The Halo Effect

12

After Dulcie and I had dinner, we watched My Fair Lady on television. Then my daughter went to her room to study the part she’d won in Our Town while I stayed in the living room and picked up Cleo’s book.

I read it that night and another hundred pages the next night, and with every page became more and more aware of why she was worried about what would happen to her if she did, indeed, go ahead and publish this book.

I was anxious to see her on Wednesday morning, but for the second time in a row, Cleo was late for her appointment.

During the first fifteen minutes, I assumed she was still on her way. But by ten-thirty, I realized she wasn’t coming.

Had we delved too far in the last session? Had she run scared? I hadn’t expected she would react this way to opening up.

Maybe she just woke up with a sore throat and meant to call but fell back asleep, I reasoned. Or maybe she got an early-morning call from a client that she couldn’t ignore.

I did some paperwork and made some calls and gave up waiting.

When a patient misses a session without calling, they get charged the full price of the appointment. I don’t call to find out where someone is. At the start of the next session, I ask him or her to explain what happened.

And so I put Cleo out of my mind and left my office at twelve-fifteen. My next appointment wasn’t until two o’clock, and I needed to walk.

It was a lovely June afternoon and I headed into Central Park, crossing by the Bethesda Fountain and going west. I passed nanies with children holding on to toys, their faces smeared with food; dog walkers trotting along at a fast clip, each with a pack of ten or thirteen dogs; and young couples full of the romance of spring, holding hands and walking lazily in the sunshine.

I looked at them and thought of my daughter, thankful that she was two or three years away from her first pass at love. And I hoped it might not happen even that soon. And then, without cosciously being aware of it, I was thinking about Cleo again and her confusion now that she was feeling the stirrings of a powerful emotion she wasn’t very familiar with.

Love isn’t a germ or a virus. We can’t put it under a microscope to examine it. Nor is sexual attraction or desire or lack of desire. Or any of the fetishes and anxieties that haunt us. But I try, along with everyone else at the institute and therapists all over the world, to treat people who succumb to love or passion or lust or any variation of those and who get sick with them.

The wind picked up and debris scattered. My eye caught the headline on the sheet of newsprint that had snagged on the bottom of the stone water fountain.

No Headway in Hooker Killings.

And then the wind blew the paper away.

I went over the stats I’d read earlier in the paper, thinking that at least all the girls I worked with in prison were safe. Safer behind bars than they were on the street.

And Cleo was safe. She was too savvy to get messed up with anyone she didn’t know. I knew enough about how she worked and how careful she was about screening clients. She would never go to a hotel with a complete stranger. Would never allow herself to be put in a position where she wasn’t protected.

And yet, and yet, what if some man was smarter than she was? What if this psychopath was clever enough to-

I sat down under the wisteria arbor on the West Side and pulled out my cell phone. I dialed my office number, listened to it ring and then punched in the code to play back my messages.

I wasn’t usually this nervous about a patient. But the news preyed on me. And Cleo mattered to me.

I had three messages.

The first was from a client requesting a second appointment that week.

The next was from another therapist at the institute requesting a consult later in the week.

I waited for the third message, desperately wanting it to be Cleo, worried that it wouldn’t be, concerned that if it wasn’t, my imagination would take off like the newspaper had.

The third message was from my ex-husband to say hello and talk about the rest of Dulcie’s summer schedule with him.

There was no word from Cleo.