The Kings Of Cool

148

Being a shrink in Laguna is like being a fisherman at SeaWorld.

(What Chon would later come to call a Target-Rich Environment.)

You dip your line in those waters, your net is going to be full of thrashing, flopping, gasping creatures faster than you can say, “And how does that make you feel?”

Which is what Diane now asks the woman sitting (not lying) on the sofa across from her.

After the Viking funeral of the Bread and Marigolds Bookstore, Stan and Diane decided that society’s ills were more likely to be cured by Reich and Lowen than by Marx and Chomsky.

So they went back to school (UC Irvine, and if that ain’t irony for you, you haven’t been to Irvine) and became

Psychotherapists.

Stan and Diane soon developed a clientele of sixties refugees, acid casualties, strident feminists, confused men, manic-depressives (not “bipolar” yet), drug addicts (see “sixties casualties,” supra), alcoholics, and people whose mothers really didn’t love them.

It’s easy to make fun, but Stan and Diane turn out to be really good at what they do, and they help people. Except maybe not so much the young woman in Diane’s office right now, working through her (let’s face it, probably first) divorce.

“I don’t know if you can help her,” Stan said over dinner last night. “That kind of narcissistic personality disorder is almost impossible to treat. There is no pharmacological protocol, and schema therapy has its own problems.”

“I’ve been working more with cognitive techniques,” Diane answered, sipping the excellent red that Stan brought home.

They’ve built a nice, tidy life since she went a little crazy with John McAlister and Stan responded by burning down the store. They made enough money from the insurance settlement to buy the house in what was formerly known as Dodge City and use it as both a home and an office. They’ve made new “couple” friends, exchange gourmet dinner parties, and now Stan has become quite the oenophile with a small but sophisticated cellar.

If this life lacks excitement, it also lacks chaos.

“Have your cognitive techniques had any effect?” Stan asked drily, in regard to her difficult client.

“Not yet,” she answered.

Now she sits and tries to focus on Kim’s umpteenth and constantly changing repetition of her story-her upbringing in a wealthy albeit emotionally unavailable family, which provoked her young marriage to a “white knight” savior who was just another version of her remote father and who doesn’t understand or appreciate her and how she cannot seem to relate sexually no matter how hard she tries, and what Diane is thinking is I want a baby.