark said. “You’re completely incompetent. Give her to me and when she’s grown I’ll have her call you.”

He looked the same as when Claire had first met him: intense, his hair and clothing thrown off balance by his energy. Seeing him again after twenty-four years, she found the familiarity of his features comforting, until she placed Jody beside him. They were identical; the same clear eyes, wavy hair, sweet lips, the same urgent nature that compelled Claire to offer herself up as if she could save them. And in the dream, when Jody appeared next to Mark, Claire could swear that his face changed to accommodate her, to become her. Hysterical, Claire began flailing at Mark, and Jody disappeared. Claire him him again and again as hard as she could on his chest, his head, his face. His nose started to bleed but he did nothing, offered no resistance. Blood dripped down onto the desk. Finally, still screaming, still waving her fists, she ran out into the hall. Her mother and father were there, waiting to take her away.

The bedroom was dark. Next to her Sam snored steadily. Using the top sheet, she wiped sweat from her neck and chest. She curled against Sam and tried to put together what she remembered. Bits and pieces, fragments, not enough. It was never enough. She wanted to make sure Jody wasn’t her daughter; simultaneously, she wanted Jody to be her daughter. Sam shifted in his sleep, rolling away from her, and Claire got up to make herself a cup of tea.

In the kitchen at three in the morning, she decided that Barbara knew Jody was her child. Barbara had conducted a search when Jody was her patient. She’d done it because she was curious, and because she had to stay home half-days, pregnant with her complicated first child. She had time on her hands and, on the verge of motherhood herself, was obsessed by the psychological arid genetic nature of things. She did it because she thought it would help her help Jody. All the people who’d held back on Jody, who’d refused to give her information, offered it freely and willingly to Barbara. After all, she was a professional. She knew best. And ultimately, giving away the goods relieved the guilt associated with having kept a secret for so long — a secret that didn’t belong to them in the first place. First thing in the morning, Claire would call Barbara. She watched her tea whirling around in the microwave. She looked out the kitchen window at the dark building across the way.

She wouldn’t call Barbara in the morning, or ever. If she was wrong, if she was making this whole thing up, Barbara would think she’d gone over the edge. Not quite sure what to do, she’d call Sam at the office. Together they’d decide that Barbara should call Jody and tell her to get out while there was still time. She’d refer Jody to someone else. If Barbara found out, she’d take Jody away. She’d ruin everything.

J-O-D-Y. Claire wrote her name across a legal pad in the good script she used for important letters to her children’s teachers, to patients who’d moved many miles away, to sign Chanukah and Easter cards. J-O-D-Y R-O-T-H. J-O-D-Y S-T-E-V-E-N-S — Claire’s maiden name. J-O-D-Y E-I-N. What the hell was her name? Jody Goodman. She wrote it over and over a million times, in every possible combination.

“I’m so bored,” Naomi said when she called Claire at seven-thirty. “You’re sleeping? I’ve been up since six. I can’t take it anymore. Can we do something today — just for us? Go to Soho for lunch, walk around, spend money?”

“Patients all day,” Claire said. “Maybe next week I can juggle the schedule.”

“So busy,” Naomi said. “Are you sure you’re not having an affair?”

“Just busy,” she said.

Claire wished she could talk to Naomi about Jody. She wanted someone to know, but the one time she had tried to tell her, it hadn’t gone over well. “You act like you’re in love,” Naomi said. “The way you talk about her, you get all jazzed up.” Claire shrugged and said, “Well, she’s interesting,” and then dropped the subject permanently.

At nine-forty-five Claire buzzed Polly in. In the taxi as they left the clinic, Polly had told Claire she was going home for a while and wouldn’t make the next few appointments. Claire wasn’t sure she believed her. Maybe mixing Claire with the abortion experience had been too much. Maybe just the sight of a shrink out of context made the world too confusing; maybe that’s why shrinks saw people in offices. But it had seemed like the right thing to do.

“How’re you feeling?” Claire asked.

For once Polly wasn’t crying. She wasn’t carrying her own personal box of Kleenex. Some days she’d start up in the waiting room. Now there was nothing on her face except a vaguely blank look. Worried, Claire half-wished for tears and considered what their absence meant. Resignation, strange surrender, or perhaps even progress? “Was it good to go home for a while?” Claire asked.

Polly didn’t answer, and they sat quietly for a few minutes. Claire decided that calling attention to the crying or lack thereof would be too aggressive. Sometimes you had to let things play out. If she mentioned noticing a difference, the temptation to regress would get stronger.

“Is there something special you’d like to talk about?”

Polly didn’t speak. They sat in silence for the full session, something Claire found difficult but had trained herself to do. The real trick was figuring out what she should do with herself. She’d learned to relax in her chair, to look comfortable and communicative while daydreaming behind an expression of sincerity.

At the end of the hour, Claire said softly, “Should we make an appointment for next week?”

Polly nodded. At least she didn’t say “No,” or “I’ll be dead by next week.” Claire hated it when patients did that, especially at the end of the session. She’d have five minutes or less to sweet-talk them into living a week longer, all the time sweating the details: How serious were they, what was the likelihood, and would it be her fault?

“Tuesday at two,” Claire said.

Polly nodded, then got up and left.

Jody was coming just as Polly walked out and had to turn sideways to avoid a collision.

“What’d you do, steal her Hershey bar?” Jody asked Claire once the door was closed.

Claire smiled but didn’t answer. She wasn’t allowed to.

Jody walked into the office and sat down. “What’s up?”

Claire raised her eyebrows.

“Did you have a good weekend? Do you want to talk about it?” Jody asked.

Claire didn’t say anything. The fastest way to get Jody to change the subject was to ignore her.

“Okay. Let’s talk about the multitude of ways a person can get to California,” Jody said. “There’s two roads, it’s your basic low-road, highroad deal. You can take the bus, like my father did forty years ago. It still takes a week. Or is it a month? There’s a train that goes straight from New York to Chicago, but then you have to switch, and keep on switching the whole rest of the way across, even out in the desert, where they have poisonous train-switching desert snakes.” She paused, as if waiting for a laugh track. “Or you can take my mother’s car. She’s getting a new one. We’re driving out together. It’s kind of a mother-daughter thing. She even wants my father to go, but I said no way. Not because I don’t like him, but realistically, all three of us in the car for five days, it could get ugly. My dad offered to do it himself. To drop me off in L.A. But I really need my mom. Is that terrible? Okay, I’m admitting it. I need my mother. If I get to a new place without her, I freak. I don’t know what to do — how to unpack or arrange the closets. I have zero nesting instinct.”

Claire still didn’t say anything. Polly’s silence had rubbed off on her.

“I’m leaving in about a month.”

“I’ll miss you,” Claire said, staring at Jody, thinking about the dream, trying to remember what Mark really looked like, how he carried himself.

“Yeah, well …” Jody said. “Anyway, don’t you think I should start getting ready, if only conceptually?”

“Soon,” Claire said, and then was quiet for a minute. “I’ve been thinking about your being adopted.”

“That’s really nice of you,” Jody said. “I’ve been slacking off myself.”

Claire felt guilty. She was doing this for herself. It had nothing to do with Jody, and it was bad practice. “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” she said, giving Jody an out.

“I can talk about it,” Jody said.

Claire pretended to be unaware of the fact that Jody would do whatever Claire wanted her to. “When is your birthday?”

“Why?” Jody asked. “Do you want to buy me a present? I don’t have a CD player or a Cuisinart.”

“Do you know what hospital you were born at?” Claire asked matter-of-factly, looking at the sky outside her windows.

“It went out of business.”

“I’m trying to have a serious conversation,” Claire said, annoyed, focusing in.

“Sorry, but it’s true. It went bankrupt or corrupt or something and closed. A little depressing, isn’t it? My one connection to my real mother goes out of business.”

“What was it called?”

“I don’t know,” Jody said, looking puzzled. “My elementary school also closed. They turned it into an office building. Do you think this means something?”

“If you know that it closed, you must have known what it was called.”

Jody looked at her. “I did know,” she said. “But I’ve forgotten. Doctors, maybe. Is that the name of a hospital? Or is it a TV show? Why do you care, anyway — are you, like, a hospital groupie?”

Claire remembered a Doctors Hospital in Washington, somewhere downtown. But she’d given birth at Columbia Hospital for Women.

“Would you want to know who your mother was?” Claire asked a few minutes later.

Contemplating the Rothko print on the wall, Jody shrugged. “If someone was passing out pictures, saying ‘This is your mother,’ I’d look. I’d be curious. If someone came right up to me and said ‘Your mother’s name is whatever and she lives wherever and here’s her phone number,’ I’d listen, I’d take the information, but I don’t know what I’d do with it. It might mess me up.”

“How?”

“First off, I have a mother and a father already. That’s good enough, isn’t it? I mean, it should be, shouldn’t it? Second, it would grate on me and in a moment of weakness, a moment of wanting something, I might call and get rejected. She gave me away, remember? Chances are, she doesn’t want anything to do with me. I’m like a bad memory.”

“Do you ever think she might be out there looking for you?”

“No,” Jody said sharply. “Why would you say that?”

“I was just curious whether you’d ever thought about it from her side.”

“Why should I?”

Claire didn’t respond. “So, you’d never do a search or anything like that?”

“Only if I was sure it didn’t matter, if I was positive everything would stay the same no matter what. I’d have to go into it not wanting anything, not expecting anything. By the time you’re at that point, why bother?”

“Obviously you’ve given it some thought.”

“I’m not an idiot,” Jody said.

“Hardly,” Claire added, and again they were quiet for a moment. “Let’s talk about California.”

“Finally,” Jody said.

13

Peter Sears and Jody were naked in Jody’s bed when her mother called at eleven. The lights were off at Jody’s request — she didn’t know Peter well enough to be both nude and illuminated. It took her a minute to find the phone in the dark.

“Hi, Mom,” she said.

“Were you sleeping?”

“No.”

“You sound sleepy.”

Without warning, Peter’s hand was between her legs.

Jody cleared her throat. “I’m awake. How was your day?” She made a mental note to either bleach or shave the hair on the upper part of her thighs before their next date.

“Do you have company?” her mother asked.

“Company? No,” Jody said. Peter slapped her butt and it made a sharp smacking sound. “I was just watching TV.” He put his tongue to her breast.

“I thought I heard something in the background.”

“A book fell off my bed.”

“It’s good you’re reading, sweetie. Did you have a good day?”

“It was fine.” Jody felt guilty. Peter’s presence was a strange but necessary betrayal of Jody’s relationship with her mother. As much as her mother nagged her about never having a boyfriend, she never acknowledged the possibility of Jody having a sex life.

“I’m so tired,” her mother said. “I pulled a muscle in my back and had to take two Advil and now I can hardly keep my eyes open. Can we talk tomorrow?”

“Yeah, sure, Mom. Go to bed.”

“Everything’s all right?”

“Fine,” Jody said. “Sweet dreams.” Peter took the receiver from her and hung up the phone. “She calls me every night at eleven,” Jody said, getting out of bed. Peter grabbed her and pulled her back down on top of him. “I don’t think so,” Jody said.

“I’m not done.” He pressed his tongue against her breast, his cock against her crotch.

Sleeping with Peter was an experiment. Jody wanted to see if she could have sex with someone she didn’t care about. It was easier than she expected, but boring. She wished he’d leave. She was also angry with herself for having given in on the condom thing. Jody constantly lectured Ellen and everyone else, but when it came down to it, she’d crumbled and was furious with herself.

“No,” Peter had said, not even willing to discuss it.

“Yes,” Jody said.

“No,” he said, and pushed his naked self into her.

Instantly, Jody felt like it was too late. The moment of contact transmitted poison like an electric shock, and she just lay there, paralyzed, as if she’d been fatally stung.

Men are so fucking annoying, she thought, daydreaming as he pumped away on top of her. This wasn’t fun, definitely not fun, but there seemed to be no way out — like a loop-de-loop, upside-down, inside-out roller coaster bringing you to the edge of vomit and death. Jody forced herself to simply hang on, finding relief in the idea that eventually it would be over. Meanwhile she wondered if maybe it was her; maybe there was something about her that made good sex impossible. To some degree it had always been a problem, but this was pathetic.

He pulled out before he came, grabbed her palm, spit on it, and put her wet hand on his dick. It was gross; spit on her hand, his dick slimy from being inside her. She flicked her hand and wrist up and down in a matter-of-fact motion as if shaking down a thermometer. Peter stuck his fingers inside her. Men always did that, shoved as many fingers as they could organize deep inside and then wiggled them around as if trying to find the prize in a blind treasure hunt. She’d had examinations that were more fun. With her empty hand, she pulled on his wrist and shook her head, no way. It took him a minute to catch on.

At four in the morning, Jody was still awake, trapped under Peter’s arm. She looked down at his penis, sleeping nicely, quietly on his thigh. It looked good there, healthy and relaxed. She’d seen some frightening ones — thick, stumpy things, or miniaturized pencil dicks — but this one was nice. She liked it better than its owner. Jody carefully lifted Peter’s arm and crawled out of the bed. She felt crusty, disgusting. In the bathroom as she washed, she tried to decide if it would be worse to be pregnant or have AIDS.

14

Claire promised Jake that if he went with her to Bob Rosenblatt’s office she’d spend the whole afternoon with him. He wasn’t impressed. Well past the point where spending an afternoon with his mother was a great pleasure, he was into being left alone, lying on his bed with the shades pulled down.

“When you spend an afternoon with me,” Claire asked, “doesn’t something good happen?”

“Yeah, you feel guilty and buy me ice cream or french fries. I can buy my own french fries.”

“Isn’t there anything you’d really like to do?”

He shook his head.

“Well, I’d really like you to come to see Bob Rosenblatt with me.”

“Why?”

“Because I think it would be good for us.”

“You think I need a shrink. You’re a shrink, so why don’t you just go ahead and do it to me?”

Claire didn’t say anything.

“Okay, fine, I’ll go, but then I get to pick out something I want and you have to buy it for me.”

Claire still didn’t say anything.

“Those are my conditions.”

“Put your shoes on,” Claire said.

Jake jumped down from his loft onto Adam’s bed, sending toys flying like shrapnel.

“Be careful,” Claire said.

• • •

Rosenblatt kept them in the waiting room for ten minutes and twenty-three seconds. Claire watched the clock on the wall, sure there was no one in his office. It was a trick, Rosenblatt’s way of asserting his authority over her: I’m the doctor and you’re the patient.

“I’ve never been in a shrink’s office before, except my mom’s,” Jake said, shaking Bob Rosenblatt’s hand.

“Well, this is it,” Rosenblatt said, gesturing toward the Philip Pearlstein painting on the wall and the Oriental carpet on the floor, as if to demonstrate his superiority. “Take any seat you like.”

Jake sat in the Eames chair that was clearly Rosenblatt’s usual seat and Claire felt proud of him. Rosenblatt made a face. Instead of saying something, he stuffed his large body into the smaller, more subservient chair across from Jake. Claire sat alone, pressed against the arm of the sofa.

“Your mother is worried about you,” Rosenblatt said.

Immediately Claire was pissed. You don’t start off pitting family members against each other. Jake wasn’t a junkie they were trying to get into a treatment program. He was a bored eleven-year-old.

“Is there something she should be worried about?”

Jake shook his head.

“Is there anything in particular you’d like to talk about?”

Jake shook his head again. He was losing his baby shape, the sweetness in his face changing into something more angular, less familiar, mannish.

“You’re in what grade?”

“Sixth,” Jake said. “And if you’re going to ask me if I like school, the answer is it’s okay. I mean, I like the kids and everything.”

“Do you have a lot of friends?”

“I guess.”

“Any one in particular?”

Jake shrugged.

Rosenblatt was driving Jake further into himself. What a fucking idiot, Claire thought. She tried to think of a way to interrupt, to get things back on track.

“Is there anything special you like to do with your friends?”

Jake shrugged again.

“Jake’s on the baseball team, and the soccer team, and he plays the trumpet,” Claire said.

Both Jake and Rosenblatt gave her hard looks, then ignored her.

“Do you like sports?” Rosenblatt asked.

“I guess.”

“Any one in particular?”

It went on like that for half an hour. In monosyllabic statements, Rosenblatt found out that Jake liked to eat in restaurants and go to movies, liked girls but didn’t have a girlfriend yet, blushed easily, thought his father was okay, wished his family was bigger, hoped one day he’d get his own room, and still wanted a drum set for his birthday even though his parents said it wasn’t a possibility.

Every so often Rosenblatt would bring her into the conversation in the worst way. “Is it true Jake sometimes says he has a stomachache when really there’s nothing wrong? Did you really throw out the copy of Playboy that he borrowed from a friend’s brother?” So she sat in her corner, distant, excluded, staring at the slice of the Chrysler Building visible from Rosenblatt’s window. Briefly she considered whether she should have asked Sam to come with them. But there was something about the nature of the problem that made Claire think it was strictly between her and Jake, a mother/son thing.

Claire pictured her own family in therapy. Her father would’ve sat on a chair as far away from the rest of them as possible, both feet planted on the floor, arms crossed over his belly, face unpleasant, chin doubled onto his chest. Her mother would be in the middle, her attention split between husband, daughters, doctor. Her sister would be in a swivel chair, spinning in circles, touching everything on the doctor’s desk, and no one would tell her to stop. There would be no chair for Claire; she would be forced to stand in the middle of the room. “See,” her father would say, “she’s always doing something to get attention. Everyone else is sitting down and she insists on standing up.”

In Rosenblatt’s office, Claire all of a sudden remembered that her sister always had earaches. When they went swimming, Laura had to put special plugs in her ears and wear a bathing cap and still try to keep her head above water. She swam laps with her neck stretched out, like a rare bird, the bright orange and yellow flowers on their mother’s hand-me-down rubber cap flapping in the breeze. Claire thought of Jody’s ears, thought of Jody’s tetracycline-stained teeth and tried to picture her sister’s mouth, but saw nothing except Laura’s head with the bathing cap on it and the thick red line running like a vein across her forehead that stayed for hours after she took the cap off.

That was it. On Rosenblatt’s lousy black leather sofa, while her son and this pompous ass transferred and countertransferred all their boy/man business, it all began to make sense. She’d figured it out. Laura had accidentally met Barbara at a conference — probably something like “Adolescent Willfulness” or “Finding Meaning in Your Marriage.” From across the room Barbara had seen someone she thought was Claire — the two sisters looked a lot alike — and ran over, calling Claire’s name. Laura smiled, said she had a sister by that name, and everything came out — Barbara’s discovery that she had a patient who was Claire’s actual daughter. Barbara and Laura skipped their afternoon panels and over coffee came up with the plan to send Jody to Claire. I am your child, back from darkest Peru. Barbara and Laura thought they’d done a remarkable thing. They got together, swapped details about Jody and Claire, and wondered if Claire had figured it out. They laughed. They became best friends. The two families rented a beach house together and had cookouts. Barbara, Laura, and their husbands sat in lounge chairs in the backyard while their children stood around a Weber grill toasting marshmallows. It was perfectly logical. Barbara and Laura would love each other. Long ago, Barbara had married someone who worked for the government — some sort of analyst or spy — and had moved from Baltimore to Washington. She’d grown up, stopped burning holes in other people’s sweaters, quit smoking, started drinking wine, embraced security, rules, and regulations, the conservative style of Washington society. She’d become a hard-core do-righter, in the sense of embracing the system, becoming the system, and believing in it. She would think Laura was great — exactly as Claire had seemed but not as depressed, not as quirky or weird. Claire hated them both.

“How would you feel about coming to see me once a week? Not with your mother, but by yourself?”

Claire was whipped through time back into the room, slightly dazed. What happened? What had she missed?

Jake shrugged.

“Is that something you’d be able to do?”

“I guess,” Jake said.

Claire was furious. Claire and Rosenblatt hadn’t discussed the possibility of Jake going into individual therapy, and to ask Jake about it before checking with Claire and Sam took a lot of nerve. After all, they’d have to pay for it. Rosenblatt was playing dirty, using Jake to manipulate Claire.

“How would you feel about Jake coming here?” Rosenblatt asked her.

Claire glared at him. “I’ll have to discuss it with Sam. We’ll call you.”

If Jake were left alone with Rosenblatt, together they would perform strange male rituals that worked like magnetic polar curses and drove the mother figure farther and farther away, until finally Jake would live in Maine and Claire in Florida.

“Why don’t we go ahead and make a time,” Rosenblatt said. “When do you get out of school on Wednesdays?”

“Let’s wait,” Claire said.

It was her obligation to protect what she perceived to be the best interests of her child. And if he needed to be in therapy, it would certainly be with someone else.

“I’m done at three,” Jake said, looking at his mother.

“I think you have an orthodontist appointment Wednesday,” Claire said, standing up. “We’ll have to check the book at home and call you.” Claire waited for Jake to get up and then marched out of the office.

“What a fucking asshole,” she said in the elevator.

“Mom,” Jake whined.

“Did you see what he did? Did you see how he tried to use me? He tried to use the process to get what he wanted? What a creep.”

“I didn’t think he did anything all that bad.”

Claire didn’t answer. Jake was eleven years old, he never thought anything anyone did was all that bad; that was part of the problem. She patted his head. “Do you think you need to talk to someone?”

Jake shrugged.

“You always have your father and me, and if you feel like you need someone else, let me know and we’ll find you someone, someone good.”

They walked a few blocks in the cool air, among the Saturday crowds. Claire walked quickly, hoping she wouldn’t go marching back to Rosenblatt’s office and give him a piece of her mind. She’d given him too much already.

“I kind of liked him,” Jake said after a while.

Claire shrugged. “There are plenty of other people you’d like even better. So, where would you like to go?”

“You don’t have to spend the whole afternoon with me,” Jake said. “Why don’t you just give me twenty dollars and drop me off at Matt’s house?”

Claire shook her head. “I want to spend the afternoon with you. How about a museum? We haven’t been to a museum in a long time.”

“Aren’t I a little old for that?” Jake said.

“No.” Claire almost laughed. “Which one do you like best?”

“I guess the Modern is more grown-up than Natural History,” Jake said.

They took the bus up Sixth Avenue to Fifty-third Street. Before looking at anything, they ate. Eating always made Jake happy. He had a sandwich, Jell-O salad, Coke, chocolate cake, and frozen yogurt. Claire had cottage cheese and black coffee. They both finished feeling virtuous. Now there was no way they could be in bad moods.

In his adolescent way—“cool”—Jake expressed interest in Picasso and Pollock, but what really got him going was the helicopter hanging from the ceiling on the third floor and the red sports car parked next to it. “Unbelievable,” he said, circling both exhibits.

They ended up in the gift shop. “Buy me this,” Jake said, immediately picking out a bright multicolored truck intended for someone much younger.

“Look around a little,” Claire said.

He pretended to and came back with the same toy. “I want this.” It was something she knew Adam would be happy with. Jake would have fun putting it together, but he’d never play with it. She took the box from him and turned it over. Forty dollars. If she bought it for Jake, as soon as Adam saw it there’d be a fight.

Claire picked up another box, an airplane for thirty-five dollars. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll get you the truck, and the plane for Adam.”

“It’s supposed to be my special day,” Jake said. “I’m supposed to get a present — just me, not him too.”

“I have two children. I can’t buy one a present and not the other.”

“Why not?”

“Because.”

“Then you have to get me something better.”

“What about a book?”

“Oh, that’s real exciting.” Jake went carefully around the store and ended up pointing out an interesting collection of painted wooden pieces that could be put together to create creatures or abstract designs. It was much more age-appropriate than the truck.

“Do you really want it?” Claire asked. It was a great toy, something she might even tinker with herself but unlike anything Jake had ever asked for.

“It’s called Zollo,” he said.

Claire bent down and looked a the price in the case. “It’s a hundred and ten dollars.”

Jake got serious. “It’s very cool. Buy it for me. Please.”

Claire didn’t want to ruin the good time they were having. Good times were fragile these days. One wrong move and Jake could lapse into a week-long sulk that would put the whole house in a foul mood. Thirty-five for the plane, a hundred and ten for the painted wood.

“Will it make you happy?”

“Definitely,” Jake said.

She handed the cashier her credit card. In the end it was cheaper than therapy.

15

Harry took Jody on one arm and Carol Heberton on the other and walked the two of them off the location at the Forty-second Street library. They’d spent the morning getting the scene just right — Carol researching psycho killers while, unbeknownst to her, the one stalking her was watching. Leading the two women up the street like they were blind old ladies, Harry pressed close to Jody’s ear. “I would’ve invited you to have dinner alone with me,” he whispered, “but I knew you’d decline.”

Jody could feel the thick flesh of Harry’s lips tickling her lobe.

He held open the door to Aux Trois Mousquetaires on Forty-fifth Street, and Jody quickly ducked into the restaurant after Heberton.

“I hope you’re happy,” Harry said.

She was — very. Lunches like this with producers, famous directors, and movie stars, drawing stares and whispers from across a room — that was part of what she’d come to New York looking for.

“It’s your going-away party,” Michael, her boss, said, kissing her cheek. “Hello and goodbye.”

Jody wanted to rub the side of her face, to ask the waiter for a special cloth and a glass of bottled water to resterilize the spot.

Despite what everyone was saying, she knew the lunch wasn’t really for her. Jody’s impending departure was an excuse to take everyone out for a morale booster: martinis and snails.

“It’s only the beginning,” Harry said, after the waiter took their drink order. “There’ll be more.”

“You look like you’re about to cry,” Raymond said to Jody. “Interesting, tears and snot — but not really the stuff of a good meal, would you say?”

Jody blinked and took a deep breath. She wouldn’t cry.

“Don’t worry,” Carol Heberton said. “In L.A. everyone has lunch, sometimes two and three times a day.”

“Let’s paint the child a mural,” Harry said, passing around the cup of crayons that sat next to the sugar bowl. Everyone took one and dutifully started scrawling on the white butcher paper laid over the tablecloth.

Two women came up to Carol, and before they even finished asking “Are you …?” Carol had taken pen and paper and signed her name in huge, nearly floral script.

Harry looked up from his escargot and smacked his buttery lips. “Only the true cognoscenti know directors.”

“P.S.” Michael said to Jody. “Could you stop by the office this afternoon and do whatever it is you do to the Xerox? It’s not working again and I have some scripts to send out.”

“Take a lesson,” Jody said.

“Well, before you go anywhere, I want you to teach your replacement how to do it.”

“Replacement?” Jody said. “You mean you’re not having my chair bronzed?”

The main courses arrived on huge heated plates, and for a few moments of almost prayerful silence they all focused on what was before them, going at it with knives and forks, oohs and ahs. When they’d satisfied their most immediate needs, the remains were passed in a circle so everyone could taste. Lunch ended with espresso all around and a full course of desserts — fruit tarts, crème brulée, and a serving of profiteroles that arrived in front of Jody in a pool of chocolate sauce, a flaming sparkler in the middle. Jody expected that at any minute a long line of waiters would pull up to the table and start singing “Happy Birthday,” “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” or something like that. Fortunately, no one came.

Harry looked down at Jody’s profiteroles and poked at them tentatively with his knife. “Probably not unlike what’s mounted on your chest, in both size and density.”

Jody carefully pulled out the flaming sparkler, then turned to Harry. “If those are mine, this must be yours.”

Harry smiled, took the sparkler, and dunked it upside down in his wineglass. “Touché,” he said, holding up the still-sputtering stick of metal.

“God, this is a good time,” Carol Heberton said. “It’s been so long since I’ve had such fun.”

After they finished eating and Michael had handed over his platinum card — the one he called his “plutonium card”—Harry insisted they wait while the busboys cleared the table and the crayons were passed again and everyone finished the drawing, making bright waxy circles and nasty comments about the spots of wine and food that had stained the surface. Harry directed them all to sign their work, rolled the mural up like a diploma, and presented it to Jody.

“Go forward,” he said, holding the restaurant door open.

Jody stepped out into the humid afternoon and immediately felt sick, overwhelmed, and in need of a nap.

“Back to the trenches,” Michael said.

Harry belched, rubbed his belly, and belched again. “A lovely lunch, Michael. Thank you. I shan’t forget it.”

“Don’t forget about the Xerox,” Michael said to Jody.

“Thanks,” Jody said, and they all walked back downtown toward the two huge granite lions that marked the spot where the movie would end.

At eleven-thirty that night, Peter Sears called Jody from the pay phone on the corner of Charles and Bleecker. “I have to come up,” he said. “It’s an emergency.”

Jody wasn’t pleased. She’d just come in the door, numb and dumb from the narcotic combination of too much work, too much lunch, too many drinks before dusk, and the prospect of giving up the life she’d always wanted for something completely unknown. She was also in the middle of doing laundry for the first time in almost a month, and she looked like shit.

“What’s wrong?” she said, opening the door.

“Hi,” Peter said, kissing her.

Jody didn’t kiss back. There were some people she simply wasn’t interested in kissing, and Peter was quickly becoming one of them. He kissed too urgently. His tongue ashed wildly in her mouth, as if he’d lost a family heirloom among her molars. Behind every kiss was his full weight, thrown against her with equal passion.

He ignored the fact that she didn’t kiss back, lifted her shirt, and started kissing her stomach.

The farther away his face is, Jody thought, the happier I am. “So what’s the problem?”

His tongue was in her belly button and it was starting to hurt. She imagined that when he finally pulled away, her intestines would rise up and out in a long curly line like a charmed snake.

“This is the problem,” Peter said, stepping back, unzipping his pants and letting his hard-on pop out.

“I don’t get it,” Jody said, unimpressed.

“It’s been like this all day. It’s not healthy, you know. I mean, there’s a condition you can get from this.”

“I’m sure you’ve dealt with similar phenomena before,” Jody said, sitting down on her sofa.

“Touch it,” Peter said.

“Touch it yourself,” Jody said.

He shook his head and stepped towards her.

“Do I have to?” she asked.

“I brought it here for you,” Peter said.

“If I do this, you have to leave right away. I can’t spend the whole night with you. I have a life.”

“Fine,” Peter said, positioning himself in front of her.

She had the urge to take him in her mouth. As penises went, his was very nice. More than anything she wanted to suck it, but didn’t feel that Peter deserved such luck. He held her hand, spit on it, then put her hand down on his dick. She couldn’t believe he was spitting on her again; no one had ever done that before. He kept putting his hand on top of hers, showing her what to do, and it was incredibly boring. Jody figured if he wanted it a certain way, he should do it himself.

“Come on — let’s go in your room,” Peter said in the thick, mass-murderer tone men sink into when they’re too excited for their own good.

Jody went only because she had nothing better to do. The stuff in the dryer wouldn’t be done for another half an hour; the couch was completely uncomfortable. The quicker she got it over with, the sooner Peter would leave, and maybe, just maybe, there might be something in it for her.

Before lying down, Peter took off all his clothing and neatly draped everything, even his socks, over the chair.

Still clothed, she lay on her bed. What was she supposed to do — undress like at a doctor’s office? If so, where was her gown? At least if she got to put on one of those blue paper gowns, there’d be some excitement, some possibility. The thin plastic belt could be used to tie her up; the gown could be open in the front or the back — something, anything.

Naked, Peter sat on Jody, straddling her hips. He pushed up her shirt so her breasts and belly were exposed. Trapped beneath him, pelvis semi-crushed, lungs in jeopardy, Jody could do little more than raise her hand and put it on him again. She did it violently, feeling a little guilty for subjecting such a nice penis to such a brutal beating, but realizing that in the end Peter himself would surely be punished more than his dick. Almost immediately he started making noises she found annoying. She always found it annoying when people made noises. Enjoy, but don’t fucking vocalize. Moaning was what people in movies did when they were crushed between two cars. Without warning, he came onto Jody’s chest, onto her stomach and breasts. Shock kept her from saying anything.

“I came on you,” Peter said, sitting up straight.

Jody tilted her head as far down as she could, trying to look, not caring that it made her chin double or triple. Peter touched the come, rubbing it around over her breasts. Jody leaned back and closed her eyes, thinking that in situations like these the best thing to do is not to respond.

As soon as Peter left, Jody took a fast, scalding shower. Hot-pink and wrapped in her bathrobe, she took the elevator down to the laundry room. It was not exactly a smart move — the kind of thing an idiot would do in a movie and then end up raped, strangled, and stuffed into a dryer set on high. Still, Jody was tough, she was brave, she was bold, she took a huge kitchen knife with her. A stranger had taken her clothing out of the dryer and folded it into two neat stacks, taking care to pair the socks.

While she was collecting her things, Ellen came in with Rob. Jody figured they were planning to fuck on the folding table as part of Ellen’s plan to do it at least once in every possible location and position.

“What happened to you?” Ellen asked, touching the bright pink skin on Jody’s neck. “Overtime on a tanning bed?”

Jody shook her head. Telling Ellen about Peter would ruin her chaste image, and Ellen would never let it go. Besides, Jody was somewhat surprised at herself for doing it in the first place.

Rob glared at Jody. A long time ago, Jody had answered Ellen’s phone at two o’clock in the morning, and ever since Rob thought Jody and Ellen were having an affair behind his back. Jody couldn’t believe anyone would be that stupid.

“Got to go,” Jody said, picking up her laundry. She was in a hurry to get back upstairs, to change the sheets, beat the sofa cushions, to reclaim her night.

“Bye, sweetie,” Ellen said, kissing Jody’s cheek. “Call me at the office tomorrow. And put some lotion on yourself when you get upstairs.”

Jody lifted Ellen’s hand, holding it up toward Rob. “Great ring,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll be really happy together.”

Ellen flashed her a voodoo look and Jody laughed. She couldn’t help but laugh. It probably made Rob even more annoyed, but she kept laughing all the way into the elevator, an intense kind of manic laugh, a laugh that could turn into a scream at any minute.

16

Gloria Owens arrived before her husband, and they started the session without him.

“Sometimes I really hate him.”

“Who?” Claire asked.

“Jim,” she said. “Sometimes I really hate Jim.”

Claire nodded. Patients always thought it was shocking when they talked about hate. They acted as though they were revealing a horrible hidden secret. Their greatest realization was the simple relief that came from seeing that nothing bad happened as a result of the confession. I hate. I despise. Claire barely responded when people said it. Her lack of response was intentional, designed to push the patient further, to go beyond hate and into the fury for which there was no name.

“Sorry I’m late,” Jim Owens said, bursting into the office without knocking, twenty minutes into the session. Someone coming out of another office must have let him into the waiting room.

Claire was surprised. People didn’t just barge in like that. What if there had been a time switch and the hour didn’t belong to him? What if Claire had been in there alone, between patients, taking a nap or doing who knows what?

“I was just saying that someday we might get divorced,” Gloria said as her husband sat down.

He smiled at Claire as if to ask, Was this your idea?

Even though Claire was probably a few years older than the Owenses, she felt vibrant, changeable, and youthful in comparison. The Owenses were well into middle age. They’d settled, you could tell just by looking. Both were about fifteen or twenty pounds overweight, pounds gained by not caring, not having to worry about impressing or seducing the other. They felt entitled to satisfy cravings, take pleasure from candy bars in the afternoon, ice cream with the late news, steak dinners. They were used to each other. If they got divorced, it would be difficult; they wouldn’t be able to simply go forward as a freed man and woman. They would have to make changes, go on diets, rethink careers, wardrobe, friends, and addresses.

“Don’t say the D word,” Jim said.

Claire wondered if Jim knew that for most people the D word was Death, not Divorce. Possibly he thought that since the M word was Marriage, D had to be Divorce. Regardless, it was curious.

“Why not?” Gloria said. “What do you care?”

The session went on like a chicken fight, Mr. and Mrs. pecking at each other as supervised by Claire until finally their hour ran out.

“Well, I’ll see you next week,” Claire said, clapping her hands to gether. As they went out the door, she winked at Jody, who was sitting in the waiting room, pretending to read a magazine. “Be with you in a minute,” she said, closing her door to check her answering machine and pull up her pantyhose. She was glad Jody was next; now she could relax.

Claire rewound her messages, jotting down quick notes and first impressions that she’d go over later. “Hi, it’s Eric Silverman. A new patient came to see me today — very interesting, but I think she’d be better off with a woman. Call me.” Referrals were nice, a vote of confidence from her peers. All the same, Claire didn’t want any new patients now. Getting started in the summer was too difficult, and she’d be leaving in a few weeks anyway. Maybe in the fall. Maybe after Jody went to L.A.

That morning, while she was putting on her makeup, Claire imagined that she’d secretly named her little girl. Before handing her over, she’d whispered “Hilary” into the baby’s ear. Now, years later, she’d only have to whisper the name again and, if the child were hers, the girl’s cheeks would flush, her eyes would brighten, and, without a second’s hesitation, she’d say “Mom.”

“I’ve never done this before in my life,” Claire said, smiling at Jody, “but I’m starving to death. Do you mind if I order something?”

Jody shrugged.

“Do you want anything?”

“No thanks,” Jody said.

Claire picked up the phone, ordered a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich and a cup of coffee from the restaurant around the corner, then settled back into her chair. “Let’s talk about what you’re doing until you leave for California.”

She considered whether ordering grilled cheese seemed too strange, too goyish. It was what her mother used to eat, with bread-and-butter pickles stuffed in after the cheese was melted. Perhaps she should have gone for something simpler, a bagel or a milk shake. Her stomach growled.

“You’re leaving when in August?” she asked.

“I have to be there by the seventeenth, so we’ll probably take off from my parents’ house around the eighth.”

The buzzer went off, and Claire got up to pay the delivery man. Hilary. Why Hilary? Hilarity. Hilarious. Happiness. Red hair. Claire didn’t know anyone with red hair. She never had.

She sat with the sandwich on her knees, hoping the whole thing wasn’t too terribly distracting. “What’s your middle name?” she asked between bites.

“Beth,” Jody said. “Why?”

Jody Beth. Well, that was no Hilary.

“I’d like to see you a lot before you leave,” Claire said. “Do you think we could arrange that?” When she looked up from her sandwich, Jody blushed. Claire chewed and swallowed. “I’ll be going away at the very end of the month and won’t be back until September, so we don’t have much time. Two weeks.”

She couldn’t believe she’d waited until now to discuss leaving; but then again, from the very beginning the whole relationship had been about leaving. That’s why Jody came to see her in the first place. All the same, it felt wrong. Claire ate her grilled cheese and watched Jody staring down at her sneakers. Clearly this was a complicated issue for both of them.

“Are you going to miss coming here?” Claire asked.

Jody shrugged again. She reminded Claire of Jake. Whenever he was uncomfortable or didn’t want to admit something, he shrugged.

“If you like, I could help you find a therapist in Los Angeles, either through UCLA or privately,” Claire said, sipping her coffee, curious whether she’d dripped any on her silk blouse. If she were a man, it would be charming, professorial, to have a little coffee absentmindedly splashed on her shirt. But the same splash brought a woman ten steps closer to the edge of incompetence, unable to properly care for herself much less others.

“No thanks,” Jody said.

“It might make you feel safer if you know there’s someone there.”

Jody shrugged.

“Think about it,” Claire said, crumpling up the sandwich paper. “I’d be happy to make some calls. And when you come back on vacation you can come see me — or write letters, if you want.”

“P.S.,” Jody said, “and not to change the subject, but before I forget: I talked to my mother and she said I wasn’t born at Doctors.”

“Did she tell you where?” Claire said, playing down her curiosity.

“She said the stork brought me.”

Claire could have strangled her. Was Jody possessed by some demon especially programmed to drive Claire over the edge?

“What did she really tell you?”

“Just what I said. And she thought it was funny. Very funny. So funny I forgot to laugh.”

“Did she say anything else?”

“Not much. They just sort of got me. The lawyer called to say I’d been born and then called back two days later and made plans for someone to pick me up. My mother sat in the car at the corner of Twenty-first and L streets in downtown Washington for half an hour, waiting. And then out of nowhere the next-door neighbor they sent to do their dirty work showed up with this bundle. Me. And then it started to snow. End of story.”

A winter baby. Claire’s was a winter baby as well. She knew it. She’d known it all along. Twenty-first and L was right around the corner from Columbia Hospital for Women. The day Claire got out of the hospital it snowed. All that afternoon and evening in Baltimore it snowed — eight inches — and at nineteen, she took the snow to be the tears she couldn’t cry. The whiteness pouring from the sky, clean and soft, was what saved her.

“When did you say your birthday was?” Claire asked.

“Why do you keep asking me? I’m not telling you.”

“What’s the secret?”

“Yeah,” Jody said, “what’s the deal? Can we change the subject?”

“There are a few things you seem to find difficult to talk about — your birthday, our relationship. What’s going on?”

Claire was starting not to like herself. She was doing things that might not be prudent, yet she had to do them. Knowing was becoming more important than anything else. She’d have to call Barbara and ask if she could add anything more. Or Claire could ask Jody her sign. She’d make up something about how useful astrology and charts were as therapeutic tools.

“I don’t find it difficult,” Jody said. “What I find difficult is moving to Los Angeles. I have the horrible feeling that at the last minute something will happen and I won’t be able to do it.”

“What will happen?”

“Nothing, in reality. I mean, I wouldn’t be lucky enough for the world to end while I’m packing my stuff into my mother’s car. It’ll be more subtle, like we’ll get in the car and at the end of the driveway suddenly I’ll forget how to drive. The morning we’re supposed to leave I’ll be frozen, stuck to my bed, something like that.”

“What could you do to prevent that from happening?”

“Use plenty of antifreeze?”

“Is there something we could do now, in the next two weeks, that would make the transition easier?”

Claire had clipped herself back into a highly professional mode, forcing herself to respond only to the issues at hand, hoping nothing she said or did gave away what she was thinking.

“I just don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to pick up and move myself and everything I own across the country. It makes no sense on one level. Why would I want to do that?”

“Because that’s what you have to do in order to get what you want,” Claire said.

“Maybe not. Maybe that’s not what I want. Maybe I should stay in New York or go home to Washington. Maybe I should just live in Washington for my whole life.”

“You’ve got too much personality for Washington,” Claire said.

Jody looked at Claire as if to ask, How do you know? Claire smiled. There was something about Jody that made it impossible for Claire to play it completely straight. She couldn’t; she didn’t want to. She glanced at Jody and tried to figure out what Jody was really like, outside the office, with her friends, with men.

The relationship between patient and therapist was supposed to be a micro-moment, a mirror of the patient’s interaction with the world at large. The therapist was supposed to be the authority figure, the good mother, the perfect listener, the best kind of friend — the one who never talked about herself. The dynamics were so heavily invested with potential meaning that it was impossible for the relationship to mirror anything except itself.

“So,” Claire said, “in these next weeks, now that you’re not working as much, we can really get down to it.”

Jody looked at her blankly.

“You don’t have as many restrictions on your time. It’ll make things easier.”

“I guess,” Jody said.

There was a certain doubt on Jody’s part, a lack of trust. What was she afraid of — the process, the attachment, her own potential? Or Claire? Claire looked at Jody and Jody looked away. The richness of grilled American cheese rose in Claire’s throat. No, Jody shouldn’t be afraid of Claire. Claire loved her. Claire caught herself and repeated the thought more slowly: I love Jody. I do, she told herself, as though there were some part of herself she had to convince.

“I’ve never told you this,” Claire said, “but I’m very glad I met you.”

Jody looked at her like she was crazy.

“I enjoy you,” Claire went on. “You’re lovable.”

Jody shrugged.

They were quiet.

“How about tomorrow at ten-thirty?” Claire asked. “That way you can sleep late.”

“I guess,” Jody said, getting up and heading for the door.

Maybe she shouldn’t have done it; maybe she should have kept her mouth closed. What kind of trouble was she asking for? “See you tomorrow,” Claire whispered softly, sweetly.

“Yeah, right,” Jody said, pulling the door closed behind her.

17

“The ring. Where’s the ring?” Jody said, looking at Ellen’s well-manicured but unadorned fingers. They were in line outside an undersized, overpopular, and not really very good restaurant in Soho, waiting for the privilege to have what would probably be their last brunch together for a long time.

“Which would you be more inclined to accept? One: I gave it back to Rob with a note saying he was too good for me and that I was a fool. Or two: I sold it to buy myself a really great suit at The Baby Grows Up.”

“What’s behind door number three?” Jody asked.

“Traded it for drinks and drugs at a bar I can’t remember the name of. Tried to use it as a miniature cock ring and it shattered into a thousand pieces.”

A guy in black leather shorts standing in front of them turned around, stared for a second, then pretended to be looking down the street.

“Hard choices,” Jody said. “I pick number two.”

“You don’t think much of me, do you? I’m hurt, genuinely hurt.”

“Are there any parties of one?” the maitre d’ asked, stepping out onto the sidewalk. “Parties of one?”

“One’s not exactly a party, is it?” Ellen said.

“What happened?” Jody asked.

“We had a fight. It was supposed to be one of those romantic strolls down by the water. He said I should stop acting like a whore and settle down. I pulled the ring off and threw it in the water.” Ellen smiled. “Or so he thinks.” She tapped her purse. “He called me a worthless bitch and tried to hit me. I ducked. And that was that.”

“I’m really sorry,” Jody said.

Ellen shrugged, and wiped away a little runny makeup. “So, what’s with you? How’s the shrink?”

“She told me she was glad we’d met. ‘You’re very lovable,’” Jody said, imitating Claire’s voice.

“You know, the odds of having a really good shrink are about the same as having a perfect childhood. Something’s wrong,” Ellen said. “Either it’s her or you.”

“Or both.” Jody didn’t want to say things that Ellen could use as proof of the strangeness of the relationship, but she couldn’t help herself. She had to tell someone. The stuff with Claire was just too good, too interesting and confusing, to keep to herself.

Without warning, Jody grabbed Ellen and pulled her under the restaurant’s awning. “Up the street,” she said, nodding north, “looking in the window. I think it’s her.” Jody hid behind Ellen and peeked out. “I swear, I think it is.”

“Which one?” Ellen asked, excited, as though at any second she’d race over and ask for an autograph.

“Tall, blond, hair up, sunglasses. Is it? I can’t look.”

“This way, please, ladies,” the maitre d’ said, holding open the door. As they went in, Jody turned around and took a second look. She couldn’t be sure.

“You should’ve gone over and said hi,” Ellen said, as they were seated at a tiny table next to the kitchen.

“We would’ve lost our place in line,” Jody said. “Besides, she’s not exactly the kind of person you meet and say, wow, she’s really nice. She’s a little stiff, maybe more than a little.”

“I’m not convinced that blond business is real,” Ellen said.

“Usually she wears it in a bun.”

“In a bun!” Ellen said. “Just like Betty Crocker! What, wrapped in a cinnamon swirl? ‘We’re out of time for today — I have to take my hair out of the oven. See you next week, we’ll make braided breadsticks.’” Ellen started laughing hysterically, and people at other tables looked over. Jody was afraid the waiter would come by and tell them to keep it down, or leave.

“Sometimes she keeps me late,” Jody whispered. “She makes me stay overtime.”

“Detention?” Ellen said. “No way. They’re supposed to throw you out. Bing! Hour’s up, you’re outta here.”

The waiter put a basket of bread down on the table and handed them each a menu.

“Great,” Ellen said. “Do you take credit cards?”

The man nodded. “We take all kinds.”

“Except with Claire,” Jody said. “If you’re in the middle of something, if the next victim’s not in the waiting room, she lets you stay. Five, ten minutes, sometimes a whole extra session.”

“Oh my God,” Ellen said slowly, staring at Jody. “Don’t you see? She’s brainwashing you. That’s it. She’s indoctrinating you into a cult. Who knows when you’ll stay the whole afternoon. She’ll take you out for tea and poison you. My poor little pretty,” Ellen said, throwing her head back and laughing like the Wicked Witch of the West. Jody was petrified. “There’s nothing that can be done to save you, it’s already too late.”

“Listen,” Jody said. “I know it’s different, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. In some ways things have changed since I started seeing her. I’m happier. She likes me, and that makes me feel good.”

“And what happens when you leave? All that goes out the window. You’re on your own, kiddo.”

“I doubt it. We’ll talk. I’ll visit.”

“She’s your shrink, not your lover.”

“You’re jealous,” Jody said, looking at the menu.

Later, after they’d ducked in and out of stores up and down Wooster Street, Spring Street, Greene Street, picking up and putting down expensive primitive art from Idaho, garage-sale finds marked up three thousand percent, Ellen took both of Jody’s hands in hers and asked loudly, “Do you love me?”

Jody didn’t answer.

“Do you love her? You talk about her like you love her.”

“It’s not the same,” Jody said.

“You don’t love me. You don’t act like you love me. I’m so nice to you,” Ellen said. “I’m your best friend. For what it’s worth, as soon as I met you, I knew I loved you. I was a little scared of you — did I ever tell you that? Would you want to fuck me?”

“No,” Jody said, pushing through the store and out onto the sidewalk.

“Do you find me attractive?”

“I never thought about it,” Jody said, lying. She had thought about it. When she first met Ellen in the elevator, there was definitely something there. Jody had the sensation of being seduced. But Ellen had a boyfriend — she had ten boyfriends — and Jody wanted one of her own. It had never occurred to her to want anything other than a boyfriend. The gap between men and women, the same gap people complained about, was a relief. Men didn’t understand her, and didn’t pretend to; they weren’t her. She could fuck them and not feel as if she was giving up some part of her real self. She could fuck them and feel nothing except their weight, hardness, and breath against her.

“I think I’m sexy,” Ellen said as they went into another store. “Men find me sexy. I’m good at it. I mean, if there’s one thing I’m really good at, it’s sex.” The salesgirl stared at Ellen.

“That’s nice,” Jody said.

“Are you going to miss me when you’re in Los Angeles?”

“Yes,” Jody said, picking up a fifty-dollar T-shirt, unfolding it, looking at it, then refolding it again. She wasn’t lying. In L.A. she’d be alone, really alone. The apartment building would be filled with Manson family rejects, earthquake plotters, ugly old actresses, and blind men, all writing screenplays based on their life stories.

“I’ll miss you a lot,” Ellen said. “Maybe you should take me with you. I could live in your apartment, lay out by the pool all day. You will have a pool, won’t you?” They left the store and stepped back out onto the sidewalk.

“Everyone has a pool,” Jody said. “You can come visit. Banking wouldn’t be the same without you.”

“I know. I’m the only one there with decent tits.”

“Do you want to catch a movie?” Jody asked.

“Can’t,” Ellen said, checking her watch. “I have a date.”

At Washington Square Park, Jody and Ellen said goodbye. They’d see each other again, probably in a few hours, but Ellen hugged Jody, and in a rare moment of she didn’t know exactly what, Jody hugged back. Ellen kissed both of Jody’s cheeks and Jody smiled. She didn’t kiss back. She wandered through the park thinking that she was seeing everything for the last time.

When Jody got home, she called her mother.

“Why are you calling? You never call. Is something wrong?”

“No, Ma, I just missed you.”

“Well, I miss you too. But I’m very busy right now. In a couple of weeks we’ll be driving to California together. We’ll have all that time in the car to talk.”

Jody stretched out on her futon and made lists of things to take to California. She called the girl she’d sublet the apartment to, reminding her that the toaster oven, the mini-microwave, and the coffee maker wouldn’t be there when she moved in. Jody went around the corner to the liquor store and got boxes. She made three trips, filling her apartment with empty cartons of vodka, scotch, and wine coolers. The apartment wasn’t much, but it was the first and only home she’d made for herself. The apartment was proof that she could function independently in the real world, the first indication she was a real person. And now, after only two years, she was turning her home over to an NYU medical student who’d probably put dissected body parts in the fridge and formaldehyde in her coffee cups. She made a note to leave only the really ugly dishes that used to belong to her aunt Sylvia.

Peter Sears was on top of Jody. The room was dark. Her eyes were closed. She was concentrating on enjoying herself. She figured she’d try one more time.

“Fuck me, you fucking bitch!” he growled.

Jody opened one eye. She wanted to see his face, to make sure he was kidding. He wasn’t. His body was contorted, writhing. The whiteness of anger had met the pink flush of desire.

“Fuck me, you fucking bitch!” he said again.

And he had a limited vocabulary, which somehow made Jody less frightened. She figured she could win over anybody who had to repeat the word “fuck” in a short sentence.

“Eat me,” Jody said.

And Peter did.

Regardless, Jody swore she’d never invite him over again. In case for some reason he just showed up, she’d warn him that he was persona non grata.

Peter’s head was in her crotch, his fingers squeezing her nipples too hard. She looked down at him. He seemed caught in the strained posture of a swimmer doing the butterfly stroke. She decided that he was in fact doing some sort of butterfly on her. She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate. She wanted to come at least once before she left for Los Angeles.

At first she didn’t know what had happened — a flash of pain and the hot sting of shocked flesh. Jody supposed something had fallen on her. Something had lifted itself up off the dresser on the other side of the room, flown over, and dropped itself down on her. She opened her eyes, but there was nothing except Peter on top, grinding away. While she was looking, his hand rose up against her cheek. Jody screamed and the hand fell hard against her.

“Fuck me, you fucking bitch!”

No one had ever hit her before — not like that. No one had ever. Horrified, she opened her mouth and only a grunt came out. He got harder inside her. She felt it.

“Asshole,” Jody finally said. “Fucking asshole. Get off.” She wiggled under him, trying to get out. He liked that. He held her down, raised himself up, and pushed deeper into her. He swore. She closed her eyes. It was too late to fight. Fighting would only make things worse. There was no such thing as screaming for help. There was no such thing as rape when you were already having sex. There was no such thing. He spit on her chest, and she threw up all over him.

18

July 31, the last session; both Claire and Jody fighting against images of finality. It would be better if they weren’t in this alone, if they had something more than each other.

“We really haven’t had a chance,” Claire said.

“‘It seems we just get started and before you know it,’” Jody sang, “‘comes the time we have to say so long.’”

“‘So long, goodnight, everybody,’” Claire added. They both laughed.

Outside, the gears of a truck ground down. A police car raced by, a cop barking “Get outta the way, outta the way, pull to the right,” over the speaker.

Within the hour, Claire’s life would be her own again. She’d go away with her husband and her sons. For the next month she’d be making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, pouring apple juice into insulated thermoses, and rubbing endless quantities of sunblock onto chests, shoulders, noses, and legs.

She handed Jody a thin, flat envelope. “I thought you might need this.”

“Did you plant a tree in Israel for me?”

“You’re not dead, you’re just moving,” Claire said, knowing that she’d spend the four days between now and when she left for the beach in a funereal daze. She’d spend them packing for Adam, Jake, Sam, and herself; the act of packing somehow reinforcing the sense of being left, of ending.

“Oh yeah, right, I’m moving,” Jody said, opening the envelope, pulling out a map of the United States.

“Are you going to be all right?” Claire asked.

“I have to do it,” Jody said.

“You can do it.”

Jody shrugged.

“You really can. I have faith in you.”

Jody shrugged again. “Anyway,” she said, “there’s no point in talking about it now.”

“Has this been helpful at all?”

“It’s been fun,” Jody said. “Interesting.”

Claire smiled. “Write me if you want to. Call me when you get back.”

“I will.”

They were silent, lingering in the sensations of being in a room with that one person, that most specific person, with whatever it was that made one person different from the next, that made a living person truly alive. They spent the hour in near-silence, soaking it up, holding it in, unwilling to risk ruining the moment with misplaced words.

And at the end Claire said, “I’ll miss you.”

“Thanks,” Jody said, standing up and shaking her hand — a very Jody thing to do. “Bye. Nice knowing ya.”

She turned to leave and Claire squeezed her shoulder. “You’ll do well. Have a great time.”

“You too,” Jody said. “Have a good vacation.”

Jody was out the door, alone in the hall. She took a breath and pushed the elevator button, glad she was going, glad she was leaving Claire.

Claire sat in her office, in Jody’s still-warm chair, flipping through her appointment book. It was over.